"Ponderous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... track, they came upon a singular party travelling in the opposite direction. Their singularity consisted chiefly in this, that instead of mules they had a train of bullock-waggons, which were laden with ponderous mill-machinery. At their head rode a fine-looking man of middle age, who addressed Will in Spanish. Bunco's services as interpreter being called into requisition, the traveller told them that the pass was pretty clear, but advised ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... sovereign power to move and influence the people. He was absolutely a novel personage to Mary: their conversations are like a quick glancing of polished weapons—his, too heavy for her young brilliancy of speech and nature, crushing with ponderous force the light-flashing darts of question; but she, no way daunted, comprehending him, meeting full in the face the prodigious thrust. A brave young creature of twenty confronting the great Reformer, in single combat so to speak, and ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... stronger will over a weaker, or the power of one living creature to act on and influence another, is an ordinance of nature, which has its parallel in the inorganic kingdom, where ponderous bodies, widely separated in space, influence one another so much as to keep up a constant interplay of action and reaction throughout nature's vast realms. The same ordinance which keeps the spheres in their orbits ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... was to give place to doubts as to his success, and that the longer he waited the more likely they were to be discovered. That no watch was being kept was certain, and rising in the boat he took hold of the anchor as far up as he could reach, its ponderous nature rendering it immovable; and drawing himself steadily upward he ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... half, owing to the better proportion of the parts and to the superior appropriateness in the details on the part of the German cathedral."[22] The truth of these remarks will be felt by every one on whom the ponderous vacuity of the interior has weighed. Other notable defects there are too in this building, proceeding chiefly from the Italian misconception of Gothic style. The windows are few and narrow, so that little light even at noonday struggles through them; and broad barren ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... that I am braced for the battle. Assume that I have carefully weighed and comprehended your ponderous remarks; how do I begin?" Dear sir, you simply begin. There is no magic method of beginning. If a man standing on the edge of a swimming-bath and wanting to jump into the cold water should ask you, "How do I begin to jump?" you ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass. Think back through history, and you will know it. What will this lowest deep—thieves, Magdalens, negroes—do with the light filtered through ponderous Church creeds, Baconian theories, Goethe schemes? Some day, out of their bitter need will be thrown up their own light-bringer,—their Jean ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... all. The salt raw scent of the margin; While, with men at the windlass, groaned each reel, and the net, Surging in ponderous lengths, uprose and coiled in its station; Then each man to his home,—well I ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... damage. Not a single pew in the gallery or bottom having been removed in the process. In this emigrated chapel, I had the satisfaction of preaching the gospel of the kingdom to a large congregation. Perhaps you will wonder how the ice of this mighty river bore upon its bosom so ponderous a body; but your surprise will cease when I inform you that in the depth of winter, it is from two to three feet in thickness, making a bridge of aqueous crystal capable almost of ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... disturbed since it left the upholsterer's hands. Whatever life and motion there might have been in the basement, were sheltered from observation by conical firs or square-clipped box borders, set out on strictly geometrical principles in each of the four front yards. The doors were ponderous and tight fitting, as if they were never meant to be opened; and the vivid polish of their surfaces showed no trace of human handling. No marks of feet could be detected on the smooth, heavy flagstones which led up from the sidewalk, or on the great ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... everything, and the sun, only venturing now a little way above the southern horizon, shone cold and cheerless, weakly penetrating the ever-present frost veil. The tide, still defying the shackles of the mighty power that had bound all the rest of the world, surged up and down, piling ponderous ice cakes in mountainous heaps along the river banks. Occasionally an Eskimo or two would suddenly appear out of the snow fields, remain for a day perhaps, and then as suddenly disappear into the bleak wastes whence ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... sometimes added a walk in the evening, to visit children or friends, or transact some necessary business. When the weather was very unpleasant, he availed himself of the Harlem cars. Upon one of these occasions, it chanced that the long, ponderous vehicle was nearly empty. They had not proceeded far, when a very respectable-looking young woman beckoned for the car to stop. It did so; but when she set her foot on the step, the conductor, somewhat rudely pushed ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... than half a million people passed by to view the body. General Scott came down with the procession to the station, and to him I introduced our Illinois friends. His response was given in a most dignified and ponderous style: "Gentlemen, you do ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... also reflected in his dimly seen features. Something indefinable was in the air, something so mysterious and wonderful, that voices seemed stricken dumb, and life itself suspended. An owl flew slowly out from the wood with ponderous flapping of wings, and sailed over their heads. Every one started: Madame de Melbain gave a half-stifled shriek. The strain was over. Louise and she were half sobbing now in one ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... which one can stand with ease, is ornamented with a fine iron bas-relief of the family arms, and a ponderous pair of andirons which support a heavy iron bar big enough to roast a wild boar on. Count G—— called Mr. Brent's attention to it, and Mr. Brent said, pleasantly, "I suppose this is where the ancestors toasted ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... huge grey stone archway of the Moskovsky Gate, covered with golden hieroglyphics, ponderous Imperial eagles and the names of Tsars, we sped out on the wide straight highway, grey with the first light fall of snow. It was thronged with Red Guards, stumbling along on foot toward the revolutionary front, shouting and singing; and others, greyfaced ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... light touch of Lohengrin and the Mastersingers. His very deadly earnestness over the "lesson" of his opera and his desire to express his feeling accurately and logically led to his overweighting small melodies with ponderous harmonies. The orchestration of the day was heavy. The art of Mozart had been forgotten; Weber scored cumbrously—as was inevitable; Spontini and Marschner scored cumbrously also, partly because they could not help it, partly because they wanted to fill the theatre with ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... guests, presented in its vastness the appearance of a country-house. One of the prettiest spots in the world is the ice-rink, fashioned by the skill of Herr Caspar Badrutt on a high raised terrace, commanding the valley of the Inn and the ponderous bulwarks of Bernina. The silhouettes of skaters, defined against that landscape of pure white, passed to and fro beneath a cloudless sky. Ladies sat and worked or read on seats upon the ice. Not a breath of wind was astir, and warm beneficent sunlight flooded ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... very ripe fruit down; but there was neither jollity nor romance about the process. The olive is a tree of association, but that is all. Its culture, its manuring and clipping, and trimming and grafting—the gathering of its fruits, and their squeezing in the mill, when the ponderous stone goes round and round in the glutinous trough, crushing the very essence out of the oily pulps, while the fat oleaginous stream pours lazily into the greasy vessels set to receive it; all this is as prosaic and uninteresting, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... Scotchman, born in 1585, may almost be looked upon as the harbinger of a fresh outburst of word-music. No doubt all the great poets have now and then broken forth in lyrical jubilation. Ponderous Ben Jonson himself, when he takes to song, will sing in the joy of the very sound; but great men have always so much graver work to do, that they comparatively seldom indulge in this kind of melody. Drummond ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... true mystery of a person in office, gave two grave nods, and withdrawing from the wards a ponderous key of about two feet in length, he proceeded to shut a strong plate of steel, which folded down above the keyhole, and was secured by a steel spring and catch. Butler stood still instinctively while the door was made fast, and then looking at his watch, walked ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... face grew pale. He knew now for the first time that Angele and her father were in England, and he looked Lempriere suspiciously in the eyes; but the swaggering Seigneur met his look frankly, and bowed with ponderous and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the school were enclosed from the rest of the town by a high and thick brick wall, dingy with years, which seemed to frown like a prison wall upon the grassy and pleasantly shaded freedom without. At one corner of this ponderous wall was set a more ponderous gate, riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. As the boy passed through it he trembled with delicious awe which was deepened by the ominous creak of the mighty hinges. He fancied himself entering upon a domain of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... at a commander's back, it is easy to organise an expedition on an elaborate scale, and to carry it out with the nicety of perfection, but for the realisation of these ponderous plans there is one thing more necessary, and that is time. I have no doubt if Gordon's letter had said "granaries full, can hold out till Easter," that Lord Wolseley's deliberate march—Cairo, September 27; Wady Halfa, October 8; Dongola, November 14; Korti, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Adige, and looked across the river. Far away the Alps that look down on Garda glistened under the stars; the citadel on its hill, the houses across the river were alive with lights; to the left the great mediaeval bridge rose, a dark, ponderous mass, above the torrents of the Adige. Overhead, the little outside restaurant was roofed with twining vine-stems from which the leaves had fallen; colored lights twinkled among them and on the white tables underneath. The ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the service of the Church—voluminous systems of recurrent double rhymes, intricate rhythms moulded upon tunes for chanting, solid melodic fabrics, which, having once been formed, were used for lighter efforts of the fancy, or lent their ponderous effects to parody. Thus, in the first half of the centuries which intervene between the extinction of the genuine Roman Empire and the year 1300, ecclesiastical poetry took the lead in creating and popularising new established ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... suspended heavy beams of wood at intervals along the wall, each beam hanging by long chains from two cranes which rested on the wall and projected outwards from it; and whenever a ram was being brought up, they drew up the beam at right angles to it, and then, letting go the chains, dropped the ponderous timber, which came crashing down on the ram, ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... short knock sounded on the back door, and an instant change came over Becky Boozer. It was impossible to imagine that anyone as ponderous as Becky could be coy, but at the sound of the knock, this is what she became. Wiping her hands hastily on one of many petticoats, she pushed and pulled at her hat (which remained immovable), straightened her fichu, and smoothing her dress, she minced ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... they had no right to shoot him as if he were some wretched thief. But he found that in some quite absurd fashion he was as if fixed to the ground. It was as if he had suddenly become of the most ponderous and incredible weight, like lead—or that other metal, not gold, which is the heaviest of all. Only the metal, seemingly, was not only heavy but fiery hot, and his strength was incapable of holding it ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... convenient corners outrage my love of Love! It is true that I care more to retain love's dream than these Cochin-Chinese, who, courting a giggle, use refinement in coarseness, research in vulgarity; true that my blood has swifter flow in a less ponderous body, and that I am not a ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... soon over that morning, and then the question arose, how were such ponderous chests to be conveyed to the ship? They measured, roughly, about two and a half feet square, and were so heavy that eight men—all who could conveniently get round one of them—could not raise the weight from the ground, much less carry it along a narrow path cumbered ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... Artemisia about to drink her husband's ashes from a costly cup reveals a ponderous hand. It is but indifferent Rembrandt, despite several jewelled passages. Van Dyck shows at least one great picture, the Betrayal of Christ. The Brazen Serpent only ranks second to it; both are masterpieces, and Antwerp must envy the Prado. The Crown of Thorns, and the portraits, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... marked the approaches of Washington's besieging army; although the buildings since erected in the vicinity have shut out almost every object, save the steeple of the Old South, which seems almost within arm's length. Descending from the cupola, I paused in the garret to observe the ponderous white-oak framework, so much more massive than the frames of modern houses, and thereby resembling an antique skeleton. The brick walls, the materials of which were imported from Holland, and the timbers of the mansion, ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... Golden Hoof, but an essayical history, based on research. The deference paid to Mary Austin's The Flock marks the author as civilized. Towne wrote the book; Wentworth supplied the information. Wentworth's own book, America's Sheep Trails, Iowa State College Press, Ames, 1948, is ponderous, amorphous, and in part, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... he have unfolded it!" was the thought that nestled in her heart, as she replaced the precious parcel in the safe, and closed and locked the ponderous door. ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... custom, we sat around the round table in the evening. Father was in very good spirits, and was telling us amusing tales about his youthful travels. As it was striking nine we all at once heard the street door creak on its hinges, and slow ponderous steps echoed across the passage and up the stairs. "That is Coppelius," said my mother, turning pale. "Yes, it is Coppelius," replied my father in a faint broken voice. The tears started from my mother's eyes. "But, father, father," ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... indulging my astrological reveries, a ponderous bell struck ten, and such a peal of chimes succeeded, as shook the whole edifice, notwithstanding its bulk, and drove me away in a hurry. No mob obstructed my passage, and I ran through a succession of streets, free and unmolested, as if I had ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... length of a paper machine, from the screens to the calenders, is about one hundred and twenty-five feet, while the height varies, the average being about ten feet. The machines, while necessarily of the finest adjustment, are ponderous and heavy, weighing in some cases as much as four hundred tons, this being the weight of the machine itself, exclusive of its foundations. The machine-room is of necessity well lighted and thoroughly ventilated, and should be kept ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... walked down the corridor, she saw more and more of the evidences of the convulsion. The thick iron-bound door lay where it had fallen, and it had not been moved since it was lifted to get the two men from under it. Its ponderous hinges were twisted as if they had been made of glue, and its massive bolts were snapped across like bits of glass. All along the corridor on the floor was a thick coating of dust and debris, finely powdered, growing deeper and deeper until they ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... sometimes even weeks. If a warm day came, and thawed the upper surface of the snow, sufficiently for succeeding cold to freeze it into a crust, the outlook for the bison began to be serious. A man can travel over a crust through which the hoofs of a ponderous bison cut like chisels and leave him floundering belly-deep. It was at such times that the Indians hunted him on snow-shoes, and drove their spears into his vitals as he wallowed helplessly in the drifts. Then the wolves grew fat upon the victims which they, also, slaughtered ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... who can believe it? The bearers move within a few feet of us, and yet it resembles the most ponderous limestone or granite. Then you ask yourself: How is it possible? If their burden were what it seems to be, they would be crushed to earth instead of striding proudly along. Admirable figures! As you say, the spectacle takes one back ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Walter Scott observes, in his "Life of Dryden," that the romances of Calprenede and Scuderi, those ponderous and unmerciful folios, now consigned to oblivion, were, in their day, not only universally read and admired, but supposed to furnish the most perfect models of gallantry and heroism. Dr. Johnson read them all. "I ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... but found no trace of the curry-cook: they made guarded enquiries of the servants as to whether he had been seen, but nothing whatever could be learned about him. So when Peppino took a ponderous hammer and a stout chisel from his tool chest and led the way upstairs, they all knew that the decisive moment had come. Perhaps he might be meditating (for indeed it was likely that he had a good deal to meditate about), but perhaps—Peppino called to him in his most sonorous ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... stood there islanded among the swelling tides of civilization which had already engulfed their kindreds. "Last Bull" they had called him, as he answered their gaze with little, sullen, melancholy eyes from under his ponderous and shaggy front. "Last Bull"—and the passing of his race was in ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... old smile, ripened only by age, she reached the ponderous keys from the nail where they hung, and gave them into my hand. I left her in the shadow of her dwelling, and stepped forth into the sunlight. The first thing I observed was the blacksmith waiting for ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... farmer would be, and much like the other farm-houses of the region. But Diana's room, a little one it was, had one side filled with bookshelves; and on the bookshelves was a dark array of solid and ponderous volumes. A table under the front window held one or two that were apparently in present use; the rest of the room displayed the more usual fittings and surroundings of a maiden's life. Only in their essentials, ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... Brasher—I must own that his manner is a little ponderous—"is of a scientific, I may say also, and at the same time, of a judicial nature. Our object is the Pursuit of Truth ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... ponderous gravity. "I wouldn't go for to say so much as that," he said soberly, "there's wild beastes about in ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... with a big black stud and a very small black wisp of a tie. His conversation indicated now and then that he gave thought to the other world, always that he knew the ways of this. May liked him in spite of the rather ponderous deference he showed to her; with Quisante, on the other hand, he was familiar, seeming to say that he could tell the younger man a thing or two; Quisante's manner did nothing to contradict ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... monument was finished. All that part of the church between the choir and the door del Perdon was occupied by this showy and ponderous fabric. According to their traditional custom all the Toledans gathered to admire—the steps covered with rows of burning lights, the Roman legionaries in alabaster leaning on their lances, and the rich curtain with its innumerable folds that hung from the vaulting down ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... two boards, also carved on the outside with a name similar to the one on the shelf. The characters were beautifully formed, and I tried to purchase a small volume, if a thing about two feet long could be called so, but without effect. There were about thirty of these books in the place, ponderous tomes, carefully covered up, and little read, to judge by the quantity of dust collected on them. They read us, however, a small portion of one, in a drawling, sonorous tone, and with no very ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... realizing, to its greatest extent, the evil of this superfluity of books; but if you were constantly receiving from thirty to forty daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals, besides one or more ponderous volumes, every week, I cannot but think that, with all your ambition and thirst for knowledge, you would wish rather for an Alexandrian conflagration than ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... stately buildings growing out of it—and, everywhere, the same extraordinary silence. Presently, we shot across a broad and open stream; and passing, as I thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps with which it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous construction and great strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of hoarfrost or gossamer—and where, for the first time, I saw people walking—arrived at a flight of steps leading from the water ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... and encouragement from the dense circle of spectators, the lady danced round the sham clergyman, dodging his ponderous blows, slipping under his arms, and smacking back at him most successfully. Once she tripped and fell over her own skirt, but was up and at him ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the scales, which was inscribed by the word Eternity; though I threw in that of time, prosperity, affliction, wealth, poverty, interest, success, with many other weights, which in my hand seemed very ponderous, they were not able to stir the opposite balance, nor could they have prevailed, though assisted with the weight of the sun, the ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... looked in vain for signs of human life. They found it to be a massive ancient castle, standing in the midst of an extensive grove or park. They were somewhat awed by the deathlike silence that pervaded the place. They, however, stepped up to a massive oaken door, and Dr. Jones seized the ponderous iron knocker and struck several vigorous blows. They waited two or three minutes, but could ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... material by a ball and socket contrivance above and below, were not yet opened, and the party were detained on the bridge. A small oval orifice only appeared, less than a human face, and an ear was applied there to receive an expected word in a whisper. This complied with, the ponderous gates unfolded, and a vista of solemn magnificence was presented to the view. It was a vista at once of colossal statues and trees, interminable in perspective and extending, as it was found, the whole length of the city to its western gate. Incredible as it ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... general character of the dwellings of the Monguls in the days of Genghis Khan. They took their character evidently from the wandering and pastoral life that the people led. One would have thought that very excellent roads would have been necessary to have enabled them to draw the ponderous carts containing their dwellings and household goods. But this was less necessary than might have been supposed on account of the nature of the country, which consisted chiefly of immense grassy plains and smooth river valleys, over which, in many places, wheels would travel tolerably ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... Laura is ponderous and billowy, and her moonlike face of rusty bronze is lined to show that she, too, has gone down a little into the vale of years. She was swathed in many skirts, her shoulders enveloped by a neutral-tinted shawl, and upon her head was a modist toque of light straw, garlanded with pink ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... heard the heavy booming and presently came softly back into the door from the kitchen to listen. She leaned against the facing in an attitude of ponderous attention, a hand, on her bulging hip. She could not suppress her unbounded admiration of her liege lord's manly physique, and jealous to fierceness as she was of his experiences so eloquently and picturesquely related, her woman's nature ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... irritation fought an interminable guerilla. Now one obtained the advantage, now the other. His nerves demanded relief from the friction, but he could offer them no holiday, not one single day's holiday. Twice every day he had to manoeuvre and persuade that ponderous, irrational body in his father's bedroom. Maggie helped the body to feed itself at table. But Maggie apparently ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... policeman of Staffin interpreting "The Bonnie House o' Airlie." When his big, manly voice threw out the terrible threat, "I'll no' leave a staunin' stane in Airlie," his eyes shot fire, his teeth gleamed, and his ponderous fist came thundering down on the table in front ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... we found the gate closed, and were obliged to wait until the ponderous key was brought to open it. The officer controlling the gate made no haste, and we were delayed in a crowd of Chinese men and dogs for nearly fifteen minutes. It was a peculiar sensation to be shut in a Chinese town and fairly locked in. It is the ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... most delightful and daring NUANCES of free, free-spirited thought. And just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to him in body and conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying species of style, are developed in profuse variety among Germans—pardon me for stating the fact that even Goethe's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, as a reflection of the "good old time" to which ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... spiritedly thrown off by a poet of the Pleiad. I examined an elegant Masquerade by Watteau. I felt, with my eye, the weight of a two-handed sword, a steel gorgerin, a morion. What a thick helmet! What a ponderous breastplate— Seigneur! A giant's garb? No—the carapace of an insect. The men of those days were cuirassed like beetles; their weakness was within them. To-day, on the contrary, our strength is interior, and our armed souls dwell ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... the officers, and the continual clatter of the muskets, made a maddening din. Now a multitude bounded up the great breach, as if driven by a whirlwind, but across the top glittered a range of sword-blades, sharp-pointed, keen-edged on both sides, and firmly fixed in ponderous beams chained together, and set deep in the ruins; and for ten feet in front the ascent was covered with loose planks, studded with sharp iron points, on which, feet being set, the planks moved, and the unhappy soldiers, falling forward on the spikes, rolled down upon ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... "I'll tell you both how I happened to buy it. I went into a jeweller's about my watch, which has taken to lose lately in a most unceremonious fashion, and there I saw a whole display of chains hanging up; some ponderous enough for a sheriff, some light and elegant enough for Barbara. I dislike to see a thick chain on a lady's neck. They put me in mind of the chain she lost, the day she and Cornelia went with me to Lynchborough, which loss Barbara persisted in declaring was my fault, for dragging her ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... upon my lifted shield Though the just critic pass my humble name, And sweeter lips have drained the cup of fame, While my gay stanza pleased the banquet's lords, The soul within was tuned to deeper chords! Say, shall my arms, in other conflicts taught To swing aloft the ponderous mace of thought, Lift, in obedience to a school-girl's law, Mirth's tinsel wand or laughter's tickling straw? Say, shall I wound with satire's rankling spear The pure, warm hearts that bid me welcome here? No! while I wander through the land of dreams, To strive with great ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... uttered these words I do not think that the full horror of what had happened had come home to us, preoccupied as we were with the sight of poor Foulata's end. But now we understood. The ponderous mass of rock had closed, probably for ever, for the only brain which knew its secret was crushed to powder beneath its weight. This was a door that none could hope to force with anything short of dynamite in large quantities. And we ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... was that more than one-half of the winter was passed in delving into the accounts of the enterprise Allan and his partner had built up, while the other, the second half, was spent by Mrs. Mowbray and Father Jose at Leaping Horse, where the ponderous legal machinery was set in motion for the final settlement of ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... the crowd to right and left—came the virgin priestess, white-robed and veiled, riding upon a horse, and followed by several mounted priests in white garments and high black caps of ceremony. Behind them advanced the ponderous shrine, swaying above: the heads of its bearers like a junk in a storm. Scores of brawny arms were pushing it to the right; other scores were pushing it to the left: behind and before, also, there was furious pulling and pushing; and the roar ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... down from their chairs, by slow and ponderous degrees, and a hugging match of the ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... far from the sea there is an old castle called Glimminge. It is a big and substantial stone house; and can be seen over the plain for miles around. It is not more than four stories high; but it is so ponderous that an ordinary farmhouse, which stands on the same estate, looks like a little children's ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... the inner buildings of the fortress, the ponderous thickness of whose walls made itself felt like a physical pressure. An internal stone staircase, ranged round four sides of a square, was next revealed, leading at the top of one flight into a spacious hall, which seemed to occupy the whole area of the keep. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... sledge-hammer were worn bright by hard service and flashed in the sunlight. Mr. Roosevelt sees as far ahead and as much as he needs to see. He has an almost infallible sense of where to strike the next important blow, and even during the ponderous labors of the day he prudently and confidently lays out the task of to-morrow. Thus while he has contributed to the liberation of American intelligence chiefly in the sense that he has given his fellow-countrymen something to think about, he is very far from being ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... infernal a nature, must, in time, produce the effect desired. Spirituous liquors being abolished, instead of having the most undisciplined and abandoned poor, we might soon boast a race of men, temperate, religious, and industrious, even to a proverb. We should soon see the ponderous burden of the poor's rate decrease, and the beauty and strength of the land rejuvenate. Schools, workhouses, and hospitals, might then be sufficient to clear our streets of distress and misery, which never will be the case, whilst the love of poison prevails, and the means ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... his countrymen? The answer is supplied by Mr. Gooch. Freeman ignored organic evolution. "The world of ideas had no existence for him.... No less philosophic historian has ever lived." For one man who, with effort, has toiled through Freeman's ponderous but severely accurate Norman and Sicilian histories, there are probably a hundred whose imagination has been fired by Carlyle's rhapsody on the French Revolution, or who have pored with interested delight over Froude's account of the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... so, now?" returned the little man, gazing off through the sunny, velvet air to a world which had been painted clean, new green. His shrewd, blue eyes returned to the ponderous Scotchman. ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... outset of Johnson's career, one can not but see that the companionship and nimble wit of Garrick saved his ponderous and melancholy ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... lordly manner of conquerors Charles, too, demanded reimbursement for his trouble in bending these free citizens to his illegal will. The reinstated bishop wanted his rents and legal perquisites, all difficult to collect, and many were the ponderous documents that passed on the subject. How justly pained sounds Charles's remonstrance on the default of payment of taxes to his ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... direction; blankets, clothes, carpenters' and blacksmiths' tools, cooking utensils, furniture. You would have thought the Boers were settlers moving to a new country with all their effects, instead of an army on the march. This is how they do things, however, in the homely, ponderous fashion. They often take their women and children with them. There were many ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... Green-glass goggles, a broad-brimmed straw hat, a pongee shirt, loose trousers of brown linen, and dust-colored canvas shoes made up the outer man of a personality as distinctly unmilitary as it was ponderous. Slow and labored in movement, the major was correspondingly sluggish in speech. He sauntered out into the glare of the evening sunshine and became slowly conscious of a desire to swear at what he saw: that, though in a minute or two the day-god would "douse his glim" behind the black horizon, ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... suited to the growth of the plantain is found in the virgin land most recently taken in from the forest, having a formation of clay and decomposed vegetable substances. A large portion of organic matter is required, as well as clay or other ponderous strata, to afford the greatest production of fruit. I have known good plantains produced in the West Indies, upon land considerably exhausted by the culture of cotton, but which was enriched by the application of a quantity of the decomposed seed of ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... rallied around her, and, following the impetuous girl, they wielded axe and lance for the final struggle. The result came quickly. The ponderous battle-axe of the knight of Leyenburg crashed through the helmet of the Lord of Arkell, and as the brave young leader fell to the ground, his panic-stricken followers turned and fled. The troops of Jacqueline pursued them through the streets of Gorkum and out into the ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... its shelf the ponderous diary "made to view his life and actions in," and called through the inner door for his bedroom candle. A morose voice answered "Coming," ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... the narrow ancient side-streets of Florence, with their ponderous prison-like palaces with iron-barred windows are so ill-lit and cavernous, the place seems a city of evil deeds, as indeed it was in the days of the ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... negotiations, in which it had hitherto, in his country, been involved, to the more general contemplation of arts and philosophy, and the progress of human affairs; and, in some respects, he certainly effected a great reformation on the ponderous annalists who had preceded him. But the foundation of his history was still biography; he regarded human events only as they were grouped round two or three great men, or as they were influenced by the speculations of men of letters and science. The history of France he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... a motor-car. Those were still the days when touring cars with strangely clad occupants were less familiar, even on French roads, than they have since become, and the machines announced themselves from afar by their ponderous groans. Very few cars, indeed, got down to this secluded Brittany village which was reached by only one road of the third class that penetrated the little peninsula from Morlaix, a number of miles away to ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... common to him; 'you must positively alter this dining-room, that is, remodel it altogether; look here, it is just sixteen feet by fifteen; did anybody ever hear of a dining-room of such proportions?' and the archdeacon stepped the room long-ways and cross-ways with ponderous steps, as though a certain amount of ecclesiastical dignity could be imparted even to such an occupation as that by the manner of doing it. 'Barely sixteen; you may call it ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... accomplished, her servant had gone to bed and Deena, afraid to be left alone downstairs in a house so prone to spooky noises, followed her example, but alas! not to sleep. She tossed on her bed, sacred for many years to the ponderous weight of old Mrs. Ponsonby, till suddenly all she had suffered from the maxims and example of her mother-in-law took form, and she wove a story half humorous, half pathetic, that she longed to commit to paper; but her delicacy forbade. She ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... is a prominent worker in the cause of philanthropy and temperance. He is ponderous and bland; and for the rest, he is president of the Society for the Suppression of Nicotine and the Nude, vice-president of the Anti-Inebriation League, secretary of the Incorporated Brotherhood of Benevolence, and the bearer of ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... listen; they all could hear the one great straining breath; the creak of wood slowly yielding; the wrench of iron; the mighty fall of the ponderous gates. Fanny stood up tottering—made a step or two towards her mother, and fell forwards into her arms in a fainting fit. Mrs. Thornton lifted her up with a strength that was as much that of the will as of the body, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... round by the warehouse lane into the street, waiting at the door while his friend went through the old building, carefully putting up the bars and locking the street door upon its emptiness with a ponderous key; then the two captains walked away together, the tall one and the short one, clicking their canes on the flagstones. They turned up Barbadoes Street, where Mrs. Lunn lived, and bowed to her finely as ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... establishment, a pompous, well-to-do merchant, stout, short, and baldheaded, and evidently well satisfied with himself and his position in society, was vehemently expressing his opinions upon the affairs of the nation to an attentive audience of two or three elderly business men, with a ponderous earnestness that proved him, in his own estimation, as much au fait in political affairs as in the routine of his counting-room. An individual of middle age, a man of the world, apparently, who was seated at a side-table, carelessly glancing ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... land,' that it is not surprising to hear of the Chinese having begun to use paper-money as currency in the second century preceding the Christian era. At that time, the coinage of the Celestials was of a more bulky and ponderous nature than it is at the present day; and we may easily believe that a people so cunning and ingenious, would contrive not a few schemes to avoid the burden of carrying it about; as the man did, who scratched the figure of an ox on a piece of leather, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... vibrated, and shook with every stroke of the ponderous piston. The laughter of the crowd, the exchange of gossip and news, the banquet at the long table, the newspapers and books in the reading-room, even the luxurious couches in the staterooms, were all dominated, thrilled, and pulsating with the perpetual throb ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... his ponderous shield Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round, Behind him cast. The broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... darts increased to streams of portable fire, that burst the fog and illumined the wet sands. And Helen burst out laughing like chanticleer, for this first break of day revealed the sextons that had scared her—three ponderous turtles, crawling, slow and clumsy, back to sea. Hazel joined her, and they soon found what these evil spirits of the island had been at, poor wretches. They had each buried a dozen eggs in the sand; one dozen of which were very ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... Chymists call it) I observ'd with pleasure, that immediately upon the Diffusion of this Liquor, the Impregnated Water was restor'd to its former Caeruleous Colour; And this Liquor of Tartar being very Ponderous, and falling at first to the Bottom of the Vial, it was easie to observe that for a little while the Lower part of the Liquor appear'd deeply Caeruleous; whilst all the Upper part retain'd its former ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... vague disappointment. Like Hilda in the "Marble Faun," we at first prefer our own dream-edifice to the solid reality. It is, in fact, so immense that you utterly fail to take it in all at once; your gaze is arrested by ponderous columns and you must be content to see it in fragments. You yourself seem so lost in its immensity, that you find it impossible to take in its immeasurable vastness from any single standpoint, the mind utterly refusing to grasp it; ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... deciding every move of the great game, the stake of which for him was life itself. About him were gathered the ablest members of the Richmond bar: John Wickham, witty and ingenious, Edmund Randolph, ponderous and pontifical, Benjamin Botts, learned and sarcastic, while from Baltimore came Luther Martin to aid his "highly respected friend," to keep the political pot boiling, and eventually to fall desperately in love with Burr's daughter, ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... dentated cornice, like that which is seen on the tomb. Externally they were clamped together in the same careful way which we find to have been in use both at Persepolis and Parsargadae. The building seems to have been closed originally by two ponderous stone ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... his talk, that it was all his mother could do to keep his state concealed from public observation. She had for this purpose given him a sleeping potion; and, while he lay heavy and inert under the influence of the poppy-tea, his mother bound him with cords to the ponderous, antique bed in which he slept. She looked broken-hearted while she did this office, and thus acknowledged the degradation of her first-born—him of whom she had ever been ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... out of breath—if birth hath been This night, in any guest-room, high or low? The drowsy porter at the gate saith, "No!"— Shooting the bars; while the packed camels shake Their bells to listen, and the sleepers wake, And to their feet the ponderous steers slow rise, Lifting from trampled fodder large mild eyes;— "Nay! Brothers! no such thing! yet there is gone Yonder, one nigh her time, a gentle one! With him that seemed her spouse—of Galilee; They toiled at sundown ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... was curiously in keeping with the master of the house. For example, in one corner of the apartment there stood a hazelwood bureau with a bulging body on four grotesque legs—the perfect image of a bear. Also, the tables and the chairs were of the same ponderous, unrestful order, and every single article in the room appeared to be saying either, "I, too, am a Sobakevitch," or "I am exactly ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... as it may, the native had only time to pick up his ponderous spear and face toward the wood, when the lion emerged from the broadening band of shadow, and, with a low, threatening ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... Without even waiting to get any breakfast, she unfastened the hall door, opened it, and stepped out into the full radiance of the summer's morning. A quick walk brought her in a little over half an hour to Harley Grove. When she went up the ponderous flight of steps which led to the principal door of the mansion a clock far away struck the hour ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... among the greatest, as well as the latest, of the agents of destruction. In our island various cherished antiquities have been often most unnecessarily swept away in constructing these race-courses for the daily rush and career of the iron horse. His rough and ponderous hoof, for example, has kicked down, at one extremity of a railway connected with Edinburgh (marvellously and righteously to the dispeace of the whole city), that fine old specimen of Scottish Second-Pointed architecture, the Trinity College Church; while, at the other extremity of the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... elder woman. He looked at the younger. With a nervous yet ponderous movement—it was Marshall Wace's misfortune always to take up more room than by rights belonged to his height and bulk—he got on to his feet. Inattentively let drop the volume of poems upon a neighbouring table, to the lively danger of two ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... any way for the pause. At such moments every one seems instinctively to feel the same influence, and the first person who breaks the spell either experiences a sensation of awkwardness, and says something very foolish, or, conscious of the odds against him, delivers himself of a sentiment of ponderous severity and sententiousness. As I smoked, watching the great flaming bowl of the water pipe, a little coal, forced up by the expansion of the heat, toppled over the edge and fell tinkling on the ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... the Argonauts, as these fifty brave adventurers were called, had prepared everything for the voyage, an unforeseen difficulty threatened to end it before it was begun. The vessel, you must understand, was so long and broad and ponderous that the united force of all the fifty was insufficient to shove her into the water. Hercules, I suppose, had not grown to his full strength, else he might have set her afloat as easily as a little ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... be supposed that our hero was ignorant of the large number of emigrants that was moving over the plains, and it is quite probable that his sagacity was precocious enough to look ahead at the result of attempting to carry forward such ponderous loads, and such a variety of at least dispensable things as the earlier parties started with. A detailed list of the 'amount and variety of goods and wares, useful and superfluous, including many of the appendages of refined and fashionable life, would astonish the reader. Our hero was not in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... arose and the gang, who were at the door, fled right and left, leaving four or five of their number crushed beneath the ponderous mass. ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... it was rather more dull than former Thwaite Hall festivities, and Frank was seen to yawn. But then everybody knows that the real fun of Christmas never begins till the day itself be passed. The beef and pudding are ponderous, and unless there be absolute children in the party, there is a difficulty in grafting any special afternoon amusements on the Sunday pursuits of the morning. In the evening they were to have a dance; that had been distinctly promised to Patty Coverdale; but the dance would not commence till ...
— The Mistletoe Bough • Anthony Trollope
... out in rain, and though the sun now shone brightly from a cloudless sky, the streams were swollen and the road was heavy. The ponderous coach and the four black horses made slow progress. The creeping pace, the languid warmth of the afternoon, the scent of flowering trees, the ceaseless singing of redbird, catbird, robin, and thrush, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... and his sermons. Leaving out of the question those most extraordinary books, The Pilgrim's Progress and Holy War, his other writings ought to have handed down his name, with honour and popularity, to the latest posterity. While the logical and ponderous works of Baxter and Owen are well calculated to furnish instruction to those who are determined to obtain knowledge, the works of Bunyan create that very determination, and furnish that very knowledge, so blended with amusement, as to fix it in the memory. Let one illustration ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... engineer of the mill-dam, is now here, after about a fortnight's absence. He is a plain country squire, with a good figure, but with rather a ponderous brow; a rough complexion; a gait stiff, and a general rigidity of manner, something like that of a schoolmaster. He originated in a country town, and is a self-educated man. As he walked down the gravel path to-day, after dinner, he took up a scythe, which one of the mowers had left on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... also taken it into his head to give her a specimen of his agility, by an attempt to clear a space between two masses of ice of somewhat too great a breadth for a heavy grenadier, buttoned up to the chin in a ponderous bear skin coat. He succeeded in gaining the opposite piece of ice, but had no sooner reached it, than he fell, entangled in such a manner in his covering that he found it impossible to extricate himself. To add to his disaster, the force of his fall broke off, from the main body, ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... idol of him called Jagannatha (or the Lord of the World), which, in festival times, attracts thousands of pilgrims to worship at its shrine, on one of which occasions the idol is dragged forth in a ponderous car by the pilgrims and back again, under the wheels of which, till prohibited, multitudes would throw themselves to be crushed to death in the hope of thereby attaining a state ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... want to paint blue mist in order to teach you the nature of evaporation; nor this lava stream, to explain to you the operation of gravity on ponderous and viscous materials. He paints the blue mist, because it brings life and joy to men, and the lava stream because ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... from the above that Greenough's epistolary style was florid and grandiose in the extreme, but no doubt there was a foundation of sincerity beneath it. A bitter disappointment awaited him. The ponderous figure reached Washington safely in 1843, and was conveyed to the Capitol, where, beneath the rotunda, its predestined pedestal awaited it. But the statue was found too large to pass the door, and when the door was widened and the great stone rolled inside, the floor settled so ominously that ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... though his heart was breaking, he marched nor paused, perceiving, so long as he was king, he must uphold the order of the State. He was no dilettante. Great service called him, and he thought he heard the voice of God. Duty is a ponderous word in Arthur's lexicon. In "Lucretius," Tennyson shows the moral apathy of materialism by letting us look on at a suicidal death, and hear the cry, half-rage and half-despair, "What is duty?" and in that fated cry, atheism has ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... first time we have been allowed to leave the room and go outdoors. We are still under house-arrest, but we can go out in the garden, while two soldiers guard the entrance. Isn't it ludicrous? A gendarme came last night and announced with ponderous importance that we were to be permitted the liberty of the garden if we gave our word of honor not to try to escape. We signed two red-sealed documents, and so we can go into the garden while two soldiers with bayonets look to it that we don't go ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... streams on the slopes. It was the voice of all that widely separated water spilled suddenly with magical power into the desert river to make it a mighty, thundering torrent, red and defiled, terrible in its increasing onslaught into the canyon, deep, ponderous, but swift—the ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... vague brightness arose from the snow itself, in order to spread itself into space. By degrees the highest and most distant summits assumed a delicate, fleshlike rose color, and the red sun appeared behind the ponderous giants of the ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... preponderates over ornament; that city which so early encouraged that most glorious of inventions, by the aid of which he hoped, that the diminutive barks of his countrymen might yet be propelled, thus superseding the ponderous paddle of teak, He here expected to be involved in an intricate labyrinth of mechanical inventions,—in a stormy discussion on the comparative merits of rival machinery,—to be immersed in speculative but gigantic theories. He was elected an honorary member of a news-room; ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... to know her better during the next few days, under the sharp spur of adversity, he realised more and more how much goodness and strength of character lay hidden under the rough exterior and the sharp tongue, and his liking changed into an honest admiration. Mr. Smith was ponderous and egotistical to the last degree, while Spotts seemed hail-fellow-well-met, the jolliest, brightest, most good-looking and resourceful youth that Cecil had met for many a long day. The other two men were the most reserved of the company, saying little, and devoting ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... ponderous lesson book, and Fate The teacher. When I came to love's fair leaf My teacher turned the page and bade me wait. "Learn first," she said, "love's grief"; And o'er and o'er through many a long to-morrow She kept me conning that ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... their account of apparently insurmountable difficulties. England and Austria laughed in scorn at the idea of transporting across the Alps, where "no wheel had ever rolled, or by any possibility could roll," an army of sixty thousand men, with ponderous artillery, tons of cannon balls and baggage, and all the bulky munitions of war. But the besieged Massena was starving in Genoa, and the victorious Austrians thundered at the gates of Nice, and Napoleon ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the corridor of the Holland Agency by a sharp-nosed individual who regarded him with suspicion. The operatives were undoubtedly expecting trouble from all quarters, for three other large men of the "bull" type, heavy-jowled, ponderous men, surrounded him as ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... of this society probably suggested topics for the Rambler, which appeared at this time, and caused Johnson's fame to spread further beyond the literary circles of London. The wit and humour have, indeed, left few traces upon its ponderous pages, for the Rambler marks the culminating period of Johnson's worst qualities of style. The pompous and involved language seems indeed to be a fit clothing for the melancholy reflections which are its chief staple, and in spite of its unmistakable ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... add to her fears, immured as she seemed to be, to perish by a strange and subterranean death, while her friends and deliverers were probably within a few yards of her. She flung her arms wildly around in search of some avenue of escape, but every effort she made for liberating herself from the ponderous circumvallation, was as ineffectual as if directed against the dome of ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... mountain pathway that leads from Upper Rydal to Grasmere. The ponderous block of stone, which is mentioned in the poem, remains, I believe, to this day, a good way up Nab-Scar. Broom grows under it, and in many places on the side ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... we can let you have a bed, and you can rely upon me that it is clean and well-aired.' I followed her eagerly, and she led me down a narrow passage into a big room with a low ceiling, traversed with a ponderous oak beam, blackened with the smoke of endless ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... as of some ponderous weight let fall, and I knew that the only living soul in there was hers who sat with hands fast hold of frosty bars, high up in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... been able to get seats in Parliament, stood about in clubs, and in lobbies, and chambers of the House, with all that busy, magpie air which is worn only by those who have high hopes of good things to come speedily. Lord Mount Thistle was more sublime and ponderous than ever, though they who best understood the party declared that he would never again be invited to undergo the cares of office. His lordship was one of those terrible political burdens, engendered originally by private friendship or family considerations, ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope |
