"Dead weight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... short that it must soon reach bottom. On the other side the horse could attain the top by a rush; after which, having gained at least a front footing over the bank, he could draw the light vehicle by dead weight the rest of the distance. Naturally, the driver had to take the course at exactly right angles, ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... as she fell, Garth's arms closed round her like steel bars, and she felt herself lifted clean up from the rocking boat on to the landing-stage. For an instant she knew that she rested a dead weight against his breast; then he placed her very gently on ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... John Baronet's son on whom they relied. My father's strength and courage and counsel they sought for in me. But all the time I felt myself to be like a spirit on the edge of doom. I worked as one who feels that when his task is ended, the blank must begin. Yet I left nothing undone because of the dead weight on my soul. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Boy and I worked harder than ever in our school in the cool pavilion. I had flung off the dead weight of my stubborn repinings, and my heart was light again. There were delightful discoveries of beauty in the artless, childish faces that greeted us every morning; and now the only wonder was that I had been so slow to penetrate the secret of their charm. That eager, radiant elf, the Princess Somdetch ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... enables you to stand firm on your dizzy height. Your fortune was experience to you, joy, growth, discipline, and character; to him it will be a temptation, an anxiety, which will probably dwarf him. It was wings to you, it will be a dead weight to him; it was education to you and expansion of your highest powers; to him it may mean inaction, lethargy, indolence, weakness, ignorance. You have taken the priceless spur—necessity—away from him, the spur which has goaded man to nearly ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... sudden strain at the line, which flies through the rings of the rod. It is not well to give too much line; best to follow his course, as he makes off as if for Berwick and the sea. Once or twice he leaps clean into the air, a flying bar of silver. Then he sulks at the bottom, a mere dead weight, attempting devices only to be conjectured. A common plan now is to tighten the line, and tap the butt end of the rod. This humane expedient produces effects not unlike neuralgia, it may be supposed, for the ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... 'em, and onto that all perished at the ends! Why ever they couldn't go to a new floor when they done the new roof Mr. Bartlett could not conceive. They had not, and what was worse they had carried up the wall on the top of the old brickwork, adding to the dead weight; and it only fit to pull down, as ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... be found in the whole commonwealth of letters. The universities coldly rejected the offer. The London booksellers understood no science like that of profit. The valuable property, therefore, lay a dead weight, till purchased by a literary society at ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... of this city, you would not know what to do with it more than to plunder it. To hold it in the manner you hold New York, would be an additional dead weight upon your hands; and if a general conquest is your object, you had better be without the city than with it. When you have defeated all our armies, the cities will fall into your hands of themselves; but to creep into them in the manner you got into Princeton, Trenton, &c. is like ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of making himself audible, and the equal impossibility of bearing up against Mrs Gamp, who threw herself upon him like a feather-bed, and forced him backwards down the stairs by the mere oppression of her dead weight, prevailed. Tom shook the dust of that house off his feet, without ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... Miss Kilmansegg, That gowden, goolden, golden leg, Was the theme of all conversation! Had it been a Pillar of Church and State, Or a prop to support the whole Dead Weight, It could not have furnished more debate To the heads and tails of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... cigarette, which somebody had brought him. It dropped from his fingers. Somebody picked it up and lit it and stuck it in his mouth; it dropped again. Then I noticed something odd about his left arm; he was holding it up with his right hand and feeling it. It dropped, too, like a dead weight, on the counterpane. Cameron watched its behaviour with anguish. He complained that his left arm was all numb and too heavy to hold up. Also he said he was afraid to ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... gone twelve yards when the inevitable took place. We were all three swept away, and Chanden Sing and Mansing in their panic clung tight to my arms and dragged me under water. Though I swam my hardest with my legs, we continually came to the surface and then sank again, owing to the dead weight of my helpless mates. But at last, after a desperate struggle, the current washed us on to the opposite side, where we found our feet, and were soon able to scramble out of the treacherous river. We were some two hundred ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... overcome with emotion that, after uttering a long sigh like a death rattle, he sank, a dead weight, into the ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... slope by means of ropes. I have never seen an animal stand more beating than that brute did. Although I am most kind to animals, I must say for my men that this particular mule often drove us all to absolute despair. Dragging the dead weight of an animal up a steep slope, 40, 50, or even 70 ft. high—we were only seven men—was no joke at all. When you had to repeat the operation several times a day, it was somewhat trying. Once the brute ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... within his son, we see, And often rises in the third degree; If better luck a better mother give, 420 Chance gave us being, and by chance we live. Such as our atoms were, even such are we, Or call it chance, or strong necessity: Thus loaded with dead weight, the will is free. And thus it needs must be; for seed conjoin'd Lets into nature's work the imperfect kind; But fire, the enlivener of the general frame, Is one, its operation still the same. Its principle is in itself: while ours Works, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... required twelve hours. One of the peculiar features of the invention was that of employing the pile itself as the support of the steam-hammer part of the apparatus while it was being driven, so that the pile had the percussive action of the dead weight of the hammer as well as its lively blows to induce it to sink into the ground. The steam-hammer sat as it were on the shoulders of the pile, while it dealt forth its ponderous blows on the pile-head at the rate of 80 a minute, and as the pile sank, the hammer followed it down ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... must have been proud of them. But to-day she felt herself singularly dissatisfied with them. She said to herself that she hated Sundays, of all the days of the week. Other days had their duties: music, studies, riding, tennis, or walks, but on Sundays the girls were a dead weight upon her. Somehow, they were not in the current of good times that the other girls and boys of their ages were having. If she suggested brightly that they go over to the Parmalees' or the Morans' and see if the ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... pretend to rest give up entirely to the bed, a dead weight,—letting the bed hold them, instead of trying to hold themselves on the bed. Watch, and unless you are an exceptional case (of which happily there are a few), you will be surprised to see how you are holding yourself on the bed, with tense muscles, if not all over, so nearly all over that a little ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... sound of footsteps on the stairs and a heavy muffled noise as of some dead weight being dragged down the staircase and along the passage. Then she heard the hall door cautiously opened and shut. And, finally, she distinguished the sound of wheels rolling away from ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... old stand," Carter replied, as putting his foot on the step he raised himself and the dead weight of the ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... fighting to keep her respect and love intact through the debauchery. For him, the battle waged on between love and desire, his love for her—his one inspiration, while desire was constantly reenforced by the taunts of his godless fatalism and the dead weight ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... atmosphere—a sense of suffocation—anxiety—and, above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant. A dead weight hung upon us. It hung upon our limbs—upon the household furniture—upon the goblets from which we drank; and all things were depressed, and borne down thereby—all things save only the flames of the seven iron lamps which illumined our revel. Uprearing ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... broken loose there was a pretty fair chance that the craft with its long extended planes would float, and even bear up the two aviators. Perhaps the quick-witted Casper Blue had looked out for just such a contingency, and found a way to free the framework from the dead weight of the motor. ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... Below, he heard a whispered conversation between Arsdale and the nurse; within, he heard nothing. So five minutes passed, and to Donaldson the world was chaos. He felt as though he were locked up in a tomb. There was the same feeling of dead weight upon the shoulders; the same sensation of stifling. Then ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... streamers, fled low above the tree tops. They reminded Tarzan of frightened antelope fleeing the charge of a hungry lion. But though the light clouds raced so swiftly, the jungle was motionless. Not a leaf quivered and the silence was a great, dead weight—insupportable. Even the insects seemed stilled by apprehension of some frightful thing impending, and the larger things were soundless. Such a forest, such a jungle might have stood there in the beginning of that unthinkably far-gone age before ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... dog who had dropped to shot; "Fetch!" And, signalling the boy behind, he relieved the dog of his burden and tossed the dead weight of ruffled plumage toward him. Then he broke his gun, and, as the empty shells flew rattling backward, slipped in fresh cartridges, locked the barrels, and walked forward, the flush of excitement still staining ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... fit N exactly, so that, though C C and N move up and down very rapidly, they still make perfect contact. The disc is vibrated by the sound-impulses, and drives the cutting point down into the surface of the wax cylinder, turning below it in a clockwork direction. The only dead weight pressing on S is that of N, C C, and the ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... the collapse of the human mass in his arms into dead weight that brought Parish Thornton again out of his mania and back to consciousness. The battle was over, and as he drew his arms away his enemy sank shapeless and limp ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... had taught Return Kingdom a trick or two at wrestling. And now he allowed the hunter to lift him off the ground, then he let his muscles relax, his dead weight falling in his opponent's arms. Suddenly getting his feet to the ground in this way, he sprang against the hunter's muscular frame with such rapidity of thought and motion that he was able by a tremendous ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... railway carriage to give itself the sensation of making the train travel at sixty miles an hour. It is immorality, not morality, that needs protection: it is morality, not immorality, that needs restraint; for morality, with all the dead weight of human inertia and superstition to hang on the back of the pioneer, and all the malice of vulgarity and prejudice to threaten him, is responsible for many persecutions and ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... general facts which are equally true of every other human being. It is in degree, and not in kind, that one man differs from another. In this, the poet is but the type of what every human being must be, if he would be anything better than a dead weight in society, incapable of success in any department ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... No dead weight follows you as you tow. The burden is willing; it depends upon you gaily, as a friend may do without making any depressing show of helplessness; neither, on the other hand, is it apt to set you at naught or charge you with a make-believe. It accompanies, it almost ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Phil said quickly, beginning to gather Fee into his arms. But I tell you it was hard work getting him up, he was such a dead weight! ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... [by its dead weight] a greater weight than the sum of its own weight outside the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... in what he was saying, and it was with difficulty that she repressed an outburst of her sullen sorrow. "Yes," her mouth worked, "I am unhappy, and I won't be, I won't be. I never was before. It is all in here, like a dead weight, a drag, a cold hand clutching me." She pressed both hands to her heart. Then she drew back as if furious at ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... a dead weight had fallen on her spirits. If Sir Richard had thought her bad form ten minutes before, his unspoken mind now declared her stupid. Meanwhile Kitty was saying to herself, as she watched her husband ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... you mean?" she asked, her heart seeming to be a dead weight in her breast, heavy with suspicion over the dread significance in his voice and words. She ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... civilized society has to carry below the lowest sections of the masses a dead weight of ignorance, poverty, crime, and disease. Every such society has, in the great central section of the masses, a great body which is neutral in all the policy of society. It lives by routine and tradition. It is not brutal, but it is shallow, narrow-minded, and prejudiced. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories, and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... what the Elephant heard. He heard nothing more but he could feel. He could feel himself a stone; that is a dreadful thing to feel. It was a heavy, crushing feeling; a dead weight always bearing him down. He could not lift it; he could not throw it off. It was forever crushing him down, down,—though he never really sank. But it was the same thing to him; he felt that he ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... only get some dead weight over the frigate's side, it will lessen her way you see, and the wind may lull enough before morning to give the little craft a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... think any good will come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them. Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will lend a hand; the children will bring flowers. And why drag this dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Christendom? It is natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut up the young ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... all was well, but the stolen motor car was a dead weight on Renwick's conscience, and the danger of detection was still most unpleasant. If an excuse were needed for his arrest, a pretext which would hide the real secret of the mission of his pursuers, the larceny ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... his head sharply and his lips parted; then his head sank again, and he became a dead weight in the ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... for countless modifications in shape and size of this portion of the stand. The chief desiderata—stability and ease of manipulation—are attained in the first by means of the "spread" of the three feet, which are usually shod with cork; in the second, by the dead weight of the foot-plate. The tripod is mechanically the more correct form, and for practical use is much to be preferred. Its chief rival, the Jackson foot (Fig. 41, c), is based upon the same principle, and on the score of appearance has ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... brought the boat slightly around. They were now close enough to see that Tom Foss was supporting dead weight in the person of ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... to flow; she lay in his arms a dead weight, as if stricken by a thunderbolt, and ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... unwound her arms, gently drawing her up, up, till her head lay against his shoulder. Then she became a dead weight. She had fainted. He lifted her up in his strong arms and started ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... is wonderful on account of the greatness of the enemy that it does battle with. To lift dead weight; to overcome length of languid space; to multiply or systematize a given force; this we may see done by the bar, or beam, or wheel, without wonder. But to war with that living fury of waters, to bare its breast, moment after moment, against the unwearied enmity ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... Pampa de Avieras and the government troops came thirty minutes later. I was beginning to get weak from loss of blood. My left arm seemed to be a dead weight, and the muscles were painful and swollen. The people from the passenger train crowded about me and did everything in their power to relieve my suffering. The soldier who had been struck with the shovel came out of ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... bridge, the more important is economy of material, not only because the total expenditure is more serious, but because as the span increases the dead weight of the structure becomes a greater fraction of the whole load to be supported. In fact, as the span increases a point is reached at which the dead weight of the superstructure becomes so large that a limit is imposed to any further increase ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... And yet at last Down sank Excalibar to rise no more. This is not well. In truth, it vexes me. Instead of whistling to the steeds of Time, To make them jog on merrily with life's burden, Like a dead weight thou hangest on the wheels. Thou art too young, too full of lusty health To talk ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Frank. Sometimes when the tow rope hung slack in the water, he pulled through his stroke with ease and comfort Sometimes when the Tortoise hung back heavily he seemed to be pulling against an impossible dead weight But his worst experience came when the Tortoise altered her tactics in the middle of one of his strokes. Then, if it happened that she sulked suddenly, he was brought up short with a jerk that jarred his spine. If, on the other; hand, she chose to rush forward when he had his ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... before his eyes. So he settled his grasp upon his collar, held his head above the water and strove with all his might to get beyond the reach of the cruel sea. Had he been alone he could have reached the land with ease, but the slaver pulled upon him almost a dead weight. ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... him infuriated; but his strength held her locked in a vicelike embrace, and, toward morning, she suddenly relaxed—crumpled up like a white flower in his arms. For a while her tears fell hot and fast; then utter prostration left her limp, without movement, even without a tremor, a dead weight in ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... has never been known to behave in this manner before. The mahouts seem to understand; I don't. This I do know: When a tiger charges an elephant's neck, the elephant's way is—if the tiger has gotten in past the thrust of his head—to plunge dead weight against a big tree, an upstanding rock, or lacking these—the ground. In that case he always rolls. You see where I would have been very ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... certainty that every able-bodied person who receives economic maintenance of the nation shall render at least the minimum of service. The laziest is sure to pay his cost. In your day, on the other hand, society supported millions of able-bodied loafers in idleness, a dead weight on the world's industry. From the hour of the consummation of the great Revolution, this burden ceased to ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... enthusiastic meetings and any one of our audiences would give a majority for women; but the negroes are all against us. These men ought not to be allowed to vote before we do because they will be so much more dead weight to lift. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... man, and to force him to move; but the man sat as a dead weight, and only mumbled ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... was drawn to him also, unconsciously, by that something in personality which determines the relations of men and women. Yet there were deep instincts in her that protested. Girl as she was, she felt herself for the moment more alive than he to the dead weight of the World, fighting the tug of those who would fain move it from ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the theatre has been frequently remarked upon. Why the world should ever fear a radical, indeed, is hard to see, since he has against him the whole dead weight of society; but least of all need the radical be dreaded in the theatre. When the average person pays money for his amusements, he is little inclined to be pleased with something which doesn't amuse him: and what amuses him, nine times out of ten, is what has amused ...
— Washington Square Plays - Volume XX, The Drama League Series of Plays • Various
... care if I were cultivated, Ha is like all the rest. He would like to joke and laugh. Well, I think that is nice, too, and I wish I could do it. But I never could, and now I can't try. I suppose he wonders what makes me such a dead weight on you all." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of strong will, and of a thorough devotion to the cause. Senator Wade would be suitable for this duty. Cameron is devoted, but I doubt his other capacities for the emergency, and he has on his shoulders General Scott as a dead weight. ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... huge Persia?—then we are not unworthy of the men that fought at Ilion, our fathers; the race and spirit of anax andron Agamemnon is not dead! Ha, we can do anything; there are no victories we may not win! And here is the dead weight and terror of the war lifted from us; and there is no anxiety now to hold our minds. We may go forth conquering and to conquer; we may launch our triremes on immaterial seas, and subdue unknown empires of the spirit!—And here ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... late. Red-beard's arms were still about him. Suddenly he felt the dead weight of the islander's body. As he strove to break the man's hold he tottered on the brink of the ledge. He felt himself being dragged downward. Before his eyes flashed the rock-dappled waters of the cove. His only chance lay in clearing the rocks below. His knees straightened with a jerk. Shoving ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... this incomplete treaty France had had to sacrifice part of her colonies in equatorial Africa; and in addition to the uncertain relation with Germany there remained the dead weight of the Spanish zone and the confused international administration of Tangier. The disastrously misgoverned Spanish zone has always been a centre for German intrigue and native conspiracies, as well as a permanent obstacle to the ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... it to the dead weight of instinct which he could not step over, again through weakness and meanness. He looked at his fellow prisoners and was amazed to see how they all loved life and prized it. It seemed to him that they loved and valued life more in prison than in freedom. ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... were all in fair order. The line is worked by small locomotives, six wheels coupled and no truck, of the Baldwin Locomotive Company's manufacture, the load handled by them being 15 cars, each containing 3-1/2 tons of coal, and averaging in dead weight 1-3/4 tons each. The grade down to the port is very steep, and the heaviest work for the engines is in taking the empties ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... 'distinguo. There are other reasons. It is written, So run that ye may obtain. Now, no man can run after the prize we seek if he carrieth a woman on his back. And that for two reasons: first, because she is so much dead weight; and second, because a woman is so made that, if her bearer did achieve the reward, she would immediately claim a share in it. But that is no part of the divine plan, as ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... its monotony of color. And though Jack was almost boyishly penitent, in the manner of one who comes before parental authority after he has been in mischief, still John Wingfield, Sr. could not escape the dead weight of an impression that he was speaking to a stranger and not to his own flesh and blood. He wished now that he had shown affection on Jack's entrance. He had a desire to grip the brown hand that was on the edge of the desk fingering ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... No writer, whose work is familiar to me, has ever yet described with unsparing fidelity the kind of misery which lies in having to do precisely the same things at the same hour, through long and consecutive periods of time. The hours then become a dead weight which oppresses the spirit to the point of torture. Life itself resembles those dreadful dreams of childhood, in which we see the ceiling and the walls of the room contract round one's helpless and immobile ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... mother countries tends to diminish, or at least to keep down below what they would otherwise rise to, both the enjoyments and industry of all those nations in general, and of the American colonies in particular. It is a dead weight upon the action of one of the great springs which puts into motion a great part of the business of mankind. By rendering the colony produce dearer in all other countries, it lessens its consumption, and thereby cramps the industry of the colonies, and both the enjoyments and the industry of ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... manufacturing people, must we have huge mills crowded full with heavy apparatus, vibrating machinery, and human lives. Have we forgotten Lawrence? Let us not wait for another such holocaust ere we learn wisdom. We can do without ornament, but we must have safety. A mere increase of dead weight is no remedy; there should be a well-studied mechanical disposition of material. If buttresses are applied to warehouses and factories with sole reference to their utility, elegance will grow upon them afterward as naturally as leaves grow ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... pay for taking her. D——n me, Jack, that's too bad. I'll write to Joseph Hume to bring it before the House of Commons. I know he is a great reformer and a sailor's friend, although he terms them a dead weight. ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... the masters. It is mainly inspired by love, and takes a popular courtly or scholastic form. The style of Gianni had many of the faults of his predecessors. That of Cavalcanti, the friend and precursor of Dante, showed a tendency to stifle poetic imagery under the dead weight of philosophy. But the love poems of Cino are so mellow, so sweet, so musical, that they are only surpassed by those of Dante, who, as the author of the "Vita Nuova," belongs to this lyric school. In this book he ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... rolling eyes I saw nothing but the madness of pain and terror. As it drew back for a second charge, in its mad effort to dash through the woodwork to liberty, I slipped sideways with the dead weight of Suzee on my arm, into the seats on one side. It was not an instant too soon. The next, the bull rushed forwards and our seats were falling in splinters about his head. Along, sideways, over chair after chair, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... could get his breath. He felt that silence was not good for the woman beside him, though he doubted much whether she was in a condition to understand him. She was gasping irregularly, and her body was a dead weight against him. "It was sure fierce, there, for a ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... set forth? And one might penetrate some way towards a consideration of the vascular organism of a true literary style in which there is a vital relation of otherwise lifeless word with word. And wherein lies the progress of architecture from the stupidity of the pyramid and the dead weight of the Cyclopean wall to the spring and the flight of the ogival arch, but in a quasi-organic relation? But the way of such thoughts might be intricate, and the ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... bracing himself in the slipping earth, dragged her up and out of the saddle. The roan, with Laramie's hand on his bridle, swept on downstream. The clay bank, under the strain of the double load, gave under Hawk's feet. But without releasing Kate's hands he threw himself flat and, matching his dead weight against the chance of being dragged in, caught her with one arm and flung the other backward into the dark. A clump of willow shoots clutched in his sinewy fingers gave him a stay and, putting forth all his strength, he drew ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... armies like Gideon's, panic, once started, spreads swiftly, and becomes frenzied confusion. The same thing is true in the work of the Church to-day. Who that has had much to do with guiding its operations has not groaned over the dead weight of the timid and sluggish souls, who always see difficulties and never the way to get over them? And who that has had to lead a company of Christian men has not often been ready to wish that he could sound out Gideon's proclamation, and bid the 'fearful and afraid' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... found that woman running wild down the road, cryin' and sobbin'. At first I thought she'd done the shooting. It was a risky thing for me to do, gentlemen; but I took her up on the horse and got her away to Lowville. It was that much dead weight agin my chances, but I took it. She was a ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Quantities, however, remained as ground-ice, anchored to the kelp and stones on the bottom. Gazing down through the clear waters one saw a white, mamillated sheath covering the jungle of giant seaweed, recalling a forest after a heavy snowfall. The ice, instead of being a dead weight bearing down the branches, tended to float, and, when accumulated in large masses, sometimes succeeded in rising to the surface, uprooting and lifting great lengths of seaweed with it. One branching stem, found floating in the harbour, ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... one that lay near to her heart. Her face was flushed and eager. He wavered, and, having wavered, he did what no practical man should do. He allowed sentiment to interfere with business. He knew that a series of articles on Broster Street would probably be so much dead weight on the paper, something to be skipped by the average reader, but he put ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... a free goer," said the servant, dismounting to adjust the girths and stirrups,"he only pulls a little if he feels a dead weight ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... prophecy intoxicated Savonarola. His fiery temperament, strained to the utmost by the dead weight of Florentine affairs that pressed upon him, became more irritable day by day. Vision succeeded vision; trance followed upon trance; agonies of dejection were suddenly transformed into outbursts of magnificent and soul-sustaining enthusiasm. It was no wonder if, passing as he had done from the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... prejudicial to her truth and affection. At the same time he felt it impossible to prevent himself from experiencing a strong sense of anxiety, or perhaps we should say, a feeling of involuntary pain, which lay like a dead weight upon his heart and spirits. In truth, do what he might and reason as he would, he could not expel from his mind the new and painful principle which disturbed it. And thus he went on, sometimes triumphantly defending Mary from all ungenerous suspicion, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... said the doctor to himself. Surely, in this long interview, he had tried all that suggestion could do to get a fulcrum to raise the dead weight of conviction that years of an accepted error had built up undisturbed. How easy it would have been had the tale of Daverill's audacious fraud been a few months old; or a few years, for that matter! It was ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... truth was all too apparent. Sir Charles Abingdon was almost past speech. He was glaring across the table as though he saw some ghastly apparition there. And now with appalling suddenness he became as a dead weight in Harley's supporting grasp. Raspingly, as if forced in ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... men go down in heaps, but finally they swarmed forward with the bayonet and threw all their weight of numbers upon us. We gave them one terrible volley, but nothing could have stopped the ferocious impetus of their attack. For one terrible moment our ranks bent under the dead weight, but the Germans, too, wavered, and in that moment we gave them the bayonet, and hurled them back in disorder. It was then I got a bayonet thrust, but as I fell I heard our boys cheering and I knew we had finished ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... the outer shaft, till this snapped under the heavy strain, when finally the yoke strap which joined the two together also broke. Mansana's grasp of the bridle of the other horse helped him to save himself, and helped also, together with the dead weight of the fallen animal, to bring the whole cortege to a standstill. But the prostrate brute, feeling the carriage close upon him, struggled to free himself; his companion reared, the near shaft broke, a splinter pierced Mansana in the side; but thrusting himself ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... the words was no trace of rebellion or even of self-pity, but merely there was the dead weight and numbness of a hopeless resignation to make the words sound ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... lock, or fierce struggle, with a good village Hindoo or Mussulman in active training, and having any knowledge of the tricks of the wrestling school. No hitting is allowed. The Hindoo system of wrestling is the perfection of science and skill; mere dead weight of course will always tell in a close grip, but the catches, the holds, the twists and dodges that are practised, allow for the fullest development of cultivated skill, as against mere brute force. The system is purely a scientific one. The fundamental rule ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... air places upon its power of supporting wings, taken in connection with the combined weight of a man and a machine, make a drawback which we should not too hastily assume our ability to overcome. The example of the bird does not prove that man can fly. The hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight which the manager of the machine must add to it over and above that necessary in the bird may well prove an insurmountable obstacle ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... a person attempts to inspect a redstart's nest containing young, the female drops from the nest a dead weight and falls from branch to branch of any tree in the way, striking the ground with a dull thud. Her next move is to trail a helpless wing along the ground. At another time she flies from the nest and alights on the ground with spread wings ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... behavior to her feelings. There were not only things to be done; there were also the social standards of what ought, in crises, to be felt. She had to satisfy her gods. And she simply wasn't strong enough. Her hold was broken. She knew it, clutched at him and hung on him, a dead weight, while he buoyed her up. Were they all, he wondered, victims of the War? Milly, as she said that night when she came to him in her stark sincerity while Dick lay unconscious, had given him up once. She had given him to the War, and done the act with the high decorum suited to it. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... certainly; for a hand that can manage it. Lancie Crossthwaite will land you a trout, three pounds weight, with a line that wouldn't lift a dead weight of one pound from the floor to the table. I'll uphold ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... of me to mingle mine with yours so," she objected. "And it was wrong and selfish. I can't fasten this dead weight of my troubles on you and drag you back. I ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... reached Lake George when the Grand Seigneur insisted upon his coming back and espousing Miss St. Vincent,—very Frenchy, was it not? But Eugene did not mean to be burdened with a dead weight all his life. We have had enough botherment with that miserable patent, not to have a beggarly girl thrust ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... just as calm and beautiful,—the far-off mountains wore their veil of mist just as arially,—the brook rippled over the stones with just as soft a melody; but what "discord on the music" had fallen! what "darkness on the glory"! A miserable, dull, dead weight was the heart which throbbed so lightly but an hour before. Wearily, drearily, she dragged herself home. It was nearly sunset when she arrived, and she told her mother she was tired and had the headache, which was true,—though, if she had said heartache, it would have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... back beside him. Here was the cold water he had sought, and she put it against his forehead and drenched the wounded shoulder with it. Three times she tried to move him, so he might lie more easy, but his dead weight was too much, and desisting, she sat close and raised his head to let it rest against her. Thus she saw the blood that was running from in front of the shoulder also; but she said no more about fainting. ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... accomplished, whether the head was racked with pain, and the frame was consumed by fever, or not; but the day came at length when poor Harriet could work no more. The sting of the lash had no power to rouse her now, and the new master finding her a dead weight on his hands, returned the useless piece of property to him who was called her "owner." And while she lay there helpless, this man was bringing other men to look at her, and offering her for sale at the lowest possible price; at the same time setting forth her ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford
... Cleigh stoop and put his arms under the body of his son, heave, and stand up under the dead weight. He staggered past her toward the main ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... walk erect to their front doors, I will never crawl around to the back entrances. If I ever must take to keep from starving, it will be from strangers. I shall never inflict myself as a dead weight and a painfully tolerated infamy on any one. I was able to get myself into this disgusting slough, and if I haven't brains and pluck enough to get myself out, I will remain at this, my level, to ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... comfortable." He was silent a while, and then in a cautious whisper said, "I'll explain to you, Bruce. I might have made Jane's life easier if I had worked. I know that. I know our friends look on me as a lazy, selfish dog, a dead weight on the child. But—you are the first person to whom I have ever told this—I have had for many years a disorder, an ailment, which must in any case make my life a short one. Confinement and continued exertion would bring on a crisis at once. My physician told me that five years ago. Now you ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... quickly, inquiringly, toward him. He stooped and whispered a few words. He felt her thrill from head to foot, felt her rock and sway for a moment, and then—he had just time to catch her before she fell a dead weight in his arms. ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... waist for the purpose, he could be lifted by the ends of the fabric through that aperture by the strength of any one man. Naturally he himself would make no effort to facilitate the enterprise. On the contrary, such inertness as the sheer exercise of will could compass was added to his dead weight. Nevertheless he rose slowly, slowly through the air. As he was finally dragged through the rift in the rocks, his first feeling was one of gratification to perceive that no one man could so handle him. The feat had required the utmost exertions of two athletic Indians pulling ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... culture, in order to uphold the traditional system in the interests of the few? In neither case do the reformers desire to suppress the study of the old culture-giving language; rather it is hoped that the interests of scholarly and liberal learning will benefit by being freed from the dead weight of grammar grinders, whose mechanical performance and monkey antics are merely a dodge to catch a copper ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... under which the human race is actually living it may not so befall, but curiosity may prevail over necessity and knowledge over hunger, nevertheless the primordial fact is that curiosity sprang from the necessity of knowing in order to live, and this is the dead weight and gross matter carried in the matrix of science. Aspiring to be knowledge for the sake of knowledge, to know the truth for the sake of the truth itself, science is forced by the necessities of life to turn aside and put it itself at their service. While men believe themselves ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... was thus speaking, he had risen from bed with great difficulty, holding to my shoulder with a grip that almost made me cry out, and moving his legs like so much dead weight. His words, spirited as they were in meaning, contrasted sadly with the weakness of the voice in which they were uttered. He paused when he had got into a ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... almost crossly: "Don't 'Great and Wonderful Mystery' me. This head is becoming a dead weight, and I'm thirsty and tired, and, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... flattering to such a child, for he always took as much pains to amuse me, and to inform me on anything I wished to know, as ho could have done to the greatest person in the land. I have heard him express great disgust towards those people who, lively and agreeable abroad, are a dead weight in the family circle. I think the remarkable clearness of his style proceeds in some measure from the habit of conversing with very young people, to whom he has a great deal ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... she nothing loath, began her new and naturally taught gift of bottom upheavings and cunt pressures until again we sank exhausted in the death-like ending of love's battles. On recovering our senses, I was obliged to withdraw and relieve my sister of the dead weight of my ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... her arms relaxing, felt the dead weight of her form against him. He raised her to her feet, he half carried her to the door, and on to the stairs. She was nearly fainting, but her will held it at bay. He threw open the door of their ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... suffrage had been a failure, to which she replied: "Although the United States has gathered a population which represents every race; although among its people are the followers of every religion and the subjects of every form of government; although there has been the dead weight of a large ignorant vote, yet the little settlement, which 150 years ago rested upon the eastern shores of the Atlantic a mere colonial possession, has steadily climbed upward until today it occupies a proud position of equality among the greatest ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... hand! Slender hands, to bear the double burden. Delicate shoulders, to carry the dead weight that hangs on them. Are they elastic steel, those fingers that grip the rope, never slipping, ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... traitor being pronounced on the whole two hundred and seventy-eight. Poor little Jasper woke for an interval from the sense of present discomfort to hear it, he seemed to stiffen all over with the shock of horror, and then hung a dead weight on Stephen's arm. It would have dragged him down, but there was no room to fall, and the wretchedness of the lad against whom he staggered found vent in a surly imprecation, which was lost among the cries and the entreaties of some of the others. The London magistracy were some of them in ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... may so express it, in our friendly communications. The preventive cause of my not seeing you, has been the absolute necessity of keeping myself uninterruptedly employed to finish a literary task which had long hung as a dead weight ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... that it was a living creature that lay on the path. It was plainly, in fact, some poor, half-frozen fellow-man, who lay coiled together there, perishing of cold in that bitter night. The rector tried to raise the poor wretch from the ground, but the body hung like a dead weight upon him. ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... "you and your friend are a dead weight on us just now. And there's one quick, convenient way of getting rid of you. Talk out, my friend. Tell us ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... straightened up and stood for a while, very drawn of feature and pallid. He lifted a hand vaguely and the arm dropped again like dead weight at his side. Without seeing them, he looked at the mirrored stars in the fresh-water lake across the way and twice his lips moved, but succeeded ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... may also happen with a monkey. Although it is usually cowardly enough to let itself fall a dead weight as soon as it is touched (so breaking all its bones) it may by chance cling to the bough upon which the Sakai shot it, but if the arrow itself does not succeed in killing it, the poison never fails to do so and nothing can save it from the fatal ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... however, we have to reckon with the existence of this enormous amount of stupidity, which those who fortunately escaped such education in childhood have to drag along with them in the long struggle towards the stars. This dead weight ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... boys soon managed to get the young man up on level ground. As often happened, it was Max who conceived the easiest way of doing this. To lift a dead weight of a hundred and fifty pounds is no light task, and so he started to break away one side of the pit, thus raising the bottom of the interior until they were able to simply carry Robert out of ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... dead weight on Antinor's left arm, and the right one, lacerated by the panther's claws, burned and ached well-nigh intolerably. But the glorious memory of long ago now preceded him, the Divine Martyr walking on ahead with sacred shoulders bent to the sacrifice, and he seemed to hear ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... reply of the Danish court showed that force was required, the two admirals virtually changed places with less friction than might have been expected, and Nelson "Lifted and carried on his shoulders the dead weight of his ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... two, felt himself incapable of speech or movement. Fenella was hanging, a dead weight, upon his arm. The eyes of both of them were riveted upon the hand which ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... me to lift the child into the cart. He is asleep, and has been a dead weight on my arm for close on an hour now. Have you a dry bit of sacking or ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... dead weight. "Tell you what," said Heyl, cheerfully. "You wait here. I'll go on down to Timberline Cabin for help, and ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... the water slowly rising about his prostrate body. He realized that the boat in which he lay was filling. He calmly figured out that with the body of the dead man and the cartridge-cases about him it was carrying a dead weight of nearly half a ton. And through the bullet hole in its bottom ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... of every man who passed her she looked with eager eyes of hope. Every man's body that lay in street or lane she hovered over with caught breath and eyes of fear, nerving herself to stoop, to turn the dead weight that settled sullenly into itself as her hands left it; to scan the face by the light of her flaring torch. And the light showed her as ghastly as what she looked on; black hair streaming like smoke behind her, eyes ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... herself leaning on Nancy nowadays; not as a dead weight, but with just the hint of need, just the suggestion of confidence, that youth and strength and buoyancy respond to so gladly. It had been decided that the house should be vacated as soon as a tenant could be found, but the "what next" had not been settled. Julia had confirmed Nancy's worst fears ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the dead weight upon the bosom at which the dagger had been aimed, and the first expression of his face indicated a certain disappointment that a single blow had not been permitted to end his troubles, as well as terror ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... thought that English soldiers could have marched fast enough to overtake Russians, more especially with such a being to command them, as —-, whom I, and indeed almost every one else have always considered a dead weight on the English service. I suppose, however, that both they and their commander were spurred on ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... back of the house and sobbed quietly. Mrs. Rumford and the skeptical Jimmy had gone to Old Orchard, and Huldah had slipped out of the front door, tacked the obtrusive placard on the gate-post, and closed all the blinds in honor of the buried hopes that lay like a dead weight at the bottom ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... are better equipped than the average, we have a right to ask for an improvement in their practice, even if they have inherited a great many handicaps from their predecessors and it is not easy to throw off the past, which acts as a dead weight ever tending to check progress. The tendency of the times is for fuller, freer and more sincere service in every line, for evolving out of the useless into the greatest helpfulness. It is not asking too much when we demand ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker |
