"Buttressed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feet. The vertical line of the buttresses measures in round numbers one hundred feet. To make walls of that height and length stand up at all was no easy matter, as Robert de Torigny had shown; and so the architect buttressed them from bottom to top with twelve long buttresses against the thrust of the interior arches, and three more, bearing against the interior walls. This gives, on the north front, fifteen strong vertical lines in a space of two hundred ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... ripeness, on the pavement there A wicker basket gapes and overflows Spilling out cool, blue plums. The market glows, And flaunts, and clatters in its busy care. A stately minster at the northern side Lifts its twin spires to the distant sky, Pinnacled, carved and buttressed; through the wide Arched doorway peals an organ, suddenly — Crashing, triumphant in its pregnant tide, Quenching the ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... the tops of which lay Burbage Moor, where the hawking was to be held. On the south, over the valley, stood out the modest hall and buttery (as, indeed, they stand to this day), with a door between them, well buttressed in two places upon the falling ground, in one by a chimney, in the other by a slope of masonry; and behind these buildings stood the rest of the court, the stables, the wash-house, the bake-house and such like, below; and, above, the sleeping rooms for the family and the servants. ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... when they came to Blentz. The castle lay far up on the side of a steep hill above the town. It was an ancient pile, but had been maintained in an excellent state of repair. As Barney Custer looked up at the grim towers and mighty, buttressed walls his heart sank. It had taken the mad king ten years to make his escape from ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was himself the vital evidence of the resurrection which he taught. Against the assaults of doubt his unique teachings are buttressed forevermore by his own return from the land of silence. In a short week after his words to Martha at Bethany he had become, through his own rare experience, the resurrection and the life. Not the dead Buddha, nor the departed Zoroaster, nor ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... required to take an oath without reservations. She showed no temper this time. She considered herself well buttressed by the proces verbal compromise which Cauchon was so anxious to repudiate and creep out of; so she merely refused, distinctly and decidedly; and added, in a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... little towards the street; its roof sloped a little to one side, like the cap over the left ear of a Tugendbund student; its lines wanted accuracy; but after all, it stood firm, thanks to an old elm which buttressed it in front, and which often in spring sent its young sprays ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... intervene! On the whole, Professor Teufelsdrockh, is not a cultivated writer. Of his sentences perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes, buttressed up by props (of parentheses and dashes), and ever with this or the other tagrag hanging from them; a few even sprawl out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered. Nevertheless, in almost his very worst moods, there lies in him a singular attraction. ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... assuredly, in large measure, sincere, believing in itself, and believed: a goodly system, moreover, in aspect; gorgeous, harmonious, mysterious;—a thing which had either to be obeyed or combated, but could not be scorned. A religion towering over all the city—many-buttressed—luminous in marble stateliness, as the dome of our Lady of Safety[125] shines over the sea; many-voiced also, giving, over all the eastern seas, to the sentinel his watchword, to the soldier his war-cry; and, on the lips of all who died for Venice, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... under a hanging bulb, and Aubrey was amazed at the transformation. The apparently genial apothecary of cigar stand and soda fountain was gone. He saw instead a heavy, cruel, jowlish face, with eyelids hooded down over the eyes, and a square thrusting chin buttressed on a mass of jaw and suetty cheek that glistened with an oily shimmer. The jaw quivered a little as though with some intense suppressed emotion. The man was completely absorbed in his task. The thick lower lip lapped upward over the ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... wet cushion round about, and jutted over the edges of the pool like a floating shelf. Graceful, water-loving ferns swayed to and fro. Above, the great conifers spread their murmuring branches, dimming the light, and keeping out the heat; their brown boles sprang from the ground like buttressed columns. On the barren mountain-side beyond the heat was oppressive. It was small wonder that Bruin should have sought the spot to cool his gross carcass in the fresh ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... sank into silence, and was relieved when I saw the grey, buttressed gables of Startington Hall appear below us grouped ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... the staircase to the dormitory. The small cloister is at W, where were the carols or cells of the scribes, with the library (P) over, reached by a turret staircase. At R we see a portion of the infirmary. The whole precinct is surrounded by a strong buttressed wall ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... station for our supply of spavined air-planes that had already done their bit on the Western Front; of the improvement of our ferocious-looking armored train, with its coal-car mounted naval guns, buttressed with sand bags and preceded by a similar car bristling with machine guns and Lewis automatics in the hands of a motley crew of Polish gunners and Russki gunners and a British sergeant or two. This armored train was under the command of the blue-coated, ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... followed a trodden path winding south through the gorse. Then a dip in the moorland hid the semaphore and at the same moment brought a house into full view—a large, solid structure of dark stone, heavily Romanesque, walled in by an ancient buttressed barrier, above which I could see the tree-tops of ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... art has nothing like the scope and freedom of Hilda's and mine. In painting there is no similar objection to the representation of brief snatches of time,—perhaps because a story can be so much more fully told in picture, and buttressed about with circumstances that give it an epoch. For instance, a painter never would have sent down yonder Faun out of his far antiquity, lonely and desolate, with no companion to keep his ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of Lords and scarcely less powerful in the House of Commons. In France it was a bureaucracy so securely protected by law and custom that nothing short of a political cataclysm could shake it. In Germany and Italy it was an aristocracy buttressed by laws cunningly designed to nullify the numerical superiority of the mob, and by a monarchical theory that set up a heavy ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... scant ten minutes of talk with a most uninteresting person, whose sole claim to notice seemed to be that he had gone and fenced the wrong water hole over back of Horsefly Mountain, where we have a summer range. The talk was quick and pointed and buttressed with a blue-print map, and the too-hasty fencer was left helpless after a pitiful essay at quibbling. We rode off saying that he could do just as he liked about sending someone over right away to take that fence down, because we had already took ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... which can not stand unless buttressed by contradictions is built upon the sand. The profoundest faith is faith in the unity of truth. If there is found any conflict in the results of a right reason, no appeal to practical interests, or traditionary ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the governments only, however, who, after having for over four years colored and refracted the truth, now continued to twist and invent "facts." The newspapers, with some honorable exceptions, buttressed them up and even outstripped them. Plausible unveracity thus became a patriotic accomplishment and a recognized element of politics. Parties and states employed it freely. Fiction received the hall-mark of truth and fancies were current as facts. Public men who had solemnly hazarded ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... faces in clouds. The sun was already setting when we rode into Santa Maria Tule, and we went at once to see the famous cypress