"Ponderous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the family saw him at this moment. He gave a huge howl of joy, and knocked the dog down with a heavy coffee-pot. The dog, yelling in supreme astonishment and fear, writhed to his feet and ran for cover. The man kicked out with a ponderous foot. It caused the dog to swerve as if caught in a tide. A second blow of the coffee-pot ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... stirring. Making a circuitous course through this tranquil and orderly district, they at last found themselves in an open place in the centre of which rose a church of vast proportions, and built of hewn stone in that stately, not to say ponderous, style which Vanburgh introduced. The area round it, which was sufficiently ample, was formed by buildings, generally of a very mean character: the long back premises of a carpenter, the straggling yard of a hackney-man: sometimes a small, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... of a stronger will over a weaker, or the power of one living creature to act on and influence another, is an ordinance of nature, which has its parallel in the inorganic kingdom, where ponderous bodies, widely separated in space, influence one another so much as to keep up a constant interplay of action and reaction throughout nature's vast realms. The same ordinance which keeps the spheres ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the yards, the hammers of the stone dressers clinking out a not unmusical chorus from every shed, and skirting the docks where the ponderous cranes swung the great slabs to the canal boats, scrambled down a rough roadway into the quarry proper amidst all the hurly-burly of the teamsters and the hoarse steam drills. The walls of sandstone rose sheer around him, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... that emotion born of wonder, which awakens the consciousness and attracts it to the mysteries of life with a passionate enthusiasm. It was thus that we, accustomed hitherto to read in school only ponderous and arid printed books, felt that the book of Nature was opening before our spirit, infinite in its possibilities of creation and of miracle, and responding to all our ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... dream will put us on the track of the powerful helper from the unconscious. These ever active and, as it were, immortal wishes from the unconscious recall the legendary Titans who from time immemorial have borne the ponderous mountains which were once rolled upon them by the victorious gods, and which even now quiver from time to time from the convulsions of their mighty limbs; I say that these wishes found in the repression are of themselves ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... but the motive which prompted them. The best writers on Gordon have taken up parts of his life only, so that no one can get a view of it as a whole without wading through a large number of volumes, some of them very ponderous. The best record of his career in China is a work by Mr. Andrew Wilson called "The Ever-Victorious Army." A smaller book by Mr. W. E. Lilley gives an interesting account of Gordon's life at Gravesend. The first part of his life in Africa is given in a larger volume by Dr. G. ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... completely shrinks from the question; a question, be it remembered, not raised by us—a question which we should have felt strong objections to raising unnecessarily—a question put forward by himself, as intimately connected with the subject of his two ponderous volumes. He attempts to carp at detached parts of our reasoning on the subject. With what success he carries on this guerilla war after declining a general action with the main body of our argument our ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the copying there appeared, in 1831, the first volumes of Lord Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities. The work in the trade cost 175l.; the expense of publication had been over 30,000l. The eighth and ninth volumes followed only in 1848. The ponderous work has undoubtedly great value from its many illustrations of old monuments of Central American art and literature, which in great part had never been published. As regards the Spanish and English text, it is of much less value. We may pass in silence over the notes added by Lord ...
— Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices • Cyrus Thomas
... officer, wounded and bleeding as he was, did not desert him. On quitting the larger apartment above, he had secured the outside fastenings of a small door at the top of the stairs, and having now gained the bottom, he took a similar precaution. All that remained was to unclose the bolts of the ponderous door that opened upon their final chance of escape: this was speedily done, but here the feelings of the officer were put to a severe test. A rude partition divided him from the fatal council-room; and while he undid the fastenings, the faint and dying groans of his butchered ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... against their fateful thought, And brute strength, like a scornful conqueror, Clangs his huge mace down in the other scale, The inspired soul but flings his patience in, And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe— One faith against a whole world's unbelief, One soul against the flesh of ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... glad vhen ve sail again, too. [Then, as she makes no comment, he goes on with a ponderous attempt at sarcasm.] Ay don't see vhy you don't like Boston, dough. You have good time here, Ay tank. You go ashore all time, every day and night veek ve've been here. You go to movies, see show, gat all kinds fun—[His eyes hard with hatred.] All ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill
... 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 yet six o'clock. She dressed herself with the ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... piezoelectric balance, analytical balance, two-pan balance, one-pan balance; postal scale, baby scale. [Science of gravity] statics. V. be heavy &c adj.; gravitate, weigh, press, cumber, load. [Measure the weight of] weigh, poise. Adj. weighty; weighing &c v.; heavy as lead; ponderous, ponderable; lumpish^, lumpy, cumbersome, burdensome; cumbrous, unwieldy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... he drew on over his buckskin under-shirt a bear-skin hunting-shirt ample enough for the shoulders of Hercules, securing it at the waist with a broad leathern belt, into which he stuck his sheathed hunting-knife and his tomahawk, or battle-ax it might be called, it was so ponderous. His ammunition-pouch and powder-horn—that on the left-hand side, this on the right—he then slung over his shoulders by two wide leathern straps, crossing each other on breast and back. Last, he doffed his coon-skin cap and donned another of bear-skin, more portentous ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... on Jehovah's throne! E'en tho' thou saw'st the mighty fabric nod, Of system'd worlds, thou bears't a sacred charm, Grav'd on thy heart, to shelter thee from harm: And thus it speaks:—"Thou art my trust, O GOD! And thou canst bid the jarring powers be still, Each ponderous orb, like me, subservient to ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... reports from the muskets, I was led to believe that they were worked by the islanders in the same manner as the Sultan Solyman's ponderous artillery at the siege of Byzantium, one of them taking an hour or two to load and train. At last, no sound whatever proceeding from the mountains, I concluded that the contest had been determined one way or the other. ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... Exeter present a quaint and picturesque appearance, especially along the High Street, where is located the old Guild Hall, a ponderous stone building, with a curious front projecting over the footway and supported by columns; it was built in the sixteenth century. Sir Thomas Bodley, who founded the Bodleian Library of Oxford, was born in Exeter, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... the chief justice, a portly, ponderous person, was moving solemnly forward to perform ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... him to his meanest tasks and sometimes convinced him of a divine mission, bent him back to his big plans. In long silence he returned their gaze, moving his head sharply from side to side to fix every eye. None knew better than he the value of silences, of the ponderous manner. Every art of the leader ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... It is no ponderous affair of logs, or stones, or asphalt; a very simple, homely thing went to its making: just wire-netting, with a two-inch mesh, the kind one uses for the fowl-run! Laid in three rows, and pegged down on to the sand, it is wide enough for ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... before the corpse had grown cold, heavy steps were heard on the staircase, and Dick and Laura entered, one with a quantity of cockatoo-like flutterings, the other steadily, like a big and ponderous animal. At a glance they saw that all was over, and in silence they sat down, their hands resting on the table. The man spoke hesitatingly in awkward phrases of a happy release; the woman listened with a calm serenity ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... individual who happened at the moment to be on his, or her, feet on board the sailing ship was thrown to the deck; while, as for the ship herself, she was heeled over by it until the water poured like a cataract in over her starboard topgallant rail; there was a horrid crunching sound as the ponderous iron bows of the steamer irresistibly clove their way through the wooden side and decks of the ship; a loud twanging aloft told of severed rigging; there was a terrifying crash of breaking spars overhead; and then, ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... by the correspondents as "Richard, the Lion-hearted," with strong arm and ponderous battle-ax, as he went about winning victories. Stephens, no less effective and influential, seemed to be the great Saladin with well-tempered Damascus blade—so skillful as to sever the finest down. ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... and his crew have treated me—they have actually thrown me overboard. A man of my weight, too!" "That was the very objection, my Lord," replied the rubicund functionary. "Their rotten craft could not carry a statesman of your ponderous abilities. Your dead weight would have brought them to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... forefront of the defense stood Burr himself, an unerring legal tactician, deciding every move of the great game, the stake of which for him was life itself. About him were gathered the ablest members of the Richmond bar: John Wickham, witty and ingenious, Edmund Randolph, ponderous and pontifical, Benjamin Botts, learned and sarcastic, while from Baltimore came Luther Martin to aid his "highly respected friend," to keep the political pot boiling, and eventually to fall desperately in love with Burr's daughter, the beautiful Theodosia. Among the ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... three minutes, was deep in his usual game of throwing the dice, left hand against right. To do the villain justice, however, he did not neglect his duty. His eyes were upon me frequently, while at the slightest stir, he turned quick as lightning, one hand grasping his ponderous club. ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... very slowly, clad in long, thick, frieze coats, bearing lanterns in their left hands, and thumping along the pavement with their ponderous staves. ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... entering other religious houses. This is due, first, to the vast size of the interior, the immense length of the nave, and the unobstructed view one has inside owing to the removal by the "vandal" Wyatt of the old ponderous stone screen—an act for which I bless while all others curse his memory; secondly, to the comparatively small amount of stained glass there is to intercept the light. So graceful and beautiful is the interior that it can bear the ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... meal under another name, and at hours little varying from those of the past. The Parisian dines at half-past six, remaining at table until eight. The Englishman, later in all his hours, and more ponderous in all his habits, sits down to table about the time the Frenchman gets up; quitting it between nine and ten. The Italian pays a tribute to his climate, and has his early dinner and light supper, both usually alone, the habits of the country carrying him to the opera and ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... and ponderous diction, Sir Richard Phillips unfolded his philanthropic designs regarding the young writer to whom his words meant a career. He did not end with the appointment of Borrow as general utility writer upon The Universal ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... remarkable for flexibility, and which had never before been employed in such discussions; and Tertullian seems to have often found it necessary to coin unwonted forms of expression, or rather to invent an ecclesiastical nomenclature. The ponderous Latin, hitherto accustomed to speak only of Jupiter and the gods, engages somewhat awkwardly in its new vocation; and yet contrives to proclaim, with wonderful power, the great thoughts for which it must now find utterance. Several years after ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... his spear. It was unwieldy, ponderous, the weight of that long, not-too-thin steel bar. Jim's great shoulders and heavy arms were suited well enough to such a weapon; but Dennis could have wished that his were ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... ahead!' The steam whistles through its silent chambers, like sweet music, calling into life that ponderous mechanism, until it ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... critic pass my humble name, And sweeter lips have drained the cup of fame, While my gay stanza pleased the banquet's lords, The soul within was tuned to deeper chords! Say, shall my arms, in other conflicts taught To swing aloft the ponderous mace of thought, Lift, in obedience to a school-girl's law, Mirth's tinsel wand or laughter's tickling straw? Say, shall I wound with satire's rankling spear The pure, warm hearts that bid me welcome here? No! while I wander through ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Venetian Period. Deserving mention only for its notably negative character. None of the great Venetian painters, Tintoret, Titian, Veronese, Bellini, Giorgione, Bonifazio, ever introduce a ship if they can help it. They delight in ponderous architecture, in grass, flowers, blue mountains, skies, clouds, and gay dresses; nothing comes amiss to them but ships and the sea. When they are forced to introduce these, they represent merely a dark-green plain, with reddish galleys spotted about it here and there, ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... execution. To torture the Muses to madness, to wire-draw poetry through inextricable coils of difficult rhymes and impossible measures; to hammer one golden grain of wit into a sheet of infinite platitude, with frightful ingenuity to construct ponderous anagrams and preternatural acrostics, to dazzle the vulgar eye with tawdry costumes, and to tickle the vulgar ear with virulent personalities, were tendencies which perhaps smacked of the hammer, the yard-stick and the pincers, and gave sufficient proof, had proof been necessary, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... horses of to-day would make a sorry record with those of days no longer past than those of the "pony express," to say nothing of the couriers of centuries ago, because they have been made to deteriorate in vigor and endurance. We have ponderous, heavy horses to-day; but they can not do as much work before the plow or dray as those of the eighteenth century. We can not point anywhere to horses produced by breeding that are the equals of the horses of ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... there was a surprise. It was on the third day, when Joe Cross and his mate had called in the aid of a couple more to help drag the ponderous roughed-out piece of crooked timber to the waterside ready for the carpenter and his