"Ponderous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... expressed his personal consequence chiefly through an antique gold snuffbox, and a ponderous silk pocket-kerchief, which he had an imposing manner of drawing out of his pocket like a banner and using with both hands at once. Sir Barnet's object in life was constantly to extend the range of his acquaintance. Like a heavy body dropped into water—not ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... fought great battles, and performed mighty deeds of valor, childish pranks had no interest. He cared now for nothing in the world but to read all day long, and half the night; to read anything and everything, from the hair-raising cowboy tales Davy Munn loaned him, to the ponderous histories from the minister's book-shelf. Through this selfsame book-shelf the minister had become one of Tim's closest friends, and might have made a pastoral visitation every day in the week and been welcome. He had almost got ahead of the doctor in the eldest orphan's ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... bright and early, "two travellers might have been seen" crossing one of the ponderous bridges that lead over the Schuylkill from Philadelphia to the opposite shore. The one was a stout young cavalier, arrayed in fustian brown; the other was a pretty youth, attired in broadcloth blue, and brilliant was his flashing eye, and coal-black was his hair. By my troth, good masters, a ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... amenities, in the rather ponderous style of the sixteenth century, Sir Thomas ceremoniously conducted his guest to Lady Enville's boudoir. She sat, resplendent in blue satin slashed with yellow, turning over some ribbons which Barbara Polwhele was displaying for her inspection. The ribbons were at once dismissed when the noble ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... glanced off from him without inflicting any wound, being turned aside by the steel armor that he wore, while every person that came near enough to him to strike him with any other weapon was felled at once to the ground by a blow from the ponderous battle-axe. The example which Richard thus set was followed by his men, and in a short time the Saracens began every where to give way. When, in the case of such a combat, one side begins to yield, it is all over ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... had conducted them beyond, into the city, did he speak: "We know not what echoes there may be within those walls," he said, pointing back to the ponderous gateway ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... if she could have slain the Queen on the spot, but commanded her temper and retired from the apartment, bearing in her hand the ponderous ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... flower-garden, adorned with large oil paintings (cattle-pieces and portraits) in massive and, for the most part, tarnished frames, and furnished in the solidest of British styles—mahogany chairs and table, an immense sideboard, a white marble fireplace, and a chandelier hanging with ponderous menace above the gleaming expanse of table-cloth. Here were seated eleven persons: Mr. Liversedge and his wife, their seven children (four girls and three boys), Miss Pope the governess, and Mr. Denzil Quarrier; waited upon ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... pudding, and it rendered him inattentive to Theodora's views on the origin of totem poles. Theodora saw his inattention, and, with the tact of the true hostess, she promptly changed the subject to one which should be less ponderous and more interesting. Leaving the totem poles, she began to talk of Quantuck and the vagaries of Mac. Quantuck proved to be an old vacation ground for Mr. Gilwyn, and he and Billy vied with each other in stories of the days when golf links were not, and the post office was still of the ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... foolish or otherwise, not according to the absolute facts involving the supposed danger, but according to the means which the person in question has of knowing the facts. A lady, for example, in passing along the sidewalk of a great city comes to a place where workmen are raising an immense and ponderous iron safe, which, slowly rising, hangs suspended twenty feet above the walk. She is afraid to pass under it. The foreman, however, who is engaged in directing the operation, passing freely to and fro under the impending weight, as he has occasion, and without the least ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... the right dogs for those who want Spaniels to travel faster and cover more ground than the more ponderous and short-legged Clumbers, Sussex, or Field Spaniels do, but their work is hardly equal in finish and precision to that of either of ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... defect in his character; and that was the habit in which he constantly indulged, of deploring the past, without making any very strong efforts toward amendment in the future. He was one evening seated in his room; a ponderous volume lay open, on his study-table; and for a time he vainly tried to fix his attention thereon, till finally he closed the book; and leaning back in his chair, his brows contracted, and the lines about his mouth grew tense, as if ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... been This night, in any guest-room, high or low? The drowsy porter at the gate saith, "No!"— Shooting the bars; while the packed camels shake Their bells to listen, and the sleepers wake, And to their feet the ponderous steers slow rise, Lifting from trampled fodder large mild eyes;— "Nay! Brothers! no such thing! yet there is gone Yonder, one nigh her time, a gentle one! With him that seemed her spouse—of Galilee; They toiled at sundown to our doors—but, see! No nook was here! Seek ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... hearts; These are their stay, and when the leaden world Sets its hard face against their fateful thought, And brute strength, like a scornful conqueror, Clangs his huge mace down in the other scale, The inspired soul but flings his patience in, And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe— One faith against a whole world's unbelief, One soul against the flesh ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... sagely, and said nothing. The immediate result of the experience was that Veronica went to Miss Beasley, and borrowed An Antiquarian Survey of the County of Bedworthshire, including a description of its Castles and Moated Houses, together with a History of its Ancient Families—a ponderous volume dated 1823, which had before been offered for the girls' inspection, but which nobody had hitherto summoned courage to attack. She studied it now with deep attention, and gave a digest of its information for the benefit of weaker minds, less ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... when the Argonauts, as these fifty brave adventurers were called, had prepared everything for the voyage, an unforeseen difficulty threatened to end it before it was begun. The vessel, you must understand, was so long and broad and ponderous that the united force of all the fifty was insufficient to shove her into the water. Hercules, I suppose, had not grown to his full strength, else he might have set her afloat as easily as a little boy launches his boat upon a puddle. But here were these fifty heroes, pushing and straining ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... probably take the longer time to effect her mobilization. Russia had started, it is true, before war was declared. But interior railroads in Russia are few. Russia, too, is proverbially slow, if for no other reason than by virtue of her ponderous numbers. France, on the other hand, is checked and counter-checked by good strategic railroads, and, having no such vast territory over which her troops would have to be moved, would be able to mobilize in a much shorter time than her ally. England, for ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... first visit to the Mikado in 1868. Sir Harry Parkes showed us all their apartments, and the large though subsidiary temple once used as a hospital, and we afterwards went to see the service performed in the temple. A dozen bonzes, or priests, were sitting round in a circle, chanting monotonously from ponderous volumes, with an occasional accompaniment from a gong or drum. Incense was being burned, vestments worn, processions formed, and prayers offered to Buddha to intercede with the Supreme Being. The accessories ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... it very raw at times, crude and new. He himself lived with dignity and elegant simplicity. He gave now and then lengthy, ponderous dinners, making out the lists himself, and handing them over to his timid English wife in much the manner in which he gave the wine list and the key to the wine cellar to the butler. And, at the head of his table, he let other men talk and listened. They talked, those industrial ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... reverence at this bold buccaneer, for such he really suspected him to be. There was a chinking of gold and a sparkling of jewels in all his stories about the Spanish Main that gave a value to every period, and Wolfert would have given anything for the rummaging of the ponderous sea chest, which his imagination crammed full of golden chalices, crucifixes, and jolly round ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... his delivery was perfect, and even more than that. One of our best critics has called him matchless in this respect, and no other orator of the century, except possibly Canning, may be compared to him. Webster was more effective, but rather ponderous. Choate's style was peculiar, and Everett's cold and studied. Gladstone resembles him more, perhaps, than any other, but Gladstone has a decided solemnity of manner which is a help to him among his countrymen, but a defect as judged by classic standards. ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... generous bands, secure to meet the rewards of victory or the repose of honourable death! Go forth, ye generous bands, but unaccompanied by the wretch I have described! His feeble arm refuses to bear the ponderous shield; the pointed spear sinks feebly from his grasp; he trembles at the noise and tumult of the war, and flies like the hunted hart to lurk in shades and darkness. Behold him roused from his midnight ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... the engravings of Clarke's marbles, and read the account of how these ponderous marbles had been transported to England. We saw the marbles themselves. The famous enormous head of Ceres must have belonged to a gigantic statue, and perhaps at a great height may have had a fine effect. It is in a sadly mutilated condition; there is no face; the appearance ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... sound of shrill protestation in strange vernacular. Even Wren heard the voice, and found something reminiscent in the sound of weeping and wailing that followed. The performer was unquestionably Elise—she that had won the ponderous, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... the field officers in a revolt against the general. No better fortune ever befell this very fortunate nation. If the anti-slavery extremists had been able to reinforce their own pressure by the ponderous impact of the popular will, and so had pushed the President from his "border-state policy" and from his general scheme of advancing only very cautiously along the anti-slavery line, it is hardly conceivable either that the Union would have been saved or that ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... most important points to attend to is, that while they are held with sufficient firmness in order to be turned to the required form, they should be free from any strain which might in any way distort them. In strong and ponderous objects this can be easily accomplished by due care on the part of an intelligent workman. It is in operating by the lathe on delicate and flexible objects that the utmost care is requisite in the process of chucking, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... I admitted. "And there again is another sign of wisdom. Your ponderous fool talks pompous sense always. He sees life in only one facet. Your lover sees its many sides, its infinite variety. He can laugh and weep; his imagination lights up dry facts with whimsical fancies; ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... gubernatorial candidate, or for the construction of a canal. Samuel Young, who seemed to nourish a deep-seated dislike of Clinton, never tired of disparaging the ex-Mayor. He apparently took keen pleasure in holding up to ridicule and in satirising, what he was pleased to call his ponderous pedantries, his solemn affectation of profundity and wisdom, his narrow-mindedness, and his intolerable and transparent egotism. But the canal sentiment was all one way. With the help of the Federalists, who declined to make an opposing ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the upper part of his ponderous figure arrayed in a frock-coat. He did not take kindly to what he termed "those skittish sparrow-tailed affairs". Frock-coats suited him, but I am not partial to them on every one. They look well enough on a podgy, fat, or broad ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... was a somewhat ponderous affair, and, when she trusted to it, it usually ran her violently down a steep place. She concluded to say nothing more about ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... busy, happy, splendid scene of English summer? And the highroad, a hundred years ago, was not that grass-grown desert of the present time. It was alive with constant travel and traffic: the country towns and inns swarmed with life and gaiety. The ponderous waggon, with its bells and plodding team; the light post-coach that achieved the journey from the White Hart, Salisbury, to the Swan with Two Necks, London, in two days; the strings of packhorses that had not yet left the road; my lord's ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a long impromptu prayer followed, till some instinct told Mr Peters that supper-time had come, and we rose from our knees with hunger for our predominant feeling. Over supper the minister did unbend a little into one or two ponderous jokes, as if to show me that ministers were men, after all. And then at ten o'clock I went home, and enjoyed my long-repressed yawns in the three-cornered room before going to bed. Dinah and Hannah Dawson, so their names were put on the board above the shop-door—I always ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... figure, somewhat ponderous and thick in the legs, but well-dressed, walking in front of him, with a slight roll and waddle in his gait? Where had he seen that head, covered with tufts of flaxen hair, and as it were set right into the shoulders, that ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... no means gratified by the ponderous prancings of his imitator. We learn from Boswell that when the great man met Captain Cook at a dinner given by the President of the Royal Society, he said that he "was much pleased with the conscientious accuracy of that celebrated circumnavigator, who set me right as to many of the exaggerated ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... greatest pleasure,—he said, and proceeded to wheel the ponderous dome, and then to adjust the instrument, I think to the one in Andromeda, or that in Cygnus, but I should not know one of them ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a little more; but finally he composed himself, and took a chair by Mr. Bayard's side. The bookseller then drew from his pocket a ponderous document, with a big official seal upon it, and exhibited it ...
— Now or Never - The Adventures of Bobby Bright • Oliver Optic
... after all, lost nothing of The Princess Pattie except half of the overture—a loss that, as operettas go, might indeed be counted a gain; but the succeeding activities of the prima donna, the ponderous basso and the brace of "comedians" were subject to a series of very sensible impediments and interruptions. Several times—and often at the most inopportune of moments—a swarthy, earnest young man walked across the stage, throwing out big sheets of brown paper right and left and looking ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... sanctity of contracts for so small a result is another question; but our Mr. Jones certainly did feel the comfort that came to him from the fact. Certain fragments of land had been reduced by the sub-commissioners after ponderous sittings, very beneficial to the lawyers, but which Mr. Jones had found to be grievously costly to him. He had thus agreed to other reductions without the lawyers, and felt those also to be very grievous, seeing that since he had purchased the property with a Parliamentary ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... the table, he turned up the lamp, acknowledged the ponderous jubilations of Brutus, and took the damaged pipe out of his pocket. Then he stood looking at it thoughtfully, as it lay in the palm of his hand; an eloquent testimony to that which had been starved, denied, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... to the impregnable fortress, but on coming at last to the base of the rock we found a long flight of narrow steps mounting zig-zag up its dark, moss-grown face. When the cavalcade halted before them our trumpeters blew thrice shrill blasts upon their big ivory horns, and like magic the ponderous iron gate far above instantly swung open, and the walls literally swarmed with men, whose bright arms glittered in the sun. Above, where all had been silent a moment before, everything was now bustle and excitement ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... singled me out as the object of her ponderous Palatine sarcasms. She exaggerated my style of dress, my ways and habits. She thought to make fun of my little spaniels by causing herself to be followed, even into the King's presence-chamber, by a large turnspit, which in mockery she called by the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... ground timbers of all varieties, and for unnumbered uses, a tithe of which cannot be told in a brief notice. Formerly these trees were cut away and burned up, to clear the track for redwood, tamarack, and ponderous pith-pines, etc.; now all else is superseded by this incense cedar. Thus is seen how hasty and ill-advised notions give place to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... we will get in a large safe. There is nothing like a ponderous safe, with the name of the company in gilt letters on it, for impressing the ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... peeped at us from beneath their clothes; indeed, they seemed more surprised than alarmed: the mothers kept uttering a low and mournful cry, as if entreating mercy. In the camp were several spears, or rather lances, as they were much too ponderous to be thrown by the arm; these were jagged: there were also some elamongs (shields), clubs, chisels, and several workbags filled with every thing necessary for the toilet of a native belle; namely, paint and feathers, ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... parson's exit he has been executing "Norma" with great spirit, and, so far as I am able to judge, with wonderful skill. I doubt not his thoughts are a thousand miles hence, among brown-skinned wenches, dressed in crimson robes, and decorated with ponderous ear-drops. In fact, "Norma" is good, and goes far to carry one out ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... Brunswick tones, all and more of these varied sounds mingle with one another, and half-drown by their clamour the sweet strains of the Viennese orchestra that discoursed dreamy waltzes from behind a bower of crimson roses; whilst ponderous Flemish wives of city burgomasters gaze open-mouthed at the elegant ladies of the old French noblesse, and shy Belgian misses peep enviously at their ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... many mornings she had wakened up in strange places that it took her several minutes before she could make out the geographical whereabouts of the heavy blue moreen curtains, the print of the lord-lieutenant of the county on the wall, and all the handsome ponderous mahogany furniture that stuffed up the room. As soon as full memory came into her mind, she started up; nor did she go to bed again, although she saw by her watch on the dressing-table that it was not yet six o'clock. She dressed herself with the ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... He over-sees the commonwealth, as his shop, and it is an argument of his policy, that he has thriven by his craft. He is a rigorous magistrate in his ward; yet his scale of justice is suspected, lest it be like the balances in his warehouse. A ponderous man he is, and substantial, for his weight is commonly extraordinary, and in his preferment nothing rises so much as his belly. His head is of no great depth, yet well furnished; and when it is in conjunction with his brethren, ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... dome Where Genius and where Valour find a home; Awe-struck, midst chill sepulchral marbles breathe, Where all above is still, as all beneath; Bend at each antique shrine, and frequent turn To clasp with fond delight some sculptured urn, The ponderous mass of Johnson's form to greet, Or breathe the prayer at Howard's ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... in the bar of candle-light which one of the shop sconces extended across the room, and lifted the violin to his neck. He was so large that all his gestures had a ponderous quality. His dress was disarranged by riding, and his blond skin was pricked through by the untidy growth of a three-days' beard, yet he ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... spectacle are plainly observable. The gradual mustering of the forces is near the Rockies to the westward, then the skirmish-line of fleecy cloudlets comes rolling and tumbling in advance, bringing a current of air that causes the ponderous wind-mill at the railway tank to "about face" sharply, and sets its giant arms to whirling vigorously around. Behind comes the compact, inky veil that spreads itself over the whole blue canopy above, seemingly banishing all hope of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... youth was speaking, the maddened baron snatched a heavy mace from a man who stood by. Already the ponderous mass quivered in his powerful grasp, when his daughter, with a piercing shriek, threw herself upon his arm. After a vain effort to free himself, the ready knight seized the weapon with his left hand, and with wonderful adroitness and strength prepared for the blow. But the baron's arm was again ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... spoke; I almost added my childish plea to his for them to stop—to remember me and stop. But not a muscle in my throat responded to my agonized effort. Her cold, clear 'No!' fell before my tongue was loosed or my heart freed from the ponderous weight ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... where Derwent rolls his dusky floods Through vaulted mountains, and a night of woods, The Nymph, GOSSYPIA, treads the velvet sod, And warms with rosy smiles the watery God; His ponderous oars to slender spindles turns, 90 And pours o'er massy wheels his foamy urns; With playful charms her hoary lover wins, And wields his trident,—while the Monarch spins. —First with nice eye emerging Naiads cull From ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... please, you may indulge in strengthening your hypothesis, and prove by the faithful histories of different nations, that Jews, Greeks, and Romans were most stupidly superstitious. Also that India, Turkey, and Arabia are now groaning under the ponderous weight of this vanity. Go on and enlarge on all that you have said, and point out all the superstitions of which we read or know; show how powerful this superstition is in the human heart; how it renders its votaries ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... heavier piece than this," said young Mark, frowning, equally with the exertion and with the instigations of his aspiring spirit, as he held out the ponderous weapon in a single hand; "we have guns that might tame a wolf with greater certainty than any barrel of a bore less than my own height. Tell, me grand'ther; at what distance do the mounted warriors, you so often ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... covered the last vertebrae and pressed upon the giant's cerebellum, and, above all, hearing the shrill, sharp voice which contrasted so absurdly with his huge body, would have understood why this ponderous, coarse being adored his only son, and why he had so long expected him,—a fact proved by the name, Desire, which was ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... a precious human document," was the poet's ponderous pronouncement. "It is unpleasant, painful, but—what is the lesson? The lesson is that infinite trouble grows out of our rotten squeamishness about sex facts. This girl craved a reasonable amount of pleasure after ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... seemed, of others. He saw in her now no longer merely the motherly aunt who was to welcome him, but one whom he should care for, and take under his protection. He heard steps in the entry, and easily detected the ponderous tread of Mr. Manlius, who now opened the door, and reappeared in more careful toilet, since he was furbished and smoothed by the addition of proper touches, until he had quite the air of a man of society. He entered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Naval Brigade by Lord Charles Beresford; the Royal Sussex by Major Sunderland; the Royal Artillery by Captain Norton; and the Royal Engineers by Major Dorwood. So they marched slowly forward. The progress was like that of some ponderous machine, slow, regular, compact, despite the hail of bullets that came from front, left and right, and ultimately from the rear. Some ten or twelve thousand Arabs it was seen had surrounded the Zareba. There was no retreat; it was "do or die!" About 9.50 a.m., about 5000 of the enemy were seen on ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... universally conceded by every De Willoughby of the clan, was a dismal failure. Even from his earliest boyhood, when he had been a huge, overgrown fellow, whose only redeeming qualities were his imperturbable good-humor and his ponderous wit, his family had regarded him with a sense of despair. In the first place, he was too big. His brothers were tall, lithe-limbed youths, who were graceful, dark-eyed, dark-haired, and had a general air of brilliancy. They figured ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... long breath and her eyes dilated. The howdah filled up, and the ponderous creature moved slowly down to the end of the space and up again, amid childish exclamations ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... with the victims of Clinch's ponderous fists as they re-entered the room from which they had been borne ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... was seen hat in hand careering over the meadow, beyond the cover, with the tail hounds straining to overtake their flying comrades. Twang—twang—twang went Frostyface's horn; crack—crack—crack went the ponderous thongs of the whips; shouts, and yells, and yelps, and whoops, and halloas, proclaimed the usual wild excitement of this privileged period of the chase. All was joy save among the gourmands assembled at ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... evolution performed, when there, right before us, were the lowering mat-sails of the great junk, and then, crash! there was a wild despairing yell, and we were into her amidships, the ponderous gunboat literally cutting her down and going right over her; while at a second command every man sprang up again, and for the next minute or two bayonet and cutlass were flashing in the evening sunlight as the wretches who climbed ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... current set in a curve to the left, running off the rocky embankment into the natural channel of the river. The dam was now only a couple of hundred yards distant. The water was smooth and the drift had settled to a slow, ponderous, sliding movement. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... too wicked to be reasoned with. He completely shrinks from the question; a question, be it remembered, not raised by us—a question which we should have felt strong objections to raising unnecessarily—a question put forward by himself, as intimately connected with the subject of his two ponderous volumes. He attempts to carp at detached parts of our reasoning on the subject. With what success he carries on this guerilla war after declining a general action with the main body of our argument our readers ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the lofty perpendicular monolith, to set up the tall stele as the headstone of a grave, to lift and poise the ponderous rocking-stone, to raise and fix the massive impost of the trilithon, or the slab covering a sepoltura, a cromlech, or a cistvaen; (for the remark applies to Celtic as well as Mediterranean antiquities), to heap up, not Pelion on Ossa, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... honey-dew Of learning from his lips. Amazement filled All eyes beholding him. No hoary sage, He who had sat in Egypt at the feet Of Moses ben-Maimuni, called him friend; Raschi the scholiast, poet, and physician, Who bore the ponderous Bible's storied wisdom, The Mischna's tangled lore at tip of tongue, Light as a garland on a lance, appeared In the just-ripened glory of a man. From his clear eye youth flamed magnificent; Force, masked by grace, moved in his balanced frame; An intellectual, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... This ponderous door, in elaborate carpentry, opened upon a flight of steps and on a flower-yard surrounded by elms, firs, and Paulownia trees, the latter of a beany odor and nature. A lower servants' part of ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... great mistake, except as to a few passages where he rose to a white heat. If any person will open a volume of his speeches at random, it will be found that the characteristic of his sentences is a somewhat ponderous Latinity. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... work in the sewing for my family, so that I might have more time for the improvement of my mind. For novels and light reading I never had much taste; the ladies' department in the periodicals of the day had no attraction for me. "She would lay a copy of William Penn's ponderous volumes open at the foot of her bed, and drawing her chair close to it, with her baby on her lap, would study the book diligently. A woman of less energy and less will-power than young Mrs. Mott would have given up all hope of being a scholar. She read the best books ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... had had his doubts as to the reception of Lady Milborough, and was, to tell the truth, listening with most anxious ear, when her ladyship was announced. His wife, however, was not so bitterly contumacious as to refuse admittance to his friend, and he heard the rustle of the ponderous silk as the old woman was shown up-stairs. When Lady Milborough reached the drawing-room, Mrs. Trevelyan ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... the "Articles of War and Army Regulations," condensed to a small compass, the result of our war experience. But they did not suit the powers that were, and have ever since slept the sleep that knows no waking, to make room for the ponderous document now in vogue, which will not stand the strain of a ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... aside the curtain of vindicative fire, and see what this pain of loss is like; I say, what it is like, for it fortunately surpasses human imagination to conceive its dire reality. Suppose that we could see the huge planets and the ponderous stars whirling their terrific masses with awful, and if it might be so, clamorous velocity, and thundering through the fields of unresisting space with furious gigantic momentum, such as the mighty avalanche ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... agony of that moment he uttered a cry so terrible that it might well have been supposed to have come from the throat of a supernatural being. The Indians had not time to evade the danger. The ponderous mass in its descent hit a projecting crag, and burst into smaller fragments, which fell in a rattling shower, killing two men, and wounding others. Those of the group who escaped, as well as those who chanced to be beyond the danger, saw, by the dim moonlight, the Wild Man ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... secession to the ranks of the sombre crew was therefore the more remarked. If Fanny moped, all Grey Abbey might figuratively be said to hang down its head. Lady Cashel was, in every sense of the words, continually wrapped up in wools and worsteds. The earl was always equally ponderous, and the specific gravity of Lady Selina could not be calculated. It was beyond the power of figures, even in algebraic denominations, to describe her ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... is the clerical party, which is the majority; there is the anti-clerical party, and there are the ne'er-do-wells. The clerical people are dark and pious and cold; there is a curious stone-cold, ponderous darkness over them, moral and gloomy. Then the anti-clerical party, with the Syndaco at the head, is bourgeois and respectable as far as the middle-aged people are concerned, banal, respectable, shut off as by a wall from the clerical ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... on habit and accommodating. When a boy I have listened to "Ivanhoe" read out—O enchantment! by the light of two "mould" candles—the regular thing—which required "snuffing" about every ten minutes, and snuffing required dexterity. The snuffers—laid on a long tray—were of ponderous construction; it was generally some one's regular duty to snuff—how odd seems this now! The "plaited wicks" which came later were thought a triumph, and the snuffers disappeared. They also are to be seen ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... laugh. He seemed filled with laughter to-night. Evidently he had noticed nothing strange in Leland's greeting; he was in the gayest of his gay moods. He had no opportunity to answer Leland's words, for Julia, who had forgotten her usual slow, ponderous method of travel bounced into the room like a wonderfully animated ball at the sound of his voice, and he actually swept the two hundred pounds of her off of her feet as he gathered the big woman up into his arms and kissed her. Then ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... good-humoured eye of the habitual sportsman. He wore invariably an old shooting coat and a cap that had seen younger, but perhaps not better, days. His vehicle was a battered but serviceable two-wheeled cart drawn by a placid though adequate horse. His weapon for all purposes was a rather ponderous twelve-gauge. ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... to the mill without another word; without even a grin from the broad-faced Ole, who sat in ponderous thought in the wagon ahead. To a nature such as his the infrequency of a new idea gives it the force of a cataclysm; during its presence, obliterating ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... was absent-minded rather; yet not that his mind was absent so much as intent upon other things. The children found him heavy; he seemed ponderous to them. And pondering he certainly was—pondering the meaning of existence. The children, he realised, were such brilliant comments upon existence; their unconscious way of living, all they said and thought ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... staggered. Dick had a bowie-knife. The Senator grasped a ponderous beam that he had placed on the coach in case of another break-down. Mr. Figgs had a razor which he had grabbed from the storehouse in the Doctor's pocket. Buttons had nothing. But on the road lay three ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... vaulted heaven,[9] fiery and without weight, shone forth, and selected a place for itself in the highest region; next after it, {both} in lightness and in place, was the air; the Earth was more weighty than these, and drew {with it} the more ponderous atoms, and was pressed together by its own gravity. The encircling waters sank to the lowermost place,[10] ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... ponderous tome, "I read this case from a feeling that it bears very strongly upon that before us. Saponificus, the learned and animated civilian, in his reply to the celebrated treatise of 'Rigramarolius de Libris priggatis,' commonly called his Essay on Stolen Books, asserts that there ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... one side, the Dukes of Austria and their ponderous German chivalry wanted to reduce the cantons and cities to vassalage, not to the Imperial Crown, a distant and scarcely felt obligation, but to the Duchy of Austria; on the other, the hardy mountain peasants and stout burghers well knew their ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The ponderous portal obeyed the signal of the bell, and apparently opened without any human means; and Captain Armine, proceeding down a dark yet capacious passage, opened a door, which invited him by an inscription on ground glass that assured him he was entering the counting-house. Here ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... must go back at once; he knew I could be trusted to stay by myself and walk home afterwards. He and Rickson quietly slipped out, and I was left sole tenant of the large square pew, with its high partition, and ponderous chairs, and fire-place, and table, just like a small room, as is the custom in ...
— The Story of the White-Rock Cove • Anonymous
... this place, "old in story and name-father to a noble book." The author of that same "noble book" possessed himself of some memorials of the keep he had rendered so famous, securing the stones of the gateway, and the door with its ponderous fastenings to decorate the entrance of his kitchen-court at Abbotsford. And this ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Lord John we owe also the Probationary Ode for Major Scott, and the playful parody on "Donae gratus eram libi."] Townshend, Richardson, George Ellis, and Dr. Lawrence. [Footnote: By Doctor Lawrence the somewhat ponderous irony of the prosaic department was chiefly managed. In allusion to the personal appearance of this eminent civilian, one of the wits of the day thus parodied a passage ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... Annersley's mild manner. As Young Pete started toward the wagon, the trader jumped and grabbed him. The boy flung up his arms to protect his face. Old man Annersley said nothing, but with ponderous ease he strode forward, seized the trader from behind, and shook that loose-mouthed individual till his teeth rattled and ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... factory we saw an immense workman at the hottest and heaviest work, wielding a ponderous hammer, and asked him what liquor he drank. He replied by pointing to an immense vessel filled with water and oatmeal, to which the men went and drank as much as they liked." This is made by adding one pound fine oatmeal to ...
— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis
... troll you no song that will hinder you long, I pen you no ponderous treatise, The theme that I sing is a gossamer thing As light as the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... crewel in the cushion fixed: If cushion might be called, what harder seemed Than the firm oak of which the frame was formed. No want of timber then was felt or feared In Albion's happy isle. The lumber stood Ponderous, and fixed by its own massy weight. But elbows still were wanting; these, some say, An alderman of Cripplegate contrived, And some ascribe the invention to a priest Burly and big, and studious of his ease. But rude at first, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... the bull when "whang!" came something against the door, and they all jumped for their guns. It was the discomfited but not discouraged Monarch breaking into the cabin in search of his supper. With two or three blows of his ponderous paw the grizzly smashed the door to splinters, but as he poked his head in he met a volley from two rifles and a shotgun. He looked at Jeff reproachfully for the inhospitable reception, turned about and went away, more in ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... man who has been led to believe that he is a brilliant and interesting talker has been led to make himself a rapacious pest. No conversation is possible between others whose ears are within reach of his ponderous voice; anecdotes, long-winded stories, dramatic and pathetic, stock his repertoire; but worst of all are his humorous yarns at which he laughs uproariously though every one else grows solemn ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... the native had only time to pick up his ponderous spear and face toward the wood, when the lion emerged from the broadening band of shadow, and, with a low, threatening ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... hatter's. Here the R.F.C. caps of the "stream-lined" variety had all been sold, so the war baby was obliged to buy a general service hat. The only one that fitted him was shapeless as a Hausfrau, ponderous as a Bishop, unstable as a politician, grotesque as a Birthday Honours' List. It was a nice quiet hat, we assured Marmaduke—just the thing for active service. Did it suit him? Very well indeed, we replied—made him look like Lord Haldane at the age ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... and aunt Bhaer, who were receiving in state, the one full of genuine delight in all men and things, the other suffering martyrdom with a smile, as she stood shaking hand after hand, and affecting utter unconsciousness of the sad fact that ponderous Professor Plock had camped upon the train of her ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... indecision, then resistance, two or three sharp words from the man, and then the two seemed to fade through the wall. The ponderous gate was closing before the dumbfounded watcher could collect his wits. Like a shot he was across the stones, now alive to the meaning of the strange proceeding. With desperate hands he grasped the bar of the gate and pulled, ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... thou hence unscathed to go? No, by Saint Bride of Bothwell, no! Up drawbridge, grooms,—what, warder, ho! Let the portcullis fall." Lord Marmion turned,—well was his need,— And dashed the rowels in his steed, Like arrow through the archway sprung; The ponderous gate behind him rung: To pass there was such scanty room, The ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... would do something, turned the cheeses in the cheese-room alone. Taking one corner of the clean cloth in her teeth, in a second, by some dexterous sleight-of-hand, the heavy cheese was over, though ponderous enough to puzzle many a man, especially as it had to come over gently that the shape might not ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... of the 14th the monster iron-plated frigate New Ironsides, crossed the bar and added her formidable and ponderous battery to those destined for the great effort of reducing the sullen earthwork which barred the Federal advance. There were now five monitors, the Ironsides and a fleet of gunboats and monster hulks grouped together and only waiting the signal to unite ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... love to Duncan, the fervent heat of which vaporized the dark heavy stone of obligation into the purple vapour of gratitude, and enhanced the desire of pleasing him until it became almost a passion. Obligation is a ponderous roll of canvas which Love spreads aloft into a tent ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... pointing to St. Paul's; the back panel Charity, two female figures, typical of Plenty and Riches, casting money and fruits into her lap—while a wrecked sailor and sinking ship fill up the background. By the kind permission of the Lord Mayor we are enabled to give a representation of the ponderous old vehicle, which is still the centre of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the seeds terrene, since ponderous most And most perplext, in close embraces clung, And towards the centre conglobating sunk. And as the bond grew firmer, ampler forth Pressed they the fluid essences that reared Sun, moon, and stars, and main, and heaven's high wall. For those of atoms lighter far consist, Subtiler, and more ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the church and seat of the patriarchs might be enriched with a repository of books: but, if the ponderous mass of Arian and Monophysite controversy were indeed consumed in the public baths, a philosopher may allow, with a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to the benefit of mankind. I sincerely regret the more valuable libraries, which have been ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... robe was of dark cloth, cinctured round the waist with his rich sword-belt, from which was suspended a gold-hilted scimitar, encased in a scabbard also enriched with gold: His legs and feet were bare, and had a ponderous look about them, since he suffered from that strange curse of Zanzibar—elephantiasis. His feet were slipped into a pair of watta (Arabic for slippers), with thick soles and a strong leathern band over the instep. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... had grown stouter since he had returned to town from Black Fells; but the increase of weight was evenly distributed over his six feet odd, which made him only a trifle more ponderous and not abdominally fat. But Mortimer had become enormous; rolls of flesh crowded his mottled ear-lobes outward and bulged above his collar; cushions of it padded the backs of his hands and fingers; shaving left his heavy, distended face congested and unpleasantly shiny. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... if it could possibly right itself, and if my father could escape. Was this the end of our struggles and adventures? Was this death? All these questions flashed through my mind in the fraction of a second, and a moment later I was engaged in a life and death struggle. The ponderous monolith of ice sank below the surface, and the frigid waters gurgled around me in frenzied anger. I was in a saucer, with the waters pouring in on every side. A moment ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... the great hooded television disk—the ponderous type we used in those days—and picked up Strobus without difficulty. The body more than filled the disk and I reduced the magnification until I could get a full view of ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... already gone. The next chance of a billet was at Grantsville, two leagues farther on. Now that sounds too absurdly short a distance to disquiet any traveler; but neither is the fatal straw in the camel's load a ponderous thing, per se. Both Falcon and I had reckoned that our day's work was done when we climbed the last hill, so it was in some discontent that we set our faces once more against the black road, and the stinging sleet, and the ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... saw that it was filled with wild elephants. Everywhere, as far as the eye could range between the trees, they were massed, not in tens or scores, but in hundreds. On every side were vistas of multitudes of great heads with gleaming white tusks and restless-moving trunks, of huge bodies supported on ponderous legs. And with an unwonted fear clutching at his heart Dermot realised that all their eyes were turned in ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... George came in, ponderous and unsmiling; picked out the superintendent at once, and thanked him gruffly for admission to the "sanctum"; a word which George chose to ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... crossed to Isaac and his ponderous volumes, and began to talk to him with that benign lack of haste which usually means a very competent personality. Phyllis hurried somewhat with Robin Hood among his little fishes, and felt happier. It was always, in her eventless life, something of a pleasant adventure ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... by a triumph of manoeuvring, effected his escape. He was quit in this way of the ponderous gratitude of Mr. Killian, and of the confidential gratitude of poor Ottilia; but of Fritz he was not quit so readily. That young politician, brimming with mysterious glances, offered to lend his convoy as far as to the high-road; and Otto, in fear of some residuary ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a prominent worker in the cause of philanthropy and temperance. He is ponderous and bland; and for the rest, he is president of the Society for the Suppression of Nicotine and the Nude, vice-president of the Anti-Inebriation League, secretary of the Incorporated Brotherhood of Benevolence, and the bearer of ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... but whom he had failed to win. He had risen with the others at La Fosse's bidding, either unsuspicious or else deeming suspicion too flimsy a thing by which to steer conduct. Yet at the mention of her name a scowl darkened his ponderous countenance. He set down his glass with such sudden force that its slender stem was snapped and a red stream of wine streaked the white tablecloth and spread around a silver flowerbowl. The sight of that stain recalled him to himself ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... wheeze from the engine, as if from a giant in pain; the sharp jerk, and then the steady pull at the carriage in which I was sitting; the "pant, pant! puff, puff!" of the iron horse, as he buckled to his work with a will; and then, finally, the preliminary oscillation of the ponderous train, the trembling and rumbling of creaking wheels along the rails—as we glided and bumped, slowly but steadily, out of the terminus—the distance signal showing "all clear" to us, and blocking the up line with the red ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... dignified, terse, epigrammatic, felicitous, euphonious, elegant, and lofty. Undesirable qualities are the diffuse, verbose, redundant, inflated, prolix, ambiguous, feeble, monotonous, loose, slip-shod, dry, flowery, pedantic, pompous, rhetorical, grandiloquent, artificial, formal, ornate, halting, ponderous, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... the charge of the judge does not mean his bill for expenses or his salary for trying the case. A charge implies something grave, heavy, and aggressive. It is what the judge tells the jury about the case. It is never light or humorous, but ponderous and hard to understand. The court-room doors are locked, no one must come in or ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... stood in full view of that grand old building—a castle of the olden times—kept, so far as possible to elegance or comfort, in its ponderous mediaeval grandeur. But Madam Art had softened all its ruder features. Plate-glass was sunk into those thick walls; circular rooms in those twin towers, commanded a splendid view of the valley, over which the ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... derived from mathematical study; the power of keeping continually in the mind's eye, without winking or wavering, the distant proposition which is to be proven; of advancing to it by steady steps on the shortest route; and bearing up, with the strength of Atlas, the most extended and ponderous chain of logical deductions. Such was the habitual steadiness and strength of his mind, that, unlike his fellow-students, I never saw him lose sight, for an instant, of the point in debate, much less ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... of heaven! Does any passion bear sway there? The ponderous globes obey the mandate of spiritual superiority; and shall the order of nature be reversed here, and the animal species lord it over men? Shall barbarism again come on the track of civilization, with fire and sword, and ruthless annihilation? Shall civilization invoke ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... considerable difficulty they succeeded in dislodging the spirit, and in securing it to a sledge to which these oxen were yoked, and now struggling to get free, he was dragged along by the powerful oxen towards a lake on Hiraethog Mountain, but so ponderous was their load and so fearful was the spirit's contentions that the sledge ploughed the land between the church and the lake as they went along, leaving in the course that they took deep furrows, ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... phrase: "Honest as the day is long." He did not go to the hotel that night. He went back to his room and read the Constellation. He liked the Constellation. Newspapers were very kind, he thought. Now and then, he would pick up his pile of legislative bills and try to spell through the ponderous sentences, but he always gave it up and went back to the Constellation. He wondered if Hurlbut had read it. Hurlbut had. The leader had even told the author of the item that he was glad somebody could appreciate the ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... The tank is ponderous, the smallest of them, which were those first constructed, weighing forty-two tons, or about as much as a good-sized railroad freight car. And it is this ponderosity, with its slow but resistless movement, that gives ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... the spirit and the intentions of those with whom he had to do. We, however, must keep a faithful, everlasting memory of this dear father of ours, and never let him go out of our hearts." Such was Luther—an almost superhuman nature; his mind ponderous and sharply limited, his will powerful and temperate, his morals pure, his heart full of love. Because no other man appeared after him strong enough to become the leader of the nation, the German people lost for centuries their leadership of the earth. The leadership of ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... on the track of the powerful helper from the unconscious. These ever active and, as it were, immortal wishes from the unconscious recall the legendary Titans who from time immemorial have borne the ponderous mountains which were once rolled upon them by the victorious gods, and which even now quiver from time to time from the convulsions of their mighty limbs; I say that these wishes found in the repression are of themselves of an infantile ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... the main gate of her main fort on one of the frontiers of her empire so insecurely defended that a single American can carry it with his fruit-knife. Such ideas I energetically enforce, till I am cut short by the slow retrogression of the massive gate on ponderous hinges turning. ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... illustrate what I mean. Take any large, massive, heavy building: this hard, ponderous body that fills so much space exists, I tell you, only in the soft pulp of the brain. There alone, in the human brain, has it any being. Unless you understand this, you ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... a close carriage drove up to the palace. It contained no less a personage than the Prime Minister, the Marquis de Lutera,—a dark, heavy man, with small furtive eyes, a ponderous jaw, and a curious air of seeming for ever on an irritable watch for offences. His aspect was intellectual, yet always threatening; and his frigid manner was profoundly discouraging to all who sought to win his attention or sympathy. He ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... her to the cell, fitted the key to the ponderous lock, pushed back the door, and remained outside. Mary entered, and in a second was in the arms of our hero, kissing him, and bedewing his ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... village, happily remains what nature left it, a stony and desolate valley, without a single object to divert the eye from the scene before it. This is a solid mass of limestone, of perhaps equal height with the Cove, cleft asunder by some great convulsion of nature, and opening its "ponderous and marble jaws" on the right and left. The sensation of horror on approaching it is increased by the projection of either side from its base, so that the two connivant rocks, though considerably distant at the bottom, admit only ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... role of a working member until committees fought for him. It surprised his colleagues to see this elegant young man, with such fine abilities, so modest and so laborious—to see him ready on the dryest subjects and with the most tedious reports. Ponderous laws of local interest neither frightened nor mystified him. He seldom spoke in the public debates, except as a reporter; but in the committee he spoke often, and there his manner was noted for its ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... ten shots without reloading. The barrels were not very long, measuring only three feet from breech to muzzle, but they were of one- and-a-half-inch bore and fired a conical shell four and a half inches in length. Notwithstanding their somewhat ponderous appearance they were very light, being ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... in the Boston Symphony or the Official Symphony, and of military bands up to the perfected concert organizations headed by a Sousa or a Gabriel Pares. It would embrace with like inclusiveness the history of the pipe organ through its stages of evolution from the ponderous instruments with men straddling unwieldy bellows to the marvel installed in Festival Hall, and it would embrace the history of the art of organ music up to such exemplars as our own Clarence Eddy, John &. McClellan, Edwin ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... warehouses shut. Pausing in the alleys behind the closed Banks of mighty Lombard-street, it gives one as good as a rich feeling to think of the broad counters with a rim along the edge, made for telling money out on, the scales for weighing precious metals, the ponderous ledgers, and, above all, the bright copper shovels for shovelling gold. When I draw money, it never seems so much money as when it is shovelled at me out of a bright copper shovel. I like to say, 'In gold,' and to see seven pounds musically pouring out of the shovel, like ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... almost overwhelming. One lovely and enthusiastic person told him that the sight of his "Dryad Disturbing a Beanfeast" had just marked an epoch in her mental development, and that she considered it quite the supreme achievement of the Art of the Century. A ponderous man in spectacles, whom TICKLER had no recollection of having ever met before in his life, encouraged him by his solemn assurance that his "Jews Sitting in a Dentist's Waiting-room, in the reign of King John," was perfectly marvellous ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 9th, 1892 • Various |
