"Cumbrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... than the "Fifines," the "Hohenstiel-Schwangaus," and the "Red Cotton Nightcap Countries" of a later and less happily-inspired period. "Ferishtah's Fancies and Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day" was the rather cumbrous title of a still later volume; and last of all appeared "Asolando," a work which displays all the old qualities, the old fire, and the old audacity, apparently untouched by advancing years, or even by imminent death. He died the same month that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the leaves. Anyway, there is greenery and breadth of space enough to be as good as beauty to a child and a dog; and these two asked no better, when their work was done, than to lie buried in the lush grasses on the side of the canal, and watch the cumbrous vessels drifting by and bringing the crisp salt smell of the sea among the blossoming scents of ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... made no reply. He was worshiping her bodily. And from this conversation came a sequel, a day or two later, which was but the worshiping put into things material. Of his love and the bath he would have fancies, and he wanted what touched her to be from him. She was surprised by a cumbrous package which, opened, revealed great things for a woman's dalliance with water—the soft Turkish towel, vast enough to envelop her, the perfumed soaps, and even the bath-mittens. And she was a little frightened, maybe, at the personality of it all, but she recognized the ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... of this event, Peel issued an address to his constituents which became celebrated as the "Tamworth manifesto". It is somewhat cumbrous in style, but it embodies with sufficient clearness the new conservative policy of which Peel was the real author and henceforth the leading exponent. It opens with an appeal to his own previous conduct in parliament, as showing that, while he was no apostate ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... of the military conduct of affairs, there is no doubt of the value, or of the unflagging energy, of the naval support given. Sir William Howe alludes to it frequently, both in general and specifically; while the Admiral sums up his always guarded and often cumbrous expressions of opinion in these words: "It is incumbent upon me to represent to your Lordships, and I cannot too pointedly express, the unabating perseverance and alacrity with which the several classes of ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... than eighty strong, and chiefly consisted of cavalry. Armed with pitchforks and cumbrous scythes where they were not able to lay their hands on the more orthodox weapons of war, they presented a determined appearance; the few foot-soldiers who had no cart-horses at their disposal bearing in their arms bundles of firewood. One memorable morning they set out to avenge their losses; ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... so many English battle-fields. Hard by, we see the long white front or rear of Somerset House, and, farther on, rise the two new Houses of Parliament, with a huge unfinished tower already hiding its imperfect summit in the smoky canopy,—the whole vast and cumbrous edifice a specimen of the best that modern architecture can effect, elaborately imitating the masterpieces of those simple ages when men "builded better than they knew." Close by it, we have a glimpse of the roof and upper towers of the holy Abbey; while that gray, ancestral pile on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... celebrations. For a week he spent his days in the unaccustomed but truly royal occupation of field sports. Once he visited Josephine at Malmaison. The next months he had spent again in Paris conducting the matrimonial negotiations and arranging every detail of the etiquette to be observed in the cumbrous ceremonial which he had devised for the celebration of his marriage in France. When all was completed to his satisfaction he left for Compiegne to supervise the arrangements made for the reception of his new consort, and spent the last week of waiting there. Of all his family the giddiest ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of their fists. It is worth asking: What is this love of violence which moves the breast of the man of peace? What is this emotion which leads men to be heroic by proxy? Is it surviving physical excellence which reveals itself in this way, or is it a cumbrous atavistic relic like the appendix which the doctors remove? We see, for instance, enormous crowds gathering at the football matches where professional players show their prowess, and muscles trained and hardened for the fray. We ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... faithful representation of the manners, customs, and daily life and speech of his own time, in "The Canterbury Tales," are sweepingly advanced against his works at large. In an allegory — rendered perhaps somewhat cumbrous by the detail of chivalric ceremonial, and the heraldic minuteness, which entered so liberally into poetry, as into the daily life of the classes for whom poetry was then written — Chaucer beautifully enforces the lasting advantages ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... flew to their posts; and whilst the cumbrous screw was descending slowly into the water, the stokers had roused the smouldering ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... Cour's brief and unsuccessful appearance as an actress she had taken part in a play with the rather cumbrous title, Who Puts out the Eyes must Pay for Them. The widow may have forgotten this event; its occurrence so many years before may have been merely a sinister coincidence. But the incident of the ballet-dancer and her sightless lover was ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... so large, and lay at such grand distance to the eye of childhood, are now near by, and have fallen away to mere rolling waves of upland. The garden-fence, that was so gigantic, is now only a simple paling; its gate that was such a cumbrous affair—reminding you of Gaza—you might easily lift from its hinges. The lofty dove-cote, which seemed to rise like a monument of art before your boyish vision, is now only a flimsy box upon ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... Being always on the alert for squalls, I ran to the bow. There could be no doubt it was a squall, and as I listened I thought I heard the murmur of the coming gale. Instantly I began to work might and main at my cumbrous tackle for shortening sail, and in the course of an hour and a half had the most of it reduced—the topsail yards down on the caps, the topsails clewed up, the sheets hauled in, the main and fore peaks lowered, and the flying-jib down. While thus engaged, the dawn advanced, and I cast an ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... President's cumbrous way of joking; the short, fat man was heavily ironical with ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... inconsistent with that of the metal breastplate; "the shield" covers the wearer in a way which makes a breastplate an useless encumbrance; or rather, it is ignorance of the breastplate which alone can explain the use of such frightfully cumbrous gear as the huge shield." [Footnote: Classical Review, ix. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... of boats, an object of attraction to all strangers, but more so from the novelty and singularity of its construction than from its beauty. Utility rather than elegance was consulted by the builder. This far-famed structure is ugly and cumbrous, and a passenger feels a very unpleasing sensation if he happens to stand upon it when a loaded waggon drives along it at low water, at which time there is a considerable descent from the side of the suburbs. An undulatory motion is then occasioned, which goes on gradually ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... commandeered for a bathing-place; the village school was turned, every evening, into a recreation room; and a communicants' class was started. Not for the first time I longed for a brief, clear statement of our Church's faith. The cumbrous complicated Catechisms and Confessions are magnificent monuments, but they are worse than useless under such conditions. A Credo which could be written on a blackboard and pointed to as the Church member's essential Confession ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... a sheltered corner. A little farther on we began to come more and more frequently on big colonies of "Seventy-fives." Drawn up nose to nose, usually against a curtain of woodland, in a field at some distance from the road, and always attended by a cumbrous drove of motor-vans, they looked like giant gazelles feeding among elephants; and the stables of woven pine-boughs which stood near by might have been the ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... primarily the function of the President, with the limitation that the Senate must concur in diplomatic appointments and in the validity of treaties, and that only both Houses of Congress could jointly declare war. This cumbrous system necessarily required that the President in conducting the foreign relations of the Government should keep in touch with the Senate, and such was the accepted procedure throughout the history of the nation until President ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... found it impossible to move her, strive how I would. Hereupon, and after some painful thought, I took to digging away the sand, undermining her thus until she lay so nicely balanced it needed but a push and the cumbrous structure, rolling gently over, lay in the necessary posture, viz: with her starboard beam accessible from gunwale to keel. And mightily heartened was I thus to discover her damage hereabouts so much less than ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... or tenth of July, in the afternoon; and the day being very sultry, the heat had oppressed me with langour, and I was all day as one laden with sleep. But no sooner had Mrs Aird told me this, than I felt the langour depart from me, as if a cumbrous cloak had been taken away, and I rose up a recruited and reanimated man. It was so much the end of my debility of body and sorrowing of mind, that she was loquacious with her surprise when she saw me, as it were, with a miraculous restoration, prepare myself to go out in order to learn, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... masters of a remittance of 100,000 dollars, destined for the mine-workers of Pasco. The silver bars from Pasco are sent to Lima without any military guard, for they are suffered to pass unmolested, as the robbers find them heavy and cumbrous, and they cannot easily dispose of them. These depredations are committed close to the gates of Lima, and after having plundered a number of travellers, the robbers will very ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... how these cumbrous gauds, These veils oppress me! What officious hand Has tied these knots, and gather'd o'er my brow These clustering coils? How all conspires ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... all this. He estimated that the necessary amount of baggage would thus be doubled, perhaps trebled, and that the 1,600 or 2,400 pagazis that would be required would make the expedition too cumbrous. Dr. Strahl proposed that transportation by pagazis should be relinquished altogether, and that beasts of burden should be used exclusively. He knew well that in the low lands of Equatorial Africa the tsetse-fly and ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... A loud shout, a deafening volley, the agonizing cry of the wounded and the dying, were all I heard, as my horse, rearing madly upward, plunged twice into the air, and then fell dead upon the earth, crushing me beneath his cumbrous weight, lifeless ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... all standing near the door, and, with a complete disbelief in all that he was hearing and seeing, Oliver heard Mrs. Severance's voice in his ear, "The kitchen—fire-escape—" saw her push Ted toward him as if she were shifting a piece of cumbrous furniture, and obeyed her orders implicitly because he was too surprised to ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... these places would remain longest, though not perhaps finally, sacred from the grasp of a tyrannical government. But let there be a demand for capital to support a profitable commerce, and the mass is at once consigned to the furnace, and, ceasing to be a vain and cumbrous ornament of the banquet, becomes a potent and active agent for furthering ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... conveyed to Wylam on a waggon, and there mounted upon a wooden frame supported by four pairs of wheels, which had been constructed for its reception. A barrel of water, placed on another frame upon wheels, was attached to it as a tender. After a great deal of labour, the cumbrous machine was got upon the road. At first it would not move an inch. Its maker, Tommy Waters, became impatient, and at length enraged, and taking hold of the lever of the safety valve, declared in his desperation, that "either she or he should go." At length the machinery was set in motion, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... prospective legislation, the Commons unanimously determined to treat the offences which the Committee had brought to light as high crimes against the State, and to employ against a few cunning mercers in Nicholas Lane and the Old Jewry all the gorgeous and cumbrous machinery which ought to be reserved for the delinquencies of great Ministers and Judges. It was resolved, without a division, that several Frenchmen and one Englishman who had been deeply concerned in the contraband trade should ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cowslip-coloured face of EXETER—what lambent fire, what looks of Christian love play about and beam from the whole episcopal Bench!—"No!" they cry—"we will no longer have the spirit oppressed by these cumbrous trappings of fleshy pride! We will promote an universal Christian education—we will teach charity by examples, and live unto all men by a personal abstinence from the bickerings and malice of civil life. We will not defile the sacred lawn with the mud of turnpike acts—we will no ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... is not yet introduced into most gymnasiums, in spite of the recommendations of the Roxbury Hercules: beside the fear of straining, there is the cumbrous weight and cost of iron apparatus, while, for some reason or other, no cheap and accurate dynamometer has yet come into the market. Running and jumping, also, have as yet been too much neglected in our institutions, or practised spasmodically ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... engaged in erecting this cumbrous machine, a young alligator, about a foot long, crawled out from under some leaves on the bank close to him. The urchin saw it instantly, seized his bow, and in a moment transfixed it with an arrow. The fury of the little creature, infant though it was, seemed tremendous. It turned ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... magnificence; and yet with a fulness of effect and thoroughness of sombre life that made Redclyffe feel that, so much importance being assigned to it,—it being so much believed in,—it was indeed a feast. The cumbrous courses swept by, one after another; and Redclyffe, finding it heavy work, sat idle most of the time, regarding the hall, the old decaying beams, the armor hanging beneath the galleries, and these Englishmen ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... laid the cloth there with admirable precision and neatness; ranged the plate on the sideboard with graceful accuracy, but objected to that old thing in the centre, as he called Mrs. Gashleigh's silver basket, as cumbrous and useless for the table, where they would want all the ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the saddle again when Gabriel arrived at the side of the carriage. He then made a momentary pause. In the brilliant moonlight every detail of the equipage was visible; the coach was dingy and battered, its principal color blue, and covered, according to the fashion, with gilded arabesques in cumbrous relief, in which a curious dragon, with a barbed tongue and tail, was contending in a hundred repetitions with as many little cupids. Just as these details seized upon his imagination, the window was suddenly opened, and a lady put out her head ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber's crotch at the back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque engine of torment. A flag locker was in one corner, open, exposing various colored bunting, some rolled up, others half unrolled, still others tumbled. Opposite was a cumbrous washstand, of black mahogany, all of one block, with a pedestal, like a font, and over it a railed shelf, containing combs, brushes, and other implements of the toilet. A torn hammock of stained grass swung near; the sheets ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... water in your house that you can afford, and enlarge your ideas of the worth of it, that you may afford a great deal. A bathing-room is nothing to you that requires an hour of lifting and fire-making to prepare it for use. The apparatus is too cumbrous,—you do not turn to it. But when your chamber opens upon a neat, quiet little nook, and you have only to turn your stop-cocks and all is ready, your remedy is at hand,—you use it constantly. You are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... 74, Figs. 2 and 3) are thick, heavy, cumbrous weapons, made out of the wood used for making wooden dishes. The outer surfaces are convex, and the inner ones concave, the natural convexity of the circular trunk of the tree from which they are made ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... baked. This diet becomes pretty monotonous, but is the traveller's universal fare in Keewatin. In those far regions men are not particular how or what they eat; of necessity they abandon the refinements of civilisation as needless and cumbrous. To-day, however, partly to protract his stay and so give Spurling time, partly to assert his waning gentility, the memory of which in its heyday Strangeways shared, he attempted to be lavish, to set a table, ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... is treasonable to say so, I confess I think this inscription somewhat cumbrous and awkward. The antithesis is not a good one, between the difficulty of Jeanie's 'personal exertions' and the laudableness of the motive which led to them. And there is something not metaphysically correct in the combination described ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... British arms in that quarter seems not to have been palliated by those precautions and that presence of mind which, even in defeat, reflects lustre on a commander. In rapid retreats from a pursuing enemy cumbrous and useless baggage is abandoned, and bridges and roads are destroyed and rendered as impassable as possible, in order to impede the progress of the pursuers; but General Proctor encumbered himself with a cumbrous load of baggage, and left the bridges and roads in his rear entire, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... dressed in an old-fashioned riding-habit, with a broad-brimmed white beaver hat, such as may be seen in Sir Joshua Reynolds' paintings. She rode a sleek white pony, and was followed by a footman in rich livery, mounted on an over-fed hunter. At a little distance in the rear came an ancient cumbrous chariot, drawn by two very corpulent horses, driven by as corpulent a coachman, beside whom sat a page dressed in a fanciful green livery. Inside of the chariot was a starched prim personage, with a look somewhat between a lady's companion and a lady's maid; and two ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise and its temptations to daring adventure. Facts in themselves are clumsy and cumbrous—the cowry-currency of isolated and uninventive men; generalizations, conveying great sums of knowledge in a little space, mark the epoch of free interchange of ideas, of higher culture, and of something better than ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... then, thundered the afternoon express from Paris, bearing the advance guard of the summer seekers after happiness. But if the cumbrous coaches carried swiftly onward some gay hearts, some young lovers to never-to-be-forgotten scenes, one there was among the throng to whom the world was gray—an English gentleman this, who gazed indifferently upon ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... but now his contribution to the common enjoyment was to venture as near as possible to all perilous edges; to throw stones into the water, and to make as if to throw them over precipices on the people below; to pepper his father with questions, and to collect cumbrous mementos of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. He kept the carriage waiting a good five minutes, while he could cut his initials on a band-rail. "You can come back and see 'em on your bridal tower," said ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... as you know, that there seems to me far too cumbrous and expensive and talkative a method employed in England, for raising supplies for that Mission and Columbia, Honolulu, &c. I never think of all that fuss of the four Universities, and all the meetings and speeches, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... several of the smaller being united in the choice of one. The army of the Confederation was fixed, in 1830, at 303,484 men, to be furnished by the States in a fixed proportion. The inconveniences of this cumbrous organization are apparent. One member might be at war with any power, while the others were at peace: thus the Confederation took no part in the Italian and Hungarian warfare against Austria, for it guaranteed to her only the possession of her German ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... always too large, the eyelids too wide open and the dilated pupils seem to stare at us with alarm. Amongst these mummy cases and these coffin lids fashioned in the shape of the human figure, there are some that seem to have been made for giants; the head especially, beneath its cumbrous head-dress, the head stuffed as it were between the hunchback shoulders, looks enormous, out of all proportion to the body which, towards the feet, narrows like ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... some of those insects open and close their wings no less than two hundred times in a second. It is amazing. And is it not suggestive of the capacity of motion with which this body may easily be endowed when the cumbrous flesh is changed into the immortal, ethereal body? Since those tiny insects are so wonderfully endowed for their little life here, so aimless as it might seem, what glorious capacities may not be in reserve for us, God's redeemed children, who are to live forever, ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... of cumbrous and unmanageable machine, Sam Weller imagined a habeas-corpus to be, does not appear; for Perker, at that moment, walked up and took Mr. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Knights of St. John is paved over with sprawling heraldic devices of the dead gentlemen of the dead Order; as if, in the next world, they expected to take rank in conformity with their pedigrees, and would be marshalled into heaven according to the orders of precedence. Cumbrous handsome paintings adorn the walls and chapels, decorated with pompous monuments of Grand Masters. Beneath is a crypt, where more of these honourable and reverend warriors lie, in a state that a Simpson would admire. In the altar are ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... than all the other irritating elements in his environment put together, Cameron chafed under the unceasing rasp of Perkins' wit, clever, if somewhat crude and cumbrous. Perkins had never forgotten nor forgiven his defeat at the turnip-hoeing, which he attributed chiefly to Cameron. His gibes at Cameron's awkwardness in the various operations on the farm, his readiness to seize every opportunity for ridicule, his skill at creating awkward situations, all ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... assessed in proportion to the value of lands in the several States. The question of control of territory was not distinctly settled by the articles. The powers to be conferred upon the Confederation were practically limited to war, peace, and foreign affairs. A cumbrous system of arbitration courts was established for disputes between States, but there was no machinery for settling quarrels between States and the ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... one, father prior," said the youth, yawning; "Nor have I much objection to taking arms, excepting that they are a somewhat cumbrous garb, and in February a furred mantle is more suiting to the weather than a steel corselet. And it irks me the more to put on cold harness in this nipping weather, that, would but the church send a detachment of their saints—and ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... Harry learned that there was no difficulty as to men, as any number of these could be recruited among the peasantry. There was, however, an entire absence of any arms save pikes. Harry knew how good a weapon are these when used by steady and well-disciplined men. The matchlocks of those days were cumbrous arms, and it was at the point of the pike that battles were then ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... to the question, can give a reasonable ground for his alarm. There are but two nations in the world—our own country and France—that can put England into this singular state. It is the united sensitiveness of a people extremely well-to-do, most anxious for the preservation of the cumbrous and moss-grown prosperity which they have been so long in consolidating, and incompetent (owing to the national half-sightedness, and their habit of trusting to a few leading minds for their public opinion) to judge when ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to shun the coming fight? Me wouldst thou move to base, inglorious flight? Know, 'tis not honest in my soul to fear, Nor was Tydides born to tremble here. I hate the cumbrous chariot's slow advance, And the long distance of the flying lance; But while my nerves are strong, my force entire, Thus front the foe, and emulate my sire. Nor shall yon steeds, that fierce to fight convey ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... ocean was composed of a smooth, even surface of fine sand and gravel, along which Brandon moved without difficulty. The cumbrous armor of the diver, which on land is so heavy, beneath the water loses its excessive weight, and by steadying the wearer assists him to walk. The water was marvelously transparent, as is usually the case in the southern seas, and through the ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... breeze from the open sea, and brings in with it a strong swell into the channel; which was no inconvenience to the Greek ships, which were low- built, and little above the water, but did much hurt to the Persians, which had high sterns and lofty decks, and were heavy and cumbrous in their movements, as it presented them broadside to the quick charges of the Greeks, who kept their eyes upon the motions of Themistocles, as their best example, and more particularly because, opposed to his ship, Ariamenes, admiral to Xerxes, a brave man, and by ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... coming out to be paraded for admiration and to loosen their muscles with a few stretching gallops. Each was ridden by his owner, each bore a range saddle. To one accustomed to jockeys and racing-pads, these full-grown riders and cumbrous trappings made the cowponies seem small but they were finely formed, the pick of the range. The days of mongrel breeds are long since over in the West. Smaller heads, longer necks, more sloping shoulders, told of good blood crossed on the range stock. Still, the base-stock showed clearly ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... her wolfish brood Bay his mild radiance, impotent and fell; Calm in his halls of brightness he shall dwell! 5 For lo! RELIGION at his strong behest Starts with mild anger from the Papal spell, And flings to Earth her tinsel-glittering vest, Her mitred State and cumbrous Pomp unholy; And JUSTICE wakes to bid th' Oppressor wail 10 Insulting aye the wrongs of patient Folly; And from her dark retreat by Wisdom won Meek NATURE slowly lifts her matron veil To smile with fondness ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... be imagined, that a poem constructed upon such a plan, must be full of cumbrous and misplaced description, and overloaded with a crowd of incidents equally unmeaning and ill assorted. The tedious account of the palace of Shedad, in the first book—the description of the Summer ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... darkened enthusiasm; whereat Richard puffed and swelled. Perhaps his Daily Tory letters did have the rhetorical tread of the Scotchman's masterpiece. In any event it was pleasant to have Dorothy think so. Before he could frame his modesty to fit reply, the cumbrous retreat of Senator Loot ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the heat of the sun was great, Papeiha looked out and saw the priest tottering along with bent and aching shoulders. On his back was his cumbrous wooden god. Behind the priest came a furious crowd, waving their arms and ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... through neglect of the Bible on one hand, or through wrong teaching about it on the other. Not in his ideas alone, but markedly in his style, Arnold has felt the Biblical influence. He came at a time when there was strong temptation to fall into cumbrous German ways of speech. Against that Arnold set a simple phraseology, and he held out the English Bible constantly as a model by which the men of England ought to learn to write. He never gained the simplicity of the old Hebrew ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... objects were uncommon, and proportioned to the merits of one so highly placed. She thought little of her reputation, but much of her glory. To appear yielding, and to be unapproachable, is perfection. Josiana felt herself majestic and material. Hers was a cumbrous beauty. She usurped rather than charmed. She trod upon hearts. She was earthly. She would have been as much astonished at being proved to have a soul in her bosom as wings on her back. She discoursed on Locke; she was polite; she was ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... instance, perhaps, to be anywhere found, Bronzino's treatment of the same subject (Christ visiting the spirits in prison,) in the picture now in the Tuscan room of the Uffizii, which, vile as it is in color, vacant in invention, void in light and shade, a heap of cumbrous nothingnesses, and sickening offensivenesses, is of all its voids most void in this, that the academy models therein huddled together at the bottom, show not so much unity or community of attention to the academy model with the flag in ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... poetry and virtue go always together is an opinion so pleasing that I can forgive him who resolves to think it true. The third stanza sounds big with "Delphi," and "AEgean," and "Ilissus," and "Meander," and "hallowed fountains," and "solemn sound;" but in all Gray's odes there is a kind of cumbrous splendour which we wish away. His position is at last false. In the time of Dante and Petrarch, from whom we derive our first school of poetry, Italy was overrun by "tyrant power" and "coward vice;" nor was our state much better when we ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... sailors of that coast. Next, we sought the guidance of the Brethren of the Trinity, and built a lighthouse on the Snout, to be a Channel beacon for sea-going ships, as Maskew's match had been a light for our fishing-boats in the past. Lastly, we beautified the church, turning out the cumbrous seats of oak, and neatly pewing it with deal and baize, that made it most commodious to sit in of the Sabbath. There was also much old glass which we removed, and reglazed all the windows tight against the wind, so that what with a high pulpit, reading-desk, and ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... duty to go out and interview him. There was something peculiarly and touchingly romantic about the creature and his strange actions, according to the newspaper reports. He was represented as being hairy, long-armed, and of great strength and stature; ugly and cumbrous; avoiding men, but appearing suddenly and unexpectedly to women and children; going armed with a club, but never molesting any creature, except sheep, or other prey; fond of eating and drinking, and not particular ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the book is admirable. At the commencement of each chapter we have the titles of the various sections, and each successive section is introduced by a statement of the contents of each clause. This facilitates search, though it necessitates the cumbrous mode of reference adopted in the foot-notes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... did not exist, and implied surrounding circumstances in ludicrous contrast with fact, and men taught themselves to speak in character, and prided themselves on keeping it up by substituting for the ordinary language of life and emotion a cumbrous and involved ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... without evident regret) upon the clapboards as Lige fired them. Flames burst forth almost instantly, and the smoke, uniting with that now rolling out of every window of the saloon, went up to heaven in a cumbrous, gray column. ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... life, "you consider old Sal as a sort of saucy, flippant trollope, belonging to nobody, and not worth fathering." But, nevertheless, Irving's genius was trying its wings in it, and pluming itself for flight. Salmagundi undoubtedly, to a later taste, is rather crude and cumbrous fun, but it is interesting as the immediate forerunner of our earliest work of sustained humor, and of the wit of Holmes and Lowell at a later date. When it was discontinued, at the beginning of 1808, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... methodize, regulate, systematize, coordinate, organize, settle, fix. unravel, disentangle, ravel, card; disembroil[obs3]; feaze[obs3]. Adj. arranged &c. v.; embattled, in battle array; cut and dried; methodical, orderly, regular, systematic. Phr. "In vast cumbrous ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated; the field of politics supplies the alchemists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... "The Adventures of Roderick Random" (the cumbrous full titles of earlier fiction are for apparent reasons frequently curtailed in the present treatment), published when the author was twenty-seven, he avails himself of a residence of some years in Jamaica to depict life in that quarter of the world at a time when the local color ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... that the alert and inventive spirit of the American has lightened the cumbrous awkwardness of Old-World implements, has simplified their traditional complexity, has systematized methods of manufacture, and has shown a certain audacity in its innovations which might be expected from a community where every mechanic is a voter, and a maker of lawgivers, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... walking and they arrived at the stables of the elephants. These, like those of the horses and the oxen which drew the cumbrous war machines, were formed in the vast thickness of the walls, and were what are known in modern times as casemates. As Nessus had said, the Indian mahout and the other two Arabs were the only human occupants of the casemate. The elephant at once showed that he perceived ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... colour; so that his compositions have sometimes almost a Titianesque look in this particular. This innovation was a healthy one, and led to very noble results when followed up by succeeding artists: but in many of Giotto's compositions the figures become ludicrously cumbrous, from the exceeding simplicity of the terminal lines, and massiveness of unbroken form. The manner was copied in illuminated manuscripts with great disadvantage, as it was unfavourable to minute ornamentation. The French never adopted it in either branch of art, nor did any other Northern ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... the blaze of the setting sun, like so many burnished mirrors. Then came Cromwell's own carriage, drawn by four strong black horses;—they had need of strength, dragging, as they did, a weight of plated iron, of which the cumbrous machine was composed. The windows were remarkably narrow, and formed of the thickest glass, within which was a layer of horn, that, if it were shattered by any rude assault, would prevent the fragments from flying to the inside. Behind this ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... so simple and stenographic that the fathers often use it as a rapid way of writing French. It has, however, the disadvantage of ambiguity at times. Any Indian boy can learn it in a week or two; practically all the Indians use it. What a commentary on our own cumbrous and illogical spelling, which takes even a bright child two or three ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... royalty as to behold without some shame a noble lady at our feet. Nay, thou art pale, very pale; thy coming hither hath been too rapid, too hurried for thy strength, methinks; I do beseech you, sit." Gently he raised her, and leading her gallantly to one of the cumbrous couches near them, placed her upon it, and sat down beside her. "Ha! that is well; thou art better now. Knowest thou, Mary, thine office would have been more wisely performed, hadst thou presented me to the Countess of ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... are the Dutch troops, who are under the immediate command of the Commander-in-Chief, the Prince of Orange. The English volunteers being the next to the Prince's regiment of Guards, followed close upon the main body of the army, and behind them trailed the long, cumbrous baggage train. The rear-guard, together with some details of various kinds and nations, consisted of the Spanish division, which was commanded by Prince Vaudemont. As they came to higher ground Claverhouse began to see the lie of the country, and to ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... the slinking bootleggers of the town, a score or more of whom are known to make money by this liquor peddling, and some of whom do nothing else for a living, yet whom it is next to impossible to convict, owing to the cumbrous machinery of the law and the attitude of juries, and it will be seen that the hands of those who are fighting for the native ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... Here we entered a palace, of roughed stone blocks after the ancient Florentine style, where a splendid porter with cocked hat, a silver-headed baton, and gorgeous livery kept guard. Up the white marble stairs, into stately halls overladen with gilding, the walls crowded with paintings in cumbrous but resplendent frames. Prince So-and-So had got into financial difficulties, and wanted to part with some of ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... gurgles the quiet winding stream, and far away comes the din and hum of active life, thronged with the busy crowd whose restless feet are bearing them swiftly on to the end of life's journey, where they must resign the cumbrous load and "join the pale caravan in ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... to learn what it meant to be entangled in an intricate clumsy old machine, incredibly cumbrous and at the same time incredibly powerful, jolting along with its absurd forms and abominable English towards an end which might or might not be just, but was most certainly ruinously expensive. The game began by a direct letter from the Queen, of ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... should be composed of rude fragments, such as the giant of the Peak would step upon, that he might not be wetshod. The expense of the works now carrying on will amount to forty thousand pounds. A heavy quadrangle of stables is part of the plan, is very cumbrous, and standing higher than the house, is ready to overwhelm it. The principal front of the house is beautiful, and executed with the neatness of wrought plate; the inside is most sumptuous, but did not please ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... left them to breed conviction. If they gave them entrance and cherished them, they would soon find how full of primary truth they were, and how well they would serve them, as they had served him. With all this heavy artillery, somewhat slow and cumbrous, on great questions, he had no want, when he was speaking off-hand, of quick, snell remark, often witty and full of spirit, and often too unexpected, like lightning—flashing, smiting, and gone. In Church Courts this was very marked. On small ordinary matters, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the effect which has been again and again made to construct a universal language on a rational basis has at length succeeded, and that you have a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful simmer of many-hued significance, no hoary Archaisms "familiar with forgotten years"—a patent deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs. Your language may be ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... revered abroad; Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, "An honest man's the noblest work of God:"[30] And certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road, The cottage leaves the palace far behind; What is a lordling's pomp! a cumbrous load, Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, Studied in arts of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... several geometrical problems. The workings out of these prove that the Egyptian spared himself no trouble in making his calculations, and that he worked out both his arithmetical examples and problems in the most cumbrous and laborious way possible. He never studied mathematics in order to make progress in his knowledge of the science, but simply for purely practical everyday work; as long as his knowledge enabled him to obtain results ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... at Gaza for two or three days more, and he wanted me to become his guest. I persuaded him, however, that it would be better for him to let me depart at once. He wanted to add to my baggage a roast lamb and a quantity of other cumbrous viands, but I escaped with half a horse-load of leaven bread, which was very good of its kind, and proved a most useful present. The air with which the Governor’s slaves affected to be almost breaking down under the ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... plays then current, and more or less supported by popular favour, of which hardly a sample is now extant, and which cannot be classed with such as these. The poets or rhymesters who supplied them had already seen good to clip the cumbrous and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all to seed and weed, which jingled their thin bells at the tedious end of fourteen weary syllables; and for this curtailment of the shambling and sprawling lines which had hitherto done duty ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of complacent satisfaction was indulged in over the advantages likely to result from such rapid travelling. This great speed, however, was made to appear quite slow in the first half of the nineteenth century when locomotives were invented capable of covering sixty miles an hour. Nowadays the old cumbrous locomotive, rumbling and puffing along and making only sixty miles in sixty minutes, is a very dilatory machine in comparison with our light and beautiful rocket cars, which frequently dart through the air at the ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... And thus the listening throng address'd. 'Goodness, how abject is our race, Condemn'd to slavery and disgrace! Shall we our servitude retain, Because our sires have borne the chain? Consider, friends! your strength and might; 'Tis conquest to assert your right. How cumbrous is the gilded coach! The pride of man is our reproach. Were we design'd for daily toil, To drag the ploughshare through the soil, To sweat in harness through the road, To groan beneath the carrier's load? How feeble are the two-legg'd kind! What force is in our nerves combin'd! Shall ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... answering elaborate letters from the official personages in the next building. The company officers and men were assigned their regular hours for drill, as well as for everything else that men could think of doing in barracks. In short, we found ourselves all drawn into the operations of a vast, cumbrous, slow-moving machine, with a great many more cogs than drivers, through which no regiment or any other body could pass rapidly. The time required in our case was ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... disappointments? I had gone through the list with her, selecting just the right people to be asked to meet the Landors, our new neighbors. Not a mere cumbrous county gathering, nor yet a showy imported party from town, but a skillful blending of both. Had anything happened already? I had been late for dinner and missed the arrivals in the drawing-room. It ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... never seen any conveyance at once so light and handsome, the cumbrous coaches of the times being little to his liking. He had always travelled afoot or on horseback hitherto, and he had expected to do the same now, when he received his summons ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... from which, however, I started as the old clock struck two from a turret adjoining to my bedchamber. I instantly arose, struck a light, wrote the letter I proposed to leave for my uncle, and leaving behind me such articles of dress as were cumbrous in carriage, I deposited the rest of my wardrobe in my valise, glided down stairs, and gained the stable without impediment. Without being quite such a groom as any of my cousins, I had learned at Osbaldistone Hall to dress ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... consequently, introduced so much confusion into their mythology, that philosophers rejected the entire system. This circumstance greatly facilitated the progress of Christianity, whose beautiful simplicity furnished a powerful contrast to the confused and cumbrous mass of divinities, worshipped in the time ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... sons was William D., who was born in New Orleans in 1809, but was educated in the North and was appointed to the navy when fourteen years old. He was placed in command of a cumbrous ironclad constructed from a ferryboat at the beginning of the war and named the Essex, in honor of the famous cruiser with which his father played havoc with the shipping of Great Britain in the Pacific. In the attack on Fort Henry, in February, 1862, ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... were placed. Ney's had just received its tribute of a beautiful garland of blue cornflowers: and the other a Chaplet of Honeysuckle. By both graves were weeping willows. Mr. Sotheby's friend, the poet Delille,[125] sleeps beneath a cumbrous mass of marble, within which his wife immerses herself once a week, to manifest sorrow for one whose incessant tormentor I am told she was during his life. The inscriptions were for the most part commonplace. I copied out a few of the best. I was sorry to observe ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... that belonged to Scarba," she said, and then she sang, simply and pathetically enough, the somewhat stiff and cumbrous English translation of the Gaelic words. It was the song of the exiled Mary Macleod, who, sitting on the shores of "sea-worn Mull," looks abroad on the lonely islands of Scarba, and Islay, and Jura, and laments that she is far away from her ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... graceful folds a coeur sentimentally ruled the day,—now infant waists became a passion, and the most maternal forms aped the juvenility borrowed from their babies. Then for sleeves: at one time they were wide and long and cumbrous, forbidding every trace of the most rounded member beneath; then they took the form of antique drapery, disclosing the arm almost nude, save for the transparent lace of the undersleeve,—then ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... who she is," replied that practical young lady, as she placed the heavy key in the cumbrous lock, "and I shall also take leave to inform her that this bit of coast ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... form cabins. The bulwarks were high and surrounded with large round shields of wood, and leather, and brass knobs, and curious devices painted on them. The anchors were curious contrivances, made of some hard wood, very large and cumbrous, the flukes only being tipped with iron. Outside at the bows was a wonderfully awkward-looking winch for getting up the anchor; and as Jack observed, when he came to be made Lord High Admiral of the Chinese fleet, there were a good many things he saw that he ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... cumbrous ceremonial of the Roman Church, on the ground that it was not only overloaded with superfluous ornament, but too fatally disfigured by irrational, superstitious, or impious observances to be susceptible ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... and indescribably absurd use of Law-Latin in records, writs, and written pleadings, was finally put an end to by statute 4 George II. c. 26; but this bill, which discarded for legal processes a cumbrous and harsh language, that was alike unmusical and inexact, and would have been utterly unintelligible to a Roman gentleman of the Augustan period, did not become law without much opposition from some of the authorities of Westminster Hall. Lord Raymond, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... chance to words formed out of English material. Such new English words, especially new English compounds, need, it would seem, to be used for some little time before we can overcome our dislike of them, while terms of Greek and Latin origin, however cumbrous and unsuitable they may be, are accepted almost without question. We would discourage such unimaginative and artificial formations, and on principle prefer terms made of English material, which are easily understood and ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 1 (Oct 1919) • Society for Pure English
... phrase "standing before the eyes of a country," which is the real meaning of "patria coram"; it is akin to "looking a matter in the face," which is met with,—(and which I almost deem elegant,)— in the cumbrous oratory of Lord Castlereagh, but which I should be very much astonished to discover had originated from the lips of another statesman, the very opposite in speech of the renowned Foreign Secretary,—the ornate and correct rhetorician, so famed for the concinnity of his ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... the saluting party returned to their occupation, and the stuffing and sewing were soon afterwards finished, when Fairway harnessed a horse, wrapped up the cumbrous present, and drove off with it in the cart to ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the case with the tenant of a large cumbrous carriage, which, drawn heavily on by four stout horses wended slowly on the King's Highway, not very far from the spot where the wooden gates that we have described raised their white faces by the side ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... him,—why, then, England might have been a Christian land! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its hopeless problem, 'Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action;'—how cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this problem is becoming to all men ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... establishment of superfluous officials. The royal household was a complex 'body corporate' founded in the old days of 'purveyance.' There was the mysterious 'Board of Green Cloth' formed by the great officers and supposed to have judicial as well as administrative functions. Cumbrous mediaeval machinery thus remained which had been formed in the time when the distinction between a public trust and private property was not definitely drawn or which had been allowed to remain for the sake of patronage, when its functions had been transferred ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen |
