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More "Plummet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his head, caught one of her hands and held it fast while he looked deep into her eyes. He was searching, questioning, measuring, and he was doing it without uttering a word. The plummet dropped straight into the clear, sweet depths of her soul. If it did not reach the bottom, he was satisfied with the soundings he took. He drew a deep breath and gave her hand a little squeeze and ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... monstrous! 95 Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass. Therefore my son i' th' ooze is bedded; and 100 I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded, And with him there ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... Freedom, Harmony, and Love, Unite you in the grand Design, Beneath th' Omniscient Eye above, The glorious Architect Divine, That you may keep th' unerring line, Still rising by the plummet's law, Till Order bright completely shine, Shall be ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... plugilo. Ploughshare plugfero. Pluck (fowl) plumtiregi, senplumigi. Pluck (courage) kuragxo. Plug sxtopilego. Plum pruno. Plumage plumaro, plumajxo. Plumbago grafito. Plumber plumbisto. Plume plumfasko. Plummet sondilo. Plump dika. Plumpness dikeco. Plunder rabadi. Plunge subakvigxi. Plural multenombro. Plush plusxo. Poach cxasosxteli. Poach (eggs, etc.) boleti. Poacher cxasosxtelisto. Pocket posxo. Pod sxelo. Poem poemo. Poesy poezio. Poet poeto. Poetize versi. Poetry ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... sections out of office, when the general election was over, at once fetched forth line and plummet to take their soundings. 'The next few months,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 20), 'are, I apprehend, the crisis of our fate, and will show whether we are equal or unequal to playing out with prudence, honour, and resolution the drama or trilogy that has been on the stage since ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... gazing so intently at the swift rushing waters below him that you almost fancy he is attracted by the view. Suddenly he darts from his perch and, holds himself poised in mid-air until he sights a fish. He drops like a plummet and disappears. He quickly reappears and flies to a near- by rock with a fish, where he beats it to ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Captain Nemo continued to plummet into the dark depths of this forest, whose shrubbery grew ever more sparse. I observed that vegetable life was disappearing more quickly than animal life. The open-sea plants had already left behind the increasingly arid ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... sprang up to adjust its sight to this eager gaze, and followed automatically the thundering course of the big bird, and then, taking thought to itself, leaped ahead of it and fired. Thorpe's first pheasant reeled in the air, described a somersault, and fell like a plummet. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... The sienite plummet from San Joaquin Valley, California, goes back to the distant age of the Drift; and the Calaveras skull, admitting its authenticity, goes back to the Pliocene epoch, and is older than the relics or stone implements from the drift ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... living, when death has entered and removed the best friend, Fate has done her worst; the plummet has sounded the depths of grief, and thereafter nothing can inspire terror. At one fell stroke all petty annoyances and corroding cares are sunk into nothingness. The memory of a great love lives enshrined in undying amber. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the storms that blow, and although ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... many prudent persons sold out to make sure of their spoil. Many of these were noblemen about to accompany the king to Hanover. The buyers were so few on June 3rd, that stock fell at once, like a plummet, from 890 to 640. The directors ordering their agents to still buy, confidence was restored, and the stock rose to 750. By August, the stock culminated at 1,000 per cent., or, as Dr. Mackay observes, "the bubble was ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... open supporter of saloons, and that New York politics battened on all forms of vice. So a favorite son could hardly have retained the purity that women take as a standard of measurement. "Don't you find ward politics very hard?" she asked, dropping an experimental plummet, to see what depths of iniquity ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... I do not expect that! Nowadays no one really cares for anybody else's happiness but their own. Besides, I shall be much too busy to want company. I'm bent on all sorts of discoveries, you know!—I want to dive 'deeper than ever plummet sounded'!" ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... dropped like a plummet, leaving them in darkness—or rather in a thick gloom but slightly moderated by the moonlight streaming in at windows at either end of the corridor. Anisty ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... engineer named Pontius, B.C. 22. When it was taken down in 1879 to be brought to America, all the emblems of the builders were found in the foundation. The rough Cube and the polished Cube in pure white limestone, the Square cut in syenite, an iron Trowel, a lead Plummet, the arc of a Circle, the serpent-symbols of Wisdom, a stone Trestle-board, a stone bearing the Master's Mark, and a hieroglyphic word meaning Temple—all so placed and preserved as to show, beyond doubt, that they had high symbolic meaning. Whether they were in the ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... do we try to take the sea's mystery by storm. In vain do we search for its meaning with love. It lies beyond our mortal ken, deeper than ever plummet sounded. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... troop the risen souls, From him whose bones are bleaching in the waste Of polar solitudes, or him whose corpse, Whelm'd in the loud Atlantic's vexed tides, Is wash'd on some Caribbean prominence, To the lone tenant of some secret cell In the Pacific's vast ... realm, Where never plummet's sound was heard to part The wilderness of water; they shall come To greet the solemn ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... that little Meriem was his world—his sun, his moon, his stars—with her going had gone all light and warmth and happiness. A groan escaped his lips, and after that a series of hideous roars, more bestial than the beasts', as he dropped plummet-like in mad descent toward the perpetrator of this ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... this monster from the observation of mankind, and for this purpose applied to Daedalus, an Athenian, the most skilful artist of his time, who is said to have invented the axe, the wedge, and the plummet, and to have found out the use of glue. He first contrived masts and sails for ships, and carved statues so admirably, that they not only looked as if they were alive, but had actually the power of self-motion, and would have escaped from the custody of their possessor, if they had not been chained ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... ground up. On the other hand, a boy who has been grounded well in algebra, geometry and trigonometry may then easily enter the office of a practicing civil engineer and begin with the tools of the profession. Transit manipulation and readings, the use of the plummet line, the level, compass, rod, chain and staking work may all be learned thus and a knowledge of map drawing imparted to a boy who has a natural talent for ...
— The High School Captain of the Team - Dick & Co. Leading the Athletic Vanguard • H. Irving Hancock
... sleep. And, similarly, she looked at Nature. Even her vanished lover had not taught her all. There were truths below the formulae of his worship; there were secrets deeper than his intellectual plummet had ever sounded. Without understanding it, Joan yet knew that a change had come to pass in material things. Sunshine on the deep sea hid more matters for wonder than John Barron had taught or known. Once only as yet had she caught a glimpse of Nature's beating ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... with undulation soft, Adrift on Vischer's ocean, And, from my cockboat up aloft, Sent down my mental plummet oft In ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... drama. The brightest word at night in this galaxy of ultra signs is the gracious word "Photo Play House." Deep beyond plummet's sound is the interest of this part of town in the human story, as revealed upon the "screen." Grief and mirth, good and evil, danger and daring, and the horizon from Hatteras to Matapan may be scanned upon ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... many. It seemed a miracle that all this splendor and wonder had been wrought by human hands. Surely human nature was great—greater than she had dreamed. If creatures like herself had wrought this, then she was more than she had dared to imagine, "deeper than ever plummet had sounded." She felt new courage, new faith. She wanted to leave the boat and merge with those buildings and those swarming streets. She was proud of the great captains who had engineered this masswork, proud of the ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... power to read character were extraordinary; but it was necessary that the affairs should be those of a despotism, and the characters of an inferior nature. He could read Philip and Margaret, Egmont or Berlaymont, Alva or Viglius, but he had no plummet to sound the depths of a mind like that of William the Silent. His genius was adroit and subtle, but not profound. He aimed at power by making the powerful subservient, but he had not the intellect which deals in the daylight face to face with great events and great ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the star which was in the zenith of any place, say a farm-house in New York, at any time, would be there every night and every hour of the year. Now the zenith is simply the point from which the plumb-line seems to drop. Lie on the ground; hang a plummet above your head, sight on the line with one eye, and the direction of the sight will be the zenith of your place. Suppose the earth was still, and a certain star was at your zenith. Then if you went to another place a mile away, the direction of the plumb-line would be slightly different. ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... things, with you, gentlemen, here preserve with scrupulons fidelity the sanctity of your oaths, and discharge your whole duty without fear and without favour. Put justice to the line and truth to the plummet, and act up fully to the obligations of that oath, and you will ever enjoy those rich consolations which always flow from a conscientious ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... away the Devs, I am thankful for the good of the Creator Ormazd, with the opposition and unrighteousness which come from Gana-mainyo, am I contented and agreed in the hope of the resurrection. The Zarathustrian law created by Ormazd I take as a plummet. For the sake of this way I repent ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... kind, the slightest water-colour sketch of Turner, a half-finished clay sketch of Donatello, the little song done in the corner of a provincial paper by a working clerk in a true poetic hour, are not to be fathomed by the most far-descending plummet of the scientific understanding. These things are in that superphysical world into which, however closely he saw and dealt with his characters in the world of the senses, the conscience, or the understanding, Browning led ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... protection of animals. The published reports of experiments made in that country under one or another "certificate," are practically of no value whatever except to show the constant increase of such experiments every year. The plummet must sink to deeper depths. If Society is to grant to the physiological laboratory that isolation and freedom from interference which it craves, THEN SOCIETY HAS THE RIGHT TO ASK IN RETURN THE COMPLETEST DISCLOSURE THAT CAN BE GIVEN ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... your friends; and it is delightful to get hold of the book now, and know that it is impossible for you any longer, after waving your wand, as you occasionally did then, indicating where the treasure was hidden, to sink it again beyond the plummet's sound. I admire the book exceedingly. I don't suppose that it is a matter of much consequence to you whether I do or not, but I feel as much disposition to say so as if it were quite an original and peculiar idea of my own, and as ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... their prey is small fish, while most people are of opinion that they will not touch perch on account of their sharp back fin; but we had proof this afternoon that they will. But the most curious thing that I ever knew a pike to take was a leaden plummet, which it seized one day when I was plumbing the depth in a canal previous to bottom fishing, as we have been to-day. As a matter of course I was much surprised, as no doubt the pike was also, when he felt himself hooked, and, after a struggle, I drew him to land. But come, boys, ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... of the castle ran a metal gutter, which terminated at the corners in old-fashioned dolphins. On to one of such dolphins Ivan threw the pack-thread noose, and seizing hold of the re-descending lead plummet, hoisted up the rope likewise. It was really a capital idea. Mekipiros was to clamber up the rope, he knew the trick of it. He was to be the anima vilis by means of whom they were to find out whether the folks in the castle ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... he dived, to the end of his days, As the peasants oft witnessed with fear and amaze. The mad friar's diving-place long was their theme, And no plummet can fathom that pool ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... Doctor attached it to a plummet. Throwing the plummet across the space, he drew the line taut. He then marked the point where the ice-line crossed it. Then for five minutes he divided his attention between the line and his watch. As he ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... rigidities of communist central planning and management. TITO had pushed the development of military industries in the republic with the result that Bosnia hosted a large share of Yugoslavia's defense plants. The bitter interethnic warfare in Bosnia caused production to plummet by 80% from 1990 to 1995, unemployment to soar, and human misery to multiply. With an uneasy peace in place, output has recovered in 1996-97 at high percentage rates on a low base, but remains less than half the 1990 level. The country, especially in the Muslim-Croat ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... from having made out that he wouldn't do? He really felt just to-day that he might do better than usual. Hadn't he done well enough, so far as that went, in being exactly so dazzled? and in not having too, as he almost believed, wholly hidden from his host that he felt the latter's plummet? Suddenly, across the garden, he saw little Bilham approach, and it was a part of the fit that was on him that as their eyes met he guessed also HIS knowledge. If he had said to him on the instant what was ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... Time, till thou run out thy race, Call on thy lazy, leaden-stepping hours, Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace; And glut thyself with what thy womb devours, Which is no more than what is false and vain, And merely mortal dross; So little is our loss, So little is thy gain. For when as each thing bad thou hast ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... stopped, took the cork out of his bottle, and tossed it away. Light as it was, I heard it fall like a plummet. He swallowed slowly, tilting up the bottle by little and little, and now he looked at me no more. The last few drops of liquor he poured into the palm of his hand, and licked up. Then, with a sudden hurry of violence and swearing horribly, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... with mystery, it is not blank, hopeless, fathomless mystery. Our plummet-lines are only too short; but they are growing longer. It is a lively mystery, that piques and tempts and rewards endeavor. It unfolds with an appetizing delay. Every year a new secret is laid bare, which, in the flush ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... shore. I set out the same way I went at first, designing to sail two or three days out and as many home again, and resolved if possible to fathom the depth as I went. With this view I prepared a very long line with a large shot tied in a rag at the end of it, by way of plummet, but I felt no ground till the second night The next morning I came into thirty fathom water, then twenty, then sixteen. In both tours I could perceive no abatement in the height or ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... closed with his own hand. If he thought the depths of loneliness had been sounded out there in the Orient, he had now to learn that it is only in one's own country, among one's own people, that the plummet strikes bottom. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... interior of which had been scooped out to enlarge the chamber. Inside of the dolmen I found the partly decayed remains of eight human skeletons, two very large teeth of an unknown animal, two fossils, one of which is not found in this place, and a plummet. One of the long bones had been splintered; the fragments had united, but there remained large morbid growths of bone (exostosis) in several places. One of the skulls presented a circular opening about the size of a silver dime. This ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... and descending along the steep air, he stood on the summit of the hill of the woody Palatium; and he took away the son of Ilia, that moment giving out his royal ordinances to his own Quirites. His mortal body glided through the yielding air; just as the leaden plummet, discharged from the broad sling, is wont to dissolve itself[62] in mid air. A beauteous appearance succeeded, one more suitable to the lofty couches[63] of heaven, and a form, such as that of Quirinus arrayed in his regal robe. His wife was ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... self-possessed sort of man, sitting a moment on top of the wall to sound the damp darkness for warnings of the dangers it might conceal. But the plummet of his hearing brought nothing to him save the moaning of wind through invisible trees and the rustling of leaves on swaying branches. A heavy fog drifted and drove before the wind, and though he could not see this fog, the wet of it blew ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... lightly. He understood that Joyce was flirting with him, but he divined that there had been moments when the tide of her emotion had swept the young woman from her feet. She was a coquette, of course, but when his eyes fell like a plummet into hers they sounded depths beneath the surface foam. At such times the beat of the surf sounded in his blood. The spell of sex, with all its fire and passion, drew him to this lovely ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... spoke up young Mrs. Plummet, the mother of Benjy. "I never did believe in that; I don't believe in it, even for hosses; it only gets 'em to go a few rods, and then they're lazier'n ever. My father's broke more colts than any man in this county, an' he'd never let 'em be struck a blow. He said one blow spiled ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... a beating heart, I fear, but still with resolute, elastic steps, she revisited Jack's old haunts; she tried to love Nature as he had seemed to love it; she gazed at his old sunsets; she fathomed his old pools with bright plummet glances, as if seeking some lingering trace of his features in their brown depths, stamped there as on a fond human heart; she sought out his dear name, scratched on the rocks and trees,—and when night came on, she studied, in her simple way, the great starlit canopy, under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... Zeppelin with fascinated eyes. It circled round and round, in an effort to get over the biggest ship. A shot leaped up at it, and missed. The Zeppelin rose a little, then returned to the attack. Another shot narrowly missed it; but at that instant a bomb dropped like a plummet. It was a close miss. Zaidos could see wood fly as it clipped the prow and exploded as it reached the ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... clear in his own mind, as to the message he wished to deliver; to the second he appeared a prophet and a philosopher, full of all wisdom and subtlety, too deep for common mortals to fathom with line and plummet,—concealing below green depths of ocean priceless gems of thought and feeling; to the third, a poet full of inequalities in conception and expression, who has done many good things well and has made many ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... could have been justly angry and forever done with him. But I knew a man, a very near relation, with whom God might oftener have done the same, and had not; besides, I remembered that adroit petition in the Lord's Prayer, which is the plummet of the soul's sincerity—and I had read of One who reviled ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... she would go,—when, it was idle to say; it might be years before affairs were more propitious than now,—but then, at last, one day, the place that had known her should know her no more. Nevertheless, despite all this will and resolution, the heart of the child had sunk like a plummet at thought of leaving everything, at fear of future fortune; this deferring, after all, was half ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... soil on which the city stood, and preserved it from floods by his dykes. The thoughtful traveller would assent, for had he not himself observed the action of the mud; a day's journey from the coast one could not let down a plummet without drawing it up covered with a blackish slime, a clear proof that the Nile continued to gain upon the sea. Menes, at all events, had really existed; but as to Asychis, Moris, Proteus, Pheron, and most of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of it, and opened the small packet of rice, on which he placed a sort of compass. A cord was then handed to him. He placed it over the middle of the compass, and altered its position until it lay exactly in the same direction as the needle. A second cord, with a plummet attached, was then held to the first and let down into the grave, and the coffin moved backwards and forwards according to this line, until the middle was in the same direction as the needle: this arrangement consumed at least ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... left him. "It is a mystery deeper than the sea below the plummet line! Ah! it must be love; love only is so sagacious, so inventive as this. Ah! I ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us; for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves: Therefore, thus saith the Lord God, Judgment will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet; and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding-place: And your covenant with death shall be annulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... line is the level of the sea, from which on the right hand a plummet descends, representing a depth of 200 fathoms, or 1,200 feet. The vertical shading shows the section of the land, and the horizontal shading that of the encircling barrier-reef: from the smallness of the scale, the ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... use the plummet, take levels, hew the stone, wield the axes! And what a delight it was when the work was finished and we saw our own building! Perhaps we might not have accomplished it without the sapper, but every boy believed that if he were cast, like Robinson Crusoe, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and serene capacity to fathom the else unfathomable depths of spiritual nature, to solve its else insoluble riddles, to reconcile its else irreconcilable discrepancies. In his first stage Shakespeare had dropped his plummet no deeper into the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before him; and in the channel of simple emotion no poet could cast surer line with steadier hand than he. Further down in the dark and fiery depths of human ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... watched, I felt the boat plummet down, as if the sea was snatched from under her; it was the undertow—the wave was drawing the waters back beneath it. By the gunwale the blue-green sea frothed white as it poured back from the skerries near the entrance ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere blind elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of Schehallien. Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster than so healthy a girl ought to breathe in a state of repose. The steady nerves of William Murray Bradshaw felt ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... been discovered 'parceled and labeled.' But how do I know that all truth is not merely subjective? Ages ago, skepticism intrenched itself in an impregnable fortress: 'There is no criterion of truth.' How do I know that my 'true,' 'good,' and 'beautiful' are absolutely so? My reason is no infallible plummet to sound the sea of phenomena and touch noumena. I tell you, Beulah, it ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... Lord Advocate, or some modern counterpart of Braxfield, the hanging judge, would summon Susanna Crum as a witness in an important case. He would need his longest plummet to sound the ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... profession stands apart; By years of toil you've learned the trick (Like PHEIDIAS with his plastic art) Of slapping mortar on a brick; Touched too the summit Of science with your lore of line and plummet. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... high-water mark, down to abysses deeper than ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life; fauna after fauna, and flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the amount of light and warmth which each species requires, and to the amount of pressure which they are able to endure. The crevices of the highest rocks, ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... have vague accounts of a person called DAEDALUS, who seems to have been a wood-carver. Many cities claimed to have been his birthplace, and no one can give any clear account of this ancient artist. He is called the inventor of the axe, saw, gimlet, plummet-line, and a kind of fish-glue or isinglass. He is also said to have been the first sculptor who separated the arms from the bodies of his statues, or made the feet to step out; he also opened their eyes, and there is a legend that the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... open in her lap, but she had scarcely tried to read it. She had put it down after a few moments fixed upon it. It had sent her thoughts off into a world where her life had played a part too big for books, too deep for the plummet of any save those who had lived through the storm of life's trials; and life when it is bitter to the young is bitter with an agony the old never know. At last she ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... Preston's heart kept sinking down, down, like a plummet let into the sea, and his father's heart sank with it, for a child cannot feel a sorrow that does ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... nature and his possibilities which no plummet has ever sounded,—the wild, lonely joys of fanatical excitement, the perfectly ravenous appetite for self-torture, which seems able, in time, to reverse the whole human system, and make a heaven of hell. How else can we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... that the notorious Miss CRAIG, of Chicago, once more threatens the unhappy SPRAGUE with another suit for breach of promise of marriage. We had thought that the forty thousand dollars awarded by the jury in the first trial were a plummet heavy enough to reach the lowest depths of "AMANDY'S" affections, and so in fact they were; but "ELISHA'S" lawyers, utterly disregarding the claims of true love, have interposed the absurd claims of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... profession commands the same respect, gains audience so readily to the same august personages. Doors slammed in his face only flatter his self-importance. He becomes cynical as he sees how easily the spot light is made to flash upon the unworthiest figures by the flimsiest mechanism. He drops his plummet into shoal and deep water and from his contemplation of the wreck-littered shore grows skeptical of the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... herself, was almost as wonderful as really to have found it in the plays. But, in a certain sense, she did actually find it there. Shakespeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many phases of truth, each with scope large enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretation of his symbols; and a thousand years hence, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of prose. In verse, however irregular, her flight is lime-twigged, and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? Let the bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she seeks the stars. There is room and power of ascension for any quantity of ballast—fling it out, and up ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... grow through opposition—the plummet of feeling goes deeper, thought soars higher—vivid and stern personalities make enemies because they need them, otherwise they drowse. Then they need friends, too, to encourage: opposition and encouragement—thus do ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... and confess so much!" she exclaimed. "Why, Percie, Thornie, John, Dickon—Wilfred himself, might be your instructor. Even ignorance itself is a plummet over you." ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... pleas'd the northern blast to hear, And hangs on liquid mountains, void of fear; Or falls immers'd into the depths below, Where the dead silent waters never flow; To the foundation of the hills convey'd, Dwells in the shelving mountain's dreadful shade: Where plummet never reach'd, he draws his breath, And glides serenely thro' the paths of death. Two wondrous days and nights thro' coral groves, Thro' labyrinths of rocks and sands, he roves: When the third morning with its level rays ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... winged my bird, Though he flew toward the setting sun; But just as the shot rang out, he soared Up and up through the splinters of golden light, Till he turned right over, feathers ruffled, With some of the down of him floating near, And fell like a plummet into the grass. I tramped about, parting the tangles, Till I saw a splash of blood on a stump, And the quail lying close to the rotten roots. I reached my hand, but saw no brier, But something pricked and stunned and numbed ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... indicated that he was as cultivated as any ordinary gentleman, when the Pickersgill element was not apparent. The form of the garden-goddess faded, the sun had gone below the garden wall. The garden grew dusk, and the elms began to nod their tops at me. I became silent, listening to the fall of the plummet, which dropped again and again from the topmost height of that lordly domain, over which shadows had come. Were they sounding ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... that quarter of a mile was bullet-swept. There were enough men looking on to have given him a reputation, had he dared and come through. But he did not dare, he refused, and was sent under arrest to his tent. He was court-martialled and broken. He dropped out of his circle like a plummet of lead; the very women in Piccadilly spat if he spoke to them. He blew his brains out three years later in a back bedroom off the Haymarket. Explain that if you can. Turns tail, and says 'I daren't!' But you, can you explain it? You can only say it's the truth, and shrug your shoulders. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... seer-like power to show The secrets of the heart and mind; To drop the plummet-line below Our common world of joy and woe, A more intense despair ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... islands the Atlantic then, as now, had a depth, as I said before, of two thousand fathoms; indeed, in some parts between the group and Portugal the plummet of your human navigators finds no bottom, I have often heard them say, till it reaches 2,500; and out of this profound sea-bed the volcanic energies pushed up my islands as a small submarine mountain range, whose topmost summits alone stood out bit by bit above ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... of her suitors throng the vestibule; the air, now still an' sweet, rings with the sound o' fairy timbrels. Of a sudden she rises into the blue sky, an' her suitors follow. Her swift wings cleave the air straight as a plummet falls. Only the strong may keep in sight o' her; bear that in mind, boy. Her suitors begin to fall wearied. Higher an' still higher the good queen wings her way. By an' by, of all that began the journey, there is but one left with her, an' he the strongest ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... hold and powch the bait: and if you would have this ledger bait to keep at a fixt place, undisturbed by wind or other accidents which may drive it to the shoare side (for you are to note that it is likeliest to catch a Pike in the midst of the water) then hang a small Plummet of lead, a stone, or piece of tyle, or a turfe in a string, and cast it into the water, with the forked stick to hang upon the ground, to be as an Anchor to keep the forked stick from moving out of your intended ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... mean time we may rest assured that no valuable gems or lumps of gold have yet been brought up by the plummet. Indeed, so far as is shown by the soundings, the bottom of the ocean is covered with microscopic shells, so wonderfully minute that thousands may be counted on the surface of a single square inch. We know also that the bed of ocean, for at least four hundred years, has ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Some of us, alas! have been doing that all our lives. Let such hearken to the solemn words which may have rung in the ears of this unworthy king. 'Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet, and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies.' I come to you, dear friends! to press on your acceptance the true Guide and Helper—even Jesus Christ your Brother, in whose single Self you will find all that you have vainly sought dispersed 'at sundry times ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a simple-minded person, wholly devoid of subtlety of intellect, so that I willingly admit that there may be depths of alternative meaning in these propositions out of all soundings attainable by my poor plummet. Still there are a good many people who suffer under a like intellectual limitation; and, for once in my life, I feel that I have the chance of attaining that position of a representative of average opinion which appears to be the modern ideal of a leader of men, when I make free confession ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sympathy at home could not extinguish the divine fire of genius in the youthful Murgatroyd. Exhausted and hungry as he often was at the end of the day's work, he devoted his leisure to the study of bricks and mortar, and out of his scanty pocket-money he bought for himself first a trowel and later a plummet. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... of mournfulness profound, Unfathomable to plummet cast by man? Alas; for who can tell! Whence comes the wind Heaving the ocean into maddened arms That clutch and dash huge vessels on the rocks, And scatter them, as if compacted slight As little eggs boys star against a tree In wanton mischief? Whence, ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... divine desires and discontents, and certain rudimentary wings. And neither school alone is competent to paint him as he is. The author of "La Bete Humaine" fails as completely as the visionary A Kempis. Neither realism nor romance alone will ever with its small plummet sound to its depths the human heart or its mystery; yet from the union of the two much ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... fist, skilfully directed, hath the power to bestow—may easily understand how much that happy facility would be increased by a band carried by thongs of leather round the arm as high as the elbow, and terribly strengthened about the knuckles by a plate of iron, and sometimes a plummet of lead. Yet this, which was meant to increase, perhaps rather diminished, the interest of the fray; for it necessarily shortened its duration. A very few blows, successfully and scientifically ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... sight be dim, Doubt for them is doubt of Him. * * * * * Still Thy love, O Christ, arisen Yearns to reach those souls in prison, Through all depths of sin and loss Sinks the plummet of Thy Cross. Never yet abyss was found Deeper than ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... of a desperate expiation, comes the sudden touch of sarcasm which serves as a momentary breakwater to the raging tide of his reflections, and reveals the else unfathomable bitterness of a spiritual Marah that no plummet even of his own sinking can sound, and no infusion of less fiery sorrow or less venomous remembrance can sweeten. The mourner falls to scoffing, the justicer becomes a jester: the lover, with the skull of his murdered mistress in his hand, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of much assistance in architecture, and in particular it teaches us the use of the rule and compasses, by which especially we acquire readiness in making plans for buildings in their grounds, and rightly apply the square, the level, and the plummet. By means of optics, again, the light in buildings can be drawn from fixed quarters of the sky. It is true that it is by arithmetic that the total cost of buildings is calculated and measurements are computed, but difficult questions involving ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... inspire him with his own strong love for literature. The young American had a passion for books which were the reflex of great minds. His quick hearkening to the voices breathing from their pages, and made prophetic by some sudden experience; the ready plummet with which he sounded their depths of reasoning; the sentient hand with which he plucked out their truths and planted them in his own rich memory, to grow like trees filled with singing-birds: these had rendered his communings with ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... intermixture of the infinite. The sewer had no bottom. The sewer was the lower world. The idea of exploring these leprous regions did not even occur to the police. To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of discovery in that abyss—who would have dared? It was alarming. Nevertheless, some one did present himself. The cess-pool had ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... roll. Tears of men sink plummet-deep; they find their level. The tears of such a man have more of blood than of water in them.—What was she doing when they fell? She was shading his head from the sun. What, then, if those tears came of the repressed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... plummet into the hollow of that great expectancy. Ransom shivered and even Harper's hard cheek changed color. Hazen only stood unmoved, his look, his grasp, the spirit behind that look and grasp, implacable and determined. Their influence was terrible; slowly she succumbed to it against her will and ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... the mingled foliage of oaks, walnuts, and elms; while in its rocky depths a little brook creeps down to mingle with the river. From the rugged trunk of the stunted cedar that leans forward from the brink, you may drop a plummet into the river below, where the cat-fish and the turtles may plainly be seen gliding over the wrinkled sands of the clear and shallow current. The cliff is accessible only from behind, where a man may climb up, not without difficulty, by a steep and ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... and pushed it over the edge. Grimshaw, trembling violently, watched it fall. I think, from what Doctor Waram told me many years later, that the poet must have suffered the violence and terror of that plummet drop, must have felt the tearing clutch of pointed rocks in the wall face, must have known the leaping upward of the earth, the whine of wind in his bursting ears, the dizzy spinning, the rending, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... there was a long silence. In the damp south corners of the walls a frog began to croak at exact intervals. The little fountain rippled monotonously, and a magnolia flower dropped from one of the trees, falling straight as a plummet through the motionless air, and settling upon the gravelled walk with a faint rustling sound. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... Drink! drink! And thy soul shall sink Down into the dark abyss, Into the infinite abyss, From which no plummet nor rope Ever drew up the silver sand ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... pine, his heart dropped like a plummet. There were no men there, nor any tracks of men. Could it be that the factor had ignored his directions? No, hardly that, for the French trains had been captured. What, then, was the matter? With his eyes at their keenest, ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... of our readers have evinced much interest and ingenuity on the question of the propriety of placing reliance upon the accuracy of dropping a perpendicular from the top to the bottom of a shaft 1,030 feet in depth, by means of an ordinary plummet, we take the earliest opportunity of settling the matter beyond dispute, by reporting the results lately obtained, through a series of experiments by the engineers in charge, for the ultimate purpose of laying down the correct ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... resembling a chisel, the other apparently of stone, acting as a rasp on the surface of the wood, which was afterwards polished by a smooth body, probably also of stone); and these, with the ruler, plummet, and right angle, a leather bag containing nails, the hone, and the horn of oil, constituted the principal, and perhaps the only, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... undramatic quality of the play, counts it "the most imperishable because the most nearly immaculate of Browning's dramatic poems." "It seems to me," he adds, "like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough for the sinking plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life. It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which it discloses. ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the hour it was quite by design and on a calculation—over and above the prized little pleasure it might give him—of ten minutes clear with his host, whom it rarely befell him to see alone. He had a theory of something special to go into, of a plummet to sink or a feeler to put forth; his state of mind in short was diplomatic and anxious. But his hopes had a drop as he crossed the threshold. His precaution had only assured him the company of a stranger, for the person in the room to ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... it lies, my sibyl sister, still! Your plummet hath not reached it. Yes, 't is love Flaunts his triumphant colors in my cheek, And quickens my lame speech—but not for him, Not for the Prince—so may I vaunt his worth With a ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... a plummet falls. Each of us had his right hand in his overcoat pocket. I can't swear to what was in his fingers, but I felt a good deal safer for what was in mine. My back was still toward the bay, for I had a vision of the man who had disappeared—whoever he might be—slipping up through ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... drops one's plummet into life anywhere it falls the whole length of the line we give it. The man who can give his plummet the longest line is he who realises most surely that it ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... knocked down for two thousand five hundred dollars. The newspapers explained that only this ridiculous sum had been realized because experts had decided that in the first blow the steamer would slip off the ledges on which she was impaled and would go down like a plummet in the deep water from which old Razee cropped. Even the most reckless of gambling junkmen could not be expected to dare much of an investment in such a ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... deploring strains, and appropriating all their melancholy, intensified through the lens of his own dark imagination, he would sink from one depth of wretchedness to another, till he seemed lost away, where no ray of light could ever penetrate, or plummet sound. ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... linguistic studies, far more plausible than the real etymology of the word. To plunge is, no doubt, as Mr. Wedgwood says, the French plonger but the French plonger is plumbicare, while in Italian piombare is cadere a piombo, to fall straight like the plummet. To plunge, therefore, has nothing to do with the splashing sound of heavy bodies falling into the water, but with the concept of straightness, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... solitudes where in the winter nights the white tiger stares at the witches' dance of the Northern Lights dazzled by the hurtling of their myriad spears. And she told how the King-eagle, hanging motionless over the peaks of Gaurisankar, watches with golden eyes for his prey, and falling like a plummet strikes its life out with his clawed heel and, screaming with triumph, bears it to his fierce mate in her ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... rejoicing, as at first The morning stars together. Hast thou heard, In vast and silent spaces of the sky, What time the bead-roll of the universe God calls in heaven, every tiniest star— From myriad twinkling points—from plummet depths Of dark too vast for eye and sense to guess, Send up a little silver answer "I am here." Even so, the humblest of thy little ones, dear Lord, May through the darkness hear Thy still small voice, And answer with quick gladness ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... shot like a plummet for the ground and proceeded to hang itself securely in a corner of rock. The progress of the balloon was instantly halted. Still filled with terror at the machine-gun fire, the yellow men took to their ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... his eyes, and it fills my breast with heart-break. You who love great delineations of passion, what think you of our dramatist's vision of Job? You who count King Lear among the demigods of creative art, what think you of this Lear's older brother? His nature is so deep we can not fling plummet to its bottom. Lear was weak and wrong; but Job, with all his grief upon him, like a cloud upon a mountain's crest—Job has violated no propriety of man or God, so far as we have seen, and his cry fills the desert on whose verge he sits, and clamors like ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... contained in this law, to be opened at this day is, its exactness, and purity, and strictness as to all acts of good that any poor creature hath done in this life, whereby he in the judgment will think to shelter, or secure himself from the wrath of God. This is the rule, and line, and plummet, whereby every act of every man shall be measured (Rom 3:21,22); and he whose righteousness is not found every way answerable to this law, which all will fall short of, but they that have the righteousness of God by faith in Jesus Christ: he must perish, as he saith, "Judgment also will ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... itself accurately fixed in its proper place. When that is done the XII o'clock line will be found by the intersection of the dial surface with the vertical plane which contains the style; and the most simple way of drawing it on the dial will be by suspending a plummet from some point of the style whence it may hang freely, and waiting until the shadows of both style and plumb-line coincide on the dial. This single shadow will ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... breeze, as if he were an ordinary hen hawk, enjoying himself and contemplating the world from an indifferent distance. Suddenly, with one clear, sharp whistle to announce his intention, he would drop like a plummet for a thousand feet, catch himself in mid-air, and zigzag down to the nest in the spruce top, whirling, diving, tumbling, and crying aloud the while in wild, ecstatic exclamations,—just as a woodcock comes whirling, plunging, twittering down from a ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... as study the nature of plants and animals, the virtue of stones, the secrets of fire, the courses of the stars and the influence of the planets, for this reason men have named me the Prince of Darkness. Likewise they call me the Wily One, because by me was constructed the plummet-line whereby Ulpian straightened out the Law. And my kingdom is of this world. Well then, I will try these Monks, and I will make them to know their works are evil, and that the tree of their ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... a brownish rock of igneous origin. It assumes regular forms, the arrangement of which is often very surprising. Here nature had done her work geometrically, with square and compass and plummet. Everywhere else her art consists alone in throwing down huge masses together in disorder. You see cones imperfectly formed, irregular pyramids, with a fantastic disarrangement of lines; but here, as if to exhibit an example of regularity, though in advance of the ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... What then? Blessed be God, the Gospel has a provision for erring parents. If Sinai thunders, Calvary whispers peace. For men, as sinners, the righteousness of Christ prevails, and for sinners, as parents, not less shall it be found sufficient. Line and plummet can soon measure the extent of human perfection, but they cannot fathom the merit of that righteousness, and when laid side by side with the most holy law, there is no deficiency. If, then, we find ourselves daily coming short of the terms of that ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... piece of lead two or three inches in length. To this large hooks are fixed, which barbs turned in all directions. The man, whose eyes have become very keen with practice, sees some carp coming up or going down the stream, and, throwing the plummet far out into the river, he draws it rapidly through the water, across the spot where he believes the fish then to be. It is not often that he feels a tug, but he does sometimes, and then follows a deadly struggle, which may result in his landing a splendid carp ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... dark blob against the feeble starlight, something was dropping; dropping with the speed of a plummet, straight for the massed Mercutian fliers. From outer space it seemed to come, ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... invader of his eyrie. And at each turn of his head Denver caught the flash of gold, though he was loath to accept it as a sign. He waited, fighting against it, marshaling reasons to sustain him; and then, folding his wings, the eagle descended like a plummet, shooting past him with a shrill, defiant scream. Denver flinched and stepped back, then he leaned forward eagerly to watch where the bird's flight would take him. No Roman legionary, going into unequal battle with his war eagle wheeling above its ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... him to fall back a step while she said, "So!" the plummet word of our mysterious deep fathoms; and he fell back further saying, "Madam?" in a tone ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... know not, and no search will make us know; Only the event will teach us in its hour." He spoke, and Rustum answer'd not, but hurl'd His spear; down from the shoulder, down it came, As on some partridge in the corn a hawk, That long has tower'd in the airy clouds, Drops like a plummet; Sohrab saw it come, And sprang aside, quick as a flash; the spear Hiss'd, and went quivering down into the sand, Which it sent flying wide;—then Sohrab threw In turn, and full struck Rustum's shield; sharp rang, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... was not apparent. The form of the garden-goddess faded, the sun had gone below the garden wall. The garden grew dusk, and the elms began to nod their tops at me. I became silent, listening to the fall of the plummet, which dropped again and again from the topmost height of that lordly domain, over which shadows had come. Were ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... — N. depth; deepness &c adj.; profundity, depression &c (concavity) 252. hollow, pit, shaft, well, crater; gulf &c 198; bowels of the earth, botttomless pit^, hell. soundings, depth of water, water, draught, submersion; plummet, sound, probe; sounding rod, sounding line; lead. bathymetry. [instrument to measure depth] sonar, side-looking sonar; bathometer^. V. be deep &c adj.; render deep &c adj.; deepen. plunge &c 310; sound, fathom, plumb, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... mangroves displaying their ankles in the way that shocked Captain Lugard. They look most respectable, their foliage rising densely in a wall irregularly striped here and there by the white line of an aerial root, coming straight down into the water from some upper branch as straight as a plummet, in the strange, knowing way an aerial root of a mangrove does, keeping the hard straight line until it gets some two feet above water-level, and then spreading out into blunt fingers with which to dip into the water and grasp the mud. Banks indeed ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... undulation soft, Adrift on Vischer's ocean, And, from my cockboat up aloft, Sent down my mental plummet oft, In hope to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... and go to my father, and will say unto him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.' 'Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' The plummet of science—physical or metaphysical, moral or critical—has never sounded so deep as sayings such as these. We may pass them over unnoticed in our Bibles, or let them slip glibly and thoughtlessly from the tongue; but when they once really come home, there is ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... high and the low, and above all things, with you, gentlemen, here preserve with scrupulons fidelity the sanctity of your oaths, and discharge your whole duty without fear and without favour. Put justice to the line and truth to the plummet, and act up fully to the obligations of that oath, and you will ever enjoy those rich consolations which always flow from a conscientious discharge of a ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... hand, we try to imagine S. Mary's feelings at this first of the Joyful Mysteries when the meaning of her vocation comes clearly before her. Hail! thou that art full of grace, of the Living Grace, the very Presence of the divinity itself. The plummet of our thought fails always to reach the depth of that mystery of Mary's Child. It was indeed centuries before the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit thought out and fully stated the meaning of this Child; it was centuries before it fully grasped the meaning of ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... hideous intermixture of the infinite. The sewer had no bottom. The sewer was the lower world. The idea of exploring these leprous regions did not even occur to the police. To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of discovery in that abyss—who would have dared? It was alarming. Nevertheless, some one did present himself. The cess-pool ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... true; that he, the grand, the kind, the gentleman, was beneath the diver's reach, the plummet's sounding, where light could not pierce, nor Hope overtake? Her father, the first gentleman in Somerset, a drunkard, going ever downward towards the gutter, and no ray of heaven to beam upon ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... chill, and the old music of their past be silence, or at best the jangle of a broken chord? Would this latter end of Life, for both, be nothing but a joint anticipation of the grave? Gwen tried to sound the plummet of thought in an inconceivable surrounding, to guess at something she herself might think were she ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... patches of deeper blue-green, which can be seen, if you look closely, to be moving—a most uncanny motion. The water wells up incredibly fast and quiet, and surely incredibly cold, from some unplumbed, invisible source below. It would be interesting to try to find the bottom with a plummet, but probably one would be caught by a policeman. All that I have tried to do is to throw in white stones, which disappear as if they were swallowed. But the swallowing is a puzzling thing. The stone strikes the surface and sends out a widening ripple. Then you watch ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... circles, his broad vans steady to the breeze, as if he were an ordinary hen hawk, enjoying himself and contemplating the world from an indifferent distance. Suddenly, with one clear, sharp whistle to announce his intention, he would drop like a plummet for a thousand feet, catch himself in mid-air, and zigzag down to the nest in the spruce top, whirling, diving, tumbling, and crying aloud the while in wild, ecstatic exclamations,—just as a woodcock comes whirling, plunging, ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... high profession stands apart; By years of toil you've learned the trick (Like PHEIDIAS with his plastic art) Of slapping mortar on a brick; Touched too the summit Of science with your lore of line and plummet. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... as a plummet falls. Each of us had his right hand in his overcoat pocket. I can't swear to what was in his fingers, but I felt a good deal safer for what was in mine. My back was still toward the bay, for I had ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... survive his blighted hopes and disappointments, take them for just what they are, lessons and perhaps blessings in disguise, and will march boldly and cheerfully forward in the battle of life. Or, if necessary, he will bear his ills with a patience and calm endurance deeper than ever plummet sounded. He ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... and many prudent persons sold out to make sure of their spoil. Many of these were noblemen about to accompany the king to Hanover. The buyers were so few on June 3rd, that stock fell at once, like a plummet, from 890 to 640. The directors ordering their agents to still buy, confidence was restored, and the stock rose to 750. By August, the stock culminated at 1,000 per cent., or, as Dr. Mackay observes, "the bubble ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... by a great purpose, which control and triumph. The magical arts are simply the means by which a great end is served; when the work is accomplished, the staff will be broken and the book sunk beneath the sea, lower than any sounding of plummet." ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... of life beyond all bound! Eternity each moment given! What plummet may the Present sound? Who promises a future heaven? Or glad, or grieved, Oppressed, relieved, In blackest night, or brightest day, Still pours the flood Of golden good, And more than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... structure of Yugoslavia. TITO had pushed the development of military industries in the republic with the result that Bosnia hosted a large share of Yugoslavia's defense plants. The bitter interethnic warfare in Bosnia caused production to plummet by 80% from 1990 to 1995, unemployment to soar, and human misery to multiply. With an uneasy peace in place, output recovered in 1996-99 at high percentage rates from a low base; but output growth slowed in 2000 ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... paid when the copies arrive, probably a couple of months hence. I have conveyed Herr Naegeli's request, and now I must ask another favor, on his account, from myself. Everything cannot be measured by line and plummet; but Wieland says: "A little book may be well worth a few groschen." Will Y.R.H. therefore honor these poems by permitting your august name to be prefixed to them, as a token of your sympathy for the benefit of this man? the work is not likely to be quite ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... descending along the steep air, he stood on the summit of the hill of the woody Palatium; and he took away the son of Ilia, that moment giving out his royal ordinances to his own Quirites. His mortal body glided through the yielding air; just as the leaden plummet, discharged from the broad sling, is wont to dissolve itself[62] in mid air. A beauteous appearance succeeded, one more suitable to the lofty couches[63] of heaven, and a form, such as that of Quirinus arrayed in his regal robe. His wife was lamenting him as ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... without success. This spring, or rather these two springs, are two holes, each about two feet diameter, a stone's cast distant from each other; the one is but about five feet and a half in depth—at least we could not get our plummet farther, perhaps because it was stopped by roots, for the whole place is full of trees; of the other, which is somewhat less, with a line of ten feet we could find no bottom, and were assured by the inhabitants that none ever had been found. It is believed here that these springs are ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... yet strangely distorted. The miles of soft blue distance that stretch invitingly upward to the withdrawn stars of the zenith, stretch as soft and blue, but fearsomely deep beneath my feet to the nadir. Standing at the water's rim I am on the verge of a vast, deep gulf that no plummet might fathom, into which at another step I shall begin to fall, and once falling fall forever, for there is no bottom. It is all very well to say to one's self that an inch below the mirroring surface lies the good gray sand which was there by daylight. The midsummer moon ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... traditionally is a net importer of food. The private sector is growing and foreign investment is slowly increasing, but government spending, at nearly 40% of adjusted GDP, remains unreasonably high. The interethnic warfare in Bosnia caused production to plummet by 80% from 1992 to 1995 and unemployment to soar. With an uneasy peace in place, output recovered in 1996-99 at high percentage rates from a low base; but output growth slowed in 2000-02. Part of the lag in output was ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... bare rocks above high-water mark, down to abysses deeper than ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life; fauna after fauna, and flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the amount of light and warmth which each species requires, and to the amount of pressure which they are able to endure. The crevices of the highest ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... vain do we try to take the sea's mystery by storm. In vain do we search for its meaning with love. It lies beyond our mortal ken, deeper than ever plummet sounded. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... that I speak only of probabilities. There is a depth in this abyss of thought, which no human plummet is long enough to sound; there is a maze in this labyrinth to be tracked by no mortal clue. It involves the truth, How unsearchable are his judgments: Thou hidest thy ways in the sea, and thy paths in the deep waters, and thy ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... trust my pen to only one specimen of details. The Irish clergyman was not able to meet me. He wrote a very desultory letter of grave alarm and inquiry, stating that he had heard that I was endeavouring to sound the divine nature by the miserable plummet of human philosophy,—with much beside that I felt to be mere commonplace which every body might address to every body who differed from him. I however replied in the frankest, most cordial and trusting tone, assuring him that ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... an exaggerated sense of justice. This is the abuse of a right feeling, and requires to be kept in vigilant check. Nothing is easier than to be one-sided in judging of the actions of others. How agreeable the task of applying the line and plummet! How quiet and complete the assumption of our own superior excellence which we make in doing it! But if the task is in some respects easy, it is most difficult if we take into account the necessity of being ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... in mid-flight; and nose, tail-assembly, and wings were sheared neatly from the warplane by a sizzling plane of force. Side rockets and torpedo tubes were likewise sliced away and the helpless body of the Callistonian cruiser, falling like a plummet, was caught and held by a tractor ray. Captor and ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... thud of hoofs terrified her, but stung her to even greater effort. Nearer the hoofs-beats came, and nearer still. Breathless, panting, she knew now she could never reach the gully. The realization sent her heart sinking like a lead plummet, but fear drove her blindly on. Suddenly the bulk of a horse loomed beside her and a man's easy, sneering laugh bit into her soul like vitriol. An instant later Lynch leaped from his saddle and caught her ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining, he sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... pick faster. He also thought he would take all the heavy things out of his pocket, so that he could run the faster, in case he should see any bears. He put them all on a window in the shed. The things were a knife, a piece of chalk, two white pebble stones, and a plummet. When he got them all out, he asked Jonas, who was splitting wood in the shed, if he would not take care of them for him, till he ...
— Rollo at Play - Safe Amusements • Jacob Abbott
... person, wholly devoid of subtlety of intellect, so that I willingly admit that there may be depths of alternative meaning in these propositions out of all soundings attainable by my poor plummet. Still there are a good many people who suffer under a like intellectual limitation; and, for once in my life, I feel that I have the chance of attaining that position of a representative of average opinion which appears to be the modern ideal of a leader of men, when I make ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... may rest assured that no valuable gems or lumps of gold have yet been brought up by the plummet. Indeed, so far as is shown by the soundings, the bottom of the ocean is covered with microscopic shells, so wonderfully minute that thousands may be counted on the surface of a single square inch. We know also that the bed of ocean, for at least ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... to Kay. He saw the adjoining airport, and dropped like a plummet, hovering down until his wheels touched the ground. Without waiting to taxi into one of the public hangars, he leaped out and ran through the deserted grounds ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it; and thou shalt know that the Lord of Hosts hath sent me unto you. 10. For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth.'—ZECHARIAH ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... my so potent art. But this rough magic I here abjure; and when I have requir'd Some heav'nly music, which ev'n now I do, (To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for) I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fadoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... immaculate of Browning's dramatic poems, I would not have it understood that its pre-eminence is considered from the standpoint of technical achievement, of art, merely. It seems to me, like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough for the searching plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life. It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which it discloses. It has, more than any other long composition ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... clear back to the first avant-courier trace of purple twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim—yes, as if it were the very butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven—ran that wall, always sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel might climb or sparrow fly,—so broad that it was just faint-lined like the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,—so lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... table. Wesley had an inherent love of gardening which he had never been in a position to gratify. Wesley was, in fancy, eating his own green peas and squashes and things when he came in sight of the back veranda. It was vacant, and his fancy sank in his mind like a plummet of lead. However, he approached, and the breeze of blessing ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... one of her hands and held it fast while he looked deep into her eyes. He was searching, questioning, measuring, and he was doing it without uttering a word. The plummet dropped straight into the clear, sweet depths of her soul. If it did not reach the bottom, he was satisfied with the soundings he took. He drew a deep breath and gave her hand a little squeeze ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... there it lies, my sibyl sister, still! Your plummet hath not reached it. Yes, 't is love Flaunts his triumphant colors in my cheek, And quickens my lame speech—but not for him, Not for the Prince—so may I vaunt his worth ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... sun," Lydia bloomed into a hundred hitherto unsuspected graces of mind and heart and speech. A sly sense of humour woke into life, and a positive talent for conversation, latent hitherto because she had never known any one who cared to drop a plummet into the crystal springs of her consciousness. When the violin was laid away, she would sit in the twilight, by Davy's sofa, his thin hand in hers, and talk with Anthony about books and flowers and music, and about the meaning of life too—its burdens and ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Mannering, 'you are the only Ptolemy I intend to resort to upon the present occasion. A second Prospero, I have broken my staff and drowned my book far beyond plummet depth. But I have great news notwithstanding. Meg Merrilies, our Egyptian sibyl, has appeared to the Dominie this very day, and, as I conjecture, has frightened the honest man not ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... him the face of Timmendiquas, who had followed him down the line, seeking, it seemed, to give a blow on his account. Beside him, a warrior held a heavy club poised to strike. Henry saw that he could not escape it, and his heart sank, like a plummet in a pool. But the great chief, so sure of foot, stumbled and fell against the warrior with the poised club. The blow went wide, and Henry was untouched. He ran ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... all over, my lady," he said, "and it seems to me that, if your uncle heard the noise of our plummet so near, the chimney can hardly rise from the floor you searched; for that room, you know, is half-way between the ground-floor and first floor. Still, sound does travel so! We must betake ourselves to measurement, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... disturbed the water near the shore. I set out the same way I went at first, designing to sail two or three days out and as many home again, and resolved if possible to fathom the depth as I went. With this view I prepared a very long line with a large shot tied in a rag at the end of it, by way of plummet, but I felt no ground till the second night The next morning I came into thirty fathom water, then twenty, then sixteen. In both tours I could perceive no abatement in the height or steepness of ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... better than usual. Hadn't he done well enough, so far as that went, in being exactly so dazzled? and in not having too, as he almost believed, wholly hidden from his host that he felt the latter's plummet? Suddenly, across the garden, he saw little Bilham approach, and it was a part of the fit that was on him that as their eyes met he guessed also HIS knowledge. If he had said to him on the instant what was uppermost he would have said: "HAVE I passed?—for of course I know ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... of the slide. He said that if we had clung to the sides of it to break our speed we 'd have gone down like a plummet and shattered our bones on a rocky shore. Coming fast, our bodies leaped far into the air and fell to deep water. How long I lay there thinking, as I rested, I have no satisfactory notion. Louise and Louison came ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... sought him throughout the field. One of the royal esquires, named Gilbert Harper, wearing the surcoat of his master, was mistaken for him, and slain; but the true leader was at length found by de Maupas, and struck down with the blow of a leaden plummet or slung-shot. After the battle, when the field was searched for his body, it was found under that of de Maupas, who had bravely yielded up life for life. The Hiberno-Scottish forces dispersed in dismay, and when King Robert of Scotland landed a day or two afterwards, he was met by ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... and plants hidden in the rocks have something to tell of the climatic conditions and the general circumstances under which they lived, and the study of fossils is to the naturalist a thermometer by which he reads the variations of temperature in past times, a plummet by which he sounds the depths of the ancient oceans,—a register, in fact, of all the important physical changes the ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... the embers smoulder. But I, a mere man, fear to quit The clue God gave me as most fit To guide my footsteps through life's maze, Because himself discerns all ways Open to reach him: I, a man Able to mark where faith began To swerve aside, till from its summit Judgment drops her damning plummet, Pronouncing such a fatal space Departed from the founder's base: He will not bid me enter too, But rather sit, as now I do, Awaiting his return outside. —'Twas thus my reason straight replied And joyously I turned, and pressed The garment's skirt upon my ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... sea, a wide abyss, a dozen miles across from lip to lip, yawned down to the very vitals of the earth. We stood upon the rim of it—a sheer cliff that dropped a thousand feet of solid limestone, in one plummet line, to other cliffs below, that dropped again through furlongs of black gneiss, red ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... pinned the British officer to the mast, the long rifle of Natty Bumppo, the letter A in scarlet cloth embroidered in gold by Hester Prynne, the banner with the strange device 'Excelsior,' the gold bug which was once used as a plummet, Maud Muller's rake, and the jack-knives of Hosea Biglow and ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... republic with the result that Bosnia hosted a large share of Yugoslavia's defense plants. As of April 1992, the newly independent republic was being torn apart by bitter interethnic warfare that has caused production to plummet, unemployment and inflation to soar, and human misery to multiply. The survival of the republic as a political and economic unit is in doubt. Both Serbia and Croatia have imposed various economic blockades ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... by curiosity, Ska rose suddenly upward to meet the plane. Doubtless he misjudged the speed of the newcomer, but be that as it may, the tip of the propeller blade touched him and simultaneously many things happened. The lifeless body of Ska, torn and bleeding, dropped plummet-like toward the ground; a bit of splintered spruce drove backward to strike the pilot on the forehead; the plane shuddered and trembled and as Lieutenant Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick sank forward in momentary unconsciousness the ship dived headlong ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bullet-swept. There were enough men looking on to have given him a reputation, had he dared and come through. But he did not dare, he refused, and was sent under arrest to his tent. He was court-martialled and broken. He dropped out of his circle like a plummet of lead; the very women in Piccadilly spat if he spoke to them. He blew his brains out three years later in a back bedroom off the Haymarket. Explain that if you can. Turns tail, and says 'I daren't!' But you, can you explain it? You can only say it's the truth, and shrug ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... Charles, amusing himself with the notion of the young man's dutifully asking the permission of his companion, unshaken in allegiance though the staff might be broken, and the book drowned deeper than did ever plummet sound. Philip spoke no more, and Charles would ask no more, for Philip's own affairs of the kind were not such as to encourage talking of other people's. No explanation was needed why he should now promote an attachment ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of slavery and disgrace attaching to his name has no solid historical justification, and something to have suggested plausible reasons for conjecturing that his worship had a genuine spiritual basis. Yet the sincere critic, at the end of the whole inquiry, will confess that he has only cast a plummet into the unfathomable sea of ignorance. What remains, immortal, indestructible, victorious, is Antinous in art. Against the gloomy background of doubt, calumny, contention, terrible surmise, his statues are illuminated with the dying ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... and cover my temples with unfading laurel. I rehearsed at all times, seasons, and places, until I was a perfect nuisance to everybody, and my acquaintance, I am sure, to a man, wished both me and her bloodthirsty ladyship, deeper than plummet ever sounded, at the bottom of the sea. Even the brute creation did not escape the annoyance. One morning my English pointer "Spot" ran yelping out of the room, panic-stricken by the vehement manner with which I exclaimed, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... have known a fly-fisher wretched for a whole day because he had not brought the bit of indiarubber with which he was in the habit of straightening out his cast; and a roach-fisher refuse to be comforted because his plummet was not. ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... God, divine desires and discontents, and certain rudimentary wings. And neither school alone is competent to paint him as he is. The author of "La Bete Humaine" fails as completely as the visionary A Kempis. Neither realism nor romance alone will ever with its small plummet sound to its depths the human heart or its mystery; yet from the union of the two much perhaps ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... in assigning a progress, and therefore a beginning, to the solar system: can you find its origin in aught but the self-activity of Spirit, whose modus operandi no man can explain? All origination is inscrutable; the plummet of understanding cannot sound it; but wherefore may not one sleep as sweetly, knowing that the wondrous fact is near at hand, in the bosoms of his contemporaries and in his own being, as if it were pushed well out of sight into the depths of primeval time? To my mind, there is something ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... which he had resolutely closed with his own hand. If he thought the depths of loneliness had been sounded out there in the Orient, he had now to learn that it is only in one's own country, among one's own people, that the plummet strikes bottom. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... though thy sight be dim, Doubt for them is doubt of Him. * * * * * Still Thy love, O Christ, arisen Yearns to reach those souls in prison, Through all depths of sin and loss Sinks the plummet of Thy Cross. Never yet abyss was found Deeper ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... contact. The wreck of a ship, in a smooth sea after a storm, is often seen gathered into heaps. Two bullets or plummets, suspended by strings near to each other, are found by the delicate test of the torison balance to attract each other, and therefore not to hang quite perpendicularly. A plummet suspended near the side of a mountain, inclines towards it in a degree proportioned to its magnitude; as was ascertained by the wellknown trials of Dr. Maskeleyne near the mountain Skehalion, in Scotland. And the reason why the plummet tends much more strongly towards ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... some minutes before the rifle cracked again. The wheeling bird suddenly struck the wind with its wings aslant, and then fell like a plummet at a distance which showed the difficulty of the feat. Falkner started from her side before the bird reached the ground. He returned to her after a lapse of a few moments, bearing a trailing wing in his hand. "You shall make ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... counterpoise, of planetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in his metres; scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the plummet; scarce one but could speak with condescending approval of that prodigious intelligence so utterly without congener that our baffled language must coin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as to say Shakspearian of any other. And yet, in the midst of our impatience, we cannot help ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... the weight of the gold around his waist had carried him down like a plummet; and we sensed a little of the desperate horror with which he had torn and struggled to free ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... forms, Did Folly, heretofore, with Wealth conspire To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene Which once was called a garden! Britain still Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid From geometric skill, they vainly strove By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears To form with verdure what the builder formed With stone. . . Hence the sidelong walls Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms Trimmed into high arcades; the tonsile box, Wove in mosaic mode ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... tableland between Jubbulpore and Mirzapore have a perpendicular fall of more than four hundred feet over these mural precipices of the northern face of the Vindhya range.[2] A man, if he have good nerve, may hang over the summits, and suspend in his hand a plummet ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... so much!" she exclaimed. "Why, Percie, Thornie, John, Dickon—Wilfred himself, might be your instructor. Even ignorance itself is a plummet over you." ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... spirit—yet it has never been so iced over that it would not here and there bubble forth with a song of gladness.... There are depths of woe that I have never fathomed, or rather, to which I have never sunken—for there are no line and plummet to sound the dreary depths—yet the waves have overwhelmed me, as every human being, but I soon rose ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... nail head in every stake. The exact point of the plummet of your bog-line must centre on the middle of that nail head. You can't be ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... did in fact hide an inner and tumultuous life, the life of ideas, the life of the spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how it is possible for young girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no blind mother to send her plummet line of intuition to the depths of the subterranean fancies of a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste opened her window, as it were to watch for the passing of a man,—the man of her dreams, the expected knight who was to mount her behind him and ride away under ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... suspicion of it had ever crossed the mind of the most recent, and clear-sighted, and able investigator of the Baconian remains. It was buried in the lowest depths of the lowest deeps of the deep Elizabethan Art; that Art which no plummet, till now, has ever sounded. It was locked with its utmost reach of traditionary cunning. It was buried in the inmost recesses of the esoteric Elizabethan learning. It was tied with a knot that had passed the scrutiny and baffled the sword of an old, suspicious, dying, military ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... attendants advanced to the upper part of it, and opened the small packet of rice, on which he placed a sort of compass. A cord was then handed to him. He placed it over the middle of the compass, and altered its position until it lay exactly in the same direction as the needle. A second cord, with a plummet attached, was then held to the first and let down into the grave, and the coffin moved backwards and forwards according to this line, until the middle was in the same direction as the needle: this arrangement consumed at least another quarter of ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... northern blast to hear, And hangs on liquid mountains, void of fear; Or falls immers'd into the depths below, Where the dead silent waters never flow; To the foundation of the hills convey'd, Dwells in the shelving mountain's dreadful shade: Where plummet never reach'd, he draws his breath, And glides serenely thro' the paths of death. Two wondrous days and nights thro' coral groves, Thro' labyrinths of rocks and sands, he roves: When the third morning with ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... friends to greet each other Impatient fly, and pressing breast to breast They tenderly embrace, and with alternate kisses Their cheeks resound; then, clasping hands, they drop Plummet-like down upon the sofa, both Together. Seated thus, one flings a phrase, Subtle and pointed, at the other's heart, Hinting of certain things that rumor tells, And in her turn the other with a sting Assails. The lovely face of one is flushed With ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... accident, after I had waited four mortal hours. I shall never forget an impudent urchin, a cowherd, about twelve years old, without either brogue or bonnet, barelegged, with a very indifferent pair of breeches,—how the villain grinned in scorn at my landing-net, my plummet, and the gorgeous jury of flies which I had assembled to destroy all the fish in the river. I was induced at last to lend the rod to the sneering scoundrel, to see what he would make of it; and he not only half-filled my basket in an hour, but literally taught ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... Kant sank his plummet deeper. He found indeed in the working of the pure intellect an outcome of self-contradiction. But he recognized, as the most certain guide to reality which man's inner world affords, the commanding sense of duty,—the "moral imperative;" and through this he found the presence ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... deep like a leaden plummet, which, set in the horn of ox that ranges in the fields, rushes along carrying death among the ...
— Ion • Plato
... snap out his commands. He raced downward toward the street. Men seemed to spring up like magic about him. A ship with one wing aflame was tottering in mid-air, and another was dropping like a plummet. ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... of us, alas! have been doing that all our lives. Let such hearken to the solemn words which may have rung in the ears of this unworthy king. 'Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet, and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies.' I come to you, dear friends! to press on your acceptance the true Guide and Helper—even Jesus Christ your Brother, in whose single Self you will find all that you have vainly sought dispersed 'at sundry times and in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... luxuriate? Then let her expand wings of prose. In verse, however irregular, her flight is lime-twigged, and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? Let the bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she seeks the stars. There is room and power of ascension for any quantity of ballast—fling it out, and up she goes! Let some gas ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... chosen for me," Lone Chief was saying. His voice, shrill and piping, ever and again dropped plummet-like into a hoarse and rattling bass, and, just as one became accustomed to it, soaring upward into the thin treble—alternate cricket chirpings and bullfrog croakings, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... nothing but a nuisance, and a trouble, and a bother, being rich, and dressing for dinner, and going to the opera and two or three parties of a night, and being obliged to talk and walk and eat and sleep by line and plummet. I hate it all!" ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... his plummet down the broad Deep universe, and said, "No God," Finding no bottom. [Footnote: ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... of the sections out of office, when the general election was over, at once fetched forth line and plummet to take their soundings. 'The next few months,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 20), 'are, I apprehend, the crisis of our fate, and will show whether we are equal or unequal to playing out with prudence, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of change had been here also. The first object that attracted my attention was the sign-post, which at my earlier arrival, some eight or nine years before, stood up in its new white garment of paint, as straight as a plummet-line, bearing proudly aloft the golden sheaf and gleaming sickle. Now, the post, dingy and shattered and worn from the frequent contact of wheels, and gnawing of restless horses, leaned from its trim perpendicular at an angle of many degrees, as if ashamed of the faded, weather-worn, lying symbol ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... her sad little heart lying as heavy as a plummet in her breast, was just as bright and useful and entertaining to her cranky old friend as if life was a boon instead of a bane to her. You know from her letter how bitter life was to her; and I think if you have ever known sorrow and a great ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... or ever they blan; This was Dickie the fool, and hee; Dickie could not win to him with the blade of the sword, But he fel'd him with the plummet under the eye. ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... into deep waters now. That is the point I am making. They show that, dive you ever so deep, young man, present-day statesmanship has depths which not even the plummet of imagination has yet been able to sound. And can we doubt that to-morrow's national and world problems ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half-way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wyvis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... himself again into his chair, burying his face in his hands. He plunged into a reverie so deep and so self-searching that it could have been fathomed by no plummet. ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... in man's nature and his possibilities which no plummet has ever sounded,—the wild, lonely joys of fanatical excitement, the perfectly ravenous appetite for self-torture, which seems able, in time, to reverse the whole human system, and make a heaven of hell. How else can we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... place, say a farm-house in New York, at any time, would be there every night and every hour of the year. Now the zenith is simply the point from which the plumb-line seems to drop. Lie on the ground; hang a plummet above your head, sight on the line with one eye, and the direction of the sight will be the zenith of your place. Suppose the earth was still, and a certain star was at your zenith. Then if you went to another place a mile away, the direction of the plumb-line ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... Who shall sound that deep?— Too short the plummet, And the watchmen sleep. Some dream of effort Up a toilsome steep; Some dream of pasture ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... drink! And thy soul shall sink Down into the dark abyss, Into the infinite abyss, From which no plummet nor rope Ever drew up the ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... figure, rising from the flat lava in ramparts twelve to fifteen feet high, of an equal thickness, and enclosing an area of several acres. The unmortared stones were justly set; in places, the bulwark was still true to the plummet, in places ruinous from the shock of earthquakes. The enclosure was divided in unequal parts—the greater, the city of refuge; the smaller, the heiau, or temple, the so-called House of Keawe, or reliquary of his royal bones. Not his alone, but those of many monarchs of Hawaii were treasured ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the evening he dropped from the heavens in one straight plummet dive which brought him three miles in a ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... below, whilst all watched to see how it struck the flame. For this they held to be an omen, since should the body turn over in its descent it was taken as a sign that the judgment of mortal men had been refused in the Place of the Immortals. It did not turn; it rushed downwards straight as a plummet and plunged into the fire hundreds of feet below, and there for ever vanished. This indeed was not strange since, as we discovered afterwards, the ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... my bird, Though he flew toward the setting sun; But just as the shot rang out, he soared Up and up through the splinters of golden light, Till he turned right over, feathers ruffled, With some of the down of him floating near, And fell like a plummet into the grass. I tramped about, parting the tangles, Till I saw a splash of blood on a stump, And the quail lying close to the rotten roots. I reached my hand, but saw no brier, But something pricked and stunned and numbed it. And then, in a second, I spied the rattler— The shutters ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... from the Brown, which, slowing down, came on as straight as an arrow in unchanged formation in a line over the castle tower. From the forward Brown aeroplane, as its shadow shot over the garden, pursued by the great, oblong shadows of the dirigibles, a white ball was dropped. It made a plummet streak until about fifty feet above the earth, when it exploded into a fine shower of powder, leaving intact a ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... being opened, we find ourselves in a narrow passage, open to the heavens, perhaps a couple of hundred feet over-head, but walled in on either hand by rocks, perpendicular as the drop of the plummet. The passage being exceedingly tortuous, does not permit any extensive view to the front; but at each new turn some new wonder presents itself, either in the formation of some particular rock, or in the grotesque and striking ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... half a mile out to sea, till he came to a place where he hoped to find something. Here he immersed a plummet in the sea to sound its depth, and on finding that some thing was to be gained here, he dived downwards armed with a knife to cut the sponge he expected to find from the rocks; and after remaining below the surface for two or three minutes, reappeared with his booty, When first loosened ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... hardly merited, shames and failures. Especially it touches us something hard that one so wit-proud as Sir John should be thus dejected, and put to the mortification of owning that "ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me"; of having to "stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English"; and of asking, "Have I laid my brain in the sun, and dried it, that it wants matter to prevent so gross o'er-reaching as ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... looked at them as one wakened from sleep. And, similarly, she looked at Nature. Even her vanished lover had not taught her all. There were truths below the formulae of his worship; there were secrets deeper than his intellectual plummet had ever sounded. Without understanding it, Joan yet knew that a change had come to pass in material things. Sunshine on the deep sea hid more matters for wonder than John Barron had taught or known. Once ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... compass, will in the midst of a hurricane make you the biggest first-rate remain stock still, as if she were becalmed or the blustering tribe had blown their last. Nay, and with the flesh of that fish, preserved with salt, you may fish gold out of the deepest well that was ever sounded with a plummet; for it will certainly draw up the precious metal, since Democritus affirmed it. Theophrastus believed and experienced that there was an herb at whose single touch an iron wedge, though never so far driven into a huge log of the hardest wood that ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... delightful to get hold of the book now, and know that it is impossible for you any longer, after waving your wand, as you occasionally did then, indicating where the treasure was hidden, to sink it again beyond the plummet's sound. I admire the book exceedingly. I don't suppose that it is a matter of much consequence to you whether I do or not, but I feel as much disposition to say so as if it were quite an original and peculiar idea of my own, and as if the whole world were not just now saying the same thing. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... him as he heard. His soul at once seized the solution of the mystery, . . his quickened thought plunged plummet-like straight through the depths of the bewildering phantasmagoria, in which mere reason had been of no practical avail, and straightway sounded its whole seemingly complex, but actually simple meaning! ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... audience so readily to the same august personages. Doors slammed in his face only flatter his self-importance. He becomes cynical as he sees how easily the spot light is made to flash upon the unworthiest figures by the flimsiest mechanism. He drops his plummet into shoal and deep water and from his contemplation of the wreck-littered shore grows skeptical of the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... suit boldly but lightly. He understood that Joyce was flirting with him, but he divined that there had been moments when the tide of her emotion had swept the young woman from her feet. She was a coquette, of course, but when his eyes fell like a plummet into hers they sounded depths beneath the surface foam. At such times the beat of the surf sounded in his blood. The spell of sex, with all its fire and passion, drew him to this lovely creature ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... through this, and holding my lamp high over my head, I could see neither roof nor sides nor bottom,—only the wall in which was the window through which I looked. Upward it was lost in the darkness, and from my breast it descended, perpendicular as a plummet line, until it vanished in the gulf below, from which arose a sound of dripping water. This, my guide informed me, was "Gorin's Dome." Taking then from his haversack a Bengal light, he ignited it and threw it into the dark void. The sulphurous light shot up and up into a dome ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... veering helplessly at an elevation of two thousand feet. What had happened I could not conjecture, but even as we looked we saw her bow dip down lower and lower. Then the bulkheads of the various gas-chambers must have burst, for, quite perpendicular, she fell like a plummet to the earth. ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... sincere regret that the notorious Miss CRAIG, of Chicago, once more threatens the unhappy SPRAGUE with another suit for breach of promise of marriage. We had thought that the forty thousand dollars awarded by the jury in the first trial were a plummet heavy enough to reach the lowest depths of "AMANDY'S" affections, and so in fact they were; but "ELISHA'S" lawyers, utterly disregarding the claims of true love, have interposed the absurd claims of what they call "justice ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... as you may readily conceive, was sunk in the Slough of Despond deeper than ever plummet sounded. Margaret thought this very nice of him; it was a delicate tribute to her that he ate nothing; and the fact that Hugh Van Orden and Petheridge Jukesbury—as she believed—acted in precisely the same way for precisely the same reason, merely ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... consist of (1) the mine proper, comprising the explosive charge and detonating apparatus in a spherical case; (2) a square-shaped anchor chamber, connected with the mine by a length of cable; (3) a plummet-weight used in placing the mine in position, connected with the anchor chamber by a rope. Thus the mine appears on the deck of the mine-laying ship before being lowered over ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... envious Time, till thou run out thy race, Call on thy lazy, leaden-stepping hours, Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace; And glut thyself with what thy womb devours, Which is no more than what is false and vain, And merely mortal dross; So little is our loss, So little is thy gain. For when as each thing bad thou hast entomb'd, And ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... ordinary landing. Under the terrific power of the beams braking the descent of that unimaginable load of allotropic iron the water seethed and boiled; and instead of floating gracefully upon the surface of the sea, this time the huge ship of space sank like a plummet to the bottom. Having accomplished this delicate feat of docking the vessel safely in the immense cradle prepared for her, Nerado turned to the Terrestrials, who, now under guard, had ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... the ground. Each story is divided by rows of columns, so that architecturally it has a resemblance to the other buildings near at hand. There are many theories as to the leaning position of this tower, but no two persons seem to quite agree upon the matter. A plummet and line depending from the top would strike the ground some ten feet from the base of the structure. It has stood here for more than six hundred years, and does not appear to be in any danger of falling. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... ghastly purpose towards which all her energies now tend. So low has she fallen, so lost is she to all the design of woman, that she exists for one foul purpose only, viz., to excite, stimulate, and gratify the lusts of degraded, ungodly men. Verily, the word "prostitute" has an awful meaning. What plummet can sound the depths of a woman's fall who ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... smelly little hall bedroom at the earliest sign of dusk; at first, if a man on the street spoke to me, I would tremble for five minutes afterward; at first the odor of the continual boiling of mutton bones and onions that met me every time I opened the door of Mrs. Plummet's lodging-house used to make me feel sick to my stomach. I became hardened as time went on, but at first it was rather awful. I don't like to recall those early experiences ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... prospects. Baku has only recently begun making progress on economic reform, and old economic ties and structures have yet to be replaced. Whereas the economies of most of the former Soviet republics had begun to bottom out in 1995, Azerbaijan's economy continued to plummet because of its late start ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... inefficient, and the republic traditionally is a net importer of food. The private sector is growing and foreign investment is slowly increasing, but government spending, at nearly 40% of adjusted GDP, remains unreasonably high. The interethnic warfare in Bosnia caused production to plummet by 80% from 1992 to 1995 and unemployment to soar. With an uneasy peace in place, output recovered in 1996-99 at high percentage rates from a low base; but output growth slowed in 2000-02. Part of the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... rest and the star which was in the zenith of any place, say a farm-house in New York, at any time, would be there every night and every hour of the year. Now the zenith is simply the point from which the plumb-line seems to drop. Lie on the ground; hang a plummet above your head, sight on the line with one eye, and the direction of the sight will be the zenith of your place. Suppose the earth was still, and a certain star was at your zenith. Then if you went to another place a mile away, ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... direct became our fall. Now we were dropping as though at the end of an unreeling plummet cord; the floor of the valley was no more than two ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... alike serving, it is a lofty soul and a noble mind possessed by a great purpose, which control and triumph. The magical arts are simply the means by which a great end is served; when the work is accomplished, the staff will be broken and the book sunk beneath the sea, lower than any sounding of plummet." ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... reply, and there was a long silence. In the damp south corners of the walls a frog began to croak at exact intervals. The little fountain rippled monotonously, and a magnolia flower dropped from one of the trees, falling straight as a plummet through the motionless air, and settling upon the gravelled walk with a faint rustling sound. Otherwise the stillness ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... the Lord Advocate, or some modern counterpart of Braxfield, the hanging judge, would summon Susanna Crum as a witness in an important case. He would need his longest plummet to sound the ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... I should make a decided hit, and cover my temples with unfading laurel. I rehearsed at all times, seasons, and places, until I was a perfect nuisance to everybody, and my acquaintance, I am sure, to a man, wished both me and her bloodthirsty ladyship, deeper than plummet ever sounded, at the bottom of the sea. Even the brute creation did not escape the annoyance. One morning my English pointer "Spot" ran yelping out of the room, panic-stricken by the vehement manner with which I exclaimed, "Out damned ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... ordinary gentleman, when the Pickersgill element was not apparent. The form of the garden-goddess faded, the sun had gone below the garden wall. The garden grew dusk, and the elms began to nod their tops at me. I became silent, listening to the fall of the plummet, which dropped again and again from the topmost height of that lordly domain, over which shadows had come. Were they ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... in her lap, but she had scarcely tried to read it. She had put it down after a few moments fixed upon it. It had sent her thoughts off into a world where her life had played a part too big for books, too deep for the plummet of any save those who had lived through the storm of life's trials; and life when it is bitter to the young is bitter with an agony the old never know. At ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... the same august personages. Doors slammed in his face only flatter his self-importance. He becomes cynical as he sees how easily the spot light is made to flash upon the unworthiest figures by the flimsiest mechanism. He drops his plummet into shoal and deep water and from his contemplation of the wreck-littered shore grows skeptical of the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... Timmendiquas, who had followed him down the line, seeking, it seemed, to give a blow on his account. Beside him, a warrior held a heavy club poised to strike. Henry saw that he could not escape it, and his heart sank, like a plummet in a pool. But the great chief, so sure of foot, stumbled and fell against the warrior with the poised club. The blow went wide, and Henry was untouched. He ran on, but ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the achievement of a desperate expiation, comes the sudden touch of sarcasm which serves as a momentary breakwater to the raging tide of his reflections, and reveals the else unfathomable bitterness of a spiritual Marah that no plummet even of his own sinking can sound, and no infusion of less fiery sorrow or less venomous remembrance can sweeten. The mourner falls to scoffing, the justicer becomes a jester: the lover, with the skull of his murdered mistress in his hand, slides into ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause, than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... airplane. The two observers in the monoplane were at this time down near the Battery. They saw the giant beam hit the airplane. A moment it clung, and parts of the plane faded. The plane wavered, and then, like a plummet, fell. ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half-way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wyvis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... was certain, she would go,—when, it was idle to say; it might be years before affairs were more propitious than now,—but then, at last, one day, the place that had known her should know her no more. Nevertheless, despite all this will and resolution, the heart of the child had sunk like a plummet at thought of leaving everything, at fear of future fortune; this deferring, after all, was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... the herdsmen," answered the man. "In yonder lake, which is so profound that no plummet has ever reached the bottom, there dwell huge monsters, neither beasts nor fish. No man has ever seen one near; but at night, when the moon is shining, they have been descried at a distance, prowling about in search of prey. When that noise is heard, ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... foundations of morality. It is to make lies our refuge, and under falsehood to hide ourselves, so that we may escape the overflowing scourge. "Therefore, thus saith the Lord God, Judgment will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet; and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place." Moreover, "because ye trust in oppression and perverseness, and stay thereon; therefore this iniquity shall ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... As a plummet plunges into the sea, so the girl's look plunged into Warburton's soul; and had he been an officer of the law, he knew that he would have utterly disregarded ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... myself. The hand of change had been here also. The first object that attracted my attention was the sign-post, which at my earlier arrival, some eight or nine years before, stood up in its new white garment of paint, as straight as a plummet-line, bearing proudly aloft the golden sheaf and gleaming sickle. Now, the post, dingy and shattered and worn from the frequent contact of wheels, and gnawing of restless horses, leaned from its trim perpendicular at an angle of many degrees, as if ashamed ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... gathered into heaps. Two bullets or plummets, suspended by strings near to each other, are found by the delicate test of the torison balance to attract each other, and therefore not to hang quite perpendicularly. A plummet suspended near the side of a mountain, inclines towards it in a degree proportioned to its magnitude; as was ascertained by the wellknown trials of Dr. Maskeleyne near the mountain Skehalion, in Scotland. And the reason why the plummet tends ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... earth. The wind roared and whistled in their ears, and they both thought the parachutes would never open in time to prevent their being dashed to atoms on the ground. But when they were less than two hundred feet from the ground, each felt a sudden checking of the plummet-like drop and knew that the parachutes had at last taken hold. Slower and more slowly they went, as the parachutes gathered the air in their silken folds. But still the boys were not safe, for the strong wind tore at the ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... flesh, to be the Messiah, viz. It had told them all that ever they had done; shown them their insides, the most inward secrets of their hearts, and laid judgment to the line, and righteousness to the plummet; of which thousands can at this day give in their witness. So that nothing has been affirmed by this people, of the power and virtue of this heavenly principle, that such as have turned to it have not found true, ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... sail about in slow circles, his broad vans steady to the breeze, as if he were an ordinary hen hawk, enjoying himself and contemplating the world from an indifferent distance. Suddenly, with one clear, sharp whistle to announce his intention, he would drop like a plummet for a thousand feet, catch himself in mid-air, and zigzag down to the nest in the spruce top, whirling, diving, tumbling, and crying aloud the while in wild, ecstatic exclamations,—just as a woodcock comes ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... I hope, your opinion, that ignorance is the best security for female virtue. If this connexion between virtue and ignorance could once be clearly proved, we ought to drown our books deeper than ever plummet sounded:—I say we—for the danger extends equally to both sexes, unless you assert that the duties of men rest upon a more certain foundation than the duties of the other sex: if our virtues can be demonstrated ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... were struck with a wooden mallet), the drill, and two sorts of planes (one resembling a chisel, the other apparently of stone, acting as a rasp on the surface of the wood, which was afterwards polished by a smooth body, probably also of stone); and these, with the ruler, plummet, and right angle, a leather bag containing nails, the hone, and the horn of oil, constituted the principal, and perhaps ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... like a plummet of lead. Shawn! Had anything happened to Shawn? Had this stammering, purple-faced gentleman come to prepare her? Her heart gave a cry of anguish, while her eyes rested with apparent calmness on Sir Felix's unhappy face. Of course it was Mustapha. Would he ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... came unto me, saying, 9. The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it; and thou shalt know that the Lord of Hosts hath sent me unto you. 10. For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the great realization that he can make it simple,—never quite simple, but always simpler. There are a thousand mysteries of right and wrong that have baffled the wise men of the ages. There are depths in the great fundamental questions of the human race that no plummet of philosophy has ever sounded. There are wild cries of honest hunger for truth that seek to pierce the silence beyond the grave, but to them ever echo back,—only a repetition ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... every summer's day takes hold of that mighty pile of granite with its aerial fingers, lengthens the side affected, and bends the whole great mass as easily as one would bend a whipstock. A few years ago we hung a plummet from the top of this monument to the bottom. At 9 A.M. it began to move toward the west; at noon it swung round toward the north; in the afternoon it went east of where it first was, and in the night it settled back to its ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... economic structure of Yugoslavia. TITO had pushed the development of military industries in the republic with the result that Bosnia hosted a large share of Yugoslavia's defense plants. The bitter interethnic warfare in Bosnia caused production to plummet by 80% from 1990 to 1995, unemployment to soar, and human misery to multiply. With an uneasy peace in place, output recovered in 1996-98 at high percentage rates from a low base; but output growth slowed appreciably in 1999 and 2000, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... interpreter, "We now run only one danger; it is a great one. Before us are shifting sandbanks, occasionally displaced by the high tides; the galleys might ground there. It is necessary, then, that I reconnoitre the passage plummet in hand, before bringing the fleet into it. Let them rest as they are on their oars. Order the smallest boat your galley has to be launched, with two rowers. My wife will take the tiller. If you have any suspicion, you and the soldier with the axe may accompany us in the boat. Then, the ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... cold marble quarry. Whatever gulf there might exist, she recognized it not. No bridging, no descending; her attitude was that of perfect equality. She stood tranquilly on the ground of their common womanhood. And this maddened Freda. Not so, had she been of lesser breed; but her soul's plummet knew not the bottomless, and she could follow the other into the deeps of her deepest depths and read her aright. "Why do you not draw back your garment's hem?" she was fain to cry out, all in that flashing, dazzling second. "Spit upon ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... is the level of the sea, from which on the right hand a plummet descends, representing a depth of 200 fathoms, or 1,200 feet. The vertical shading shows the section of the land, and the horizontal shading that of the encircling barrier-reef: from the smallness of the scale, the lagoon-channel ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... pressures, and the visitation of the sword, that hath already learned to eat much of our flesh, but also for the special assistance and protection of the Father of lights, in this great Work unto which we are now called, and wherein we already finde many and potent adversaries: that seeing the plummet is now in the hands of our Zerubbabels, all mountaines may become plains, and they may bring forth the capstone of the Lords House with shoutings, crying, Grace, grace unto it: and that how weak and contemptible builders soever we be, the ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... are confronted with mystery, it is not blank, hopeless, fathomless mystery. Our plummet-lines are only too short; but they are growing longer. It is a lively mystery, that piques and tempts and rewards endeavor. It unfolds with an appetizing delay. Every year a new secret is laid bare, which, in the flush of triumph, seems ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... the sand and dust of the hot street to the only inn. Here he ate and slept till night had come again. Refreshed and invigorated, he continued his journey. At noon the next day he stopped to sleep at another town and to buy a lamp, materials for making fire, ropes and a plummet of bronze sufficiently heavy to anchor his boat. He was entering a long stretch of distance wherein there was no inhabited town, and he was making ready to sleep in the bari. Then he began to travel by day, for he was too far from Memphis to ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the northern blast to hear, And hangs on liquid mountains, void of fear; Or falls immers'd into the depths below, Where the dead silent waters never flow; To the foundation of the hills convey'd, Dwells in the shelving mountain's dreadful shade: Where plummet never reach'd, he draws his breath, And glides serenely thro' the paths of death. Two wondrous days and nights thro' coral groves, Thro' labyrinths of rocks and sands, he roves: When the third morning with its level rays The mountains gilds, and on the billows plays, It sees the king of waters rise ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... plunges into the abysses of stellar space, seeking to fathom, at least in a mental act, immensity beyond immensity, and gulf beyond gulf, is a definite human experience. It is the actual experience of the soul itself, dropping its plummet into immensity, and finding immensity unfathomable. But as soon as the logical reason dominates the situation, in place of this palpable plunge into a real concrete experience, with its accompanying ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... she made the sign of peace and farewell—and then the knife descended straight as a plummet to her heart. But even as she fell she spurned the dead Ramon with her feet, so that he rolled a little way while the black dog growled at him with bared teeth; even in death she would not touch him who ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... invincible truths of geology verified by our covert ways? Had not one of the natives told of a lump so weighty that no man might lift it and on which hungry generation after hungry generation had pounded nuts? Had not another used a nugget as a plummet for his fishing-line? It mattered not that the sordidly battered lump proved to be an ingot of crude copper—probably portion of the ballast from some ancient wrecks—and that Truth was sulking down some very remote well when the fable ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... counterpoise ... in his metres; scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the plummet." ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... politics battened on all forms of vice. So a favorite son could hardly have retained the purity that women take as a standard of measurement. "Don't you find ward politics very hard?" she asked, dropping an experimental plummet, to see what depths of iniquity there ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... wealth of life beyond all bound! Eternity each moment given! What plummet may the Present sound Who promises a future heaven? Or glad or grieved, Oppressed, relieved, In blackest night or brightest day, Still pours the flood Of golden good, And more ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... the right yet, although very nearly so. I will come down once a week or so and throw up a ball to you or spin a penny in the air; there is nothing like getting to hit a moving object. In the meantime you can go on practising at that plummet swinging from the string. You can do that as well by yourself as if I were with you, for when you once set it going it will keep on for five minutes. It is not so good as throwing up a penny, because it makes a regular curve; but shooting, as you do, with ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... the billows spoke, and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass. Therefore my son i' th' ooze is bedded; and 100 I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded, And with him there lie ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... cimeter had been laid. The blade was in its scabbard, but the scabbard was a mass of jewels, and the handle a flaming ruby. The belt was webbed with pearls and glistening brilliants. Under the sword were the instruments sacred then and ever since to Master Masons—a square, a gavel, a plummet, and an inscribing compass. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... what is far more rare, a keen vein of appreciation of the humour of others. He laughs as if he were amused, not like a man discharging a painful duty. It is true that he will not answer letters; but then his writing-paper is generally drowned deeper than plummet can sound; his pens are rusty, and his ink is of the consistency of tar; but he will always answer questions, with an incredible patience and sympathy, correcting one's mistakes in a genial and tentative way, as if a matter ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... other people and looked at them as one wakened from sleep. And, similarly, she looked at Nature. Even her vanished lover had not taught her all. There were truths below the formulae of his worship; there were secrets deeper than his intellectual plummet had ever sounded. Without understanding it, Joan yet knew that a change had come to pass in material things. Sunshine on the deep sea hid more matters for wonder than John Barron had taught or known. Once only as yet ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... over, my lady," he said, "and it seems to me that, if your uncle heard the noise of our plummet so near, the chimney can hardly rise from the floor you searched; for that room, you know, is half-way between the ground-floor and first floor. Still, sound does travel so! We must betake ourselves to measurement, I fear.—But another thing came into my head ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... irregular, her flight is lime-twigged, and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? Let the bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she seeks the stars. There is room ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... in the husbandman's work of sowing and planting, was now turned to the labour of building a school-room. He persuaded each family in Dormilleuse to furnish a man, who should consent to work under his directions, and having first marked out the spot with line and plummet, and levelled the ground, he marched at the head of his company to the torrent, and selected stones fit for the building. The pastor placed one of the heaviest upon his own shoulders—the others did the same, and away they went with their burthens, toiling up the steep acclivity, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... of that sea of blackness, like the plummet of an engineer, like the lead of a storm-tossed sailor, shot a drop of rain. Down it came with unerring swiftness, right through one of the spectacled gentleman's improvised "sky-lights" in the roof, and ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... in length. To this large hooks are fixed, which barbs turned in all directions. The man, whose eyes have become very keen with practice, sees some carp coming up or going down the stream, and, throwing the plummet far out into the river, he draws it rapidly through the water, across the spot where he believes the fish then to be. It is not often that he feels a tug, but he does sometimes, and then follows a deadly struggle, which may result in his landing a splendid carp that is worth ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... was the talk everywhere; it was impossible to avoid it. Every soul in the place had her omen. Jane Restless had a magpie. That very morning the bird had stolen a leaden plummet belonging to Restless and carried it to her cage, where she promptly set to work to hatch it out. And she fought when Zac went to take it away. She made such a racket when it was gone that Jane was sorry, and picked out a small chicken's egg and put it into the bird's cage. "And, my dears," ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... a slight vibration. He threw the gravity bar over to the first notch. Earth dropped, plummet-like, away from him. He pushed the bar to the limit leg; and, at a rate of hundreds of miles a second, was repelled from Earth toward Z-40, and ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... Crowd Picture with as many phases as a stormy ocean. Flying machines appear from the Fair Ground north of the city, and circle round and round as they go up, trying to reach the slowly descending plummet. ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... when death has entered and removed the best friend, Fate has done her worst; the plummet has sounded the depths of grief, and thereafter nothing can inspire terror. At one fell stroke all petty annoyances and corroding cares are sunk into nothingness. The memory of a great love lives enshrined ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... PLUMMET. A name sometimes given to the hand-lead, or any lead or iron weight suspended by a string, as used ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... and hungry as he often was at the end of the day's work, he devoted his leisure to the study of bricks and mortar, and out of his scanty pocket-money he bought for himself first a trowel and later a plummet. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... all times, and in all of us at most times, these influences and their operations lie deep below the threshold of consciousness, some of them deeper than any plummet of self-analysis can sound. They are also the unseen foundations of the social and political superstructure in which we live. Or, to use another figure, they form the fertile soil in which we, with all our activities ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... dived, to the end of his days, As the peasants oft witnessed with fear and amaze. The mad friar's diving-place long was their theme, And no plummet can fathom that ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... conditions embrace about all there is in life worth knowing. A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining, he sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can hope ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... make practical vagrant emotions and tendencies, and lop off and scorch out the idiosyncrasies of heredity and custom, and rouse the soul to a knowledge of its need of harmony with divine law. Into the real soul depths can no divulging line and plummet reach. This domain belongs to its Creator alone. It is only as the tests of living and doing manifest hidden motives and meanings that we catch glimpses of the ego that abides within and through this life, submerged as it is in the flesh. We can know but little ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... noon when the newly christened Solarite left on its first trip into space. The sun was a great ball of fire low in the west when they returned, dropping plummet-like from the depths of space, the rush of the air about the hull, a long scream that mounted from a half-heard sound in the outer limits of the Earth's atmosphere, to a roar of tortured air as the ship dropped swiftly to the field and shot into the hanger. Instantly the crew darted ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... had resolutely closed with his own hand. If he thought the depths of loneliness had been sounded out there in the Orient, he had now to learn that it is only in one's own country, among one's own people, that the plummet strikes bottom. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... caught the flash of gold, though he was loath to accept it as a sign. He waited, fighting against it, marshaling reasons to sustain him; and then, folding his wings, the eagle descended like a plummet, shooting past him with a shrill, defiant scream. Denver flinched and stepped back, then he leaned forward eagerly to watch where the bird's flight would take him. No Roman legionary, going into unequal battle with his war eagle wheeling above its standard, ever watched its ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... brownish rock of igneous origin. It assumes regular forms, the arrangement of which is often very surprising. Here nature had done her work geometrically, with square and compass and plummet. Everywhere else her art consists alone in throwing down huge masses together in disorder. You see cones imperfectly formed, irregular pyramids, with a fantastic disarrangement of lines; but here, as if to exhibit an example of regularity, though in advance of the very earliest ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... try to take the sea's mystery by storm. In vain do we search for its meaning with love. It lies beyond our mortal ken, deeper than ever plummet sounded. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... appeared along the waters but as a slim strip of blue. And then when in mid-sea the sailors heaved the lead; and it went down, and down, and down, and the long line slipped swiftly away over the boat-edge coil after coil, till, ere the plummet rested on the ouse below, all was well-nigh expended. And was it not the great sea, asks the boy, that was so vastly broad, and so profoundly deep? Ah! my child, exclaims the father, you have not yet seen aught of its greatness,—you have sailed over merely one of its little arms. ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... perfection. He would hover high up, at well over ten thousand feet from the ground, then drop straight for the earth, like a plummet, nose directly downward, seemingly bent on destruction. When still at a safe distance up, he would gradually ease his rush through the air by "teasing her a bit," as he called it. Then, before the eye from below could follow his evolutions, he would be skimming ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... rocks above high-water mark, down to abysses deeper than ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life; fauna after fauna, and flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the amount of light and warmth which each species requires, and to the amount of pressure which they are able to endure. The crevices ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... still Their primal hymn rejoicing, as at first The morning stars together. Hast thou heard, In vast and silent spaces of the sky, What time the bead-roll of the universe God calls in heaven, every tiniest star— From myriad twinkling points—from plummet depths Of dark too vast for eye and sense to guess, Send up a little silver answer "I am here." Even so, the humblest of thy little ones, dear Lord, May through the darkness hear Thy still small voice, And answer with quick gladness "Here am I,— I love Thee,—I ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... shall be good against all persons, and that the mother may not recover her child; and that law modified in form exists over every State in the Union except in Kansas. Woman has an ocean of wrongs too deep for any plummet, and the negro, too, has an ocean of wrongs that can not be fathomed. There are two great oceans; in the one is the black man, and in the other is the woman. But I thank God for that XV. Amendment, and hope that it will be adopted in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... him with his own strong love for literature. The young American had a passion for books which were the reflex of great minds. His quick hearkening to the voices breathing from their pages, and made prophetic by some sudden experience; the ready plummet with which he sounded their depths of reasoning; the sentient hand with which he plucked out their truths and planted them in his own rich memory, to grow like trees filled with singing-birds: these had rendered his communings with master-spirits one of the noblest ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... death, which was to be swept away, at the same time he says, "Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation, a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste. Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet." Regarding both the threatening and the promise, are his words,—"This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working."[492] And may there not also be applied to both his own averment,—"The Lord of ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... was now thoroughly on his guard. He had never lifted an eyebrow at the mention of Miss Johnstone. He had dropped Justine Delande like a plummet into the lake of forgetfulness, and watched Hugh Johnstone's listless trifling with the dainties of the superb collation. The raw-boned old Scotsman leaned heavily ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... walked away aft and ordered one of the men to heave the deep-sea lead. The plummet, shaped like the frustum of a cone, and weighing thirty pounds, was thrown out from the side in the line ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... and told me of it, The windes did sing it to me: and the Thunder (That deepe and dreadfull Organ-Pipe) pronounc'd The name of Prosper: it did base my Trespasse, Therefore my Sonne i'th Ooze is bedded; and I'le seeke him deeper then ere plummet sounded, And with him there ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... all truth is not merely subjective? Ages ago, skepticism intrenched itself in an impregnable fortress: 'There is no criterion of truth.' How do I know that my 'true,' 'good,' and 'beautiful' are absolutely so? My reason is no infallible plummet to sound the sea of phenomena and touch noumena. I tell you, Beulah, it ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... for there to take, as their prey is small fish, while most people are of opinion that they will not touch perch on account of their sharp back fin; but we had proof this afternoon that they will. But the most curious thing that I ever knew a pike to take was a leaden plummet, which it seized one day when I was plumbing the depth in a canal previous to bottom fishing, as we have been to-day. As a matter of course I was much surprised, as no doubt the pike was also, when he felt himself hooked, and, after a struggle, ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... it collapses, and of setting it aside wherever it is arbitrary. Certain it is that we can never convict Shakspere of bad reasoning in person; and in his later plays we never seem to touch bottom in his thought. The poet of VENUS AND ADONIS seems to have deepened beyond the plummet-reach even of the deep-striking intelligence that first stirred ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... monstrous creatures, unafraid, And feel no longing for the air of heaven To fill thy lungs, and send the warm, red blood Along thy veins. But thou shalt pass the hours In dances with the sea-nymphs, or go forth, To look into the mysteries of the abyss Where never plummet reached. And thou shalt sleep Thy weariness away on downy banks Of sea-moss, where the pulses of the tide Shall gently lift thy hair, or thou shalt float On the soft currents that go forth and wind From isle to isle, and wander through the sea.' "So spake my fellow-voyager, her words Sounding ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... scene my fancy forms, Did Folly, heretofore, with Wealth conspire To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene Which once was called a garden! Britain still Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid From geometric skill, they vainly strove By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears To form with verdure what the builder formed With stone. . . Hence the sidelong walls Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms Trimmed into high arcades; the tonsile box, Wove in mosaic mode of many a curl Around the figured ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... essays to pick his way through thickets all but untrodden? More than once I have been tempted to give up the quest and turn aside to paths where pioneers have cleared the way. There, at least, the whereabouts of that fabulous well is known and the plummet is ready to hand. Nevertheless, I resolved to struggle through with my task, in the consciousness that the work of a pioneer may be helpful, provided that he carefully notches the track and thereby ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... the most distinguished family in the place, had been refused. But the chevalier believed that his rival had still such strong chances of success that he dealt him this coup de Jarnac with a blade (namely, Suzanne) that was finely tempered for the purpose. The chevalier had cast his plummet-line into the waters of du Bousquier; and, as we shall see by the sequel, he was not mistaken in ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... for me," Lone Chief was saying. His voice, shrill and piping, ever and again dropped plummet-like into a hoarse and rattling bass, and, just as one became accustomed to it, soaring upward into the thin treble—alternate cricket chirpings and bullfrog croakings, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... land) terpeco. Plough plugi. Plough plugilo. Ploughshare plugfero. Pluck (fowl) plumtiregi, senplumigi. Pluck (courage) kuragxo. Plug sxtopilego. Plum pruno. Plumage plumaro, plumajxo. Plumbago grafito. Plumber plumbisto. Plume plumfasko. Plummet sondilo. Plump dika. Plumpness dikeco. Plunder rabadi. Plunge subakvigxi. Plural multenombro. Plush plusxo. Poach cxasosxteli. Poach (eggs, etc.) boleti. Poacher cxasosxtelisto. Pocket posxo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... across; the circumference is 467 miles, and the surface is 334 feet below the level of Lake Erie. The depth of Ontario varies very much along the coast, being seldom more than from three to 50 fathoms; and in the center, a plummet, with 300 fathoms of line, has been tried in vain for soundings. A sort of gravel, small pieces of limestone, worn round and smooth by the action of water, covers the shores, lying in long ridges sometimes miles in ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... and certain rudimentary wings. And neither school alone is competent to paint him as he is. The author of "La Bete Humaine" fails as completely as the visionary A Kempis. Neither realism nor romance alone will ever with its small plummet sound to its depths the human heart or its mystery; yet from the union of the two much ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... "my enchanter was a king; and when he got through all he wanted, and got his daughter married to the beautiful young prince, he said he would break his staff, and deeper than plummet sounded he would ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... many Pilgrims since the shout "Mark Twain!"—that serves you for a deathless sign —On Mississippi's waterway rang out Over the plummet's line— Still where the countless ripples laugh above The blue of halcyon seas long may you keep Your course unbroken, buoyed upon a love Ten thousand ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... tremendous leap, and rose to 890. It was now thought impossible that it could rise higher, and many prudent persons sold out to make sure of their spoil. Many of these were noblemen about to accompany the king to Hanover. The buyers were so few on June 3rd, that stock fell at once, like a plummet, from 890 to 640. The directors ordering their agents to still buy, confidence was restored, and the stock rose to 750. By August, the stock culminated at 1,000 per cent., or, as Dr. Mackay observes, "the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... condescend to inform me of your will on the subject. The money can be paid when the copies arrive, probably a couple of months hence. I have conveyed Herr Naegeli's request, and now I must ask another favor, on his account, from myself. Everything cannot be measured by line and plummet; but Wieland says: "A little book may be well worth a few groschen." Will Y.R.H. therefore honor these poems by permitting your august name to be prefixed to them, as a token of your sympathy for the benefit of this man? the work is not likely to be quite devoid of value. Being convinced ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... freedom, harmony, and love Unite you in the grand design, Beneath th' Omniscient Eye above, The glorious architect divine! That you may keep th' unerring line, Still rising by the plummet's law, Till order bright completely shine, Shall be my ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... its object without effort or repulsion. In other novelists we admire a subtlety that winds through the intricacies of motives, unmasking deceptions, revealing weaknesses and flaws but half suspected, or delicacies and beauties but half appreciated: George Eliot drops a plummet that sinks straight and steadily, through turbid waves and calm under-current, reaching depths before unexplored. We can claim no part in her discoveries, however our faculties may be exercised in grasping or in testing them. They more often correct than confirm our impressions; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... fancies about mysterious impassable seas and overbold mariners whose ships had been stuck fast in them. The more practical spirits were afraid of running aground upon submerged shoals, but all were somewhat reassured on this point when it was found that their longest plummet-lines failed ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... purchases a redemption from all petty troubles; it sinks all trivial annoyances into nothingness, and grants the man lifelong freedom from all petty, corroding cares. His feelings have been sounded to their depths—the plummet has touched bottom. Fate has done her worst: she has brought him face to face with the Supreme Calamity, and thereafter there is nothing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... and at an altitude still of three thousand feet, the wings slashed forward, clicking into their notches in the sides of the bulbous body, with a sound like the ratchets on subway turnstiles, and, holding their breath, the Secret Agents watched it plummet down to the sea. It was traveling with terrific speed when it struck, yet it entered the water with scarcely ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... the credit of his opulence to another. It is admitted to be an improvident expenditure of reputation, but no inference advantageous to Rowley can be deduced from this circumstance. The eccentricities and aberrations of genius, have rarely been restricted by line and plummet, and the present is a memorable example of perverted talent; but all this may be conceded, without shaking the argument ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... arduousness of the task. The ladies of N. were—But no, I cannot do it; my heart has already failed me. Come, come! The ladies of N. were distinguished for—But it is of no use; somehow my pen seems to refuse to move over the paper—it seems to be weighted as with a plummet of lead. Very well. That being so, I will merely say a word or two concerning the most prominent tints on the feminine palette of N.—merely a word or two concerning the outward appearance of its ladies, and a word or two concerning their more superficial characteristics. The ladies ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... hitherto unsuspected graces of mind and heart and speech. A sly sense of humour woke into life, and a positive talent for conversation, latent hitherto because she had never known any one who cared to drop a plummet into the crystal springs of her consciousness. When the violin was laid away, she would sit in the twilight, by Davy's sofa, his thin hand in hers, and talk with Anthony about books and flowers and music, and about the meaning of life too—its burdens and mistakes, and joys and sorrows; ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
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