tree, which no one in the party, save myself, had seen. It seems now to be a single tree, but was perhaps, originally, three; at present it displays a single, vast trunk, buttressed with heavy irregular projecting columns. So irregular is this enormous mass that no two persons taking its girth exactly agree. We measured it four feet above the ground and made the circumference one hundred and sixty feet. The mass of delicate green ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... that flowed behind it. The stone was gray, tinged with red, and the whole rock, covering an acre or so of ground, had been worn or hewn down to form a vast platform which stood about a dozen feet above the surrounding green level. The sloping and buttressed sides of the platform were clothed with ivy, wild shrubs, and various flowering plants. Broad, shallow steps led up to the house, which was all of the same material—reddish-gray stone; and the main entrance was beneath a lofty portico, the sculptured entablature of which was supported ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... lowered it to his side again, lest she should perceive its tremor. Thus a brief second, while the battle was fought within him, the bitter engagement between his desires and what he conceived to be the demands of his honour, never perceiving how far his honour was buttressed by implacable vindictiveness. Retreat, he conceived, was impossible without shame; and shame was to him an agony unthinkable. She asked too much. She could not understand what she was asking, else she would never be so unreasonable, so unjust. But also he saw that it would be futile to attempt ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... one of the strangest views of the castle is to be obtained. You may see it thrown up by a blaze of sunlight against the grassy heights behind that are all dark beneath the shadow of a cloud. The stone of the towers and heavily buttressed walls appears almost as white as the chalk which crops out in the form of cliffs along the river-side. An island crowded with willows that overhang the water partially hides the village of Le Petit-Andely, and close at hand above the steep slopes of grass that rise from ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... could thrive in the gloom. The statement of the struggle for existence was published here in plain figures, but it was not, as in our climate, a struggle against climate mainly, but an internecine war from over population. Now and again we passed among vast stems of buttressed trees, sometimes enormous in girth; and from their far-away summits hung great bush- ropes, some as straight as plumb lines, others coiled round, and intertwined among each other, until one could fancy one was looking on some mighty battle between armies of gigantic serpents, that ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... costume, readily obtained the requisite "permit of search." He then beckoned me to follow him towards a second door communicating from the dormitory with a smaller apartment beyond, whose sides, I observed on entering within, were buttressed from floor to ceiling with a series of diminutive square wooden chests, ranged along the walls on top of one another, like the deed boxes noticeable in the private office of a solicitor in large practice, and all numbered in similar fashion, seriatim, with large black ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... grey and ochre-streaked theatre of the Cigarrales were piled masses of buttressed wall that caught the orange sunset light on many tall plane surfaces rising into crenellations and square towers and domes and slate-capped spires above a litter of yellowish tile roofs that fell away in terraces from the highest points and sloped outside the walls ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... motive was buttressed by others more material and less disinterested. Until well into the seventeenth century, when much bitter experience had proved the contrary, America was still thought to be a land of wealth easily ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... exceeded; whose dainties are of putrid flesh, and are eaten up with disease; nevertheless, they are a tall, well-formed, good-looking race, and not wanting in ingenuity. Their houses are well formed of logs of small trees; buttressed up internally, frequently above seventy feet long and fifteen high, but, unlike those of the coast, the roof is of bark: their winter habitations are smaller, and often covered over with grass and earth: some even dwell in excavations of the ground, which have only an aperture ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... than that! because in bleak solitary pondering moments, there stood up, like a massive buttressed crag, a duty, not born of whispered secrets or of relations, however delicate and awestruck, with other hearts, but a stern uncompromising thing, that seemed a relation with something quite apart from man, a Power swift and vehement ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... represents true arch building. It requires no scaffolding in building and it exerts no outward thrust. In the ordinary keystone arch used by builders, a, temporary structure must be erected to hold the walls up until the keystone is fitted in position, and the base must be buttressed against an outward thrust. The Eskimo does not have to consider these points. There is no outward thrust, and the top keystone is not necessary to hold the structure up. It is doubtful whether such an arch could be built of brick ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... exclaimed Donal. "Must even the old titles of the country be buttressed into respectability with money? Away in quiet places, reading old history books, we peasants are accustomed to think differently. If some millionaire money-lender were to buy the old keep of Arundel castle, you would respect him just as ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... of another, of these, the road, for a considerable distance, descends into this fortunate valley. The song of the waters and the familiar disarray of boulders gave us a strong sense of home, which the exotic foliage, the daft-like growth of the pandanus, the buttressed trunk of the banyan, the black pigs galloping in the bush, and the architecture of the native houses dissipated ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... accepted the situation with a cheerful and genuine acquiescence. The Master did not like me, but then, why should he? I was obviously not a model undergraduate. This acquiescence was soon buttressed by a reasoned if somewhat unfair estimate of the Master's character. I very soon began to hear plenty of Oxford gossip about him and his failings—chief among them being his supposed favouritism. He was very generally called a snob, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... which in places harder crystalline rocks are disclosed. Where the canyon is deepest its walls have been profoundly dissected. Lateral ravines have widened into immense amphitheaters, leaving between them long ridges of mountain height, buttressed and rebuttressed with flanking spurs and carved into majestic architectural forms. From the extremity of one of these promontories it is two miles or more across the gulf to the point of the one opposite, and the heads of the ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... gorgeous with their beauty, and the night deadly with their chill; the stately palm still rears, a hundred feet in air, its straight gray shaft and its head of verdure; the mora builds its solid, buttressed trunk, a pedestal for the eagle; the pine of the tropics holds out its myriad hands with water-cups for the rain and dews, where all the birds and the monkeys may drink their fill; the trees are garlanded ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... not sufficiently weighed at the time, was her spirit of incorrigible independence, and a light-mindedness which, on maturer judgment, he could almost term irreligious. His conduct was based on principle, all of it; built firmly into habit and buttressed by scriptural quotations. Hers seemed to him as inconsequent as the flight of a moth. Studying it, in his solemn conscientious way, in the light of his genealogical researches, he felt that all her uncertainties were accounted for, and that the error ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... and a gold watch. Possessions other than these he would regard with the amiable tolerance of a philosopher regarding a child with toys. So strongly acquisitive a nature must win the particular little battles which it is fitted to wage. When a conscienceless mind is buttressed by a pugnacious temperament then houses and land, and cattle and maidservants, and such-like, the small change ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... employed himself in writing long memorials on the situation and prospects of affairs, on which Macnaghten's marginal comments were brusque, and occasionally contemptuous. The resolute and clear-headed Pottinger, who, if the opportunity had been given him, might have buttressed and steadied Macnaghten, was relegated to provincial service. Throughout his career in Afghanistan the Envoy could not look for much advice from the successive commanders of the Cabul force, even if he had cared ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... hundred yards or so beyond, and it is as though you had entered some secret green door into a pastoral dream-land. Great trees, like rustling walls of verdure, enclose an apparently endless roadway of gleaming water, a narrow strip of tow-path keeping it company, buttressed in from the surrounding fields with thickets of every species of bush and luxurious undergrowth, and ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... seen bold projecting bluffs, with deep caverns beyond, into which the sea forced its way, rushing out again with a loud sound. On the summits of others appeared the towers and pinnacles, the ruined arches and buttressed walls, which had at first caught Willy's sight. It seemed, indeed, as if a large city of alabaster had once stood there, reduced to ruins by a convulsion of nature. Here appeared huge piles of buildings grouped ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... application of intelligence and labor to tillage enabled the Hispano-Arab provinces to support a dense population.[1270] These Saracen cultivators had come from the severest training school in all Eurasia. Where the arid tableland of Arabia is buttressed on the southwestern front by high coast ranges (6000 to 10,500 feet or 2000 to 3200 meters) is Yemen, rich in its soil of disintegrated trap rock, adequately watered by the dash of the southwest monsoons against its towering ridges; but practically the whole country is atilt. Consequently ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... hither and thither, seemingly at random, as of old, disclosing everywhere at their limits a sky-line of picturesque gables, and shut in by walls that often are almost canon-like in narrowness; while the heavy, buttressed doors and the small, high-placed windows speak of a time when every house partook of the nature of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... the northward of the island, and was every day sighted by the British lookout frigates. Jervis held grimly on, expecting the appearance of the seven ships of Admiral Man, who had been ordered to rejoin him. That officer, however, acting on his own responsibility, weakly buttressed by the opinion of a council of his captains, had returned to England contrary to his instructions. The commander-in-chief, ignorant of this step, was left in the sorely perplexing situation of having his fleet divided into two parts, each distinctly ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... story. The strange cart sliding and slipping over the stones which were as smooth as ice, and the colored house fronts and the palms and strange plants. The darkness made it all the more unreal— There was a governor's palace buttressed and guarded by sentinels in a strange uniform and queer little cafe's under vines—and terraces of cannon, and at last a funny, pathetic little casino. It was such a queer imitation of Aix and Monte Carlo— There were chasseurs and footmen in magnificent livery and stucco white walls ornamented ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... had taken up at Poplars Grove (so called from a group of poplars round a farmhouse in the centre of their position) extended across the Modder River and was buttressed on either side by well-marked hills, with intermittent kopjes between. With guns, trenches, rifle pits, and barbed wire a bull-headed general might have found it another Magersfontein. But it is only just to Lord Roberts's ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... church, dedicated to SS. Marcelliana and Materiana (of whom the latter may be the Welsh Madron), stands at a distance, above the cliffs west of the castle; it is a stern, bare building, magnificently placed, so fully exposed to the force of Atlantic gales that the very tombstones have been buttressed. A portion of the walls, in their rude simplicity, appears to be Saxon, but many orders are represented here, from the late Norman chancel-arch to the Decorated south transept and Perpendicular screen. There is a rugged circular font, and what is supposed to be a Roman milestone. ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... last far down between two widely separated hills shone, dim and blue and ghastly, with shining white streaks like silver streams—the Valley of Death. Then beyond it climbed the league-long red slope, merging into the iron-buttressed base of the Panamint Range, and here line on line, and bulge on bulge rose the bold benches, and on up the unscalable outcroppings of rock, like colossal ribs of the earth, on and up the steep slopes to where their density of blue black color began to thin out with streaks of white, ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... followed the Sofala down the river, winding about through the belt of the coast forest, between the buttressed shafts of the big trees, through the mangrove strip, and over the bar. The ship crossed it easily in broad daylight, piloted, as it happened, by Mr. Sterne, who took the watch from four to six, and then went below ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... in the morning to look at the works. They did not appear half so mysterious as when seen in the dark. The Tower of London had shrunk into quite a small buttressed building of brick and Nebuchadnezzar's Fiery Furnace dwindled considerably in size. The Medes and Persians, on the other hand, looked wilder and more "operatic" than at night. I think as a matter of fact ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... Creek up to its head, and called it "Big Ant-hill Creek," in consequence of numerous gigantic strangely buttressed structures of the white ant, which I had never seen of such a form, and of so ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... Ashiestiel, where he wrote "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," "Marmion," and "The Lady of the Lake." It was one of the prototypes of "Tully Veolan" in his Waverley. There was no abode in Scotland more quaint and curious than Traquair House, for it was turreted, walled, buttressed, windowed, and loopholed, all as in the days of old. Within were preserved many relics of the storied past and also of royalty. Here was the bed on which Queen Mary slept in 1566; here also the oaken cradle of the infant King James VI. The library was rich in valuable and rare books ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... three horizontal departments. Nearest the floor were the foodstuffs; biscuit tins buttressed the counter on every side; regiments of Grape-nuts, officered by an occasional Quaker Oat, stood in review order all round the lower shelves. On the counter little castles of tinned fruit were built, ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... he took the sea in his arms. He swam very quietly. The water buoyed him up, holding him closely clasped. He swam towards the white rocks of the headlands; they rose before him like beautiful buttressed gates, so glistening that he half expected to see fantail pigeons puffing like white irises in the niches, and white peacocks with dark green feet stepping down the terraces, trailing ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... that the murder had been overlooked, that the guilt of Hyde was patent to the world, and that the victim was a man high in public estimation. It was not only a crime, it had been a tragic folly. I think I was glad to know it; I think I was glad to have my better impulses thus buttressed and guarded by the terrors of the scaffold. Jekyll was now my city of refuge; let but Hyde peep out an instant, and the hands of all men would be raised to take and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thousand men, and it is with difficulty such a figure could be arrived at. Yet it is freely argued, and the theory will grow, that the causes of this latest insurrection should be sought among the labour problems of Dublin rather than in any national or patriotic sentiment, and this theory is buttressed by all the agile facts which such a theory ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... apartments in the building, two on a floor. The living room formed an L. Kitty's buttressed Gregor's. The elevator shaft was inside, facing the court; and the stair head was on the Gregor side of the elevator. The two entrances faced each other across ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... Powell, was not altogether comfortable in some of the swift places. As we cleared the high butte marking the end of Gray Canyon, we perceived, stretching away to the westward from it, a beautiful line of azure-blue cliffs, wonderfully buttressed and carved. At first these were called the Henry Cliffs, but afterward Henry was applied to some mountains and the cliffs were called Azure. At the camp we found another man, like the first a Mormon and, as we learned ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... fairy tales, had all been told, but 'Once upon a time' meant for him our own time, and the grave and gay magic of Prince Florizel in dingy London or sunny France. All this is but one of his provinces, however distinctive. Besides, how he buttressed his romance with apparent truth! Since Defoe, none had a better right to say: 'There was one thing I determined to do when I began this long story, and that was to tell out everything ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... the outside you can see three apses, and as you stand there, the midmost apse is the Norman building, that on your left is of the ninth century, and that on the right of the fourteenth. This Norman flat-buttressed and round-arched apse is directed to the east of summer, while the new church in the same place points to the east of winter, and is almost at right angles to the older one. The corbels outside, beneath the roof, are carved with the hairy-bearded faces of conquered Franks and Saxons, who ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... sometimes, of late, of the gross and senseless sort that leads a people into decadence. But in the past year we had learned to know and cherish that true pride which has its foundations in the rock of Duty, and is buttressed all about and crowned by that quality which St. Peter said ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... theory founded on such an absurdly weak basis has held its ground at all, has probably been that it buttressed up another obvious fallacy. A whole school of biographers of Cassiodorus and commentators on his works has persisted, in spite of the plainest evidence of his letters, in identifying him with his father, who bore office under Odovacar (476-493). To do this it was necessary ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... dwellers in the deep as Thompson Seton found in the lives of the hunted ashore, and with the keenness and vigor which characterized his famous book "The Cruise of The Cachalot" he has made a book which, being based upon personal observation, buttressed by scientific facts and decorated by imagination, is a storehouse of information—an ideal romance of deep sea folk and, as The Saturday Times-Review has said, ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... All Gothic styles of Architecture are huge. The Greek alone is grand." When a building is vast, it ought to look so; and the proportion is right which exhibits its vastness. Nature loses no size by her proportion; her buttressed mountains have more of Gothic ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... pronounce sentence, and not to give in evidence, or argue the case; in short, that it is a passive, not an active faculty. Thus there are persons who never run into any extravagance, because they are so buttressed up with the opinions of others on all sides, that they cannot lean much to one side or the other; they are so little moved with any kind of reasoning, that they remain at an equal distance from every extreme, and are never very far from the truth, because ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... deny that there's glimmerings of sense in you, Mr. Garvald. But how do you, a lad with no backing, propose to beat a strong monopoly buttressed by the whole stupidity and idleness of Virginia? You'll be stripped of your last farthing, and you'll be lucky if it ends there. Don't think I'm against you. I'm with you in your principles, but the job is too big ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... were up betimes. I was delighted with the wooded lanes and the wild flowers, the pure atmosphere, and the lights and shadows playing on the big foliage. We looked down on magnificent ravines among buttressed-shaped mountains. The fantastic Ghats rose up out of the plain before us. On clear days there was a lovely view of Bombay and the sea with the bright sun shining upon it. The scenery everywhere was grand and bold. We made several excursions in the neighbourhood, and I found the natives, ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... durance. The latter alternative seemed hopeless, for it seemed that the castle was built upon a lonely crag, its heavy walls, which dated from feudal times, imbedded in the solid rock. From her bedroom window, below the buttressed stone, were precipitous cliffs which fell sheer and straight to the rocky bed of the stream which rushed through the ravine two hundred meters below. But there would be other modes of egress, and so, feeling that her strength was now equal to ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... included in the building. This in general style and architecture conforms to the old castle, which, excepting the fragment mentioned by Dickens, has long since vanished. Near at hand is St. Mary's Church, rivaling in size and dignity many of the cathedrals, and its massive, buttressed walls and tall, graceful spire do justice to its magnificent site. From the eminence occupied by the church the Irish Sea is plainly visible, and in the distance the almost tropical Isle of Man rises abruptly out of the blue waters. ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... And all between is cleft And carved into a hundred curving miles Of unimagined architecture! Tombs, Temples, and colonnades are neighboured there By fortresses that Titans might defend, And amphitheatres where Gods might strive. Cathedrals, buttressed with unnumbered tiers Of ruddy rock, lift to the sapphire sky A single spire of marble pure as snow; And huge aerial palaces arise Like mountains built of unconsuming flame. Along the weathered walls, or standing deep In riven valleys ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... of this we came to a cypress swamp, and for several miles waded through water ankle-deep although on a bottom of firm sand. Hardly any undergrowth was here, but in all directions stood gray, dismal cypress trees, coarsely buttressed at the water's edge and tapering to slender tips. Draped in long streamers of Spanish moss which were delicately swayed by an almost imperceptible current of air, this was a ghoulish place—suggesting a rookery for shrouded spirits which perched ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... by semi-hexagonal pavilions. The main building line is withdrawn from the lower, or southerly front, to extend the facade on that side. The roof, square-domed, rests on three arms of a Greek cross, out of the centre of which rises a heavily buttressed cupola, carrying projecting pediments, with detached columns on its four faces. The foot of the flagstaff, which is to surmount the cupola, will be 160 ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... millions of living forms which fed on one another, and were continually replenished by the rolling billows. The wall of the reef opposed to the sea was a rough slope from the summit to the bottom, buttressed against the attacks of storms, and defended by chevaux-de-frise such as the Americans sank in the Hudson River in 1777. I ventured cautiously over the edge. A student of ancient tactics would have found there all the old defenses in coral—caltrops, and ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... be necessary to enlarge on the beauty of this spire of Norwich, as the dominant feature, seen from the south-east, rising above the curved sweep of the apse, and strongly buttressed by the south transept, it stands up, clearly defined against the western sky, and points upward, significant and symbolical at once of the ends and aspirations of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... mountains, summit over summit, snow-flecked or snow-clad, in boundless fields—a grim, lonely, desolate horror of rugged, barren peaks, of dark gray for the most part, cleft by deep shadows, and right in face of us one superb slab of very pale gray buttressed limestone, perhaps a good thousand feet high. I thought it the most savage mountain-scenery I had ever beheld, while the almost feminine and tender beauty of the parks which dotted these wild hills was something to bear ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... in the Middle East established at Camp David and by the Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel is being buttressed on two fronts: steady progress in the normalization of Egyptian-Israeli relations in many fields, and the commitment of both Egypt and Israel, with United States' assistance, to see through to successful conclusion the autonomy negotiations for ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Jimmy Carter • Jimmy Carter
... weight can only be resisted by the buttress acting as a prop; for a buttress on the side of, or towards the weight, would only add to its effect. This, then, forms the first great class of buttressed architecture; lateral thrusts, of roofing or arches, being met by props of masonry outside—the thrust from within, the prop without; or the crushing force of water on a ship's side met by ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... spires, clock-tower, and buttresses of which make its shape almost precisely that of a sugar-loaf. Before the portal of this church, which is dedicated to Saint-Leonard, is a small, irregular square, where the soil is held up by a buttressed wall, which forms a balustrade and communicates by a flight of steps with the Promenade. This public walk, like a second cornice, extends round the rock a few rods below the square of Saint-Leonard; it is a broad piece of ground planted with trees, and it joins the ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... Germany is buttressed by tariffs and commercial treaties on every side. Years ago I was told in Europe that the commercial treaties wrested from France in 1871 were of more value to Germany than the billion dollars of indemnity she took as her price to quit Paris. ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... and elaborate design embellished the Ionic temples of Asia Minor. In the temple of Apollo Didymus at Miletus, the plinths of the bases were made octagonal and panelled with rich scroll-carvings; and the piers which buttressed the interior faces of the cella-walls were given capitals of singular but elegant form, midway between the Ionic and Corinthian types. This temple belongs to the list of colossal edifices already referred to; its dimensions were 366 by 163 feet, making it the largest of them all. The ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... any importance, and becoming less and less of an economic center as the depopulation of the Woevre continued, Verdun lived for its garrison. A fortress since Roman days, the city could not escape its historic destiny. Remembering the citadel, the buttressed cathedral, the soldiery, and the military tradition, the visitor felt himself to be in a soldier's country strong with ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... and eaten out by its numerous subterranean streams, had fallen. The charge of dynamite exploded, as it happened, beneath that part which buttressed the entire structure, combining with the pressure of the glacier above, had thrown the mountain on its side, filling the lake with several million tons of ice and obliterating all traces of the chateau, which ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... Mr. Vandeford as he led the way to the left stage-box to which Mr. Rooney had summarily banished the author and the angel. He seated Miss Adair at the front edge of the box and took the chair close at her left. She was thus bulwarked and buttressed for any assault that might be hurled her way. It came ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... with perpetual moisture. Hardly a breath of wind stirs, and all plant life is forced as in a hothouse. The trees do not, indeed, grow as high as the Big Trees of California or the eucalyptus in Australia, but some of these in the Teesta Valley are 200 feet in height with buttressed trunks between 40 and 50 feet in girth, and give the same impression of stateliness and calm composure. With incredible effort and incessant struggle they have attained their present proud position, and the traveller most willingly accords them ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... my Lords, in olden days it happened often that a Rajput woman held and buttressed up her husband's throne, honoring him and Rajputana with her courage and her wit, and daring even in the arts of war, so now: this prince shall have his throne by woman's wit. Before another full moon rises he shall sit throned in the palace of his ancestors; and ye who love royal Rajasthan shall ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... of confidence. Alviro felt himself buttressed by the quiet strength of this vigorous youth. Broader shoulders than his had assumed ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... light displays Each buttressed mountain side, And softly shines through stately pines Where feudal castles hide, And every height grows dazzling white In the ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... Aaron held up in blessing over the Ghetto; I think you will agree with me that this is a very happy simile. Built in the severe style of transition from Romanesque to Gothic, of massive stone walls heavily buttressed, with steep red-tiled sloping roof, blackened with age and the grime of the walled-in Ghetto, this temple served not only as a place of worship for the sons of Israel, but also as a casket for the remains of a yet older one said ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... already pouring from the Scylla of Simpson, Crawford & Simpson's on Sixth Avenue—and its Charybdis of the Big Store—past the jungles of Altman's, Ehrich's and O'Neill's—to dash feebly upon the buttressed corner of Macy's, and then die away in refluent, diverted waves, lost in the fastnesses of McCreery's and Wanamaker's, ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... restaurant and not return with her father to Piceance Creek. The plan had originated with Mollie, but Tolliver had acquiesced in it eagerly. If June went home with him Houck might reappear on the horizon, but if she stayed at Bear Cat, buttressed by the support of the town, the man from Brown's Park would not dare ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... Thus buttressed and befriended on almost all sides, Diana drank her cup of pleasure. Once in an interval between two dances, as she passed on Oliver Marsham's arm, close to Lady Lucy, that lady put up her frail old hand, and gently touched Diana's. "Do ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... named as suitable persons for Chief Executive, the sage of Lindenwald was the party's recognised leader and prospective candidate. His sub-treasury scheme, accepted as wise and salutary, was still the cornerstone of the party, buttressed by a tariff for revenue and opposition to a ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Lycoming Creek claim is buttressed by such primary sources as the journals of Weiser, Bartram, Spangenberg, Ettwein, and Fithian, three of which were written before the location of the Tiadaghton became a subject of dispute. Since none of these men was seeking lands, they can be considered impartial observers. ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... Oliver had gone, according to Ewbank's account. It wound through groves of fir and pine until it came out on a plateau, in the midst of which, surrounded by a high irregular wall, towered at the angles and buttressed all along its length, stood Scarhaven Keep. And there, at the head of a path which evidently led up from the big house, stood Chatfield, angry and threatening. Beyond him, distributed at intervals about the other paths which converged on the plateau were other men, obviously ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... from Anne Boleyn's Gateway to the Great Hall, but before proceeding thither most visitors will wish to look into the Clock Court beyond. In this Court we get the greatest clashing of the two periods to which the Palace as we know it to-day belongs. On the left, or north side, is the buttressed wall of the Great Hall with above the pinnacles surmounted by the heraldical beasts already referred to; while on the right is a colonnade masking the Tudor buildings on that side—Wolsey's own apartments—in most incongruous fashion. ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... prince of them is seeking his own several ends? I will seek mine also—and that is honour. For honour I came hither; and if I may not win it upon the Saracens, at least I will not lose a jot from any respect to this paltry Duke, though he were bulwarked and buttressed by every ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... boys and girls screaming with excitement, as they plunged through the undergrowth and vines in pursuit. Nearly on the summit was a huge tree, with foliage like an Australian white cedar, and here was the old pig's lair, for the soil at its buttressed foot was scooped out ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... name, and learned that it was Abraham Lincoln. Browning's description of the German professor, 'Three parts sublime to one grotesque,' was applicable to this man. The face had a battered and bronzed look, without being hard. His nose was prominent, and buttressed a strong and high forehead. His eyes were high-vaulted, and had an expression of sadness; his mouth and chin were too close together, the cheeks hollow. On the whole, Lincoln's appearance was not attractive until one heard his voice, which possessed variety of expression, earnestness, and ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... education, enlightenment and independence which she has reached, is to free itself from the sinister domination under which it lies, and to assert its right to political and religious liberty. Ulster sees in Irish Nationalism a dark conspiracy, buttressed upon crime and incitement to outrage, maintained by ignorance and pandering to superstition. Even at this moment the Nationalist leagues have succeeded in superseding the law of the land by the law of the league. We need only ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... King's Parade, and here, entered through a modern buttressed screen pierced with openings filled with tracery, is King's College. It was founded by Henry VI. in 1440, and in immediate connection with the school at Eton, from which the more advanced scholars were to be transferred. ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... Praya and anchored in eight fathoms of water before the town. The weather was frightful, and the surf excessively violent, though the bay was sheltered from the sea winds. The rain fell in such torrents that the town was scarcely visible through it. It rose on a plain in the form of a terrace, buttressed on volcanic rocks three hundred feet high. The appearance of the island through the thick veil of rain was ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... England is saturated, oftentimes convulsed; and it may be well to ask if any institution, however impregnable, can continue to defy public opinion, if any sovereignty, however fortified by wealth and buttressed by prescription, can continue to ignore and outrage the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... the cavernous depths of the great organ, and choral melodies ringing from the fluty throats of the singing boys. A day of great rejoicings,—for a prelate was to be consecrated, and the bones of the mighty skeleton-minster were shaking with anthems, as if there were life of its own within its buttressed ribs. He looked down at his feet; the folds of the sacred robe were flowing about them: he put his hand to his head; it was crowned with the holy mitre. A long sigh, as of perfect content in the consummation of all his earthly hopes, breathed through the dreamer's lips, and shaped ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... with trunks as smooth as if they had been polished by human hands, tremendous cotton-trees, their branches bowed down with air plants, palms, to which clung clusters of wild nuts, thick, bulbous trees, taller trees with buttressed roots, as if Nature knew the strain that was to be placed upon them and braced them up accordingly, trees with bark like mirrors, and trees with six-inch spike growing from ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... years of age. Surely my first knowledge was not of death. I must have known much and many things before, although that seems my earliest memory. As in what we foolishly call maturity, so in the dawn of consciousness, both before and after it has begun to be buttressed with self-consciousness, each succeeding consciousness dims—often obliterates—that which went before, and with regard to our past as well as our future, imagination and faith must step into the place vacated of knowledge. We are aware, and we know that we are aware, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... of the strong the lesson is despised and no count taken of the terribleness of the weak. This is the latent ignorance that, like an unsuspected worm, burrows under the bulk of the prosperous. Have we never read of the castle of power, securely buttressed on all sides, in a moment dissolving in air at the explosion caused by the weak and outraged besiegers? Politicians calculate upon the number of mailed hands that are kept on the sword-hilts: they do not possess the third eye to see the great invisible hand that clasps in silence ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... reach of the Hudson, opposite to, for a short distance below, and for a considerable distance above the town, which was quite clear of stationary ice. Vast cakes continued to come down, it is true, passing on to increase the dam that had formed below, near and on the Overslaugh, where it was buttressed by the islands, and rested on the bottom; but the whole of that firm field, on which we had first driven forth that morning, had disappeared! This we did not know at the time, or it might have changed the direction ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... bare, cold floor to the window, and, rolling up the sagging black-muslin blind, looked out upon the world. Bleak and unbeautiful was the prospect that presented itself through the interstices of the spiral fire-escape—a narrow vista strung with clothes-lines and buttressed all about with the rear walls of high, gaunt, tottering tenements, the dirty windows of which were filled with frowzy-headed women and children. Something interesting was going on below, for in a moment every window was thrown up, ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... bleak wide-bitten place enough, looking as if 'twould never pay for turning, and instead of hedges there were dreary walls built of dry stone without mortar. Behind one of these walls, broken down in places, but held together with straggling ivy, and buttressed here and there with a bramble-bush, Elzevir put me down at length and said, 'I am beat, and can carry thee no farther for this present, though there is not now much farther to go. We have passed Purbeck Gates, and these walls will screen us from prying ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... for Congressional purposes are in most cases buttressed by a gerrymander of the legislative districts, thus making it impossible for a majority of the legal voters of the State to correct the apportionment and equalize the Congressional districts. A minority rule is established that only a political convulsion can ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Gregory chatted desultorily until the Byngs arrived. Oliver was fair and ruddy and his air of dozing contentment was always vexatious to his younger brother. He had every reason for contentment. Betty's money had securely buttressed the family fortunes and he had three delightful little boys to buttress Betty's money. Gregory grew a little out of temper after talking for five minutes to Oliver and this was not a fortunate mood in which to ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Fog-banks hung heavy on the blue of the far watery horizon. Out of the fog, like ghosts in gloom, drifted the shadowy ice-floes. The coast of Labrador consists of bare, domed, lonely hills alternated with rock walls rising sheer from the sea as some giant masonry. Here the rock is buttressed by a sharp angle knife-edged in a precipice. There, the beetling walls are guarded by long reefs like the teeth of a saw. Over these reefs, the drifting tide breaks with multitudinous voices. The French voyageurs had never known such seafaring. ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... on Architecture, the first building I shall give you as a standard will be one in which the structure is wholly concealed. It will be the Baptistery of Florence, which is, in reality, as much a buttressed chapel with a vaulted roof, as the Chapter House of York;—but round it, in order to conceal that buttressed structure, (not to decorate, observe, but to conceal,) a flat external wall is raised; simplifying the whole to a mere hexagonal box, like a wooden piece of Tunbridge ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... of life and does not renew them any more, just like those lands in Asia where the fecundating rivers, drop by drop, have disappeared under the vitreous sand. Even those whom they believe they love are loved in a proprietary way; they sacrifice them to their egotism, to their buttressed pride, to their narrow and headstrong intelligence. Pierre took a sorrowful review of his parents and himself. He was silent. The panes of the apartment vibrated under the shock of a distant cannonade. And Pierre, ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... the point at issue is not a light one. It is indeed nothing less than a parting of the ways between two civilisations, or, shall we say, between a civilisation which has not lost touch with Athens and Rome and a commercial barbarism buttressed ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... demobilization was fairly complete. MacRae danced well. He had the faculty of making himself agreeable without effort. He found it pleasant to fall into the way of these careless, well-dressed folk whose greatest labor seemed to be in amusing themselves, to keep life from seeming "slow." Buttressed by revenues derived from substantial sources, mines, timber, coastal fisheries, land, established industries, these sons and daughters of the pioneers, many but one degree removed from pioneering uncouthness, were patterning their lives upon the plan of equivalent ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... gleam pierced the gloom, but for the most part deep shadow filled the gaps between the trunks. Creepers laced the great cottonwoods, tangled vines crawled about their tall, buttressed roots, and hung in festoons from the giant branches. Some of the trees were rotten and orchids covered their decay with fantastic bloom. The forest smelt like a hothouse, but the smell had an unwholesome sourness. Growth ran riot; green things shot up, choked each ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... their fantastic battlements above the trees and flowers. They are all tapestried with vines and made to serve as sunny fruit-walls—grim old defence as they once were; now giving nothing but a splendid buttressed privacy. The sculptures in the little Casino are few, but there are two great ones—the beautiful sitting Mars and the head of the great Juno, the latter thrust into a corner behind a shutter. These things it's almost impossible to praise; we can only mark them well and keep ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... outside of the north wall, at the west end, is a heavy wall which, with the main wall, forms a "well," nearly filled with rocks. There are no supporting platforms outside, but along the north and east walls are revetments reaching halfway up the face. The southeast corner is rounded and braced or buttressed. These forms of support have been noticed in only one other place. There is a house site within, at the northeast corner. On the wall, placed there in adding to its height, were a broken taro pestle and a very dense siliceous rock, of high specific gravity, and ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... up at the great towers, buttressed by deep shadows, as if he bade them farewell. Already they seemed to take on a strange and unfriendly aspect. This mass of masonry had expressed hostility to him on that September morning, he had read a warning in each impassive or grinning gargoyle, and now, as ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... underlying physical attraction, however keen at first is not of guaranteed permanence; it must be buttressed by common tastes and sympathies. To like the same people, to enjoy doing the same things, to judge problems from the same angle, to cleave to similar moral, aesthetic, religious canons is of great importance. A certain amount of contrast in ideas ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... of, which led to this part of the church being taken down and the new eastern transept being erected, cannot have arisen from any subsidence of the foundations. It, in all probability, was the result of the thrust of the apse vaults on to walls which were insufficiently buttressed. The marks on some of the stones found during this excavation, and the shape of others, seem to point to the conclusion that here we have the earliest part of the church, and that Carileph used up in his foundations much of the stone ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • J. E. Bygate
... American territory, built a fort at the Miami Rapids, and garrisoned it with British redcoats. Massive parapets were constructed on which were mounted heavy artillery. The outer walls were surrounded by a deep fosse and "frasing" which rendered it secure from escalade. The Indians, thus buttressed, as they supposed, by British support, were openly defiant and refused to ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... than I should have expected; and had somehow acquired an imposing manner, in spite of his rather slangy, if expressive, vocabulary. He had the power of making statements of mere opinion, which, from some vibration of voice or trick of expression, struck the hearer as solid facts, thrice buttressed by evidence. He bore no marks of dissipation, unless the occasional use of terms traceable to the turf or the gaming-table might be considered such; but these expressions, I considered, are so constantly before every reader of the newspapers ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... gradually I acquired a sensibility, or rather a sensitivity so lively that my soul resembled a living wound. Everything that touched it produced in it twitchings of pain, frightful vibrations, and consequently true ravages. Happy are the men whom nature has buttressed with indifference and armed ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... provision for the education of the deaf been consummated in all the states, but in some of them this provision has been buttressed, as it were, by a permanent guarantee in the organic law. This regard, while not necessary practically for the continuance of the schools, is none the less commendable,—and indeed is one that should be declared ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... pile loomed larger and more imposing than ever in the most resplendent days of its past grandeur. The original keep was there with its huge, buttressed Saxon towers whose mighty fifteen foot walls were pierced with stairways and vaulted chambers, lighted by embrasures which, mere slits in the outer periphery of the walls, spread to larger dimensions within, some even attaining the area ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... felt that its beckoning enchantment should have drawn two young men to dwell beside it for many years; to give themselves wholly to it; to descend and ascend among its buttressed pinnacles; to discover caves and waterfalls hidden in its labyrinths; to climb, to creep, to hang in mid-air, in order to learn more and more of it, and at last to gratify wholly their passion in the great adventure of this journey ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... Grez is changed. The old inn, long shored and trussed and buttressed, fell at length under the mere weight of years, and the place as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former guests. They, indeed, recall the ancient wooden stair; they recall the rainy evening, the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into the jungle, for he was as positive that Werper was waiting nearby for a chance to pot him as though his eyes had penetrated the jungle trees to the figure of the hiding Belgian, fingering his rifle behind the bole of the buttressed giant. ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... kings, and kings have sworn to protect subjects, and yet the subjects have sometimes beheaded a king; and the king has often plundered the subjects. The oaths enabled them to deceive each other. Every absurdity in religion, and all tyrannical institutions, have been patched, buttressed, and reinforced by oaths; and yet the history of the world shows the utter futility of putting in the coffin of an oath the political and religious aspirations ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Stone Bridge") and the finer and more artistic Taphan Thevadah ("the Angel's Bridge") are both imposing works. Arches, still resting firmly on their foundations, buttressed by fifty great pillars of stone, sup-port a structure about five hundred feet long and eighty broad. The road-bed of these bridges is formed of immense blocks or beams of stone, laid one upon another, and so adjusted that their very weight serves ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... look it up and point to the English word. There was some rejoicing at this, and she at once called upon the collective wisdom of her whole family. At last they got it with much nodding of heads and exhibited the book, buttressed with an eager finger at the place. And we looked and read "A young gold-finch;" so you will see that that didn't help us much. It was only by the almost miraculous emergence of the word Fat in the course of their own private ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... to us a reflection he had just made—which was, that a falling-in might have taken place between us and the issue from the grotto; or, what appeared still more probable, that the enormous rock, that was suspended and buttressed up by the column, might have fallen down, and thus bar up all passage through the hole we had so rashly made. Had such a misfortune happened to us, what a horrible situation we should have been in! We could hope for no help from ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... Pharaohs been placed beside them, I could not have discovered them without a field-glass. Some of these grand constructions stand alone, while others are in pairs; and many of them resemble Oriental temples, buttressed with terraces a mile or two in length, and approached by steps a hundred feet in height. Around these, too, are many smaller mountainous formations, crude and unfinished in appearance, like shrines commenced and then abandoned ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... fairest view was obtained by looking northward towards the dense group of mountains which buttressed the front range, facing towards Rubeho. It was the home of the winds, which starting here and sweeping down the precipitous slopes and solitary peaks on the western side, and gathering strength as they rushed through the prairie-like Marenga Mkali, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... soporific passages; circumlocutions, repetitions, touches even of pure doting jargon, so often intervene! On the whole, Professor Teufelsdroeckh is not a cultivated writer. Of his sentences perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes, buttressed-up by props (of parentheses and dashes), and ever with this or the other tagrag hanging from them; a few even sprawl-out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered. Nevertheless, in almost his very worst moods, there lies ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... of the Cathedral. The interior of Saint-Etienne is dark and somewhat gloomy, but that is an inherent trait of a fortress-church, for every added inch of window-opening brought an ell of danger. The nave is unusually low and broad, and its buttressed piers are of immense weight, ending severely in a plain, moulded band. On these great piers rest the cross-vaults of the roof and the broad arches of the wall. The north aisle, disproportionately narrow, is a later addition. Behind the altar is a true Provencal apse, shallow ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... they were, four feet in thickness, heavily buttressed; the bricks set in mortar tougher than themselves. They enclosed two acres of rich black soil at the mouth of Inniscaw's one valley, where it widens into a marsh beside the shore. Between them and the water's edge stood ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Putnam's lay before them, a Queen Anne manor-house, homely, solid, snug, with low blue parapeted roof, standing a little back from the road, and buttressed by barns and stable-buildings. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... looking down, you catch mosaic gleams of the sea among the brown and grey tree-trunks. But for the prodigality of the vegetation, one slide might take you from the cool mountain-top to the cooler sea. The highest peak, which presents a buttressed face to the north, and overlooks our peaceful bay, is crowned with a forest of bloodwoods, upon which the jungle steadily encroaches. The swaying fronds of aspiring palms, adorned in due season with masses of straw-coloured inflorescence, to be succeeded by loose bunches of red, bead-like ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... banks of the river and the valley of the Liffey, with a lively sort of richness. The broad old street looked hospitable and merry, with steep roofs and many coloured hall-doors. The jolly old inn, just beyond the turnpike at the sweep of the road, leading over the buttressed bridge by the mill, was first to welcome the excursionist from Dublin, under the sign of the Phoenix. There, in the grand wainscoted back-parlour, with 'the great and good King William,' in his robe, garter, periwig, and sceptre presiding ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... lofty house on the right hand dates probably from the end of the seventeenth century, and is a fine example of the period. The adjoining buildings are considerably earlier, and in the lower parts, where they are buttressed, they are probably of pre-Reformation times. The upper portions are somewhat later, and are very likely part of the work of Schaw. The porch to the latter buildings is on the other side, and is quaint and well ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... Point crouches, and with lifted shield Turns the whole river eastward through the pass; Whose jutting crags, half silver, stand revealed Like bossy bucklers of Leonidas; Where buttressed low against the storms that wield Their summer lightnings where her eaglets swarm, By Freedom's cradle Nature's self has steeled Her heart, like Winkelried, and to that storm Of leveled lances ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... no notice of them. He was used to attentions of that kind; it was a little compliment—of hate—they all paid him. He was looking persistently down the ranked, narrowing perspective of the buttressed forest glade to where it faded in the blue-gray mist, southward, as if he expected something to come from there. Something was coming from there now; and there had been a faint, uneasy sort of whisper in that direction for some time. Now it ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... Stimpson's mind, quite inappropriately, the waitresses at the Rigi Kulm hotel on a Sunday. Then, through more narrow streets, to a smaller square, where it stopped at some steps leading to the huge West portal of a magnificent buttressed Church. ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... of dry land scarcely three inches above the swamp level was the trail they followed. All around tall cypress trees, strangely buttressed at the base, rose pillar-like into obscurity as though supporting the canopy of dusk. The goblin howling of the big cat-owl pulsated through the silence; strange gleams and flashes stirred the surface of the bog. Once, close ahead, a great white bird, winged ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... and buttressed, the centre of the Anglo-Dutch army was well posted. The peril of this position lay in the forest of Soignes, then adjoining the field of battle, and intersected by the ponds of Groenendael and Boitsfort. An army could not retreat ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... impartial as quite sufficient to prove these two points—that the New Testament can neither subsist with the Old Testament, nor without it; and that the New Testament system was built first upon a mistake, and afterwards buttressed up with ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... southern latitude of 43 deg. by an eastern longitude of 12 deg., Tycho's crater, somewhat elliptical in shape, is 54 miles in diameter and upwards of 16,000 feet in depth. Its lofty ramparts are buttressed by other mountains, Mont Blancs in size, all grouped around it, and all streaked with the great divergent fissures that radiate from it as ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... the cells, and the fact that this arrangement allows the bees to fill the comb without leaving a single spot vacant, there are other advantages also with respect to the solidity of the work. The angle at the base of each cell, the apex of the pyramidal cavity, is buttressed by the ridge formed by two faces of the hexagon of another cell. The two triangles, or extensions of the hexagon faces which fill one of the convergent angles of the cavity enclosed by the three rhombs, form by their ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... moment they gazed at a rickety old wooden stairway that, at this point in the unbroken line of cliffs, climbs zigzag up the face of the rock-buttressed wall. Then, as if moved by a common impulse, they faced each other. The quick fire of adventure kindled in the eyes of the boy as he met ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... the Augustinian Priory of Guisborough is standing to-day, it is sufficiently imposing to convey a powerful impression of the former size and magnificence of the monastic church. This fragment is the gracefully buttressed east-end of the choir, which rises from the level meadow-land to the east of the town. The stonework is now of a greenish-grey tone, but in the shadows there is generally a look of blue. Beyond the ruin ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... character of it. The builders felt their way as they went along, and well they might, for it was not only a new church but a new and finer style altogether. They built a wall. It was not strong enough, so they buttressed it over the mouldings. The almost wayward double arcade inside was there apparently, before the imposed vaulting shafts were thought about. The stones were fully shaped and carved on the floor, and then put in their positions. Hardly anything ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... thou hast waved from of old. Thou hast seen the day be born from the night; And hast streamed for truth where the truth was bold As time fled on to the future's light. Beyond all the seas, on many a shore, Thou hast buttressed the heart and stiffened the hand To struggle for fellowship o're and o're, From the youth to the ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard |
