"Buttress" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Beside the buttress of one bridge lay two still figures of Algerian Zouaves. These were fresh dead, fallen in the taking of the town. Only two men! There were dead by thousands which one might see in other places. These two had leaped ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... out a walie hammer; About the knottit buttress clam'er; Alang the steep roof stoyt an' stammer, A gate mis-chancy; On the aul' spire, the bells' hie cha'mer, Dance your ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... breath again!" he shouted. "We are over the worse now and shall soon be in calmer water. Get your feet well out in front of you, if you can, and dig your heels into the mud, then you will act as a buttress to me and help me to ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... of the scale, and stood Upon the second buttress of that mount Which healeth him who climbs. A cornice there, Like to the former, girdles round the hill; Save that its arch with sweep less ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... strength to take the thrust of a vaulted stone roof must have required consummate capacity and skill. At Eton, where, however, the stone roof was never built, the buttresses planned to carry it appear so enormous that the building seems to be all buttress, but here such an impression could never for a moment be gained, for the chapel filling each bay completely masks the widest portion of the adjoining buttresses. The upper portions are so admirably proportioned ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... nothing to do but keep it in order.[100] All the mountain fields[101] are made in the guise of stairways of stone, and the rest of the road has no great width because of some mountains that hem it in on both sides, and on one side they had made a buttress of stone so that one day it should not slide down [the mountain], and there are, likewise, other places, in which the road has a breadth of four or five human bodies, all made and paved with stone. ...
— An Account of the Conquest of Peru • Pedro Sancho
... {little-endian}, RISC vs. CISC, etc., etc., etc. As in society at large, the intensity and duration of these debates is usually inversely proportional to the number of objective, factual arguments available to buttress any position. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... much more difficult getting down than getting up. Still, by dint of clinging tight hold of the ivy and feeling every step, he managed to descend the perilous arch and get on to the comparatively safe footing of the buttress. ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... law and order; and by and by the haughty barons themselves, who had scrambled for the worldly spoil of the church, found that the spiritual influence had been concentrated in hands as haughty as their own, and connected with no feelings likely to buttress their order any more than the Crown—a new and sterner monkery, under a different name, and essentially plebeian. Presently the Scotch were on the verge of republicanism, in state as well as kirk, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... to give relief to his own. Though now well on the wrong side of sixty, John Knott was hale and vigorous as ever. His rough-hewn countenance bore even closer resemblance, perhaps, to that of some stone gargoyle carved on cathedral buttress or spout. But his hand was no less skilful, his tongue no less ready in denunciation of all he reckoned humbug, his heart no less deeply touched, for all his superficial irascibility, by the pains, and sins, and grinding miseries, of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... began to throb with the fear Of bringing his house about his one ear; And his people came round it, quite a throng, To buttress the walls and make them strong: A full month he sat, and felt like a mome Not daring to shout his ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... toilsome battle waged. But where Tydides fought, whether in aid Of Ilium's host, or on the part of Greece, Might none discern. For as a winter-flood Impetuous, mounds and bridges sweeps away;[6] 105 The buttress'd bridge checks not its sudden force, The firm inclosure of vine-planted fields Luxuriant, falls before it; finish'd works Of youthful hinds, once pleasant to the eye, Now levell'd, after ceaseless rain from Jove; 110 So drove Tydides into sudden flight ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... is not only that it insults woman by a reassertion of a merely historical inferiority, which is steadily diminishing, but that it fortifies this by precisely the same talk about the dignity of subordination which has been used to buttress every oppression since the world began. Never yet was there a pious slaveholder who did not quote to his slaves, on Sunday, precisely the same texts with which President —— favors his meek young pupils. Never yet was there a ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Where an inconvenient buttress projected, a narrow passage was cut through it for the channel, and the marks of the chisel look as fresh as if they had been lately made. Much of this aqueduct was destroyed in quite recent days, when the rocks were blasted to make room for the road to Cahors. The Romans may have thought ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... around, as if he were most welcome to be watching me, if only I could see him once. But the place was as silent as its graves; and I followed the sexton to the shadow of a buttress. Here he went into a deep gray corner, lichened and mossed by a drip from the roof; and being, both in his clothes and self, pretty much of that same color, he was not very easy to discern from stone when the light ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... said Waterloo. 'If people jump off straight forwards from the middle of the parapet of the bays of the bridge, they are seldom killed by drowning, but are smashed, poor things; that's what THEY are; they dash themselves upon the buttress of the bridge. But you jump off,' said Waterloo to me, putting his fore- finger in a button-hole of my great-coat; 'you jump off from the side of the bay, and you'll tumble, true, into the stream under the arch. What you have got to do, is to mind how you jump in! There ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... apt to deteriorate. Coach to Chtillon, 12 m. S.E. Die, on the Drme, is in a small plain surrounded by mountains, of which the most remarkable is Mont Glandaz, 6648 ft. above the sea, flanked by great buttress cliffs. On the top is an undulating plateau, covered with small stones and grass; 5 hrs. required for the ascent. At the foot of the mountain is the rustic but not uncomfortable establishment of Sallires-les-Bains; ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... when he was a little older, came more clay; and poured itself upon him here, at the side; and he has laid crystal over that, and lived on, in his purity. Then the clay came on at his angles, and tried to cover them, and round them away; but upon that he threw out buttress-crystals at his angles, all as true to his own central line as chapels round a cathedral apse; and clustered them round the clay; and conquered it again. At last the clay came on at his summit, and tried to blunt his summit; but he could not endure ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... Normandy, the only catholic provinces which I have yet visited; so that, if the taste of the inhabitants is to be estimated by the decoration of the religious buildings, this faculty must be rated very low indeed. The exterior of the church is as richly ornamented as the inside; and not a buttress, arch, or canopy is without the remains of crumbled carving, worn by time, or disfigured by the ruder hand of calvinistic or revolutionary violence. Tradition refers the erection of this edifice to the English. From the certainty with which a date ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... outstanding evidence of new ideas in regard to caste is furnished by the Hindu revivalists who, under the leading of Mrs. Annie Besant and the Theosophists, have established the Hindu College, Benares, as a buttress of Hinduism. From the Text-book of Hindu Religion prepared for the College, we learn that these representatives and champions of orthodoxy defend caste only to the extent of the ancient fourfold division of society into brahmans, rulers, ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... Ta-kwan-hsien a few natural obstacles occur, although the road is always high up on the hill-sides. I crossed a miserable suspension bridge of two spans. The southern span is about thirty feet, the northern span eighty feet; the center is supported by a buttress of splendid blocks of squared stone, resting on the rock in the bed of the river, one side being considerably worn away by the action of the water. The longer span was hung very slack, the woodwork forming ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... build. His eyes, his alien, star-gazing eyes, were blue and uncannily clear under their dark and delicate brows. He had the face of a Celt, with high cheek-bones, and a short high nose; the bone between the nostrils, slightly prominent like a buttress, saved the bridge of it from the final droop. He had the wide mouth of a Celt, long-lipped, but beautifully cut. His thick hair, his moustache, his close-clipped, pointed beard, were dark and dry. His face ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... cord over the buttress, there," cried one of the nobles; "give the noose mouth enough to tell its own tale, and I will answer ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... over the roofs filled with flowers, warbling, and sunlight, with the same pleasure; but to-day it stops at the end of a buttress which separates our house ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... dimmed his eyes, and made the group grow indistinct, as though the mist had already gathered between him and them. Then he quickened his steps, and the people of Mont St. Michel lost sight of him behind a great buttress of ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... intellectual activity of Europe is at its height, she still groans under the unrestricted despotism of an autocrat. Here the effects of progress that obtain elsewhere seem inverted. Such advance as is made in civilization and knowledge is used to buttress imperial tyranny and the knout is wielded more cruelly than ever before. We behold liberal institutions overthrown and a whole people held in bondage worse than slavery. We hear of families torn asunder, of innocent men condemned ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... came to take a view of their work of