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More "Cumbrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for good, and to begin life afresh (so far as regards caution) with a new character. The first step was to find lodgings, and to find them quickly. This was the more needful as Mr. Rowley and I, in our smart clothes and with our cumbrous burthen, made a noticeable appearance in the streets at that time of the day and in that quarter of the town, which was largely given up to fine folk, bucks and dandies and young ladies, or respectable professional men on their ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to reproduce, testify to the heroism, religious zeal, and literary industry of the women who helped to build up the early civilization of New England. Their writings, for some presumed on authorship, are quaint and cumbrous; but in those days, when few men published books, it required marked courage for women to appear in print at all. They imitated the style popular among men, and received much attention for their literary ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... neckcloth, spotless, enveloping, cumbrous, reverence-compelling, a cravat worthy of a Moderator. And indeed the Doctor—our Doctor, parish minister of Eden Valley, had "passed the Chair" of the General Assembly. We were all proud of the fact, even top-lofty Cameronians like my grandmother secretly delighting in the thought ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... packed gold in wool: the wool takes up more room than the gold. No, Sir; I always thought Robertson would be crushed by his own weight,—would be buried under his own ornaments. Goldsmith tells you shortly all you want to know: Robertson detains you a great deal too long. No man will read Robertson's cumbrous detail a second time; but Goldsmith's plain narrative will please again and again. I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: "Read over your compositions, and where ever ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... 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 from boat ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... 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, ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... of life change readily from the banquet to the battle; and, to Richard, the exchange seemed but a succession of pleasure. He called for his helmet and the most cumbrous parts of his armour, which he had laid aside; and while Gurth was putting them on, he laid his strict injunctions on Wilfred, under pain of his highest displeasure, not to engage in the skirmish which he supposed ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... onward and onward till, one May, she joined a band of Acadian exiles who were sailing in a cumbrous boat down the broad river Mississippi. They were seeking for their kinsmen who, it was rumored, had settled down as farmers in that fertile district. Day after day the exiles glided down the river, and night after night they ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... generally worked by women and children, the women who had been engaged in the use of the older instruments—the distaff, spindle, hand-wheel—coming into the mills. But the growing complexity and size of the mule made it too cumbrous for women and children, and spinning for a while became a male occupation in England. In the United States the difficulty of procuring male labour stimulated the invention of the ring spinning-frame, some sixty years ago, which could be worked ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... from the forma of his imposed situation. All, the gossips of Paris were presently amused with the story, which, of coarse, reached the Court, with every droll particular of the pulling up and clapping down the cumbrous paraphernalia ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... dim I hear A thin voice pipingly revived of late, Which saith our India is a cumbrous weight, An idle decoration, bought too dear. The wiser world contemns not gorgeous gear; Just pride is no mean factor in a State; The sense of greatness keeps a nation great; And mighty they who mighty can appear. It may be that if hands of greed could ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... which he could not help approving, according to the fashion of the time, seemed to him a miracle of dexterity; and how had she acquired the art of looking at ease in this attire, which was much more cumbrous than that she had usually ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... seems cumbrous, but it is founded in common sense. What one of the foregoing steps, for ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... were incidents and circumstances that made her melancholy. She looked upon the Stock Exchange coming down to dinner as she would on an invasion of the Visigoths, and endured the stiff observations or the cumbrous liveliness of the merchants and bank directors with gloomy grace. Something less material might be anticipated from the members of Parliament. But whether they thought it would please the genius of the place, or whether Adrian selected his friends ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... profession exclusively. The most usual term here is 'doctor'; but the M.D. rightly objects to the application of this title to his professional brother who has no degree; and in a university town to say that John Smith is a doctor would be inconveniently ambiguous. 'Medical man' is cumbrous, and has the further disadvantage (in these days) of not being of common gender. Now the lack of any proper word for a meaning so constantly needing to be expressed is certainly a serious defect in modern (insular) English. The Americans have some right to crow over us here; but their 'physician' ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... indeed can appreciate, the pleasures of the hardy sportsman. To bear wet, cold, and discomfort; to exercise patience, skill, and endurance; and to undergo the extreme point of fatigue, was the sum of nearly every day's experience of the members of the party; but when their heavy guns and cumbrous clothing were laid aside, the rough chair and cushionless settle afforded luxurious rest, the craving appetite made their coarse fare a delightsome feast, and when, warm, full-fed, and refreshed, they invoked the dreamy solace of ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... travel in India by the old cumbrous methods of going on foot or on horseback, in palanquins or unwieldy coaches; now fast steamboats ply on the Indus and the Ganges, and a great railway, with branch lines joining the main line at ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... College library are delightful, indeed, to look at; rows upon rows of big irregular volumes, with tarnished tooling and faded gilding on the sun-scorched backs. What are they? old editions of classics, old volumes of controversial divinity, folios of the Fathers, topographical treatises, cumbrous philosophers, pamphlets from which, like dry ashes, the heat of the fire that warmed them once has fled. Take one down: it is an agreeable sight enough; there is a gentle scent of antiquity; the bumpy page crackles ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... portly, florid Englishman, laughed heartily at the gestures and outcries of the routed soldiers. The attention of the guard was drawn to this single point, while, at a distance in the fields, the wagons were seen slowly approaching with their cumbrous loads. ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... be quoted where the tedium of a long service, or the appetite engendered by it, were relieved by the entry, between prayers and sermon, of a livery servant with sherry and light refreshments.[888] Even into cathedrals cumbrous ladies' pews were often introduced. Horace Walpole tells an extraordinary story of Gloucester Cathedral in 1753. A certain Mrs. Cotton, who had largely contributed to whitewashing and otherwise ornamenting the church, had taken it into her head that the soul ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... Carlyles and believers in the divine rights of kings have, in view of the influx of discordant races and the jarring elements within, together with the cumbrous machinery of our government, prophesied that disintegration and ruin would ere long be ours. But they took no note of the harmony and fraternal feeling that must come between peoples so differing, when all have equal share in a government founded in justice, ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... bold. Attended first by the Maria de Gloria alone, and afterwards by the Carolina, the Nitherohy, and a small merchant brig, the Colonel Allen, in which he had placed a few guns, he pursued and harassed the cumbrous crowd of Portuguese warships, troop-ships, and trading vessels, about eighty in all, through fourteen days. The chase, indeed, was practically conducted by his flag-ship, the Pedro Primiero, alone. The other vessels were ordered to look out for any ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... proving of the anti-trust law as an effective weapon against the flagrantly offending trusts, according to Roosevelt's conviction, was only a part of the battle. As he said, "monopolies can, although in rather cumbrous fashion, be broken up by lawsuits. Great business combinations, however, cannot possibly be made useful instead of noxious industrial agencies merely by lawsuits, and especially by lawsuits supposed to be carried on for their destruction and not for ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... singing soon, as we have seen, relegated the first suggestions of a manner of setting vocal solos for the stage into a position of comparative obscurity and in the end this possibility was conquered by the cumbrous method of Vecchi. Perhaps the unsuitability of polyphonic composition might have made itself clear earlier than it did, had not the general state of Italian thought and taste moved in a direction making this impossible. The noble classic figure of Orpheus, with his flowing ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... quality, all is mechanical precision. The tins themselves are metal—wood, the old country material for almost every purpose, is eschewed—and they are swung up into a waggon specially built for the purpose. It is the very antithesis of the jolting and cumbrous waggon used for generations in the hay-fields and among the corn. It is light, elegantly proportioned, painted, varnished—the work rather of a coachbuilder than a cartwright. The horse harnessed in it is equally unlike the cart-horse. A quick, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... presence of a foreign employer. The agitation, now in progress, for the final abolition of the queue may be due to one or all of the following reasons. Intelligent Chinese may have come to realize that the fashion is cumbrous and out of date. Sensitive Chinese may fear that it makes them ridiculous in the eyes of foreigners. Political Chinese, who would gladly see the re-establishment of a native dynasty, may look to its disappearance as the first step towards throwing ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... month of May. Far down the Beautiful River, Past the Ohio shore and past the mouth of the Wabash, Into the golden stream of the broad and swift Mississippi, Floated a cumbrous boat, that was rowed by Acadian boatmen. It was a band of exiles: a raft, as it were, from the shipwrecked Nation, scattered along the coast, now floating together, Bound by the bonds of a common belief and a common misfortune; Men and women and children, who, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... of expediting the marriage ceremony while protecting the clergy from the consequences of any possible breach of canonical law. But they were not common, and it was rare for persons in the comparatively humble position in life of Anne Hathaway and young Shakespeare to adopt such cumbrous formalities when there was always available the simpler, less expensive, and more leisurely method of marriage by 'thrice asking of the banns.' Moreover, the wording of the bond which was drawn before Shakespeare's marriage differs in important respects from that adopted in all other ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Our England still. There, in the tingling ears Of the world he cried, En garde! to the King of Spain. There, ordering out his pinnaces in force, While a great storm, as if he held indeed Heaven's batteries in reserve, growled o'er the sea, He landed. Ere one cumbrous limb of all The monstrous armaments of Spain could move His ships were stored; and ere the sword of Spain Stirred in its crusted sheath, Bayona town Beheld an empty sea; for like a dream The pirate fleet had vanished, none knew ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... sluggish as not to feel a certain degree of rapture, at the thoughts of travelling. It should seem as if the imagination frequently journeyed so fast as to enjoy a species of ecstasy, when there are any hopes of dragging the cumbrous ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... bones, indeed thou hast rare wine for such cumbrous relics that can be turned to naught! And didst thou shrive the saint for the use of his ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... had stolen the belt of Wampum From the neck of Mishe-mokwa, From the Great Bear of the mountains, From the terror of the nations, As he lay asleep and cumbrous, On the summit of the mountains, Like a rock with mosses on it, Spotted brown and gray with ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... learnt it of my daddy' is the comment of 1880. 'Was any other human being,' he asks in 1880, 'ever constructed with such a clumsy, elaborate set of principles, setting his feelings going as if they were clockwork?' This is the comment upon a passage where he has twisted his thoughts into a cumbrous and perfectly needless syllogism. He makes a similar comment on another passage in 1865, but 'I think,' he says in 1880, 'that I was a heavy old man thirty years ago. Fifteen years ago I was at the height of my strength. I am beginning to feel now a little ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... narrowly observed by the crew of the Catamaran upon the distant verge of the horizon, was no longer a mere streak of shadowed water. It had developed during the continuance of the chase, and now covered both sea and sky,—the latter with black cumbrous clouds, the former with quick curling waves, that lashed the water-casks supporting both rafts, and proclaimed the approach, if not of a storm, at least a fresh breeze,—likely to change the character of the chase ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... fain would linger, but alas, These are the periods we must pass. So gentle reader do not grin At sight of cumbrous crinoline. Victoria Since Queen Victoria's palmy days 1837-1901 Woman has altered all her ways. In those days she was meek and mild And treated almost like a child; Was brought up in a narrow zone; And couldn't ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... out of office, and one unfavourable to him came in. The Hon. Malcolm Cameron, a hostile member of the cabinet—although he afterwards became a personal friend of Dr. Ryerson—having concocted a singularly crude and cumbrous school bill, aimed to oust Dr. Ryerson from office, it was (as was afterwards explained) taken on trust, and, without examination or discussion, passed into a law. Dr. Ryerson at once called the attention of the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... 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 array" [Churchill]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... surprised at their growth and improvement. George especially was so grown as to come up to his younger-born brother. The boys could hardly be distinguished one from another, especially when their hair was powdered; but that ceremony being too cumbrous for country life, each of the gentlemen commonly wore his own hair, George his raven black, and Harry his light locks tied with ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... be in the hands of officials whose bias and associations separate them from labor, and who will develop an autocratic temper through the habit of power. The democratic machinery by which these officials are nominally controlled is cumbrous and remote, and can only be brought into operation on first-class issues which rouse the interest of the whole nation. Even then it is very likely that the superior education of the officials and the government, combined with the advantages of their ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... thousand three months' militia was dictated as to numbers by the sudden emergency, and as to form and term of service by the provisions of the Act of 1795. It needed only a few days to show that this form of enlistment was both cumbrous and inadequate; and the creation of a more powerful army was almost immediately begun. On May 3 a new proclamation was issued, calling into service 42,034 three years' volunteers, 22,714 enlisted men to add ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... 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
... 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 the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... have been a sight never to have been forgotten could we have gazed then on that city of the sea, have watched the cumbrous barks, so unlike our light-winged merchant ships, or our swift steamers, which sailed heavily up and down the blue Adriatic, till they came in sight of the famous city, the resort of all nations, in whose ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... also, ear-rings must not be so weighty as to tear the lobes of the ears; nor should a bracelet prevent, by its size, the motions of the arm. "Barbaric pomp and gold" is a fine thing; but a medallion, as heavy and as cumbrous as a shield, appended to a lady's bosom, would be any thing but a luxury. So, in the other extreme, a watch should not be so small as to render the dial-plate illegible; nor should a shoe be so tight as to lame its wearer for life. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... airy and cheerful, with flowers in summer, as they were well heated and well lighted in winter. The most massive-looking but luxurious old arm-chairs, that modern taste would have repudiated for ugliness, abounded everywhere; and the four cumbrous but comfortable seats that stood around the circular dinner-table—and it was a matter of principle with Miss Betty that the company should never be more numerous—only needed speech to have told of traditions of conviviality for very nigh two ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... 10 'Good gods! how abject is our race, Condemned 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 designed for daily toil, To drag the ploughshare through, the soil, 20 To sweat in harness through the road, To groan beneath the carrier's load? How feeble are the two-legged kind! What force is in our nerves combined! ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... patience. But for the purposes of reading, for the purposes of poetic enjoyment, such a collection is nearly valueless. We must have it for reference, of course; nobody grudges the guineas he has spent for the best part of the last twenty years on Professor Child's stately, if rather cumbrous, volumes. But who can read a dozen versions, say, of 'The Queen's Marie' with any pleasure? What is exquisite in one is watered, messed, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... towards the west, and it was becoming possible to breathe and move about with a little more comfort on board the somewhat cumbrous vessel, fitted with huge lateen sails, which went swinging down the Nile between the lofty black rocks near Samneh. I say fitted with the sails, not borne along by them, for the stream just there took all the carrying power upon itself, rushing ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... then Kusis takes off his cumbrous girdle of grass and replaces it by a narrow band of closely-woven banana fibre, stained black and yellow (there be fashions in these parts of the world) and reaches down his pig-spear from the cross-beams ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... of the States used to be independent, while in Yugoslavia this was only the case with Serbia and Montenegro. Centralism would tend to obliterate the tribal divisions, but on the other hand it brings in its train bureaucracy, which is slow, cumbrous and often corrupt; it demands unusually good central institutions and first-rate communications, neither of which are as yet in a satisfactory state. The constitution has arrived at a compromise between the federal and the centralized systems. ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... gathering a royal army in Samoa is cumbrous and dilatory in the extreme. There is here none of the expedition of the fiery cross and the bale-fire; but every step is diplomatic. Each village, with a great expense of eloquence, has to be wiled with promises and spurred by threats, and the greater chieftains make stipulations ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The slow and cumbrous form of Clarissa has tended to lessen the number of its students, but there is probably no one who reads at all widely who has not at one time or another come under the spell of this extraordinary book. In France its reputation has always stood very high. Diderot said that it ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... any one locality, but its total amount increased as the raid was carried afield, and it soon became so bulky that the party had to stop and retrace their steps, in order to place it for safety in the nearest fortress. The booty consisted for the most part of herds of oxen and of cumbrous heaps of grain, as well as wood for building purposes. But it also comprised objects of small size but of great value, such as ivory, precious stones, and particularly gold. The natives collected the latter in the alluvial tracts watered by the Tacazze, the Blue Nile and its tributaries. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... naturally arising in every lesson given, and ending in statements of the most necessary points in household science. There are large books designed to cover this ground, and excellent of their kind, but so cumbrous in form and execution as ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... survival of the old custom is retained in the marriage ceremony, the bride and bridegroom being always carried back from the marriage-shed to the temporary lodging of the bridegroom in a palki, though for the longer journey to the bridegroom's village some less cumbrous conveyance is utilised. Four Dhimars carry the palki and receive Rs. 1-4. Well-to-do people will be carried in procession round the town. When employed by the village proprietor the Dhimar accompanies him on his journey, carrying his cooking-vessels and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... delighted with the present and willingly added the extra five pounds weight to his cumbrous and heavy burdens. ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... far back, have been worn as ornaments on the hands, and given by people to each other as tokens of affection or as a sign of power. The oldest rings known were very large and cumbrous, and they were adorned with stones, sometimes flattened to make seals on wax or clay. The gemmal ring, as it is called, is an old kind, probably several centuries old, and rings of this sort are not made now. From what we know about them, it would appear the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... yet in its rudest form. The gold is buried in solid rock, and requires heavy crushing-mills and cumbrous machinery, which must be built and transported at immense expense by capitalists. It is a question with such capitalists how certain is the promise of returns. The uncertainty of mining, as shown by the results of ventures in Colorado, has naturally deterred them. Under the old process of crushing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... then he began to understand that nothing would ever be done until Mr. Gladstone, by some means or other, had been forced to give his consent. A singular combat followed. The slippery old man perpetually eluded the cumbrous grasp of his antagonist. He delayed, he postponed, he raised interminable difficulties, he prevaricated, he was silent, he disappeared. Lord Hartington was dauntless. Gradually, inch by inch, he drove ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... peaches were, and I sometimes had a nearer observation of them in the study or the parlour. She appeared to me to take great care of the Doctor, and to like him very much, though I never thought her vitally interested in the Dictionary: some cumbrous fragments of which work the Doctor always carried in his pockets, and in the lining of his hat, and generally seemed to be expounding to her as ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... 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
... cumbrous disjointed sentence, but the thought of it is clear enough. Even Xenophon's style breaks down when he tries to say in a breath more than he naturally can. Is it a sign of senility, or ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... fair 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
... the guns on the two hills. Not only did the position of the latter give them great superiority, but much time was lost by the French in being obliged to move forward their guns as the army advanced, a slow and tedious process in days when cannon were very heavy and cumbrous. Seeing that they were losing time and suffering more loss than they inflicted, Enghien gave the order to the infantry of the centre ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... was very short. In a single round Montagu had utterly thrashed, and stricken to the earth, and forced to beg for mercy, his cumbrous and brutal opponent. He seemed to tower above him with a magnificent superiority, and there was a self-controlled passion about him which gave tremendous energy to every blow. Brigson was utterly dashed, confounded, and cowed, and took without a ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... sue for forgiveness, on account of my impatience, and I do so most cordially. And now I entreat you, count, first of all, make yourself comfortable. Permit me to assist you in laying aside your cumbrous traveling habit, and accept some ease ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... 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 and ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... difficulty squeeze three fingers into it. The mystery is, how do they use them? for Goliath of Gath could never have wielded an instrument as heavy as this with one hand. It is supposed that the warrior raises the cumbrous weapon on his shield, and having got within sword's length of his enemy, lets it drop on his head. This portion of a black's frame is undeniably hard; but such a blow would crush it like an egg-shell; and as he may be credited with sufficient sense to know this, it seems difficult to ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... whole thing was at best little more than a repetition of one fundamental air under certain arbitrary variations. As the matter shown was always much the same, the interest had to depend chiefly on the manner of showing it; and this naturally generated a cumbrous and clumsy excess of manner; unless indeed the thing drew beyond itself; while in doing this it could scarce fail to create a taste that would sooner or later force it to withdraw ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... has so recently taken on this ability to think, that he has not yet gotten used to handling it. The tool is cumbrous in his hands. He is afraid of it—this one characteristic that differentiates him from the lower animals—so he abdicates and turns his divine birthright over to a syndicate. This combination called a church agrees to take care of his doubts and fears and do his thinking ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... essential course of study in that beautiful art, which is to purchase for him fame and emolument; but he who takes up his pencil merely for pastime, will do well to regulate its movements by a few rules, not cumbrous to the memory, and of easy application.—It is my intention briefly to state the object of Gilpin's first and second essays; from the third I have deduced those rules for sketching which appeared most obviously to result from the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... many of deliberate intent to deceive; some, again, of erroneous philosophical theories. The Tibetan adepts seem to belong either to the second or to the last of these categories,—or, perhaps, to an impartial mingling of all three. They import a cumbrous machinery of auras, astral bodies, and elemental spirits; they divide man into seven principles, nature into seven kingdoms; they regard spirit as a refined form of matter, and matter as the one absolute fact of the universe,—the alpha and omega of all ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... schools. With this plan in view, Miss Sirwell collected the specimens from various schools of the State, supervised the erection of the booth, and installed the displays. As a result, the Minnesota exhibit had a distinct system and unity, was free from useless and cumbrous repetition, its main idea was readily grasped, and it stood as a memorable proof of one woman's artistic sense of proportion and adequacy. It was original in conception; it had beauty of color, order, and arrangement, and, as Miss Sirwell herself laughingly ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... between the two armies; and just as the Scots at Bannockburn, twelve years afterwards, prepared pitfalls for the heavy cavalry of England, so the Flemings laid a trap for the French knights by cutting down brushwood and covering the water. The horsemen, clad in cumbrous armour, charged, the brushwood gave way, and most of them sank into the water. The Comte d'Artois got clear, but was beaten to the ground and killed. The Chancellor Flotte, who had boasted that he would bring the people of Bruges to their knees, was trampled ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... antique, dignified, and cumbrous. High-backed chairs curiously carved, and wrought in needlework; a massive clothes-press of dark oak, well polished, and inlaid with landscapes of various tinted woods; a bed of state, ample and lofty, so as only to be ascended by a movable flight of steps, the huge posts supporting ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... driver in sight, but she did not hesitate to take her seat inside. There was extra business at the station, for this was the first train to come in for two days; and if anyone noticed her in the shadowy recesses of the cumbrous old coach, nobody approached her; nor was she in any way disturbed. When the driver did show himself, she was almost asleep, but she woke up quickly enough when his good-natured face peered in at her and she heard him ask where she wanted to go ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... on to the Cheshire hillside, where the Roaring Brook, tumbling down the steep ravine, flashed its clear waters into whitest foam, and veiled the unsightly rocks with its snowy spray; or, perchance, in cumbrous boat, floated upon Lake Saltonstall, hermit of ponds, set like a liquid crystal in the emerald hills—an eyesore to luckless piscatory students, but highly favored of all lovers of ice, whether applied to the bottoms ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... for example; examine its beautiful structure; observe the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it: yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks that preceded it; it is no deterioration from them. A day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present time are not diminishing in bulk, will be superseded owing to the universal use of watches, in which case they ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... paltry trees; the hills that were 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 a ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... him, and, from his remote retreat among the hills which look down on the infant Severn, he poured out his soul in poetry, which ranks high in Celtic literature. Welsh verse always suffers in translation into the more cumbrous English, but there are many who have known the charm even of an Anglicised version of "Myvanwy Vychan," and when he died, in 1887, he was acclaimed by such an authority as the Rev. H. Elvet Lewis, to be "one of the best lyrical poets of Wales," who had "rendered excellent ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... illustrators—the phrase is cumbrous, but we have no other—Miss A. B. Woodward stands apart, not only by the vigour of her work, but by its amazing humour, a quality which is certainly infrequent in the work of her sister-artists. The books she has illustrated are not very many, but all show this quality. "Banbury Cross," in Messrs. ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... "The cumbrous and inadequate preparation which is now in vogue can scarcely be spoken of by a person of understanding without the use of language unbefitting one who is a member of (inter alia) the Reformed Church and the highest order of ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... this spot, as a protection against pirates, which was repeatedly demolished, rebuilt, altered, and enlarged, till it was levelled to the ground in 1732, and a new palace erected, but was destroyed by fire in 1784. It was rebuilt, in its present cumbrous proportions, in 1828. The visitors entered the large court-yard, passed through the picture gallery, the "Hall of the Knights," the throne-room, looked into the riding-school,—which is a large, oblong room, with an earth floor, where the royal family may practise ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... here, since along with the kaleidoscope it did more than anything else to popularize his name, was not, as has often been asserted, the invention of Brewster. Sir Charles Wheatstone discovered its principle and applied it as early as 1838 to the construction of a cumbrous but effective instrument, in which the binocular pictures were made to combine by means of mirrors. To Brewster is due the merit of suggesting the use of lenses for the purpose of uniting the dissimilar pictures; and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... doubt a dim old pile—the Hotel du Hibou. What murderers, and thieves, and Jacobins might not have ascended the tiles of the grand stairway? There was a cumbrous mantel in his chamber, funereal with griffins, and there were portraits with horribly profound eyes. The sofa and the chairs were huge; the deep window-hangings were talking together in a rustling, mocking way; while the bed in its black recess seemed so very long and broad and high for one ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... point was that, granting the first two, some agency would be required to convey the forged notes from France to England. But here a difficulty arose. The pit-prop plan seemed altogether too elaborate and cumbrous for all that was required. Willis, as Merriman had done earlier, pictured the passenger with the padded overcoat and the double-bottomed handbag. This traveller, it seemed, would ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... moss-incrusted statues,—a proceeding that was, beyond any reasonable doubt, prompted by his happiness rather than by the artistic merits of the postured images, since they constituted a formidable and broken-nosed collection of the most cumbrous, the most incredible, and the most hideous instances of sculpture the family of Puysange had been able to accumulate for, as the phrase is, love or money. Amid these mute, gray travesties of antiquity and the tastes of his ancestors, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the grades are shaped to meet the needs of children. Each class and each school is built around this central idea. The school system, instead of taking the usual form of a cumbrous machine, is a delicate mechanism adjusted to the wants of ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... 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, a word from ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... character, like something foreign or extraneous, not a part, but an ill-adjusted appendage; or by seeming to overload and weigh it down by its unsightly bulk, like the productions of bad taste in architecture, where there is messy and cumbrous ornament without strength or solidity of column. This has exposed learning, and especially classical learning, to reproach. Men have seen that it might exist without mental superiority, without vigor, without good taste, and without utility. But in such cases classical learning ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... Scotia's grandeur springs, That makes her loved at home, revered abroad: Princes and lords are but the breath of kings; "An honest man's the noblest work of God:"{24} 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 ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... "caught hold;" and between them they managed to drag the cumbrous piece of furniture sufficiently far out of the recess in which it stood for the boy to slip behind. The half-high wainscoting had in one place dissolved partnership with the wall; and obeying an impulse for which he could never account, Aubrey dived behind, fishing out, among several ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... small sledge with the stove and all the cooking gear on. These two, black as two Mohawk Minstrels with the blubber-soot, were dubbed "Potash and Perlmutter." Next come the dog teams, who soon overtake the cook, and the two boats bring up the rear. Were it not for these cumbrous boats we should get along at a great rate, but we dare not abandon them on any account. As it is we left one boat, the 'Stancomb Wills', behind at Ocean Camp, and the remaining two will barely accommodate the whole party when we leave ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... baggage of the expedition consisted of ten bales of cloth and two bags of beads, which were to serve as the currency by which they would be enabled to purchase the necessaries of life in the countries the Doctor intended to visit. Besides the cumbrous moneys, they carried several boxes of instruments, such as chronometers, air thermometers, sextant, and artificial horizon, boxes containing clothes, medicines, and personal necessaries. The expedition travelled up the left bank of the Rovuma River, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... then, preceded by a confused mass of wand bearers, the triumphal chariot itself, surrounded by a mob so dense that it was with great difficulty that the six splendid dappled greys could force the cumbrous vehicle along, which, every instant, seemed to become a second Car of Juggernaut, and crush some of its adorers. More vehicles, a few horsemen, multitudes of hack cars and pedestrians, a tail of old women and little boys, followed; ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... President's cumbrous way of joking; the short, fat man was heavily ironical with ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... The cumbrous body lay in bed. The bed was in an architecturally contrived recess, sheltered from both the large window and the door. Over its head was the gas-bracket and the bell-knob. At one side was a night-table, and at the other a chair. In front of the night-table were Darius's slippers. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... ascent in a balloon. It has been thought by some folks, that there were easier methods of ascending into the air than by a cumbrous balloon, but their inventions never ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... now the wife of Tekoeli, for seizing the person of Leopold in the palace of Vienna, and giving him up to the Tartars, who had already commenced their ravages on the frontiers. The sultan meanwhile—the cumbrous luxury of whose harem and equipages had retarded the march of the army—had halted at Belgrade, after holding a grand review of his forces, and placing the standard of the Prophet in the hands of the vizier, in token of the full powers entrusted to him for the conduct ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... of Park Road are the terraces abutting on Regent's Park. Some of these terraces show fine design, though in the solid, cumbrous style of the Georgian period. Hanover Terrace was designed by Nash, and also Sussex Place, which was named after the Duke of Sussex. The latter is laid out in a semicircle, and is crowned by cupolas and minarets. The houses are very large, and, ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... 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 ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... south. It was not his first nocturnal visit to the spot; often, as his prototype divined, had the mimic would-be desperado sat trembling on his hoary screw, revolvers ready, while the red eyes of the coach dilated down the road; and as often had the cumbrous ship pitched past unscathed. The week-kneed and weak-minded youth was too vain to feel much ashamed. He was biding his time, he could pick his night; one was too dark, another not dark enough; he had always ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... its faded eyes, discoloured by the damp of the walls, suggested a sad omen of ill-fated youth. But besides ambition and cunning, Paul had his full share of courage; and raising with difficulty his head and its cumbrous wrapping of bandages, he asked in a voice broken and weak, though fleeting still, 'Wound or scratch, doctor?' Gomes, who was rolling up his medicated wool, waved to him to keep quiet, as he answered, 'Scratch, you ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs. We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain,—the impalpable principle of light and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the creature: whence it came it will return; ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... dawn I sighed to see my hairs fall; At dusk I sighed to see my hairs fall. For I dreaded the time when the last lock should go ... They are all gone and I do not mind at all! I have done with that cumbrous washing and getting dry; My tiresome comb for ever is laid aside. Best of all, when the weather is hot and wet, To have no top-knot weighing down on one's head! I put aside my dusty conical cap; And loose my collar-fringe. In a silver jar I have stored a cold stream; On my ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... stiffly in rows like grenadiers, a cumbrous dining-table and a couple of old-fashioned sideboards constituted the entire furniture of the room; and one could see at a glance that they had already done service for several generations. Such luxuries as wall-paper, paintings or carpet could not be found here. Evidently the occupants were ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... 