men to work into shape with their adzes, and while the latter were slaving away at high pressure to get all possible done before they ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... calibre. Unfortunately "heavy" is here an epithet unkindly apt, since it has to be admitted that the noble lord wields a pen rather philosophic than popular, with the result that Before the War (CASSELL) tells a story of the highest interest in a manner that can only be called ponderous. Our ex-War Minister is, at least chiefly, responding to the literary offensives of BETHMANN-HOLLWEG and TIRPITZ, in connection with whose books his should be read, if the many references are properly to be understood. As every ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... declining. The central mountain of this island is built of a heavy ferruginous basalt, but the shore ridges contain less iron, are more porous, and vary in their structure from a compact phonolite, to a ponderous basalt. ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... Clinton-Colden and Aylmer lakes and thence northward to the mouth of the Coppermine. By the latter part of June the ice was breaking up, and on the 22nd the party made use of their canoes (which had been carried for over a month) in order to cross a great river rejoicing in the ponderous name of the Congecathawachaga. On the farther side, they met a number of Copper Indians who were delighted to learn of Matonabbee's hostile design against the Eskimos. They eagerly joined the party, celebrating their ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... disturbances could not be dignified by the name of war. The country was large and the tribes were widely separated. Their war implements were of the crudest sort. A shield would stop a stone-headed arrow, and it necessitated a hand-to-hand conflict for the use of a flint-headed lance and the ponderous war club. The white man came, and for hundreds of years their contest has been waged against a superior force. They have disputed every mile of territory which has been acquired from them. During all that time they could not make a knife, a rifle or ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... 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 poetry to be a good ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Brodrick was. The awful thing was that both were so lamentably altered. Brodrick was no longer the enthusiastic editor, gathering around him the brilliant circle of the talents; he was the absorbed, depressed and ponderous man of business. It was as if some spirit that had breathed on him, sustaining him, lightening his incipient heaviness, had been removed. Jinny sat opposite him, a pale Mater Dolorosa. Her face, even when she talked to you, had an intent, remote expression, as if through it all she were listening ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... replied the hunter, and right quickly did he grip the proffered hand. He saw in Rea a giant, of whom he was but a stunted shadow. Six and one-half feet Rea stood, with yard-wide shoulders, a hulk of bone and brawn. His ponderous, shaggy head rested on a bull neck. His broad face, with its low forehead, its close-shut mastiff under jaw, its big, opaque eyes, pale and cruel as those of a jaguar, marked him a ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... of dictation which was so common to him, "you must positively alter this dining-room—that is, remodel it altogether. Look here, it is just sixteen feet by fifteen; did any man ever hear of a dining-room of such proportions!" The archdeacon stepped the room long-ways and cross-ways with ponderous steps, as though a certain amount of ecclesiastical dignity could be imparted even to such an occupation as that by the manner of doing it. "Barely sixteen; you ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... heavy booming and presently came softly back into the door from the kitchen to listen. She leaned against the facing in an attitude of ponderous attention, a hand, on her bulging hip. She could not suppress her unbounded admiration of her liege lord's manly physique, and jealous to fierceness as she was of his experiences so eloquently and picturesquely related, her woman's nature took fire with enjoyment ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... declare the righteous truth Just as it is? To Him who reads the soul, Hades is naked, and the realms of Death Have naught to cover them. This pendent Earth Hangs on his word,—in gathering clouds he binds The ponderous waters, till at his command They rend their filmy prison. Day and night Await his nod to run their measured course. Heaven's pillars and its everlasting gates Tremble at his reproof. The cleaving sea And man's defeated pride confess his power. Yet the same Hand ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... Bareheaded he accompanied us to a hatter's. Here the R.F.C. caps of the "stream-lined" variety had all been sold, so the war baby was obliged to buy a general service hat. The only one that fitted him was shapeless as a Hausfrau, ponderous as a Bishop, unstable as a politician, grotesque as a Birthday Honours' List. It was a nice quiet hat, we assured Marmaduke—just the thing for active service. Did it suit him? Very well indeed, we replied—made him look like Lord Haldane at the age ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... Henry as he kicked the drunken gaoler aside and sharply awoke him; "and here!" he added, as he unlocked the ponderous door and held the glimmering lantern up. "See here," he cried, "what's this?" and he ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... breath and her eyes dilated. The howdah filled up, and the ponderous creature moved slowly down to the end of the space and up again, ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... member of the Governor's vice investigating committee. The committee had been appointed to frame a minimum wage law for women. He was a person of ponderous bulk and mental equipment. He had slipped into office, not because the people yearned for him, but because there had happened to be a battle on between two factions of his natural political opponents in the fortunate hour he had selected for aspiring to office. Like most other American ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... library for Andean reference, Graham came upon Paula, sprawled gracefully over a sheet of paper on a big table and flanked by ponderous architectural portfolios, engaged in drawing plans of a log bungalow or camp for the sages ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... make them doubly perilous. Moreover, this dumb paralysis was accepted as past cure, and needing not the doctor but the priest. Before the first streak of dawn on that tardy, northern morning, Ridley's ponderous step came up the stair, into the feeble light of the rush candle which the watchers tried to shelter from ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and actions, the famous Apology. To William himself is 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 ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... 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 they reached the ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... with both elbows on the table, gazing before him with the eyes of a dead man. He had always promised to be stout, but he was already fat—a flabby, blue-jowled heap of a man, all thick creases and bulges; and his face had patches of blue and purple in its hollows. He was ponderous, he was huge; and with it there was an aspect of horror, as though ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... the crest, 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 ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... which we are now to examine, are bodies of a very different nature from those which we have hitherto considered. They do not, like the bases of gases, elude the immediate observation of our senses; for they are the most brilliant, the most ponderous, and the most palpable ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... had passed their lives in solitude and abstinence nor ever held converse with man or womankind, neither did they appear in Harran at any time save for the obsequies of the reigning race. In front came one of these greybeards steadying with one hand a huge and ponderous tome which he bore upon his head. Presently all the holy men thrice compassed the Mausoleum, then standing on the highway the eldest cried with a loud voice, "O Prince, could we by dint of orisons and devotions bring thee back to life, these hearts ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... to the lunar sphere, Since all things lost on earth are treasured there. There heroes' wits are kept in ponderous vases, And beaux' in snuff-boxes and tweezer-cases. There broken vows, and death-bed alms are found, And lovers' hearts with ends of ribbon bound, The courtier's promises, and sick man's prayers, The smiles of harlots, and the tears of heirs, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... stories contained much food for thought in the shape of revelations of character in this or that man of prominence. What we should have talked about if he had not thus held the floor I could not guess. I had noted that there were upon a ponderous table six popular novels, as many magazines, and piles of the great dailies. Nowhere could I descry even a small collection of books of the sort which may furnish material for conversation. I tried to imagine the Philosopher drawing a certain beloved book of essays from his pocket, settling himself ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... from here, is an immense tower, severely plain and massive. It makes a fine and terrible and lonely impression. Crillon, though the loftiest of all (being nearly sixteen thousand feet high), presents no well-marked features. Its ponderous glaciers have ground it away into long, curling ridges until, from this point of view, it resembles a huge twisted shell. The lower summits about the Muir Glacier, like this one, the first that I climbed, are richly adorned and enlivened with flowers, though ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... paused in his ponderous and heavy reasonings to read this real woman's letter; and being a loving man, he felt as if he could have kissed the hem of her garment who wrote it. He recorded it in his journal, and after it this significant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... After the ponderous establishments near the mouth of the Christine, and the neater sorts of industries which can be carried on within the city, we come to notice some of the mills and factories up stream. Many of these are of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... how barbarian natures had like thoughts everywhere, and, as much amused as we, he quoted and laughed and talked, still always pleased and easy under the vast weight of learning which, coming from his lips, was so utterly free from the least appearance of being ponderous or tiresome. I think I never knew any other man whose learning sat upon him as lightly or was given ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... a row of stars on the page indicated a lapse of ten years. Mr. Barton, "pale and agitated," examines with deepening despair, "page after page of his ponderous ledger." At last he exclaims, "I am ruined, utterly ruined!" "How so?" inquires Hiram Strosser, who enters the room just in time to hear the cry. Mr. Barton explains,—the failure of Perleg, Jackson & Co. of London—news brought on last steamer—creditors ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... Lohengrin and the Mastersingers. His very deadly earnestness over the "lesson" of his opera and his desire to express his feeling accurately and logically led to his overweighting small melodies with ponderous harmonies. The orchestration of the day was heavy. The art of Mozart had been forgotten; Weber scored cumbrously—as was inevitable; Spontini and Marschner scored cumbrously also, partly because they could ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Neapel, permits the author to take his choice among four languages—German, English, French, or Italian. It is issued intermittently, as occasion requires. The second set of publications consists of ponderous monographs upon the fauna and flora of the Gulf of Naples. These are beautifully illustrated in color, and sometimes a single volume costs as much as seventeen thousand dollars to issue. Of course only a fraction of that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... silence, but the significant smile on his delicate, beardless lips betrayed what he thought of this selection. The conductor of the boy choir was franker. He slightly shook his ponderous head, whose long, gray hair was parted in the middle, and then honestly admitted, in his deep tones, that the Missa Graecorum seemed to him too majestic and gloomy for this purpose. Wolf, too, disapproved of the Queen's suggestion for the same reason, and, though she pointed out that she ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... with the painful uprightness and precise carriage of one who has lunched not wisely but rather too well. His speech, too, was of ponderous brevity. The man of affairs ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... before going to bed; another perform a hybrid entertainment, between the English tea-party, and the Continental soiree, where you may enjoy your Bohea and Souchong, play long small whist, and occasionally listen to ponderous harmonies solemnly performed. A third are the formal rout-givers, the white-kid-and-slipper, orchestra-and-programme, dance-and-sit-down-to-supper folks; so like home that it only requires Gunter's men to fancy oneself in Baker Street ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... upon them, and all faces blank. After all, he was the King and she his wife. And then upon the silence, ominous as the very steps of doom, came a ponderous, clanking tread from the ante-room beyond. Again the curtains were thrust aside, and the Countess of Argyll uttered a gasp of sudden fear at the grim spectre she beheld there. It was a figure armed as for a tourney, in gleaming steel ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... 'boyish' and 'puerile,' 'fiery' and 'igneous,' 'wooden' and 'ligneous,' 'worldly' and 'mundane,' 'bloody' and 'sanguine,' 'watery' and 'aqueous,' 'fearful' and 'timid,' 'manly' and 'virile,' 'womanly' and 'feminine,' 'sunny' and 'solar,' 'starry' and 'stellar,' 'yearly' and 'annual,' 'weighty' and 'ponderous,' may all be placed in the same list. Nor are these more than a handful of words out of the number which might be adduced. You would find both pleasure and profit in enlarging these lists, and, as far as you are able, making them ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... a rusted iron hook, A bunch of ponderous keys he took, Lighted a torch, and Allan led Through grated arch and passage dread. Portals they passed, where, deep within, Spoke prisoner's moan and fetters' din; Through rugged vaults, where, loosely stored, Lay wheel, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... started forth again in the drizzling mist and fog, and presently found themselves in one of the most fashionable streets of Kingsdene and standing before a ponderous hall-door, which stood back in ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... ran along the public road. The windows were always draped and curtained, and opened one foot at the top with monotonous regularity. No one was ever seen leaning out of them, or even pushing back the curtains to widen their view. There was a broad flight of steps, and a ponderous door which, when opened, disclosed a long hall, at the end of which was a gaily flowered conservatory. Instinct made people tread gently upon the thick Turkey rugs that were laid upon the polished floor; there was a stillness in the house that seemed to ...
— 'Me and Nobbles' • Amy Le Feuvre
... much in the consulting room to please him. Elaborate instruments, seen more often in hospitals than in the houses of private practitioners, were scattered about. A sphygmograph stood upon the table and a gasometer-like engine, which was new to Dr. Ripley, in the corner. A book-case full of ponderous volumes in French and German, paper-covered for the most part, and varying in tint from the shell to the yoke of a duck's egg, caught his wandering eyes, and he was deeply absorbed in their titles when the door opened suddenly behind him. Turning round, he found ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... me the sheet he had begun with "Dear Mother," and went on dictating. It was not at all after Julius Caesar's fashion of dictating. He sat with his eyes on his own letter, and uttered one brief but ponderous sentence after another, each complete in all its parts, and quite unhesitating, though slowly uttered. I gathered it up, wrote it down, said "Well," and waited for more in silence, till, after I had looked at him once or twice to see whether he were asleep or in a reverie, another such ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lifted a fat leg over the backbone and put a ponderous foot on one pedal, while the drops of perspiration began to stand out ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... it is of no consequence. I—I had something else on my mind. It is of no consequence." The color faded, and his face fell into its usual bleak lines, but his mouth twitched. A minute afterwards he began to speak with ponderous dignity. "This love-making business is, of course, most mortifying to me; and also, no doubt, annoying to Mrs. Richie. To begin with, she is eleven years older than he—he told his mother so. He added, if you please! that he hoped ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... 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)
... stone, on arches, and was of the most massive and ponderous character. There was a roadway in the centre of it, on which two continued streams of vehicles were passing—one on the left, going into the city; and the other on the right, coming out. On each side were broad ...
— Rollo in London • Jacob Abbott
... or 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 ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... of the ponderous, mountain type, but it ran smoothly, with steam cut off, and although the ground trembled and the rails groaned as it passed, there was no ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... this room!" Rexhill had arisen in all of his ponderous majesty, roused to wrath at last. His pudgy finger shook as he pointed to the door, and his fat face was congested. "I'm not here to be insulted by a jail-bird. Put ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... into a group of cattle. Poor man, it was dreadful to saddle him with a woman at such a juncture, but I was not a woman just then. I was a green cowboy and frightened to death, as the cattle closed around me, a heavy mass of ponderous forms, here wedged in tightly and bellowing, some with the pain of being crushed, some for their calves. I expected every instant ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... lot for years had been cast with a somewhat threadbare array of army people, content with little, impecunious but honest, he wondered what manner of martial man this was. Burleigh did not loudly boast of his wealth and influence, but impressed in some ponderous way his hearers with a sense of both. Yet, ever since that run to Warrior Gap, a change had come over Burleigh. He talked more of mines and money and showed less, and now, only yesterday, when the old man's heart had mellowed to him because he had first held ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... personal consequence chiefly through an antique gold snuffbox, and a ponderous silk pocket-kerchief, which he had an imposing manner of drawing out of his pocket like a banner and using with both hands at once. Sir Barnet's object in life was constantly to extend the range of his acquaintance. Like a heavy body dropped into water—not to disparage ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... scarce and valuable alchymical tracts, in company with the caput mortum and the hour-glass. A few antiques, consisting of half-a-dozen cloth-yard arrows, the stout yew bow of the green clad yeoman, the ponderous mace and helmet of the valiant knight, and other relics of the days of chivalry, complete the decorations of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... who had discovered themselves and were seeking to be discovered. Sundry individuals were lifting their heads above the crowd but not with the modesty and self-distrust of Honest Abe. "Steve" Douglas, whom Samson had referred to as "that little rooster of a man," put on the stilts of a brave and ponderous vigor. His five-foot stature and his hundred pounds of weight did not fit the part of Achilles. But he would have no other. He blustered much with a spear too heavy for his hands. Lincoln used to call him a ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... 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
... far below the horizon when it was finished, and the glowing, arcing forces that had made and formed it were stopped. It loomed ponderous, dully gleaming in the faint light of a crescent moon and pinpoint stars. Nearly five hundred feet in height, a mighty, bluntly rounded dome at its top, the cylinder stood, covered over with smoothly gleaming metal, slightly ...
— The Last Evolution • John Wood Campbell
... deep in the hollow, so damp and so cold, Where oaks are by ivy o'ergrown, The gray moss and lichen creep over the mould, Lying loose on a ponderous stone. Now within this huge stone, like a king on his throne, A toad has been sitting more years than is known; And, strange as it seems, yet he constantly deems The world standing still while he's dreaming his dreams,— ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... captivity is chained to a stake, with no liberty of action whatever aside from begging with his trunk, eating and drinking. His only amusement is in swaying his body, swinging one foot, switching his tail, and (in a zoological park) looking for something that he can open or destroy. Such a ponderous beast cannot be allowed to roam at large among human beings, and the working elephant never leaves his stake and chain except under the guidance of his mahout. There is no means of estimating the wonderful powers of reasoning that captive elephants ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... has reached at last Cayuga's heights so near; Look out, ye men of Brantford, now, for soon he will be here! He brings with him a weighty load, his way before him feels, As slowly o'er the new-laid track he moves his ponderous wheels. ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... the spur of the hill yonder looks larger and steeper and more ponderous in the mist; it seems higher than this, a not unusual appearance when the difference in altitude is not very great. The level we are on seems to us beneath the level in the distance, as the future is higher than the present. In the hedge or scattered bushes, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... outshone all previous display. Pearls and diamonds encrusted his breast, and his draped helmet, with its flowing white aigrette, was a perfect blaze of jewels, from whose many facets the setting sun flashed in a way wonderful to behold at every movement of the ponderous beast he rode. ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... reputation concealed from the public the decay of his powers and the degeneration of his morals. At least, few said what perhaps many felt, that "he was not the man he had been." People went away from one of his ponderous and empty speeches disappointed, but not ill pleased to boast that they too had "heard Daniel Webster speak," and feeling very sure that he could be eloquent, though he had not been. We heard one of the last of his out-of-door speeches. It was near Philadelphia, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... waited not to be a witness of her skill. With one final look at the pale, exhausted child, he slowly descended from the waggon, and approaching Goisvintha, drew her towards a sheltered position near the ponderous vehicle. Here he seated himself by her side, prepared to listen with the deepest attention to her recital of the scenes of terror and suffering through which she had so ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... answered the 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. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the sound of grounding of arms, of the drawing of bolts and the turning of a key in a complicated lock. The prison was kept locked from within, and very heavy bars had to be moved ere the ponderous door slowly swung open on ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... He smiled again to hide a twitch of regret. "Why, I'm afraid it hardly produces a living wage; and I've got to think of that." He coloured suddenly, as if suspecting that Miss Hicks might consider the avowal an opening for he hardly knew what ponderous offer of aid. The Hicks munificence was too uncalculating not to be occasionally oppressive. But looking at her again he saw that her eyes ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... the contrary, adventured in no such dismal masquerade; she was a nice maiden lady, gifted with a bright clear intelligence, diversified with the charms of light wit and fancy, and as she was content to be in art what she was in nature, her books live, while those of her ponderous rival are being very rapidly forgotten. "Romola" and "Daniel Deronda" are dead beyond hope of resurrection; "The Mill on the Floss", being more feminine, still lives, even though its destiny is to be forgotten when "Pride ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... earth her rosy flowers to bear, Whose gift it is that Autumn's fruitful season Should with full grapes flow in a plenteous year, Telling of secret Nature every reason, Now having lost the beauty of his mind Lies with his neck compassed in ponderous chains; His countenance with heavy weight declined, Him to ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... wonderful. There are three apparent reasons, and one of them is aesthetic. So to clothe the body that its fineness be revealed and its meanness veiled has been the aesthetic aim of all costume, but before our time the mean had never been struck. The ancient Romans went too far. Muffled in the ponderous folds of a toga, Adonis might pass for Punchinello, Punchinello for Adonis. The ancient Britons, on the other hand, did not go far enough. And so it had been in all ages down to that bright morning when Mr. Brummell, ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... course you carry a cane—a very ponderous cane. What for? To use it, obviously. Contrive to do so when every body is silent. What's the use in being demonstrative in a crowd? It don't pay. Besides, you dog, you know your forte is in being odd. Odd fellow-you. See it in your brain—only ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... voyage that belied their threatening appearance. There had been no thought of danger to or from the forts and ports of rival nations which they had passed. There was no enmity, and no fear between them when the throats of their ponderous guns yawned at one another across the waves. They were now, in spirit, all one fleet, having one object, bearing against one enemy, ready to defend but one country, and that ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... are like unto the dragons of the earth, for ugliness. Men have enormous stature and mighty strength, and stride with fierce and lordly steps. Their faces have great noses between deep-set eyes, and protruding brows, and ponderous jaws like animals— symbols of brute force which needs but to be seen to frighten children in the dark. We are the gentler race, and we feel instinctively the dominating power of these men from ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... 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, and main, and heaven's high wall. For those of atoms lighter far consist, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... followed; also the old-style S [s] has been retained. Much of the flavour of Acetaria is lost if it is scanned too hurriedly; and one should remember also that Latin and Greek were the gauge of a man of letters, and if the titles and quotations seem a bit ponderous, they are as amusing a conceit as the French and German complacencies of a more ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... waiting-maid, was still standing behind the ponderous hall door, listening, with a smile upon her face, to young Dimsdale's retreating footsteps, when another and a brisker tread caught her ear coming from the opposite direction. The smile died away as she heard it, and her features assumed a peculiar expression, in which ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home |
