"Plummet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whip; and descending along the steep air, he stood on the summit of the hill of the woody Palatium; and he took away the son of Ilia, that moment giving out his royal ordinances to his own Quirites. His mortal body glided through the yielding air; just as the leaden plummet, discharged from the broad sling, is wont to dissolve itself[62] in mid air. A beauteous appearance succeeded, one more suitable to the lofty couches[63] of heaven, and a form, such as that of Quirinus arrayed in his regal robe. His wife ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the virtues of his sex with none of its frailties. She said she had his picture which she would show us some day. She described his mother as a "proud piece," almost putting her down on a level with "poor white trash," which wuz the deepest depth her plummet of contumely could reach. And she described her as holding her son by her apron string, ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... wide gorge or ravine, choked with the mingled foliage of oaks, walnuts, and elms; while in its rocky depths a little brook creeps down to mingle with the river. From the rugged trunk of the stunted cedar that leans forward from the brink, you may drop a plummet into the river below, where the cat-fish and the turtles may plainly be seen gliding over the wrinkled sands of the clear and shallow current. The cliff is accessible only from behind, where a man may climb up, not without difficulty, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... me you can't help it; that every one has his own difficulties, and must fight them out, and that mine are one sort, and yours another. Well, perhaps you may be right. I hope I'm getting to know that my plummet isn't to measure all the world. But it does seem a pity that men shouldn't be thinking about how to cure some of the wrongs which poor dear old England is pretty near dying of, instead of taking the edge off their brains, and spending ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... that he wouldn't do? He really felt just to-day that he might do better than usual. Hadn't he done well enough, so far as that went, in being exactly so dazzled? and in not having too, as he almost believed, wholly hidden from his host that he felt the latter's plummet? Suddenly, across the garden, he saw little Bilham approach, and it was a part of the fit that was on him that as their eyes met he guessed also HIS knowledge. If he had said to him on the instant what was uppermost he ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... said grimly. "In formation, they're like sitting ducks!" He dropped the ship like a plummet while the ray operators prepared to sweep the formation with ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... left him. "It is a mystery deeper than the sea below the plummet line! Ah! it must be love; love only is so sagacious, so inventive as this. Ah! I ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... flesh, to be the Messiah, viz. It had told them all that ever they had done; shown them their insides, the most inward secrets of their hearts, and laid judgment to the line, and righteousness to the plummet; of which thousands can at this day give in their witness. So that nothing has been affirmed by this people, of the power and virtue of this heavenly principle, that such as have turned to it have not found true, and ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... everlasting mountains, the high majestic cliffs, of the opposite coast, radiant in the sunlight, which are our ordinary guides, fail us in an excursion such as this; the lessons of antiquity, the determinations of authority, are here rather the needle, chart, and plummet, than great objects, with distinct and continuous outlines and completed details, which stand up and confront and occupy our gaze, and relieve us from the tension and suspense of our personal observation. And thus, in spite of ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... these abominations a meaning for which we grope in vain. Do not think," he added to Jenny, "that I undervalue the labours of Mr. Brendon and the police, but they have come to naught, for there are strange forces of evil moving here deeper than the plummet ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... object without effort or repulsion. In other novelists we admire a subtlety that winds through the intricacies of motives, unmasking deceptions, revealing weaknesses and flaws but half suspected, or delicacies and beauties but half appreciated: George Eliot drops a plummet that sinks straight and steadily, through turbid waves and calm under-current, reaching depths before unexplored. We can claim no part in her discoveries, however our faculties may be exercised in grasping or in testing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half-way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wyvis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... lies, my sibyl sister, still! Your plummet hath not reached it. Yes, 't is love Flaunts his triumphant colors in my cheek, And quickens my lame speech—but not for him, Not for the Prince—so may I vaunt his worth With ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... with mystery, it is not blank, hopeless, fathomless mystery. Our plummet-lines are only too short; but they are growing longer. It is a lively mystery, that piques and tempts and rewards endeavor. It unfolds with an appetizing delay. Every year a new secret is laid bare, which, in the flush of triumph, seems ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... a great purpose, which control and triumph. The magical arts are simply the means by which a great end is served; when the work is accomplished, the staff will be broken and the book sunk beneath the sea, lower than any sounding of plummet." ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the talk everywhere; it was impossible to avoid it. Every soul in the place had her omen. Jane Restless had a magpie. That very morning the bird had stolen a leaden plummet belonging to Restless and carried it to her cage, where she promptly set to work to hatch it out. And she fought when Zac went to take it away. She made such a racket when it was gone that Jane was sorry, and picked out a small chicken's ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... the Yardleys, dropping her unfailing plummet into the evening's experience. Arnold, hesitating over the rudeness of departure, thought she was sufficiently absorbed; she would hardly mind. The centurion slapped his tin armour, and made a jest about the King of the Jews which reached Stephen over his hostess's shoulder ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... leap, and rose to 890. It was now thought impossible that it could rise higher, and many prudent persons sold out to make sure of their spoil. Many of these were noblemen about to accompany the king to Hanover. The buyers were so few on June 3rd, that stock fell at once, like a plummet, from 890 to 640. The directors ordering their agents to still buy, confidence was restored, and the stock rose to 750. By August, the stock culminated at 1,000 per cent., or, as Dr. Mackay observes, "the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... speak of Herschel's pioneering work in the skies. To explore with line and plummet the shining zone of the Milky Way, to delineate its form, measure its dimensions, and search out the intricacies of its construction, was the primary task of his life, which he never lost sight of, and to which all his other investigations were subordinate. He was absolutely ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... northern part of the lake is very deep, the plummet having shown an abyss of thirteen hundred feet; but the southern end is shallow and in ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... strains, and appropriating all their melancholy, intensified through the lens of his own dark imagination, he would sink from one depth of wretchedness to another, till he seemed lost away, where no ray of light could ever penetrate, or plummet sound. ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... life's experiences. They are to consolidate and make practical vagrant emotions and tendencies, and lop off and scorch out the idiosyncrasies of heredity and custom, and rouse the soul to a knowledge of its need of harmony with divine law. Into the real soul depths can no divulging line and plummet reach. This domain belongs to its Creator alone. It is only as the tests of living and doing manifest hidden motives and meanings that we catch glimpses of the ego that abides within and through this life, submerged as it is in the flesh. We can know but little of what is now, or ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... similar nail head in every stake. The exact point of the plummet of your bog-line must centre on the middle of that nail head. You can't be too ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... the Lord Advocate, or some modern counterpart of Braxfield, the hanging judge, would summon Susanna Crum as a witness in an important case. He would need his longest plummet to sound the depths ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... by many wooded ridges. The people come running from everywhere to watch. Here indeed will be a Crowd Picture with as many phases as a stormy ocean. Flying machines appear from the Fair Ground north of the city, and circle round and round as they go up, trying to reach the slowly descending plummet. ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... her eyes, "Blessed is dey dat mou'n, fu' dey shall be comfo'ted." The old man, as he turned to go to bed, shook the young man's hand warmly and in silence; but there was a moisture in the old eyes that told the minister that his plummet of prayer had sounded ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... all but untrodden? More than once I have been tempted to give up the quest and turn aside to paths where pioneers have cleared the way. There, at least, the whereabouts of that fabulous well is known and the plummet is ready to hand. Nevertheless, I resolved to struggle through with my task, in the consciousness that the work of a pioneer may be helpful, provided that he carefully notches the track and thereby enables ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... still Their primal hymn rejoicing, as at first The morning stars together. Hast thou heard, In vast and silent spaces of the sky, What time the bead-roll of the universe God calls in heaven, every tiniest star— From myriad twinkling points—from plummet depths Of dark too vast for eye and sense to guess, Send up a little silver answer "I am here." Even so, the humblest of thy little ones, dear Lord, May through the darkness hear Thy still small voice, And answer with quick gladness "Here am I,— I love ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... the end of the rock, leaning tremblingly over and looking down into the misty gulf below with that Jacob's Ladder of faith set therein—it is not strange that the journalist for one moment wished for a line and plummet to drop into that reservoir of golden glory and bring up some memento of what seemed so near to the celestial;—just as one wishes, sometimes when the midnight heaven is darkest and the stars are burning most purely there, to be able to stretch ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... grow through opposition—the plummet of feeling goes deeper, thought soars higher—vivid and stern personalities make enemies because they need them, otherwise they drowse. Then they need friends, too, to encourage: opposition and encouragement—thus do we get the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the end of which a heavy piece of lead was fastened. Round the roof of the castle ran a metal gutter, which terminated at the corners in old-fashioned dolphins. On to one of such dolphins Ivan threw the pack-thread noose, and seizing hold of the re-descending lead plummet, hoisted up the rope likewise. It was really a capital idea. Mekipiros was to clamber up the rope, he knew the trick of it. He was to be the anima vilis by means of whom they were to find out whether the folks in the castle were asleep ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... lead?" came the mate's voice above me. "All ready with the lead, sir." "What have we now?" I gathered forward and swung the lead. I could not reach the umbrella-man, even with my spare line. Once, twice, thrice I swung, and pitched the plummet well ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... however irregular, her flight is lime-twigged, and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? Let the bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she seeks the stars. There is room and power of ascension for any quantity of ballast—fling it out, and up she goes! Let ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... its hour." He spoke, and Rustum answer'd not, but hurl'd His spear; down from the shoulder, down it came, As on some partridge in the corn a hawk, That long has tower'd in the airy clouds, Drops like a plummet; Sohrab saw it come, And sprang aside, quick as a flash; the spear Hiss'd and went quivering down into the sand, Which it sent flying wide;—then Sohrab threw In turn, and full struck Rustum's shield; sharp rang, The iron plates rang sharp, but turn'd the spear. And Rustum seized ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... heart kept sinking down, down, like a plummet let into the sea, and his father's heart sank with it, for a child cannot feel a sorrow that does not touch ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... inspire him with his own strong love for literature. The young American had a passion for books which were the reflex of great minds. His quick hearkening to the voices breathing from their pages, and made prophetic by some sudden experience; the ready plummet with which he sounded their depths of reasoning; the sentient hand with which he plucked out their truths and planted them in his own rich memory, to grow like trees filled with singing-birds: these had rendered his communings with master-spirits one of the noblest and most strengthening influences ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... money can be paid when the copies arrive, probably a couple of months hence. I have conveyed Herr Naegeli's request, and now I must ask another favor, on his account, from myself. Everything cannot be measured by line and plummet; but Wieland says: "A little book may be well worth a few groschen." Will Y.R.H. therefore honor these poems by permitting your august name to be prefixed to them, as a token of your sympathy for the benefit of this man? the work is not likely to be quite devoid of value. ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... the royal esquires, named Gilbert Harper, wearing the surcoat of his master, was mistaken for him, and slain; but the true leader was at length found by de Maupas, and struck down with the blow of a leaden plummet or slung-shot. After the battle, when the field was searched for his body, it was found under that of de Maupas, who had bravely yielded up life for life. The Hiberno-Scottish forces dispersed in dismay, and when King Robert of Scotland landed a day or two afterwards, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... looked at them as one wakened from sleep. And, similarly, she looked at Nature. Even her vanished lover had not taught her all. There were truths below the formulae of his worship; there were secrets deeper than his intellectual plummet had ever sounded. Without understanding it, Joan yet knew that a change had come to pass in material things. Sunshine on the deep sea hid more matters for wonder than John Barron had taught or known. Once only as yet had she caught a glimpse of ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... monstrous creatures, unafraid, And feel no longing for the air of heaven To fill thy lungs, and send the warm, red blood Along thy veins. But thou shalt pass the hours In dances with the sea-nymphs, or go forth, To look into the mysteries of the abyss Where never plummet reached. And thou shalt sleep Thy weariness away on downy banks Of sea-moss, where the pulses of the tide Shall gently lift thy hair, or thou shalt float On the soft currents that go forth and wind From isle to isle, and wander through the ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... magic I here abjure; and when I have required Some heavenly music (which even now I do) To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff— Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And, deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... study the nature of plants and animals, the virtue of stones, the secrets of fire, the courses of the stars and the influence of the planets, for this reason men have named me the Prince of Darkness. Likewise they call me the Wily One, because by me was constructed the plummet-line whereby Ulpian straightened out the Law. And my kingdom is of this world. Well then, I will try these Monks, and I will make them to know their works are evil, and that the tree of their Charity bears bitter ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... try to take the sea's mystery by storm. In vain do we search for its meaning with love. It lies beyond our mortal ken, deeper than ever plummet sounded. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... do not expect that! Nowadays no one really cares for anybody else's happiness but their own. Besides, I shall be much too busy to want company. I'm bent on all sorts of discoveries, you know!—I want to dive 'deeper than ever plummet sounded'!" ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... wholly devoid of subtlety of intellect, so that I willingly admit that there may be depths of alternative meaning in these propositions out of all soundings attainable by my poor plummet. Still there are a good many people who suffer under a like intellectual limitation; and, for once in my life, I feel that I have the chance of attaining that position of a representative of average ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the northern blast to hear, And hangs on liquid mountains, void of fear; Or falls immers'd into the depths below, Where the dead silent waters never flow; To the foundation of the hills convey'd, Dwells in the shelving mountain's dreadful shade: Where plummet never reach'd, he draws his breath, And glides serenely thro' the paths of death. Two wondrous days and nights thro' coral groves, Thro' labyrinths of rocks and sands, he roves: When the third morning ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... fitting of phrase to insight, of expression to need, born of long centuries of experiment and aspiration, can do for a congregation what no man alone can ever hope to accomplish. The well of human needs and desires is so deep that, without these aids, we have not much to draw with, no plummet wherewith to sound its ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... changed and chill, and the old music of their past be silence, or at best the jangle of a broken chord? Would this latter end of Life, for both, be nothing but a joint anticipation of the grave? Gwen tried to sound the plummet of thought in an inconceivable surrounding, to guess at something she herself might think were she impossibly ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... rocks above high-water mark, down to abysses deeper than ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life; fauna after fauna, and flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the amount of light and warmth which each species requires, and to the amount of pressure which they are able ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... it was taken down in 1879 to be brought to America, all the emblems of the builders were found in the foundation. The rough Cube and the polished Cube in pure white limestone, the Square cut in syenite, an iron Trowel, a lead Plummet, the arc of a Circle, the serpent-symbols of Wisdom, a stone Trestle-board, a stone bearing the Master's Mark, and a hieroglyphic word meaning Temple—all so placed and preserved as to show, beyond doubt, that they had high symbolic meaning. Whether they were ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... elevation of two thousand feet. What had happened I could not conjecture, but even as we looked we saw her bow dip down lower and lower. Then the bulkheads of the various gas-chambers must have burst, for, quite perpendicular, she fell like a plummet to the earth. ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... laurel. I rehearsed at all times, seasons, and places, until I was a perfect nuisance to everybody, and my acquaintance, I am sure, to a man, wished both me and her bloodthirsty ladyship, deeper than plummet ever sounded, at the bottom of the sea. Even the brute creation did not escape the annoyance. One morning my English pointer "Spot" ran yelping out of the room, panic-stricken by the vehement manner with which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... wedding-dinners, with their looks turn'd From the least wanton jests, their puling stomach Sick from the modesty, when their thoughts are loose, Even acting of those hot and lustful sports Are to ensue about midnight: such his cunning! He sounds my depth thus with a golden plummet. I am doubly arm'd now. Now to th' act of blood, There 's but three furies found in spacious hell, But in a great man's breast three thousand ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... the betting-ring and nervously pencils his race-card never thinks that the time of weakness and sadness and weariness is coming on; that gray and tremulous old man who bends over the roulette-table never thinks that he will speedily drop into a profundity deeper than ever plummet sounded. The gliding ball does not swing round in its groove faster than the old man's soul fares towards the darkness; and yet he clenches his jaw and engages in the most trivial of pursuits as if he had an eternity before him. The youth ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... sink. If W be the weight of the experimental solid in air, w the weight of the sinker in water, and W1 the weight of the solid plus sinker in water, then the relative density is given by W/(W w - W1). In practice the solid or plummet is suspended from the balance arm by a fibre—silk, platinum, &c.—and carefully weighed. A small stool is then placed over the balance pan, and on this is placed a beaker of distilled water so that the solid is totally immersed. Some balances are provided with a "specific gravity pan," i.e. a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... straight as a plummet falls. Each of us had his right hand in his overcoat pocket. I can't swear to what was in his fingers, but I felt a good deal safer for what was in mine. My back was still toward the bay, for I had a vision of the man who had disappeared—whoever ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... baits for there to take, as their prey is small fish, while most people are of opinion that they will not touch perch on account of their sharp back fin; but we had proof this afternoon that they will. But the most curious thing that I ever knew a pike to take was a leaden plummet, which it seized one day when I was plumbing the depth in a canal previous to bottom fishing, as we have been to-day. As a matter of course I was much surprised, as no doubt the pike was also, when he felt himself hooked, and, after a struggle, I drew him to land. But come, boys, I think it is ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... the present conversation. I stood beside her, affecting to listen and admire, but truly whirled away by my own thoughts. I have always found this young lady to be a lover of the mysterious; and certainly this first interview made a mystery that was beyond my plummet. One thing I learned long after: the hours of Sunday had been well employed, the bank-porter had been found and examined, my visit to Charles Stewart was discovered, and the deduction made that I was pretty deep with James and Alan, and most likely in a continued correspondence ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gods are just, But how can finite measure infinite? Reason! alas, it does not know itself! Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice. Whatever is, is in its causes just, Since all things are by fate. But purblind man Sees but a part o' th' chain, the nearest links, His eyes not carrying to that equal beam That poises ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... the tender devotion, the unselfish forethought, the aspiring faith, which, even though we seem to mock and to be blind, saves us from the world and from ourselves. If you are to become merely men in petticoats, what will become of us? We shall go down, down, down, like the leaden plummet cast into the depths of the sea. We shall be snuffed out and extinguished in sober truth. Hence, certain that the work of emancipation is to continue, my philosophical glance follows fondly and almost proudly the course of my second ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... there was a long silence. In the damp south corners of the walls a frog began to croak at exact intervals. The little fountain rippled monotonously, and a magnolia flower dropped from one of the trees, falling straight as a plummet through the motionless air, and settling upon the gravelled walk with a faint rustling sound. Otherwise the stillness ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... sight to see That venerable tree For o'er the lawn, irregularly spread. Fifty straight columns propt its lofty head; And many a long depending shoot, Seeking to strike its root, Straight like a plummet grew towards the ground. Some on the lower boughs which crost their way, Fixing their bearded fibres, round and round, With many a ring and wild contortion wound; Some to the passing wind at times, with sway Of gentle motion swung; Others of younger growth, unmoved, were hung Like stone-drops from ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... when the Pickersgill element was not apparent. The form of the garden-goddess faded, the sun had gone below the garden wall. The garden grew dusk, and the elms began to nod their tops at me. I became silent, listening to the fall of the plummet, which dropped again and again from the topmost height of that lordly domain, over which shadows had come. Were they sounding ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... reflection of the socialist economic structure of Yugoslavia. TITO had pushed the development of military industries in the republic with the result that Bosnia hosted a number of Yugoslavia's defense plants. The bitter interethnic warfare in Bosnia caused production to plummet by 80% from 1990 to 1995, unemployment to soar, and human misery to multiply. With an uneasy peace in place, output recovered in 1996-99 at high percentage rates from a low base; but output growth slowed ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... and Mirzapore have a perpendicular fall of more than four hundred feet over these mural precipices of the northern face of the Vindhya range.[2] A man, if he have good nerve, may hang over the summits, and suspend in his hand a plummet that shall ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... throws himself out of window and begins to fall, and keeps on fall, fall, for twenty hours together. His head is bullet-shaped, his neck short, his body all thickened up to the shoulders, tailing out to the merest streak of feather. His form is like a plummet—he is not unlike the heavily weighted minnow used in trolling for pike. Before the bend of the firmly elastic rod, the leaded minnow slides out through the air, running true and sinking without splash into ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... has a provision for erring parents. If Sinai thunders, Calvary whispers peace. For men, as sinners, the righteousness of Christ prevails, and for sinners, as parents, not less shall it be found sufficient. Line and plummet can soon measure the extent of human perfection, but they cannot fathom the merit of that righteousness, and when laid side by side with the most holy law, there is no deficiency. If, then, we find ourselves ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... crazy line to westward. Then things screamed downward and the Sergeant clapped hands over his ears once more. The ground quivered underfoot, though the eggs landed a good three-quarters of a mile away. The training-plane dropped like a plummet. The sharpness of a hexynitrate explosion carries its effect to quite incredible distances. The fabric of its wings split to ribbons. The ship landed somewhere and ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... twelve or fifteen miles apart, with a trench or trough between, along a portion of the way, that is nearly fifteen hundred feet deep if we measure from the pass which the stages traverse, which is nearly three thousand feet deep if the plummet is dropped from the highest points of the snowy spires. Down into this trench we look, and opposite upon the eastern wall and crests, as we ride out to the eastern edge of the western summit. In a stretch ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... spoke up young Mrs. Plummet, the mother of Benjy. "I never did believe in that; I don't believe in it, even for hosses; it only gets 'em to go a few rods, and then they're lazier'n ever. My father's broke more colts than any man in this county, an' ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... historical justification, and something to have suggested plausible reasons for conjecturing that his worship had a genuine spiritual basis. Yet the sincere critic, at the end of the whole inquiry, will confess that he has only cast a plummet into the unfathomable sea of ignorance. What remains, immortal, indestructible, victorious, is Antinous in art. Against the gloomy background of doubt, calumny, contention, terrible surmise, his statues are illuminated ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... But sink the plummet a little deeper and these are not our aristocracy nor our ruling class, which is too numerous and too sound of thought and principle for them to feel at home in that company. Any boy, however humble his origin, may go to West Point if he can pass the competitive ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... accounts of a person called DAEDALUS, who seems to have been a wood-carver. Many cities claimed to have been his birthplace, and no one can give any clear account of this ancient artist. He is called the inventor of the axe, saw, gimlet, plummet-line, and a kind of fish-glue or isinglass. He is also said to have been the first sculptor who separated the arms from the bodies of his statues, or made the feet to step out; he also opened their eyes, and there is a legend that the statues of Daedalus ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... And thy soul shall sink Down into the dark abyss, Into the infinite abyss, From which no plummet nor rope Ever drew up the silver ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Indian fires had sunk almost out of sight behind them, and a dense thicket lay before them. Something stirred in the thicket, and the eyes of Shif'less Sol caught a glimpse of a human shoulder. His heart sank like a plummet in a pool. The Indians were ahead of them. They would be caught, and would be carried back to become the victims ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... And at each turn of his head Denver caught the flash of gold, though he was loath to accept it as a sign. He waited, fighting against it, marshaling reasons to sustain him; and then, folding his wings, the eagle descended like a plummet, shooting past him with a shrill, defiant scream. Denver flinched and stepped back, then he leaned forward eagerly to watch where the bird's flight would take him. No Roman legionary, going into unequal battle ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... of dusk; at first, if a man on the street spoke to me, I would tremble for five minutes afterward; at first the odor of the continual boiling of mutton bones and onions that met me every time I opened the door of Mrs. Plummet's lodging-house used to make me feel sick to my stomach. I became hardened as time went on, but at first it was rather awful. I don't like to recall those early experiences ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... his plummet down the broad Deep universe, and said, "No God," Finding no bottom. [Footnote: ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... evil to the herdsmen," answered the man. "In yonder lake, which is so profound that no plummet has ever reached the bottom, there dwell huge monsters, neither beasts nor fish. No man has ever seen one near; but at night, when the moon is shining, they have been descried at a distance, prowling about in search of prey. When that noise is heard, which has just sounded in our ears, ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... palpitant and blowing, Have I set out and lost the hang of things, And ever thought, "Where can the guide be going?" But trusted long and rambled on in rings, For ever climbing up some miry summit, And halting there to curse the contrite guide, For ever then descending like a plummet Into a chasm ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... soldier, too, in her own humble way? Often with a beating heart, I fear, but still with resolute, elastic steps, she revisited Jack's old haunts; she tried to love Nature as he had seemed to love it; she gazed at his old sunsets; she fathomed his old pools with bright plummet glances, as if seeking some lingering trace of his features in their brown depths, stamped there as on a fond human heart; she sought out his dear name, scratched on the rocks and trees,—and when night came on, she studied, in her simple way, the great starlit canopy, under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... that the notorious Miss CRAIG, of Chicago, once more threatens the unhappy SPRAGUE with another suit for breach of promise of marriage. We had thought that the forty thousand dollars awarded by the jury in the first trial were a plummet heavy enough to reach the lowest depths of "AMANDY'S" affections, and so in fact they were; but "ELISHA'S" lawyers, utterly disregarding the claims of true love, have interposed the absurd claims of what they call "justice to ELISHA," and so the thing ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... very nearly so. I will come down once a week or so and throw up a ball to you or spin a penny in the air; there is nothing like getting to hit a moving object. In the meantime you can go on practising at that plummet swinging from the string. You can do that as well by yourself as if I were with you, for when you once set it going it will keep on for five minutes. It is not so good as throwing up a penny, because it makes a regular curve; but shooting, as you do, with your back to it, and ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... king felt the horrible depth of this Well, "Tell me, Progers," cried Charlie, "where am I? oh tell! Had I sought the world's centre to find, I had found it, But this Well! ne'er a plummet was made that ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... God, divine desires and discontents, and certain rudimentary wings. And neither school alone is competent to paint him as he is. The author of "La Bete Humaine" fails as completely as the visionary A Kempis. Neither realism nor romance alone will ever with its small plummet sound to its depths the human heart or its mystery; yet from the union of the two ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the story of the Pilgrim at a maturer age, and felt the plummet of its truth sounding in the deep places of the soul, has not reason to bless the author for some timely warning or grateful encouragement? Where is the scholar, the poet, the man of taste and feeling who does not ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... screen treated with platino-cyanide of barium? Will she be able to discharge a gold-leaf electroscope without touching it?" And so we travelled on the wings of imagination, always having before us the plummet of the ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... shall sound that deep?— Too short the plummet, And the watchmen sleep. Some dream of effort Up a toilsome steep; Some dream of pasture ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... a plummet into the hollow of that great expectancy. Ransom shivered and even Harper's hard cheek changed color. Hazen only stood unmoved, his look, his grasp, the spirit behind that look and grasp, implacable and determined. Their influence was terrible; ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... of recess, formed by the hills, which are here broken into a circular valley, cut off, to all appearance, from the rest of the habitable world; behind them rose a towering crag, as perpendicular as the drop of a plummet, from the top of which a little rivulet came tumbling down, giving to the scene an appearance of the most delightful coolness, and amusing the ear with the unceasing roar of a waterfall. From the very face of the cliff, where there seemed ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... Him, though thy sight be dim, Doubt for them is doubt of Him. * * * * * Still Thy love, O Christ, arisen Yearns to reach those souls in prison, Through all depths of sin and loss Sinks the plummet of Thy Cross. Never yet abyss was found Deeper than that ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... figure, rising from the flat lava in ramparts twelve to fifteen feet high, of an equal thickness, and enclosing an area of several acres. The unmortared stones were justly set; in places, the bulwark was still true to the plummet, in places ruinous from the shock of earthquakes. The enclosure was divided in unequal parts—the greater, the city of refuge; the smaller, the heiau, or temple, the so-called House of Keawe, or reliquary of his royal bones. Not his alone, but those of many monarchs of Hawaii were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the reek of those boards to fill her nostrils, and poet and alderman alike may be dedicate to the sublime, she leads them, after two sniffs of an idea concerning her, for the dive into the turtle-tureen. Heels up they go, poet first—a plummet he!" Is that humorous, or, if not, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... the eighteenth century set no very high value on Ariosto and Tasso, it ignored Dante altogether; and that the nineteenth has put aside the superficial mediaevalism of the Renaissance romancers and gone back to the great religious romancer of the Italian Middle Age. There is no surer plummet than Dante's to sound the spiritual depth of a time. It is in the nineteenth century first that Shakspere and Dante took possession of the European mind. In 1800 Shakspere was an English, or at ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... which all her energies now tend. So low has she fallen, so lost is she to all the design of woman, that she exists for one foul purpose only, viz., to excite, stimulate, and gratify the lusts of degraded, ungodly men. Verily, the word "prostitute" has an awful meaning. What plummet can sound the depths of a woman's fall ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... sighted across their tops will be exactly 7 feet higher, at all points, than the required grade of the ditch directly beneath it, and if a plumb rod, (similar to the boning-rod, but provided with a line and plummet,) be set perpendicularly on any point of the bottom of the drain, the relation of its cross piece to the line of sight across the tops of the boning-rods will show whether the bottom of the ditch at that point is too high, or too ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... Murgatroyd. Exhausted and hungry as he often was at the end of the day's work, he devoted his leisure to the study of bricks and mortar, and out of his scanty pocket-money he bought for himself first a trowel and later a plummet. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... on the wave, Walter Gay, Is deeper than plummet may sound: That can not decay till we lose our way, Or death runs the vessel aground, Walter Gay, Or death runs ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... for the protection of animals. The published reports of experiments made in that country under one or another "certificate," are practically of no value whatever except to show the constant increase of such experiments every year. The plummet must sink to deeper depths. If Society is to grant to the physiological laboratory that isolation and freedom from interference which it craves, THEN SOCIETY HAS THE RIGHT TO ASK IN RETURN THE COMPLETEST DISCLOSURE THAT CAN BE GIVEN OF ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... this was to be no ordinary landing. Under the terrific power of the beams braking the descent of that unimaginable load of allotropic iron the water seethed and boiled; and instead of floating gracefully upon the surface of the sea, this time the huge ship of space sank like a plummet to the bottom. Having accomplished this delicate feat of docking the vessel safely in the immense cradle prepared for her, Nerado turned to the Terrestrials, who, now under guard, had been ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... turn to gold:— Pull it all down, I hate its sight and touch; Heap up my cars & waggons with the load And yoke my kine to drag it to the sea: Then crowned with flowers, ivy & Bacchic vine, And singing hymns to the immortal Gods, We will ascend ships freighted with the gold, [65] And where no plummet's line can sound the depth Of greedy Ocean, we will throw it in, All, all this frightful heap of yellow dirt. Down through the dark, blue waters it will sink, Frightening the green-haired Nereids from their sport And the strange Tritons—the ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... Osbaldistone, and confess so much!" she exclaimed. "Why, Percie, Thornie, John, Dickon—Wilfred himself, might be your instructor. Even ignorance itself is a plummet over you." ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... territories. Is it possible that we can permit this Union to be broken up because of any difference on such a question as this? Better that the territories were buried in the deep sea beyond the plummet's reach, than that they should be the cause of ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... being opened, we find ourselves in a narrow passage, open to the heavens, perhaps a couple of hundred feet over-head, but walled in on either hand by rocks, perpendicular as the drop of the plummet. The passage being exceedingly tortuous, does not permit any extensive view to the front; but at each new turn some new wonder presents itself, either in the formation of some particular rock, or in the grotesque and striking combinations of masses. ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig |