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 sentence, and sometimes his secondary clauses follow ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... two, and had thoroughly examined the Gulf of Carpentaria, finding no inlet southward there. The country was clearly one immense whole. But what was it to be called? Terra Australis, Southern Land, was too long, was cumbrous, was Latin. That would not be a convenient name for a country that was to play any part in the world. The Dutch had named the part which they found New Holland. But they knew nothing of the east. Cook called the part which he had discovered ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... tangled, cumbrous, Within, it was a little paradise, Where Taste had made her dwelling. Statuary, First-born of human art, moulded her images, And bade men. mark and ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... mass, This World's material mould, came to a heap: Confusion heard his voice, and wild Uproar Stood ruled, stood vast Infinitude confined; Till at his second bidding darkness fled, Light shone, and order from disorder sprung. Swift to their several quarters hasted then The cumbrous elements, Earth, Flood, Air, Fire; And this ethereal quintessence of Heaven Flew upward, spirited with various forms, That rolled orbicular, and turned to stars Numberless, as thou seest, and how they move; Each had his place appointed, ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... Fort Scott management made careful selection of essential parts of the processes already used, omitted non-essential and cumbrous processes, availed themselves of all the experience of the past in this country, and secured a fresh infusion of experience from the beet sugar factories of Germany, and attained the success which finally places sorghum sugar making among the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... 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 ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... days the railroad did not extend beyond Terni in the direction of Aquila, and it was necessary to perform the journey of forty miles between those towns by diligence. It was late in the afternoon of the next day before the cumbrous coach rolled up to the door of the Locanda del Sole in Aquila, and Prince Saracinesca found himself at his destination. The red evening sun gilded the snow of the Gran Sasso d'Italia, the huge domed mountain that towers above the city of Frederick. ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... Shrinks humbly in the equinoctial glow, Whilst in the fields precocious grass-blades peep Above the earth so lately wrapt in sleep. What sweet, elusive odor fills the soil, To rouse the farmer to his yearly toil! Though thick the clouds, and bare the maple bough, With what gay song he guides the cumbrous plough! In him there stirs, like sap within the tree, The joyous call to new activity: The outward scene, however dull and drear, Takes on a splendor from the inward cheer. Prophetic month! Would that I might rehearse Thy hidden ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... oncomer might prove to be, he was losing no time, and he was yet some twenty yards or more away from the statue—itself separated from Sylvia by about the same width of water—when she recognized, with a sigh of relief, the somewhat cumbrous form and grampus-like ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... Gray's odes," wrote Johnson, "there is a kind of cumbrous splendor which we wish away. . . These odes are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments; they strike rather than please; the images are magnified by affectation; the language is labored into harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... eighty-two feet; to the top of the dome two hundred and ten feet. When completed, the building will be surmounted by a large dome, giving a general resemblance to the main portion of the Capitol at Washington. The dome, viewed from the rear, appears something heavy and cumbrous for the general character of the structure which it crowns; but a front view, from Chambers street, when the eye, in its upward sweep, takes in the broad flight of steps, the grand columns, and the general robustness of the main ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... friend?" said he, taking me by the right wrist. I uttered a cry, for at the motion which he caused a thrill of agony darted through my arm. "I hope your arm is not broke, my friend," said the surgeon, "allow me to see; first of all, we must divest you of this cumbrous frock." ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... But when they engaged in aggressive wars, and sought to enslave sister-cities like Pisa and Lucca, it was soon found that their simple trading constitution would not serve. They had to piece it out with subordinate machinery, cumbrous, difficult to manage, ill-adapted to the original structure. Each limb of this subordinate machinery, moreover, was a point d'appui for insidious and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Prester John be many diverse things and many precious stones, so great and so large, that men make of them vessels, as platters, dishes and cups. And many other marvels be there, that it were too cumbrous and too long to put it in scripture of books; but of the principal isles and of his estate and of his law, I ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... 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 to chapter, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... holiday in Cork. One speech in particular at this meeting impressed the whole Convention. A Southern delegate illustrated from his personal knowledge how cumbrous and uneconomic were the dealings of a government at Westminster with the meat supply from Ireland; and a mass of complicated and important trade detail was skilfully linked to the larger issue of war interest ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... 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 is ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... adopted "Milyn" from the Spaniards (see p. 100 of the Rudimentos del rabe vulgar que se habla en el imperio de Marruccos por El P. Fr. Jos de Lerchundi, Madrid 1872): This lack of the higher numerals, the reverse of the Hindu languages, makes Arabic "arithmology" very primitive and almost as cumbrous as the Chinese. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... all! Its use is proved. We should have been cooked by this time in the Daisiana cauldron, if we had had great cumbrous boots on.' ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from his side. She would be one more Jewish wife, an excellent mother of a family, grown stout from domestic life, flabby and shapeless from the productivity of her race, with a brood of children about her, preoccupied at all hours with the earnings of the family, a full moon, cumbrous, yellow, without the slightest resemblance to the springtime star that had illuminated the fleeting and best moments of his life. What a jest of fate!... Farewell forever, Luna!... No, ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... file-closers of England's nineteenth century worthies, and her coming veterans of the twentieth. We may contemplatively view them in that light, but it has little place in their reflections. Their ruddy faces and somewhat cumbrous forms belong to the animal period of life that links together boyhood, colthood and calfhood. Education of the physique, consisting chiefly in the indulgence and employment of it in the mere demonstration of its superabundant vitality, is a large part of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... that it covers the entire cost of the war; for, they point out, the entire cost of the war has to be met by taxation, and such taxation is "damaging to the civilian population." They admit that the phrase is cumbrous, and that it would have been simpler to have said "all loss and expenditure of whatever description"; and they allow that the apparent emphasis of damage to the persons and property of civilians is unfortunate; but errors of draftsmanship should not, in their opinion, shut off the Allies ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... 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
... in the method and style of the 'Convito' which in its cumbrous artificiality exhibits an early stage in the exposition of thought in literary form, but Dante's earnestness of purpose is apparent in many passages of manly simplicity, and inspires life into the dry bones of his formal scholasticism. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... their Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-grown court and silent pathway and lightless canal, where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must soon prevail over them ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... of his powers as a critic than any other piece that could have been chosen The truth is that, great in talk and supreme in poetry, Coleridge was lost directly he sat down to express himself in prose His style is apt to be cumbrous, and his matter involved. We feel that the critic himself was greater than any criticism recorded either in his writings or his lectures The present extract may be defined as an attempt, and an attempt less inadequate than was common with Coleridge, to state his poetic ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... a veritable poet. In those noble compositions he exults in his conscious power of numerous verse; and, like an eagle in the middle element, sweeps along majestically on easy wings. In "The Rival Ladies," the rhymed dialogue is exceedingly graceful, the blank verse somewhat cumbrous; and, in his dedication to the Earl of Orrery, he justifies himself "for following the new way; I mean, of writing scenes in verse." It may here, once for all, be remarked, that in all his disquisitions, by "verse" he usually means rhyme as opposed to blank verse. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... our task to support us, and the beauty of holiness to adorn and render all our performances acceptable in Thy sight. And when our work is done, and our bodies mingle with the mother earth, may our souls, disengaged from their cumbrous dust, flourish and bloom in eternal day; and enjoy that rest which Thou hast prepared for all good and faithful servants, in that spiritual house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... hills that were 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 a ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... potato man was of Victorian growth, and speedily became a recognized and popular functionary of his kind. His apparatus was not cumbrous, and was gaudy with brightly polished copper, and a headlight that flared like that of a modern locomotive. He sprang into being somewhere in the neighbourhood of St. George's Fields, near "Guy's," Lant Street, and Marshalsea of Dickenesque renown, and soon spread his ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... Night,—a pretty parlor-ornament. There is a fatal sense of unreality about works of this kind that even Thorwaldsen's genius was unable to remove. They are toys, and it seems rather flat to have toys so cumbrous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... its wonderful secrets. He will look back with a smile on the age of screaming syrens and snorting engines, of racing pistons and whirling wheels. He will be amazed at his own earlier readiness to resort to such a cumbrous and complicated system when a smaller transition would have ushered ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... quo' Kinmont Willie, 'I've pricked a horse out oure the furs; But since the day I backed a steed, I never wore sic cumbrous spurs!' ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... and believers in the divine rights of kings have, in view of the influx of discordant races and the jarring elements within, together with the cumbrous machinery of our government, prophesied that disintegration and ruin would ere long be ours. But they took no note of the harmony and fraternal feeling that must come between peoples so differing, when all have equal share in a government founded in justice, and on the broad principles ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... which elicited these changes, ultimately led to monarchical rule, Gracchus has been at times regarded as the conscious author and possessor of a personal supremacy which he deliberately intended should replace the intricate and somewhat cumbrous mechanism which controlled the constitutional government of Rome; because he sowed the seeds of a discord so terrible as to be unendurable even in a state which had never known the absence of faction and conflict, and had preserved its liberties through carefully ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... onward till, one May, she joined a band of Acadian exiles who were sailing in a cumbrous boat down the broad river Mississippi. They were seeking for their kinsmen who, it was rumored, had settled down as farmers in that fertile district. Day after day the exiles glided down the river, and night after night they encamped on its banks and slept by the blazing ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... single occupant. Huddled in a chair on the further side of the long table was Mrs. Archer. Both hands rested on the polished oak, and clutched in her small, wrinkled hands was a heavy, cumbrous revolver, pointed directly at the door. Her white, strained face, stamped with an expression of hopeless tragedy, looked ten years older than when Buck had last seen it. As she recognized him she dropped the gun and tottered ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... drop it, out of respect, a piece of politeness not always exhibited in the presence of a foreign employer. The agitation, now in progress, for the final abolition of the queue may be due to one or all of the following reasons. Intelligent Chinese may have come to realize that the fashion is cumbrous and out of date. Sensitive Chinese may fear that it makes them ridiculous in the eyes of foreigners. Political Chinese, who would gladly see the re-establishment of a native dynasty, may look to its disappearance as the first step towards ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... fields precocious grass-blades peep Above the earth so lately wrapt in sleep. What sweet, elusive odor fills the soil, To rouse the farmer to his yearly toil! Though thick the clouds, and bare the maple bough, With what gay song he guides the cumbrous plough! In him there stirs, like sap within the tree, The joyous call to new activity: The outward scene, however dull and drear, Takes on a splendor from the inward cheer. Prophetic month! Would that I might rehearse Thy hidden beauties in sublimer verse: Thy glorious youth, thy vigor ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... singular habiliments with much of the curiosity with which an antiquary would survey a suit of chain armour; the long epaulettes of yellow cotton cord, the heavy belt with its brass buckle, the cumbrous boots, plaited and bound with iron like churns were in rather a ludicrous contrast to the equipment of our light and jockey-like boys in nankeen jackets and neat tops, that spin ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... points of the compass—cattle buyers, drovers, station-owners, telegraph people—all bent on business, and all glad to get moving after the long compulsory inaction of the Wet; and lastly that great yearly cumbrous event takes place: the starting of the "waggons," with ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... obstructions. A clear spring broke out of the middle of the adjacent rock, which, dropping slowly into a cavity it had hollowed, soon overflowed, and then ran, struggling to free itself from the cumbrous fragments, till, become a deep, silent stream, it escaped through reeds, and roots of trees, whose blasted tops overhung and ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... governed by a beneficently trifling tariff. These vinaigrettes, as they are called, would be appreciated at home, if habit took kindly to novelties. How greatly they might simplify problems of calling and shopping! Our conveyances are all cumbrous. We must have the huge barouche, the coach, the close-shut coupe. Even the phaeton yields to the high T-cart. But convention is autocratic, and would frown on these vinaigrettes as it frowns on many useful ideas. Another unfortunate victim ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... everlasting wonderland of the stars with the spectral northern lights, and the moon sailing through the profound silence. It is like a dream, like a glimpse into the realms of fantasy. There are no forms, no cumbrous reality—only a vision woven of silver and violet ether, rising up from earth and floating out into infinity.... But this eternal day, with its oppressive actuality, interests me no longer—does not entice me out of my lair. Life is one incessant hurrying from one task ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... any courting. But Frenchmen of his class considered fifty the limit of an active life. It behooved him now to begin looking around; to prepare a fireside for himself. Michel was a good clerk to his employers. Cumbrous though his body might be, when he was in the woods he never shirked any hardship to secure a specially fine bale ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... for the purposes of poetic enjoyment, such a collection is nearly valueless. We must have it for reference, of course; nobody grudges the guineas he has spent for the best part of the last twenty years on Professor Child's stately, if rather cumbrous, volumes. But who can read a dozen versions, say, of 'The Queen's Marie' with any pleasure? What is exquisite in one is watered, messed, spoiled by ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... the freshness of the night air; the waist of the ship was filled with live cattle, and the forecastle was manned with its customary watch. Orellana and his companions under cover of the night, having prepared their weapons and thrown off their trousers and the more cumbrous part of their dress, came altogether on the quarter-deck and drew towards the door of the great cabin. The boatswain immediately reprimanded them and ordered them to be gone. On this Orellana spoke ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter
... for women on the upper Agsan. Sometimes as many as five of these are worn, ordinarily on the left arm. The weight of a full equipment of shell bracelets may amount to at least a kilo. The use of such cumbrous adornments is confined to festal occasions except in the case of unmarried maidens, who nearly always wear them. These shell bracelets with the black alternating rings of sea coral are very becoming indeed, as they tend, by the contrast of jet black and marble ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... creeping forth to duty's call he yields, And strolls the Crusoe of the lonely fields. On whitehorn tow'ring, and the leafless rose, A frost-nipped feast in bright vermilion glows; Where clust'ring sloes in glossy order rise, He crops the loaded branch, a cumbrous prize; And on the flame the splutt'ring fruit he rests, Placing green sods to seat the coming guests; His guests by promise; playmates young and gay; But ah! fresh pastures lure their steps away! He ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... spelling. From these it would be easy to compile a set of fairly good rules. Each of these rules, however, has exceptions, in some cases quite numerous. To remember these rules with their exceptions would be a considerable mental task and to apply them would be cumbrous and time consuming. The effort would probably resolve itself into an actual learning of the words which present difficulties. The best way to become a good speller is to form the habit of careful reading, observing ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... parts. At the first glance this new atomic theory has charms from its apparent simplicity, but the attempt thus to follow it out into its ultimate limits and extreme consequences seems to indicate that it is at once insufficient and cumbrous. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... the most certain thing about it is that it will change. In the light of this knowledge we need no longer accept the load of what we call "sin;" the grouped misery of poverty, disease and crime; the cumbrous, inefficatious, wasteful processes of life today, as needful ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Such cumbrous terminology is too forbidding to use. It serves only to mark that the middle stage differs logically from the third as much as it does from the first. In practice it comes to this. If we are going to use ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... 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 tossed, and the pillow wrinkled up like a ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... has been already noticed; the second is the 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 ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... and discomfort; to exercise patience, skill, and endurance; and to undergo the extreme point of fatigue, was the sum of nearly every day's experience of the members of the party; but when their heavy guns and cumbrous clothing were laid aside, the rough chair and cushionless settle afforded luxurious rest, the craving appetite made their coarse fare a delightsome feast, and when, warm, full-fed, and refreshed, they invoked the dreamy solace of the deity Nicotiana, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... sailing through the sea, But the Past is heavy and hindereth me. The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells About my soul. The huge waves wash, the high waves roll, Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole And hindereth ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... McCulloch greeted the discovery with appropriate remarks, but the situation called for deeds rather than words. The cumbrous craft was swinging gayly out into the stream, displaying a light-hearted energy and ease of motion which would certainly not have been forthcoming had it been the object of her unwilling crew to get her ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... which in 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
... simpler? And yet there are those who say that the system of money exchange in China is both cumbrous and exasperating. Take as a further instance the cash in Yunnan. Everyone knows that theoretically there are 2000 cash in the tael, each tael containing 20 "strings," and each "string" 100 cash, but in Yunnan 2000 cash are not 2000 cash—they are ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... motors gives it the quaintest air of antiquity. Somehow, talk of sedan chairs would sound more modern than these thrills of excitement about six cylinders and "smelly petrol." In short, for many reasons Miss Townshend's book provides a far brisker entertainment than its cumbrous title would indicate. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... serge, there were yet no cavaliers who fluttered in silk and velvet who could compare in personal beauty with Francesco Gonzago; and the bride alone, of all the beauties who shone in gold and silver, appeared superior in feminine charms to the lovely Beatrice, notwithstanding that her cumbrous robe of grey stuff obscured the delicate proportions of her sylph-like form. Buoyant in spirit, and animated by the scene before her, occasionally a gleam of sunshine would irradiate her brow as she gazed upon the sparkling throng who formed the brilliant pageant which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... of March, Napoleon had been at Compiegne, denouncing the cumbrous machinery of etiquette which was retarding the happy moment when he should at last see his new wife and enfold her in his arms. He had had the castle repaired and richly furnished, that it might be worthy to receive ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... day, as it chanced, our English companions broke the axle-tree of their wagon, and down came the whole cumbrous machine lumbering into the bed of a brook! Here was a day's work cut out for us. Meanwhile, our emigrant associates kept on their way, and so vigorously did they urge forward their powerful oxen that, ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... periods of our republic to show the superiority of the English Constitution. If we have a Prime Minister who does not suit Parliament and the people, he argued, we remove him by a simple vote of the House of Commons. The United States can only get rid of its undesirable executive by a cumbrous and tedious process which can only be brought to bear during a period of revolutionary excitement; and even this failed because a legal case was not made against the President. The criticism was pregnant, but the remedy was not Cabinet responsibility. Whatever may be the merits ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... on the quay—the rapid drive over to Loch Roag, and the first glimpse of the rocky bays and clear water and white sand about Borva and Borvabost! And Sheila would once more—having cast aside this cumbrous attire that she had to change so often, and having got out that neat and simple costume that was so good for walking or driving or sailing—be proud to wait upon her guests, and help Mairi in her household ways, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... to the kingdom, attended only by some select courtiers, and without the cumbrous appendages of royalty, he left his capital upon a hunting excursion. In the course of the sport, passing over a desert plain, he came to a spot where was the opening of a cave, into which he entered, and observed domestic utensils and other marks of its being ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... at the India House before the news of the battle of Plassey had reached London. The Directors had determined to place the English settlements in Bengal under a government constituted in the most cumbrous and absurd manner; and to make the matter worse, no place in the arrangement was assigned to Clive. The persons who were selected to form this new government, greatly to their honour, took on themselves the responsibility of disobeying ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the window, as the train drew into the station. Eric ran to her compartment; but for a time they were victimized by the nervous antics of an old lady with cumbrous luggage, who stood in the doorway calling with shrill helplessness for ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... made bigger, and bigger, for men shal neuer shot well, excepte they be broughte up in it." The advantage of this weapon over the steel crossbow (used by the Genoese) lay in the fact that it could be discharged much more rapidly, the latter being a cumbrous affair, which had to be wound up with a crank for each shot. Hence the English long bow was to that age what the revolver is to ours. It sent an arrow with such force that only the best armor could withstand it. The French peasantry at that period had no skill with ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... talent of every one concerned in its production; and it really deserves a place on every writing-table not already provided with an Atlas. For constant reference, too, it is well calculated, by its convenient size, and is preferable to the cumbrous folio, as well as the varnished, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... gigantic bunch of seals dangled from his fob, whilst his pantaloons were short and tight at the knees; and a spacious waistcoat, with a voluminous muslin cravat and a frilled shirt, completed the toilette. The dress of the British military, in its stiff and formal ugliness, was equally cumbrous and ludicrous. ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... scene), it 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 me; the heathen gods, goddesses, Christian ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... and no more. For this London, this England, Europe, world, but especially this London, is rather a thing for hospital operations than for poetic rhapsody; in aspect, too, streaked scarlet and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous of jewelled tiaras; a Titanic work of long-tolerated pygmies; of whom the leaders, until sorely discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour, will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain a conservatism of diseases. Mind is absent, or somewhere ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... use (for which we cannot be too thankful to the Arabs their inventors) have made it. It is difficult to imagine how any thing like a long sum in multiplication or division could have been done with the Roman numerals, so cumbrous were they. The number, for instance, which we represent by the figures 89 would require for its expression no less than nine figures, LXXXVIIII. The boy was helped by using the fingers, the left hand being used to signify numbers below ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... committed to this title by his early announcement, and indeed intended to carry out a device of using Snodgrass's "Note Books," whose duty it was during the course of the adventures to take down diligently all that he observed. But this cumbrous fiction was discarded after a couple of numbers. "Posthumous papers" had been used some ten years before, in ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... were solemnly read before the consultation began. After long deliberation, a petition embodying the general sense was written by the Archbishop with his own hand. It was not drawn up with much felicity of style. Indeed, the cumbrous and inelegant structure of the sentences brought on Sancroft some raillery, which he bore with less patience than he showed under much heavier trials. But in substance nothing could be more skilfully framed than this memorable document. All disloyalty, all intolerance, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... larger scale, employing wholesale machinery and involving great economies. It is alleged by modern writers that the permanent residence of the cultivator in close relation to his ground is a legacy from the days of cumbrous and expensive transit, that the great proportion of farm work is seasonal, and that a migration to and fro between rural and urban conditions would be entirely practicable in a largely planned community. The agricultural population could move out of town into an open-air life as ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... pretensions are the result of ignorance; many of deliberate intent to deceive; some, again, of erroneous philosophical theories. The Tibetan adepts seem to belong either to the second or to the last of these categories,—or, perhaps, to an impartial mingling of all three. They import a cumbrous machinery of auras, astral bodies, and elemental spirits; they divide man into seven principles, nature into seven kingdoms; they regard spirit as a refined form of matter, and matter as the one absolute fact ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 from boat to boat ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... strained until the sweat poured from me yet 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
... John be many diverse things and many precious stones, so great and so large, that men make of them vessels, as platters, dishes and cups. And many other marvels be there, that it were too cumbrous and too long to put it in scripture of books; but of the principal isles and of his estate and of his law, I ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... declining towards the west, and it was becoming possible to breathe and move about with a little more comfort on board the somewhat cumbrous vessel, fitted with huge lateen sails, which went swinging down the Nile between the lofty black rocks near Samneh. I say fitted with the sails, not borne along by them, for the stream just there took all the carrying power upon itself, rushing along its narrowed ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... in needless action; but he had the right stuff in him and hadn't forgotten his early training, either, for when he came to the "turn," his head and tail came up, his eyes brightened, and, with a playful movement of his huge body, without the least hint from the deacon, he swung himself and the cumbrous old sleigh into line and began to straighten himself ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... mounting into his high bony cheeks and his nostrils twitching like a horse's. Maggie had been always very observant, and she was detached enough now to notice that the drawing-room was filled with ugly and cumbrous things and yet seemed unfurnished. Although everything was old and had been there obviously for years, the place yet reminded one of a bare chamber into which, furniture had just been piled without order or arrangement. ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... decompositions was well known fifty years ago, and various more or less successful attempts to produce permanent pictures, by the help of that knowledge, had already been made. It was not till 1839, however, that practical success was obtained; but the 'daguerreotypes' were both cumbrous and costly, and photography would never have attained its present important development had not the progress of invention substituted paper and glass for the silvered plates then in use. It is not my affair to dwell upon the practical application of the photography of the present day, but it is germane ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... their fifty gardeners, and the daily visit of the head cook to pass the bill of fare, were incidents and circumstances that made her melancholy. She looked upon the Stock Exchange coming down to dinner as she would on an invasion of the Visigoths, and endured the stiff observations or the cumbrous liveliness of the merchants and bank directors with gloomy grace. Something less material might be anticipated from the members of Parliament. But whether they thought it would please the genius of the place, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... belonging to the nineteenth century. Sometimes, indeed, one may even be inclined to wish that one had not lived quite so soon, and to long for a glimpse of the books, even the school-books, of one hundred years hence. A hundred years ago not only were books extremely expensive and cumbrous, but many of the most delightful were still uncreated—such as the works of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, and Trollope, not to mention living authors. How much more interesting science has become especially, if ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... common turf, lie naked on the plain, Or doom'd to welter in the whelming main. Should he return, that troop so blithe and bold, With purple robes inwrought, and stiff with gold, Precipitant in fear would wing their flight, And curse their cumbrous pride's unwieldy weight. But ah, I dream!-the appointed hour is fled. And hope, too long with vain delusion fed, Deaf to the rumour of fallacious fame, Gives to the roll of death his glorious name! With venial freedom let me now demand Thy name, thy lineage, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... and in a manner which he did not venture to resist. Their steps were slow into the open space which, seeming as an introduction to, at the same time separated the various chambers of the dwelling, and terminated in the large and cumbrous stairway which conducted to the lower story, and to which their course was now directed. The passage was of some length, but with cautious tread they proceeded in safety and without noise to the head ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... grew hotter, the mountain breeze became a sultry breath, the ground steeper and more rugged, and their accumulating floral treasures more and more cumbrous. Lady Mabel seemed to take delight in adding every moment to the load L'Isle carried. "You must know," she said, "that the pupil is always the packhorse on these occasions," and she insisted on Mrs. Shortridge bearing her share of the burden. This ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... And then he began to understand that nothing would ever be done until Mr. Gladstone, by some means or other, had been forced to give his consent. A singular combat followed. The slippery old man perpetually eluded the cumbrous grasp of his antagonist. He delayed, he postponed, he raised interminable difficulties, he prevaricated, he was silent, he disappeared. Lord Hartington was dauntless. Gradually, inch by inch, he drove the Prime Minister into a corner. But in the meantime ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... Racksole that so cumbrous an article as a corpse could be removed out of his hotel, with no trace, no hint, no clue as to the time or the manner of the performance of the deed. After the first feeling of surprise, Racksole grew coldly and severely angry. ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... he died at the age of eighty years or more. He was thoroughly upright, but he had too many schemes for a successful business man. During my term with Mr. Heywood, I had charge of the post-office, keeping the accounts, which were then cumbrous, and I made the returns once in ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... phrase is cumbrous, but we have no other—Miss A. B. Woodward stands apart, not only by the vigour of her work, but by its amazing humour, a quality which is certainly infrequent in the work of her sister-artists. The books she has illustrated are not very many, but all show this quality. "Banbury Cross," ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... ambition. Prevented by native pride and indolence from climbing the ascent of learning or greatness, taught by political opinions to say to the vain pomp and glory of the world, "I hate ye," seeing the path of classical and artificial poetry blocked up by the cumbrous ornaments of style and turgid common-places, so that nothing more could be achieved in that direction but by the most ridiculous bombast or the tamest servility; he has turned back partly from the bias ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... always ready for improvements, which indeed we take for granted, so regularly do they make their appearance. No alert American can visit any foreign country without noting innumerable examples of stupid adherence to outworn and cumbrous methods in industry, commerce, ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... producing these effects. A modern man of sense and manners despises, or endeavours to despise, ceremony, parade, attendance, superfluous and splendid ornaments in his dress or furniture: preferring ease and convenience to cumbrous pomp, the person first in rank is no longer distinguished by his apparel, his equipage, or his number of servants, from those inferior to him; and though possessing real power is divested of almost every external mark of it. Even our religious worship partakes of the same simplicity. ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... with sofas and tables, or even provided with fireplaces;'[887] and cases might be quoted where the tedium of a long service, or the appetite engendered by it, were relieved by the entry, between prayers and sermon, of a livery servant with sherry and light refreshments.[888] Even into cathedrals cumbrous ladies' pews were often introduced. Horace Walpole tells an extraordinary story of Gloucester Cathedral in 1753. A certain Mrs. Cotton, who had largely contributed to whitewashing and otherwise ornamenting the church, had taken it into ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... had, it supervened, several opportunities to obtain a new view of her bridegroom's character before their voyage across the Atlantic was over. At this period of the slower and more cumbrous weaving of the Shuttle, the world had not yet awakened even to the possibilities of the ocean greyhound. An Atlantic voyage at times was capable of offering to a bride and bridegroom days enough to begin to glance into their future with a premonition of the waning of the honeymoon, at ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... exceeds the Englishman. A certain conventional artifice and dainty affectation clouded the clear and beautiful nature of Sidney, when he wrote. The elaborate embroidery of thought, the stiff and cumbrous Elizabethan dress of language, with all its ruffles and laces, make the "Arcadia" an imperfect exponent of Sidney's nature. His intense thoughts, delicate emotions, and burning passions are half concealed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... vat was 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 of Faith, to be developed and expanded according ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... dost thou bid 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 Those threatening heroes, bear them both away; One chief at least beneath this ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... fast to Whitburn, but one summer's day a tall, gallant, fair-faced esquire, in full armour of the cumbrous plate fashion, rode up to the gate, and blew the family note ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by later scholars. His aim is simply to give a vigorous summary of the main facts of his heroes' lives, a pithy analysis of their character, and a short criticism of their productions. The strong sense which is everywhere displayed, the massive style, which is yet easier and less cumbrous than in his earlier work, and the uprightness and independence of the judgments, make the book agreeable even where we are most inclined to dissent ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... cannot in this country maintain to any great extent large retinues of servants. Even with ample fortunes they are forbidden by the general character of society here, which makes them cumbrous and difficult to manage. Every mistress of a family knows that her cares increase with every additional servant. Two keep the peace with each other and their employer; three begin a possible discord, which possibility increases with four, and becomes certain with five or six. Trained ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... other extreme was a solid mass of public sentiment which had little interest in the ecclesiastical theories of the Bishop of Toronto, and which resented alike attempts to convert the provincial university into an Anglican college, and the cumbrous and unjust form of church establishment, {51} the most obvious evidence of which lay in the undeveloped patches of Clergy Reserve land scattered everywhere throughout the settlements. It was the undoubted desire ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... seemed a rude interruption; yet so unusual was the excitement of an evening visitor that they could not be quite indifferent to the event,—the less so when the visitor proved to be Polly's client of the cumbrous income. ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... vill seems to have had no organization except, perhaps, for agricultural purposes. The Danegeld, which William imposed after the Domesday survey, was assessed on the hundreds, as though there were no smaller units from which it could be levied. But the hundred was found too cumbrous for the efficient control of local details; it was divided into manors, the Normans using for this purpose the germs of dependent townships which had long been growing up in England; and the agricultural organization of the township was dovetailed into the jurisdictional organization ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... and so it suffers from every commercial change. But these changes have now gone so far, that—especially if you abolish this protective duty upon corn—we are entitled to demand a return from the present cumbrous, perplexing, and expensive mode of taxation, to the natural cheap and simple one of poll or property-tax. At present no man knows what he is paying towards the expense of government. He is reached in every way indirectly through the articles he consumes. The customs ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... amateur; and Mr. Stevenson, who is the humane artist; and Mr. Ruskin, whose rhythm and colour and fine rhetoric and marvellous music of words are entirely unattainable. But the general prose that one reads in magazines and in newspapers is terribly dull and cumbrous, heavy in movement and uncouth or exaggerated in expression. Possibly some day our women of letters will apply ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... passion, emotion,—fluid humanity. Out of this arise his forms, as Venus arose out of the sea, and as man is daily built up out of the liquids of the body. We cannot taste, much less assimilate, a solid until it becomes a liquid; and your great idea, your sermon or moral, lies upon your poem a dead, cumbrous mass unless there is adequate heat and solvent, emotional power. Herein I think Wordsworth's "Excursion" fails as a poem. It has too much solid matter. It is an over-freighted bark that does not ride the waves buoyantly and lifelike; far less so than Tennyson's "In Memoriam," which is just ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... somewhat cumbrous English currency of pounds, shillings and pence has presented little or no difficulty in those parts of the Empire where it has always been on the same basis as in the Mother country, the fact that in Canada it had two valuations—"currency" and "sterling"—made it an inevitable conclusion ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... although Paul volunteered no explanation of what it was that he was after. And he remained on guard outside the stable while Paul went in, to reappear presently with a large and cumbrous burden—a sack bulging with the spoil of his little raid. Then they went to the carriage, and soon they were driving back toward the ruined house. When they reached it the dawn was beginning to break in the east—toward Germany! It was a red, menacing dawn—the sort of daybreak one might well ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... naturally enough to the faults of husbands. Now, although we are inclined to think that these are greatly exaggerated, and that married men are, on the whole, very good—excellent men and citizens, brave men, battling with the world and its difficulties, and carrying forward the cumbrous machine in its path of progress and civilization—although we think that, as a class, their merits are actually not fully appreciated, and that the bachelors (sly fellows!) get very much the best of it—still, we must ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... things they had done and seen long ago. Some remembered a white-faced people who, nearly twenty years before, had come to Roanoke Island from no one knew where,—men with yellow hair, dressed from head to foot in cumbrous garments, and bearing wonderful weapons which spat out fire, with much noise. Many believed them gods, while others thought they were devils. And Pocahontas listened in wonder, ever curious to hear of this strange people so unlike her own. The old priest mournfully prophesied ...
— The Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith • E. Boyd Smith
... theory of the secret closet and return to the genuine ground of attack—the unsightliness of so cumbrous a pile, with comments upon the great addition of room to be gained by its demolition, and the fine effect of the projected grand hall, and the convenience resulting from the collateral running in one direction and another ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... Robert, and it would be much better so. The first shine is not off our armour at present, and it would be cumbrous to carry a second suit with us, therefore we would much rather that ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... externality. This view revolutionises the whole psychology of Perception, and therefore, though it at once gives to that science a much-needed unity, clarity, and simplicity, it will naturally be accepted with reluctance by the laborious authors of the cumbrous theories ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... the gathering gloom. The sky was of a yellow gray, and the earth reflected the dismal hue of it. Presently it began to snow, driving in a fine haze from the north. The two men lapsed into silence. Steinmetz, buried in his furs like a great, cumbrous bear, appeared to be half asleep. They had had a long and wearisome day. The horses had covered their forty miles and more from village to village, where the two men had only gathered discouragement and foreboding. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... Inquisitor who, for whatever reason, accompanied the victim into the torture chamber, was thereby rendered irregular, and could not exercise his office again, until he had obtained the necessary dispensation. The tribunals complained of this cumbrous mode of administration, and declared that it hindered them from properly interrogating the accused. Every effort was made to have the prohibition against clerics being present in the torture chamber removed. Their object was at last obtained indirectly. On April 27, 1260, ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... my luck failed me at the last, I will place my loss at the full extent of the law, and claim that nothing less than a ten-pounder was spirited away from my hand that day. I might not have saved him, netless as I was upon my cumbrous raft; but I should at least have had the glory of the fight, and the consolation of the ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... sufferers of other denominations, and advised them to obtain the permission of the king in council, that their names might be inserted in the deed; rendering them all the assistance that was in their power. Great difficulties were encountered in passing the cumbrous deed through the various offices, and then in pleading it in all parts of the country. The number of Quakers thus released from imprisonment was 471, being about the same number as those who had perished in the jails. The rest of the prisoners liberated by this ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... were slowly coaxing away. Ronald Wyde, having set his favorite books handily on the dimity-draped table, which comprised for him the process of getting to rights, and having given more than one glance of amused wonderment at the naive blue-and-white scriptural tiles that cased his cumbrous four-story earthenware stove, and smiled lazily at poor Adam's obvious and sudden indigestion, even while the uneaten half-apple remained in his guilty hand, he stepped out on his balcony, leaned his elbows among the crimson leaves, and took in the healthful morning air in great draughts. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... a great broad-shouldered countryman, with a rainy smell in his cumbrous overcoat, cleared his throat vehemently, looked startled at the sound, and again settled forward, his weedy chin resting on the knuckles of his hands as they tightly clutched the seat before him. And it was like being taken ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... a beloved friend, returning from the East by the overland route, made the journey from Suez to Cairo in the cumbrous diligence then in use. The passengers on landing took their places, about a dozen wild young horses were harnessed with ropes to the vehicle, the driver took his seat and cracked his whip, and the horses dashed off, some to the right, some to the left, and others forward, causing ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor
... 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 weight of the gifts which they bore on their shoulders, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... observed something like a black cloud against the dark sky. 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 top-sail yards down on the caps, the top-sails clewed up, the sheets hauled in, the main and fore peaks lowered, and the ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... in tracing the effect of the experiment on the soul of the man, who has pursued scientific inquiry beyond legitimate limits. But apart from this, there is little resemblance. Godwin chose the supernatural, because it chanced to be popular, and laboriously built up a cumbrous edifice, completing it by a sheer effort of will-power. His daughter, with an imagination naturally more attuned to the gruesome and fantastic, writes, when once she has wound her way into the heart of the story, in a mood of breathless excitement ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... employment. Indeed, we at the West, particularly, need a good, cheap, steam plow that can be made practicable for at least the better grade of farmers. The English plan of moldboards, that overcome all possible traction and necessitate the duplex stationary engines, with the cumbrous "artillery of attachments," may do for sluggish people but will never meet the wants ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... commencement Amherst's guns, shot, shell, powder, stores, food, tents, and a thousand other things had all to be landed on the surf-lashed, open beach. It was the sailors' stupendous task to haul the whole of this cumbrous material up to the camp. The bluejackets, however, were not the only ones to take part in the work, for the ships' women also turned to, with the best of a gallant goodwill. In a few days all the material was landed; and Amherst, having formed his camp, sat ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood
... Neptune and his steeds, who seem to be sliding down with a cataract that tumbles over a ledge of rocks into a marble-bordered lake, the whole—except the fall of water itself—making up an exceedingly cumbrous and ridiculous affair." He goes to St. Peter's, and "it disappointed me terribly by its want of effect, and the little justice it does to its real magnitude externally; as to the interior, I am not sure that it would not be even more grand and majestic if it were less magnificent, though I should ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... taking me by the right wrist. I uttered a cry, for at the motion which he caused a thrill of agony darted through my arm. 'I hope your arm is not broke, my friend,' said the surgeon; 'allow me to see. First of all, we must divest you of this cumbrous frock.' ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... to be got: position, berths, favours, profit. The other's thoughts run upon husbands and settlements, wives and dowries. Worthless for their ostensible purpose of daily bringing human beings into pleasurable relations with each other, these cumbrous appliances of our social intercourse are now perseveringly kept in action with a view to the pecuniary and matrimonial results which they ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... begged for it as a particular favour. The Duke, with a sigh, owned that it was impossible, because of his cumbrous rank; and Mr. Gresham, when it was offered to him, declared that he was fatigued with the business of the House, and not up to the occasion. How much did she say to you; and ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... the stately mastodon Roam at his will o'er earth's prolific plains, And the unwieldy megatherium Dragging his cumbrous, disproportioned weight Through quaternary marsh and stagnant fen; Or watched the ichthyosaurus plow the seas, Churning the waters till the glistening foam Rode on the greenish undulating waves; And huge saurian and reptilian shapes Amphibious and pelagic, swim and crawl, Cleaving the ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... hushed with fold on fold, And cumbrous gorgeousness of gold; White casements o'er embroidered seats, Looking on ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... example; examine its beautiful structure; observe the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it: yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks that preceded it; it is no deterioration from them. A day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present time are not diminishing in bulk, will be superseded owing to the universal use of watches, in which case they will become as ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... itself those complicated formalities with which it had been loaded, as a surgeon strips from a wound the dressings which had been hastily wrapped round it, in order to proceed to his cure SECUNDUM ARTEM. Developed of the cumbrous and complicated technicalities of litigation, with which the perverse obstinacy of the client, the inconsiderate haste or ignorance of his agents, and the evasions of a subtle adversary, had invested the process, the cause of Poor Peter Peebles, standing upon its simple merits, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... the fact that the art of easy letter-writing, in which Frenchwomen of the next century were to show themselves such proficients, had not yet been developed, and that most of them are couched in a heavy, laborious, semiofficial style, which smells, as far as mere style goes, of the cumbrous refinements of the rhetoriqueurs, in whose flourishing time Margaret herself grew up, and which conceals the writer's sentiments under elaborate forms of ceremonial courtesy. Something at least of the groundless scandal before referred to is derived in all probability, ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... 1849 the Provincial administration personally favourable to Dr. Ryerson's views went out of office, and one unfavourable to him came in. The Hon. Malcolm Cameron, a hostile member of the cabinet—although he afterwards became a personal friend of Dr. Ryerson—having concocted a singularly crude and cumbrous school bill, aimed to oust Dr. Ryerson from office, it was (as was afterwards explained) taken on trust, and, without examination or discussion, passed into a law. Dr. Ryerson at once called the attention ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... abject is our race, Condemned 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 designed for daily toil, To drag the ploughshare through, the soil, 20 To sweat in harness through the road, To groan beneath the carrier's load? How feeble are the two-legged kind! What force is in our nerves combined! Shall ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... ice-locked beach are two scows. It is warmer now for the road winds between the pines on both sides. The snow ceases gradually but we do not see the least brightness in the sky to show location of old Sol. We are making four versts an hour in spite of the hills and the cumbrous boots. The drivers are keeping up well. Only once is the advance party able to look back to the rear guard, the caravan being extended more than a verst. Here is another steep hill. See the crazy Russki driver give his pony his head ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... early, before 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 ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... armour well made." "What do you take that to be?" said Pistias. "I think," answered Socrates, "a suit of armour that is well made does not load the bearer so much as one ill made, even though it weigh as much. For ill-made arms, by pressing too much upon the shoulders, or hanging cumbrous on some other part, become almost insupportable, and greatly incommode the person that weareth them. But those arms which, as they ought, distribute an equal weight to all the parts of the body, that join upon the neck, the shoulders, the breast, the back, and the hips, may be said to be glued to ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... to begin life afresh (so far as regards caution) with a new character. The first step was to find lodgings, and to find them quickly. This was the more needful as Mr. Rowley and I, in our smart clothes and with our cumbrous burthen, made a noticeable appearance in the streets at that time of the day and in that quarter of the town, which was largely given up to fine folk, bucks and dandies and young ladies, or respectable professional men on their way ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... particularly splendid aspect, though its great Duomo was seen in the middle distance, sitting in its circle of little domes, with the tall campanile close by, and within one or two hundred yards of it, the high, cumbrous bulk of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its lofty, machicolated, and battlemented tower, very picturesque, yet looking exceedingly like a martin-box, on a pole. There were other domes and towers and spires, and here and there ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the detail of astronomical observations. Had I adopted a mode of composition which would have included in one and the same chapter all that has been observed on one particular point of the globe, I should have prepared a work of cumbrous length, and devoid of that clearness which arises in a great measure from the methodical distribution of matter. Notwithstanding the efforts I have made to avoid, in this narrative, the errors I had to dread, I ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... to inspect Hogarth's painting-room—a mere loft, of most limited dimensions, over the stable, which the imagination could easily furnish with the necessary easel, or still less cumbrous graver's implements. It is situated at the furthest part of the garden from the house; a small door in the garden-wall leads into a little inclosure, one side of which is occupied by the stable. The painting-room is over the stable, and is reached by a stair; it has but one window which looks towards ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... really must find that word. Curves curves...Those little valleys had the lines of a cup moulded round a woman's breast; they seemed the dinted imprints of some huge divine body that had rested on these hills. Cumbrous locutions, these; but through them he seemed to be getting nearer to what he wanted. Dinted, dimpled, wimpled—his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... first stage south. It was not his first nocturnal visit to the spot; often, as his prototype divined, had the mimic would-be desperado sat trembling on his hoary screw, revolvers ready, while the red eyes of the coach dilated down the road; and as often had the cumbrous ship pitched past unscathed. The week-kneed and weak-minded youth was too vain to feel much ashamed. He was biding his time, he could pick his night; one was too dark, another not dark enough; he had always some excuse for ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... monkey, set some ragged children jigging under the watery rays of a street-lamp. Esther drew her little plaid shawl tightly around her, and ran on without heeding these familiar details, her chilled feet absorbing the damp of the murky pavement through the worn soles of her cumbrous boots. They were masculine boots, kicked off by some intoxicated tramp and picked up by Esther's father. Moses Ansell had a habit of lighting on windfalls, due, perhaps, to his meek manner of walking with bent head, as though literally bowed beneath the yoke of the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... middle of the road. It seemed but a few seconds before the horse was upon me. He swerved to one side, but I was ready for that. I dashed at his bridle, but caught the end of his cumbrous bit in my right hand. I leaned forward with all the strength that dwelt in my muscles and nerves. The horse's glaring eye was over my face, and I felt the round end of a shaft rise up under my arm. A pair of outstretched forelegs ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... little mention of writing or education in ancient times, and it seems likely that written records were at first confined to castings or engravings upon metal, and carvings upon stone. In the days when the written character was cumbrous, there would be no great encouragement to use it for daily household purposes. It is a striking fact, not only that writings upon soft clay, afterwards baked, were not only non-existent in China, but have never once been mentioned or conceived ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... little. The camp enriched the soldiers; almost all the valuable effects, not only of that army which was conquered, but of that which was serving with Hannibal in Italy, having been left on this side the Pyrenees, that the baggage might not be cumbrous to those who ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... 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
... Cincinnati, and began studying and teaching the Evangelists. With the course of this study and teaching came a period of spiritual clairvoyance. His mental perplexities were relieved, and the great question of 'what to preach' was solved. The shepherd boy laid aside his cumbrous armor, and found in a clear brook a simple stone that smote down the giant; and so, from the clear waters of the Gospel narrative Mr. Beecher drew forth that 'white stone with a new name,' which was to be the talisman of his ministry. To present Jesus Christ personally as the Friend ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... state-cabins on either side, the buffets for plate and crockery, the neat book-case, the racks for charts and telescopes, the sofa at one end, and the fireplace, all showing an attention to the comfort of any passengers who might be on board. Everything valuable had, however, been carried away, the more cumbrous articles alone remaining. Mr Vernon looked round with deep anxiety depicted on his countenance. "Yes, D'Arcy, this is indeed the Ariadne. I know her well," he whispered. "I myself put up that book-case, and screwed in those hooks for a cot ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... its own choice. While agreeing in this essential feature, the settlement of 1264 did not merely reproduce the constitution of 1258. It was simpler than its forerunner, since there was no longer any need of the cumbrous temporary machinery for the revision of the whole system of government, nor for the numerous committees and commissions to which previously so many functions had been assigned. The main tasks before the new rulers were not constitution-making ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... poor farce has neither truth nor art To please the fancy or to touch the heart Dark but not awful dismal but yet mean, With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene, Presents no objects tender or profound, But spreads ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 glass plate ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... of the subsistence of our cumbrous clods of clay after they have become the food of worms and pismires; indeed, he is absolutely certain that ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... solitude hung about the rooms and about their inhabitant. He was much worn, and so were they. Their sloping ceilings, cumbrous rusty locks and grates, and heavy wooden bins and beams, slowly mouldering withal, had a prisonous look, and he had the haggard face of a prisoner. Yet the sunlight shone in at the ugly garret-window, which had a penthouse to itself thrust out among the ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... ornaments also, ear-rings must not be so weighty as to tear the lobes of the ears; nor should a bracelet prevent, by its size, the motions of the arm. "Barbaric pomp and gold" is a fine thing; but a medallion, as heavy and as cumbrous as a shield, appended to a lady's bosom, would be any thing but a luxury. So, in the other extreme, a watch should not be so small as to render the dial-plate illegible; nor should a shoe be so tight as to lame its wearer for life. Beauty, it has been said, should learn to suffer; and there are, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... encounter was varied, and balanced by the contrast of arms and discipline; of the direct charge, and wheeling evolutions; of the couched lance, and the brandished javelin; of a weighty broadsword, and a crooked sabre; of cumbrous armor, and thin flowing robes; and of the long Tartar bow, and the arbalist or crossbow, a deadly weapon, yet unknown to the Orientals. [86] As long as the horses were fresh, and the quivers full, Soliman maintained the advantage ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 sentence, and sometimes his secondary clauses follow one another ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... flour and water mixed to a thick paste and then 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, and to entertain. For cloth he spread a dress-length of gaudy muslin, such as Indians purchase ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... let the woodbine twine, And leave untrimmed the eglantine: Nay, my friend, nay—Since oft thy praise Hath given fresh vigour to my lays; Since oft thy judgment could refine My flattened thought, or cumbrous line; Still kind, as is thy wont, attend, And in the minstrel spare the friend. Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale, Flow forth, flow unrestrained, ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... avoided, it seems desirable to give at least a fair 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 naturally spoken ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 1 (Oct 1919) • Society for Pure English
... at the side of the house, which was approached by a steep descent of a few odd steps, diverging from the main staircase nearly opposite to Mrs Clennam's door. It could scarcely be said to be within call, the walls, doors, and panelling of the old place were so cumbrous; but it was within easy reach, in any undress, at any hour of the night, in any temperature. At the head of the bed and within a foot of Mrs Flintwinch's ear, was a bell, the line of which hung ready to Mrs Clennam's hand. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... coaches mustered at a short notice, partly from the territorial nobility, partly from the camp. Precisely, however, at military head quarters, and on the route of an army, carriages of this description were an available and a most useful means of transport. Cumbrous and unweildy they were, as we know by pictures; and they could not have been otherwise, for they were built to meet the roads. Carriages of our present light and reedy (almost, one might say, corky) construction would, on the roads of Germany or of England, in that age, have ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the Christmas festivities were continued; but if the truth had been admitted, the cumbrous ceremonials, the excessive eating and visiting, would have been pronounced by every one very tiresome. Julius found it particularly so, for the festival had no roots in his boyhood's heart; and he did not include it in his ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
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