measurement, they soon found that in politics the most fallacious of all things was geometrical demonstration. They had then recourse to another basis (or rather buttress) to support the building, which tottered on that false foundation. It was evident that the goodness of the soil, the number of the people, their wealth, and the largeness of their contribution, made such infinite variations between square and square as to render mensuration ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of St. Malo—thrust out like a buttress into the sea, strange and grim of aspect, breathing war front its walls and battlements of ragged stone, a stronghold of privateers, the home of a race whose intractable and defiant independence neither time nor change has ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Civilizational Value of Prostitution.—The moral argument for prostitution is based on the belief that our marriage system is so infinitely precious that an institution which serves as its buttress must be kept in existence, however ugly or otherwise objectionable it may in itself be. There is, however, another argument in support of prostitution which scarcely receives the emphasis it deserves. I refer ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... could scarcely believe in their departure from Berberah with sound skins. [25] Coasting with a light breeze, early after noon on the next day we arrived at Siyaro, a noted watering-place for shipping, about nineteen miles east of the emporium. The roadstead is open to the north, but a bluff buttress of limestone rock defends it from the north-east gales. Upon a barren strip of sand lies the material of the town; two houses of stone and mud, one yet unfinished, the other completed about thirty years ago by ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... portals, though locked and barred, seemed unguarded; above, the many domes and glittering crescents pierced heaven; while the old walls, survivors of ages, with ivy-crowned tower and weed-tangled buttress, stood as rocks in an uninhabited waste. From within the city neither shout nor cry, nor aught except the casual howling of a dog, broke the noon-day stillness. Even our soldiers were awed to silence; the music paused; the clang of arms was hushed. Each man asked his fellow in whispers, the meaning ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... slenderness of the tower, and its own height above the eye. The first stage is panelled so as not to present too great a contrast to the octagon, and the next is also panelled and has narrow canopied slits on alternate sides, with four thin buttress-like projections on each face. These provide the slight entasis to the outline which is found in so many spires, as it is in classic columns, and is designed to correct the appearance of hollowness which would occur in so long a straight line. The upper two-thirds of the spire has ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... abreast. So smooth and perpendicular are the supporting walls that scarcely a shrub or tuft of grass has grown upon the aqueduct in all these years. And yet the huge fabric is strengthened by no buttress, has needed no repair. This lightness of structure, combined with such prodigious durability, produces the strongest sense of science and self-reliant power in the men who designed it. None but Romans could have built such a monument, and have set ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... him, dressed in the white uniform of a Russian, standing by a buttress of the wall. His uniform had a faint yellowish colour, as if it had been laid away for many years against this evening's dance; the light caught his knees and long boots, but the shadow of the buttress crept over his face, turned from her towards a further door. On his ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... Tr. 15) contains several small sketches of sections and exterior views of the Dome; some of them show buttress-walls shaped as inverted arches. Respecting these Leonardo ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... then, the glad chaunt Of the marriage,—first go the young maidens, next, she whom we vaunt As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling.—And then, the great march Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an arch Naught can break; who shall harm them, our friends? Then, the chorus intoned As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned. But I stopped here: for here ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... draws his courage from wine! the same ALAS for the man whose health is its buttress! the touch of a pin on this or that spot of his mortal house, will change him from a leader of armies, or a hunter of tigers in the jungle, to one who shudders at a centipede! That courage also which is mere insensibility crumbles at once before any ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... sure-foot along that little ledge,' said Nance, pointing as she spoke; 'then out through the breach and down by yonder buttress. It is easier coming back, of course, because you see where you are going. From the buttress foot a sheep-walk goes along the scarp—see, you can follow it from here in the dry grass. And now, sir,' she added, with a touch of womanly pity, 'I ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... precipices, interrupted with patches of fiery colour the deep, rich, transparent gloom of the shadows. It was an enchanted voyage until we reached the mouth of the Aurlands Fjord, divided from that of Gudvangen by a single rocky buttress 1000 feet high. Beyond this point the watery channel is much broader, and the shores diminish in grandeur as they approach the Sogne Fjord, of which this ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... at random, not knowing what to do. He had lost heavily of late both in grain and cheese, and the lawsuit with Gibson had crippled him. It was well for him that property in Barbie had increased in value; the House with the Green Shutters was to prove the buttress of his fortune. Already he had borrowed considerably upon that security; he was now dressing to go ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses. This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, buttress, Nor coin of vantage, but this bird hath made His pendent bed, and procreant cradle: where they Most breed and haunt, I have observed, the air ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... therefore, it has been frequently said that the evidence of causation between neurosis and psychosis is recognized causation. Lastly, to fortify this hypothesis, materialists point to the doctrine of the conservation of energy, which is supplied by the science of physics as a sort of buttress in this matter to the teachings of physiology. For, as this doctrine compels us to believe that the chain of physical causation involved in cerebral processes can nowhere be broken or deflected ab extra, we are compelled to believe that the mental processes, which are ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... tradition throughout Egypt to shun the spot, though few know why they must. A curse is laid upon the place. An unfaithful wife whom the priests denied repose with her ancestors is entombed yonder." He pointed toward an angle between an outstanding buttress and the limestone wall. "Her soul haunts him who comes here with the plea that her mummy be removed to On, where she dwelt in life, and laid with the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... to call it by that name, on occasion? for in these sad Manuscripts of ours the names alternate—is a fine, fertile, useful and beautiful Country. It leans sloping, as we hinted, to the East and to the North; a long curved buttress of Mountains ("RIESENGEBIRGE, Giant Mountains," is their best-known name in foreign countries) holding it up on the South and West sides. This Giant-Mountain Range,—which is a kind of continuation of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... plan for taking that closet behind my room on the stair into the room itself. In preparation, I had a wall built across the middle of the closet, so as to divide it and make two recesses of it, and act also as a buttress to the weakened wall. Then your aunt died, and I hadn't the heart to open the recesses or do anything more in the matter. So one half of the closet was cut off, and remained inaccessible. But there had been left in it an old bureau, containing ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... this large building, have long ago been removed. Besides the sepulchral monuments and inscriptions already mentioned we shall note the epitaphs of Erwin of Steinbach, of Husa his wife, and of his son John, at the lower part of the buttress in the little yard behind Saint John's chapel[1]; also the inscription to the memory of Conrad Guertler, who bequeathed to the chapter of the Cathedral his house, a large building in the rue du Dome; this inscription is opposite that of Geiler ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... the office of Governor of Gelderland, to which he had been elected by the estates of that province on the 11th of March. That important bulwark of Holland, Zealand, and Utrecht on the one side, and of Groningen and Friesland on the other—the main buttress, in short, of the nascent republic, was now in hands which would defend ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... by way of Poland Hill, looking down over the Sedgemoor plain, Chedzoy Church, on whose southern buttress the battle axes were sharpened, and Weston Zoyland, with its ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... eat, and were absolutely ignorant of the country we were to traverse. From our observations on the previous days, we had decided to strike out on a northeast course, over the gentle slope, until we struck the rocky ridges on the southeast buttress of the dome. On its projecting rocks, which extended nearer to the summit than those of any other part of the mountain, we could avoid the slippery, precipitous snow-beds that stretched far down the mountain at this time ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... evening, while he himself took post behind. As soon as it was dark he lay down by the wall close to the entrance at which the servitors generally passed in and out. The moon was up but was still young, and the back of the palace lay in deep shadow; a projecting buttress screened him to a great extent from view, while by peeping round the corner he could watch those who came out and see them as they passed from the shadow of the building into the comparatively light ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... breakfast—no eggs," quoth the leader of the strange folk, "and a slice of toast without butter." "And for thy drink"—("What?" gasped Brother John)—"one dessert-spoonful of whisky, with a pint of the water of Apollinaris at luncheon and dinner. No more!" At this Brother John fainted, falling like a great buttress of a hill, such ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... climb again, followed the crest of the ridge where it swept upward to buttress the side of the mountain. The going was not difficult. The trees and shrubs grew thinner here, and provided clear spaces for him to wind among them. The stones, at first a problem to his bare feet, bothered him less and less until he forgot them. He felt no physical ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... we entered a suspicious-looking place. On the right was a stony buttress, along whose base the stream, when there is one, flows; and to this depression was our road limited by the rocks and thorn-trees, which filled the other half of the channel. The left side was a precipice, grim and barren, but not so abrupt as its brother. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the milder members of the tribe living in the vicinity of Compostela. On one occasion I had made arrangements to meet a Maggugan warrior chief at an appointed trysting place in the forest. Upon arriving at the spot, one of my companions beat the buttress of a tree as a signal that we had arrived, but it was more than an hour before our Maggugan friends made their appearance. Upon being questioned as to the delay, they informed us that they had circled around at a considerable ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... Buttress Foot, or Low Ringbone Definition Symptoms and Diagnosis Pathological Anatomy Treatment Recorded Cases of ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... to laws which, in the remotest degree, could be used or manipulated to swell profits or to buttress property, Astor and his class were untiring and vociferous in demanding their strict enforcement. Successfully ignoring or circumventing laws objectionable to them, they, at the same time, insisted upon the passage and ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... otherwise in good preservation, which accounted for his distended and sleepy state. One day, just after Evensong, when the people were coming out of church, one of the boys heard a hiss, and saw a cobra in the angle of a buttress. The long bamboo was again equal to ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... a sort of flying buttress which sprung sideways, with a wide span, across the angle the tower made with the hall, from an embrasure of the battlement of the hall to the outer corner of the tower, itself more solidly buttressed. I think it must have been made to resist the outward pressure of the roof of ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... terrace-wise upon the slope of Monte Caprino, where goats were pastured in the middle ages; while the few fine trees in the grounds of the Caffarelli palace, the present German embassy, set some greenery above the ancient Tarpeian rock now scarcely to be found, lost, hidden as it is, by buttress walls. Yet this was the Mount of the Capitol, the most glorious of the seven hills, with its citadel and its temple, the temple to which universal dominion was promised, the St. Peter's of pagan Rome; this indeed was the hill—steep on the side of the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... "Mine eyes have often striven to pierce those stone walls, and see him lying there in that narrow chamber, or forcing his way upwards, to catch a glimpse of the blue sky above him. When I have seen the swallows settle on the old buttress, or the thin grass growing between the stones waving there, I have thought ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... semicircular pilasters or gigantic reeds to which we have already alluded as strongly characteristic of Chaldaean architecture, and one of the most certain signs of its origin. The chevrons, the spiral lines and lozenges of the coloured decoration with which the semi-columns, and the salient buttress by which they are divided into two groups, are covered, should be curiously noticed. The ornament varies with each structural division. Loftus, however, was chiefly struck by the process used to ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... often wander up from their shaggy and austere plains in quest of this aromatic forage. But this lofty mountainside barren had yet another attraction for the caribou. Close at its edge, just where a granite buttress fell away steeply toward the lake, a tiny, almost imperceptible spring, stained with iron and pungent with salt, trickled out from among the roots of a dense, low thicket. Past the bare spot made by ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... cobblers' stalls, are plastered, as it were, against the Gothic projections and abutments, so that it seemed as if the traders had occupied with nests, bearing the same proportion to the building, every buttress and coign of vantage, as the martlett did in Macbeth's Castle. Of later years these booths have degenerated into mere toy-shops, where the little loiterers chiefly interested in such wares are tempted to linger, enchanted by the rich display of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... its western side," says a sentimental voyager long ago, "where it faces the black buttress of Albemarle. I walked beneath groves of trees—not very lofty, and not palm trees, or orange trees, or peach trees, to be sure—but, for all that, after long sea-faring, very beautiful to walk under, even though they supplied no fruit. And here, in calm spaces at the heads of glades, and on ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... little party of six Englishmen with six Oberland guides, who left the inn at 3 A.M. on July 20, 1862, were not, perhaps, in a specially poetical mood. Yet as the sun rose while we were climbing the huge buttress of the Moench, the dullest of us—I refer, of course, to myself—felt something of the spirit of the scenery. The day was cloudless, and a vast inverted cone of dazzling rays suddenly struck upward into the sky through ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... the course which the Plutocrats have traversed. They have destroyed individual liberty; they have entrenched themselves in our halls of legislature by bribery; our executives are their puppets; our courts are their final buttress. To reclaim the rights of the people we must reach the powers in control; the actual men who engineer the scheme of public loot. These men have sacrificed human lives to attain their ascendency. We must demand, we must enforce ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... colouring to a shade) appealed to an eye which had never looked longer than necessary in the glass. Lawn-tennis courts were marked out snowily on a shaven lawn; the only eyesore the good man encountered was poor Pocket's snob-wickets painted on a buttress in the back premises; his own belching blast-furnaces, corroding and defiling acres and acres within a few hundred yards of his garden wall, were but another form of beauty to the sturdy Briton who ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... rectangle of lamplight fell from the sitting room window over a brick path and ground tramped bare of grass; a clinking of dishes sounded in the kitchen. The sod was damp, and perhaps eight feet below the wooden buttress of the land ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... brink of the Curral. It is a huge valley, or rather crater, of immense depth, enclosed on all sides by a range of magnificent mountain precipices, the sides and summit of which are broken in every variety of buttress or pinnacle—now black and craggy and beetling—at other times spread with the richest green turf, and scattered with a profusion of the evergreen forest-trees, indigenous to the island; while far below, in the midst of all these horrors, smiles a fairy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... the trail curved sharply around a rocky buttress, which hid the remainder of it from view. In his eagerness to see what lay beyond, Stratton did not mount but led his horse over the short stretch of level rock. But as he turned the corner, he caught his breath and jerked back ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... beyond, Nature seems, as she often does, to have made a study for some larger design. She delights in this—a sketch within a sketch—a dream within a dream. Wherever we see it, the lines of the great buttress in the fragment of stone, the hues of the waterfall, copied in the flowers that star its bordering mosses, we are delighted; for all the lineaments become fluent, and we mould the scene in congenial ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... the brush of a perfumed sleeve,—of the flitting color in her clear cheek,—of a subtile magic, interweaving blush, perfume, picture, and thought of Alice. Dainty pinnacle and massive arch and carved buttress were photographed on his brain, and arch and pinnacle and buttress could be notched out in bone by his poor skill,—and if he died, some kindly comrade should carry it to Alice, and it should tell her what he had left unsaid,—and if he lived, he would take it to her himself, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... a narrow, thread-like road, which has barely room to draw itself along between the rocky bank of the River Inn, and the base of a frowning buttress of the Solstein, which towers many hundred feet perpendicularly above you. You throw your head far back and look up; and there you have a vision of a plumed hunter, lofty and chivalrous in his bearing, ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... be earlier. The hours dragged interminably. Louis walked the stone buttress where the flag which he had raised in signal to Lapas flapped and whipped against its staff. At last his binoculars, fixed on the rock, caught the dip of the colors there. With a great sigh of relief the ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... mouldering walls Of the vast theatre, like the deep roar Of distant waves, or the tumultuous rush Of multitudes: the lichen creeps along Each yawning crevice, and the wild-flower hangs Its long festoons around each crumbling stone. The window's arch and massive buttress glow With time's deep tints, whilst cypress shadows wave On high, and spread a melancholy gloom. Silent forever is the voice Of Tragedy and Eloquence. In climes Far distant, and beneath a cloudy sky, The echo of their harps is heard; but all ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... curve of a flying buttress, or the apertures of a pierced parapet, gay bits of this yellow world were caught and framed. The sea lay beneath like a quiet carpet; and over this carpet ships and sloops swam with easy gliding motion, with sails and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... made an end of the rebellion, and was establishing the best government ever known in that region, and giving promise to the nation of order, peace, and prosperity, word was brought us, in the moment of our deepest affliction, that the French Emperor, moved by a desire to erect in North America a buttress for imperialism, would transform the republic of Mexico into a secundo-geniture for the house of Hapsburg. America might complain; she could not then interpose, and delay seemed justifiable. It was seen that Mexico could ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... hiding in the hollows, waiting for the others to catch up," whereupon Nolan, looking daggers, had called him a scarehead, and Geordie shouted for Cawker's glass. It was sent up the stairway in less than a minute and focussed on Porphyry Point, a massive buttress overhanging the farther valley. For long seconds Geordie steadied the binocular against the staff and peered silently through. At last he said: "Some riders and two or three livery-rigs are coming, but I see no men afoot." Then, turning over his shoulder to Cawker, standing in the midst of his ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... here and there jutted boldly forth, she fell to the ground. Though much bruised, her senses did not leave her; she uttered no cry; nay, she hailed the accident that had led her to something like a screen; and creeping close up to the angle formed by the buttress, so that on one side at least she was sheltered from view, she gathered her slight and small form into its smallest compass, and breathlessly awaited ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... involuntarily, and for a moment the architect fancied that he discerned the figure of a man standing in the shadow of the end buttress. But, as he took a few steps nearer, he saw that he had been deceived by a shadow, and ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... selfishness that were soon to become dominant in Charles's Court. Such were Ormonde, now Lord Steward, whose loyalty was as untarnished as his position was above the assaults of slander and envy, and whose unbroken friendship was a powerful buttress to Hyde, and warded off the slights to which his own more humble birth might have subjected him. Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, represented the very best type of courtier of an older generation, and his acceptance of the post of Lord High Treasurer gave security ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... remain, continue, abide; support, prop, buttress, brace, uphold, strengthen; delay, obstruct, hinder, restrain, appease, withhold, forbear, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... where this light came from, and seeing his way more clearly now, he hastened on, and soon arrived at the mouth of a large cave, which, inside, was as bright as day. He ventured farther forward and peered round a buttress of rock; and there, in the centre of the cave, a strange sight met his eyes. A gigantic bird was standing there, getting ready to fly through the farther opening overlooking the valley. It was stretching its neck and flapping its wings; ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... keep the donkey from being bewitched. He knows who has had money and how much, having reasoned out the matter by inference. He could sell himself to-morrow, but is incorruptible, and will remain a strong rock to the faith, will still buttress up the true hierarchy of heaven. He cannot be bought, and this is strange, for he ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... reading the inscription upon an old headstone, for I thought everybody was gone; when I heard a door open, and shut again before I could turn. I saw at once that it must have been a little door in the tower, almost concealed from where I stood by a deep buttress. I had never seen the door open, and I had never inquired anything about it, supposing it ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... plot of ground Clips a ruin'd chapel round, Buttress'd with a grassy mound; Where Day and Night and Day go by, And bring no touch of ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... I decided at last upon disembarking Jarl and Samoa, to seek out and conciliate the natives. So, landing them upon a jutting buttress of coral, whence they waded to the shore; I pushed off with Yillah into the water beyond, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... and a movement of troops in the Pamirs. Yet unknown to both of them the something else had already happened, though its consequences were not yet to be foreseen. A storm had delayed them for a day in a hut upon the Meije. They went out of the hut. The sky had cleared; and in the sunset the steep buttress of the Promontoire ran sharply up to the Great Wall; above the wall the small square patch of ice sloped to the base of the Grand Pic and beyond the deep gap behind that pinnacle the long serrated ridge ran out to the right, rising and falling, to ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... the House, and flashed a glance towards Lord Faramond, who, turned round on the Treasury Bench, was looking up at him. He began slowly to pit against his former startling admissions the testimony of his few principles, and to buttress them on every side with apposite observations, naive, pungent. Presently there came a poignant edge to his trailing tones. After giving the subject new points of view, showing him to have studied Whitechapel as well as Kicking ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... directly into the cloister. It is a little library or charter-house. The arrangement is almost too clever for gravity, as is the case with more than one arrangement in the Merveille. From the outside one can see that at this corner the architect had to provide a heavy buttress against a double strain, and he built up from the rock below a square corner tower as support, into which he worked a spiral staircase leading from the cellar up to the cloisters. Just above the level of the great hall he managed to construct this little room, a gem. The place was near and ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... visit it by the pale moonlight. For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray: When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruin'd central tower; When buttress and buttress alternately Seem framed of ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... industry, the Skelligs can be reached in favourable weather. Standing high above the green billows that encircle them with collars of white foam, they repay every trouble taken to inspect them. The Little Skellig, a fantastic rock, with a great arch like a flying buttress under which for centuries the seas have churned deep, is almost inaccessible. It is a great breeding ground for gannet, with which, during the breeding season, its sides are white as ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... The wind is rising; but the boughs Rise not and fall not with the wind That through their foliage sobs and soughs; Only the cloudy rack behind, Drifting onward, wild and ragged, Gives to each spire and buttress jagged A seeming motion undefined. Below on the square, an armed knight, Still as a statue and as white, Sits on his steed, and the moonbeams quiver Upon the points of his armor bright As on the ripples of a river. He lifts the visor from his cheek, And beckons, ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the old Indian agreed, and dropped back to his respectful position in his master's rear. As they topped the ridge that formed the northern buttress of the San Gregorio, Pablo rode to the left and started down the hill through a draw covered with a thick growth of laurel, purple lilac, a few madone trees and an occasional oak. He knew that a big, five-point buck had its habitat ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... a score of doves were cooing as we filed into the church. There were bas-reliefs of cherubim and seraphim over the doorway, fat, distorted bodies with wings a-wry, yet with a celestial vision showing through the crude workmanship. A loop-holed buttress on either side of the facade spoke of the days when the forethought of the builders planned for defence in case a reaction of paganism caused the congregation ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... to Explain Mechanical Forms. Defining Segment and Sector. Arcade, Arch, Buttress, Flying Buttress, Chamfer, Cotter, Crenelated, Crosses, Curb Roof, Cupola, Crown Post, Corbels, Dormer, Dowel, Drip, Detent, Extrados, Engrailed, Facet, Fret, Fretwork, Frontal, Frustrums, Fylfot, Gambrel Roof, Gargoyle, Gudgeon, Guilloche. Half Timbered, Hammer Beam, ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... but it has features of peculiar interest. Here, in some former time, there has been a landslip, a large portion of the cliff at its highest part falling below and forming a sloping mass a chalky soil mingled with huge fragments of rock, which lies like a buttress against the vertical precipice and seems to lend it support. The fall must have occurred a very long time back, as the vegetation that overspreads the rude slope—hawthorn, furze, and ivy—has an ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... an upright wall, to act in the direction of gravity, or else to give it permanent means of resistance in the direction opposite to that in which a disturbing force may act. Thus when an arch is built to bear against an upright wall, a buttress or other counterfort is applied in a direction opposed to the pressure of the arch. In like manner the inclined roof of a building spanning from wall to wall tends to thrust out the walls, and hence a tie is applied to hold the opposite sides of the roof together at its base, where alone a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... treasurer of Amphalula, vice-president of Hooligan Gulch and Red Water, secretary of Horse's Neck, Holy Jo, Gargoyle Extension, Cowhide Number Five, Consolidated Bimetallic, Nevada Mastodon, Leaping Frog, Orelady Mine, Why Marry and Sol's Cliff Buttress, ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... towers connected with such churches are amongst the earliest instances of Norman work which survive; they are simple in design, square on plan, and are carried up, without break or buttress, to the parapet, where they are finished with a gable roof, forming the saddle-back arrangement still preserved in the Muthill Tower.[14] The break in the height is formed by string courses, which mark the unequal stories. A small wheel-stair usually leads to the top, and the doorway ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story |
