"Plummet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... merely a man of talent, but of talent in the highest degree adapted to popularity. His very defects, and the shallowness of his philosophy, promoted his popularity; and by comparison with the French critics on the dramatic or scenical proprieties he is ever profound. His plummet, if not suited to the soundless depths of Shakspeare, was able ten times over to fathom the little rivulets of Parisian philosophy. This he did effectually, and thus unconsciously levelled the paths for Shakspeare, and for that supreme dominion which he has ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... first a passing airplane. The two observers in the monoplane were at this time down near the Battery. They saw the giant beam hit the airplane. A moment it clung, and parts of the plane faded. The plane wavered, and then, like a plummet, fell. ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... extinguish the divine fire of genius in the youthful Murgatroyd. Exhausted and hungry as he often was at the end of the day's work, he devoted his leisure to the study of bricks and mortar, and out of his scanty pocket-money he bought for himself first a trowel and later a plummet. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... thy sight be dim, Doubt for them is doubt of Him. * * * * * Still Thy love, O Christ, arisen Yearns to reach those souls in prison, Through all depths of sin and loss Sinks the plummet of Thy Cross. Never yet abyss was found Deeper than ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... The sienite plummet from San Joaquin Valley, California, goes back to the distant age of the Drift; and the Calaveras skull, admitting its authenticity, goes back to the Pliocene epoch, and is older than the relics or stone implements from the drift gravel ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... Clewe had just told them was substantiated by a number of witnesses, and now that they had heard from these men that a plummet, a camera, and a car had been lowered fourteen miles into the bowels of the earth, they had no reason to suppose that the great shaft had existed only in the imagination of one crazy man, and they could not believe that all these assistants ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... mighty limiting the boundless is embodied, and we learn to feel the awful infinitude of the parent space out of which it is scooped. I dare also say that the tones of the mellow old organ spoke to something in many of the listeners that lay deeper far than the plummet of their self-knowledge had ever sounded. I think also that the prayers, the reading of which, in respect of intelligence, was admirable, were not only regarded as sacred utterances, but felt to be soothing influences ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... ravenous hunger after the achievement of a desperate expiation, comes the sudden touch of sarcasm which serves as a momentary breakwater to the raging tide of his reflections, and reveals the else unfathomable bitterness of a spiritual Marah that no plummet even of his own sinking can sound, and no infusion of less fiery sorrow or less venomous remembrance can sweeten. The mourner falls to scoffing, the justicer becomes a jester: the lover, with the skull of his murdered ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... houses. That may refer to the common trials of every life, but it is best taken as referring to the future judgment, when God 'will lay judgment to the line, and righteousness to the plummet'; and whatever cannot stand that test will be swept away. Who would run up a flimsy structure on some windy headland in northern seas? The lighthouses away out in ocean are firmly bonded into living rock. Unless our lives are thus built on and into Christ, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that architecturally it has a resemblance to the other buildings near at hand. There are many theories as to the leaning position of this tower, but no two persons seem to quite agree upon the matter. A plummet and line depending from the top would strike the ground some ten feet from the base of the structure. It has stood here for more than six hundred years, and does not appear to be in any danger of falling. A view from the upper gallery, over ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... one last use of his magic power, "And then," said he, "I'll break my staff and deeper than did ever plummet sound ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... "I got him the horn of Hernani, the harpoon with which Long Tom Coffin pinned the British officer to the mast, the long rifle of Natty Bumppo, the letter A in scarlet cloth embroidered in gold by Hester Prynne, the banner with the strange device 'Excelsior,' the gold bug which was once used as a plummet, Maud Muller's rake, and the jack-knives of Hosea ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... least wanton jests, their puling stomach Sick from the modesty, when their thoughts are loose, Even acting of those hot and lustful sports Are to ensue about midnight: such his cunning! He sounds my depth thus with a golden plummet. I am doubly arm'd now. Now to th' act of blood, There 's but three furies found in spacious hell, But in a great man's breast ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... itself,—banished to the farthest horizon of the ocean, where it lies all day, a line of infinite richness, not to be drawn by Apelles, and in its compression of expanse—leagues of sloping sea and summer calm being written in that single line—suggestive of more depth than plummet or diver can ever reach. Such an enchantment of color deepens the farther and interior horizon with most men,—whether it is the atmosphere of one's own identity still warming and enriching it, or whether the orbed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... door of which he had resolutely closed with his own hand. If he thought the depths of loneliness had been sounded out there in the Orient, he had now to learn that it is only in one's own country, among one's own people, that the plummet ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... in front with the Yardleys, dropping her unfailing plummet into the evening's experience. Arnold, hesitating over the rudeness of departure, thought she was sufficiently absorbed; she would hardly mind. The centurion slapped his tin armour, and made a jest, which reached Stephen over his hostess's shoulder, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... are vital to all elevated conduct. She thought of other people and looked at them as one wakened from sleep. And, similarly, she looked at Nature. Even her vanished lover had not taught her all. There were truths below the formulae of his worship; there were secrets deeper than his intellectual plummet had ever sounded. Without understanding it, Joan yet knew that a change had come to pass in material things. Sunshine on the deep sea hid more matters for wonder than John Barron had taught or known. Once only as yet had she caught a glimpse of Nature's beating heart; and ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... we learned to use the plummet, take levels, hew the stone, wield the axes! And what a delight it was when the work was finished and we saw our own building! Perhaps we might not have accomplished it without the sapper, but every boy believed that if he were cast, like Robinson Crusoe, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the ardent friends to greet each other Impatient fly, and pressing breast to breast They tenderly embrace, and with alternate kisses Their cheeks resound; then, clasping hands, they drop Plummet-like down upon the sofa, both Together. Seated thus, one flings a phrase, Subtle and pointed, at the other's heart, Hinting of certain things that rumor tells, And in her turn the other with a sting Assails. The lovely ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... larboard signifies the left; but as the two words resemble each other, the word port is always used for larboard to prevent mistakes in shouting orders. Heaving the lead is the act of throwing a heavy leaden plummet, with a line attached, into the sea to ascertain its depth. It is thrown from the chains as far as possible ahead of the ship, so that it may reach the bottom and be perpendicularly beneath the man who heaves it when the ship comes up to the spot ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... part of it, and opened the small packet of rice, on which he placed a sort of compass. A cord was then handed to him. He placed it over the middle of the compass, and altered its position until it lay exactly in the same direction as the needle. A second cord, with a plummet attached, was then held to the first and let down into the grave, and the coffin moved backwards and forwards according to this line, until the middle was in the same direction as the needle: this arrangement consumed at least ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... many Pilgrims since the shout "Mark Twain!"—that serves you for a deathless sign —On Mississippi's waterway rang out Over the plummet's line— Still where the countless ripples laugh above The blue of halcyon seas long may you keep Your course unbroken, buoyed upon a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... one reflection of the socialist economic structure of Yugoslavia. TITO had pushed the development of military industries in the republic with the result that Bosnia hosted a number of Yugoslavia's defense plants. The bitter interethnic warfare in Bosnia caused production to plummet by 80% from 1990 to 1995, unemployment to soar, and human misery to multiply. With an uneasy peace in place, output recovered in 1996-99 at high percentage rates from a low base; but output growth slowed in 2000-02. ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... reply, and there was a long silence. In the damp south corners of the walls a frog began to croak at exact intervals. The little fountain rippled monotonously, and a magnolia flower dropped from one of the trees, falling straight as a plummet through the motionless air, and settling upon the gravelled walk with a faint rustling sound. Otherwise ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... on a large scale. And another important class of agriculturists, the beetroot growers and sugar-producers, were not to be trifled with either. But how about direct taxation, the manly sacrifice of free peoples, the plummet by which to sound the enlightenment of a nation? The chancellor instinctively felt, I believe, that there he would be going beyond his depth; that under such a regime the free will of citizens must have the fullest ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... one of her hands and held it fast while he looked deep into her eyes. He was searching, questioning, measuring, and he was doing it without uttering a word. The plummet dropped straight into the clear, sweet depths of her soul. If it did not reach the bottom, he was satisfied with the soundings he took. He drew a deep breath and gave her hand a little squeeze and let ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... Atlantic telegraph have demonstrated the existence of organic life even at the bottom of the ocean. Numerous living Infusoria have been brought to the light of day, from their hidden recesses, by the lead. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded" before these latter days, there exist myriads of minute creatures, and of Algae to furnish their food. It is an unanswered problem, How they can resist the enormous pressure to which they must be there subjected, amounting, not infrequently, to several tons to the square inch. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding-place. And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... oaks, walnuts, and elms; while in its rocky depths a little brook creeps down to mingle with the river. From the rugged trunk of the stunted cedar that leans forward from the brink, you may drop a plummet into the river below, where the cat-fish and the turtles may plainly be seen gliding over the wrinkled sands of the clear and shallow current. The cliff is accessible only from behind, where a man may climb up, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... Among its monstrous creatures, unafraid, And feel no longing for the air of heaven To fill thy lungs, and send the warm, red blood Along thy veins. But thou shalt pass the hours In dances with the sea-nymphs, or go forth, To look into the mysteries of the abyss Where never plummet reached. And thou shalt sleep Thy weariness away on downy banks Of sea-moss, where the pulses of the tide Shall gently lift thy hair, or thou shalt float On the soft currents that go forth and wind From ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... old Henry, straight as a plummet. 'Gad, what Vivvy doesn't know about British aristocracy isn't worth knowing. She looked it up the time they tried to convince her she ought to marry the duke. But she's fond of Hetty. She says she's a darling. She's right: Hetty is too good ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... and worshipper of anthropomorphic beauty shrink appalled, and sigh for a lodge under some low Grecian heaven and in the bosom of some old myth-peopled Nature, as he trembled before the apocalypses of modern sidereal science, which has dropped its plummet to unimaginable depths through the nebulous abysses of space, shoaled with systems of worlds as the sea is with its finny droves. The Nature and the Physical Universe of the old ethnic Greek formed only a little niche and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Advocate, or some modern counterpart of Braxfield, the hanging judge, would summon Susanna Crum as a witness in an important case. He would need his longest plummet to sound the ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... stiff dive position. He began to plummet down, picking up speed. His mailed hands glittered like arrowheads out in front. They pointed to a particular window in one of the towers. A predatory excitement rippled through him as he sailed down through the air. ...
— Mutineer • Robert J. Shea
... thinking it all over, my lady," he said, "and it seems to me that, if your uncle heard the noise of our plummet so near, the chimney can hardly rise from the floor you searched; for that room, you know, is half-way between the ground-floor and first floor. Still, sound does travel so! We must betake ourselves to measurement, I fear.—But another thing ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... fevered youth who stands in the betting-ring and nervously pencils his race-card never thinks that the time of weakness and sadness and weariness is coming on; that gray and tremulous old man who bends over the roulette-table never thinks that he will speedily drop into a profundity deeper than ever plummet sounded. The gliding ball does not swing round in its groove faster than the old man's soul fares towards the darkness; and yet he clenches his jaw and engages in the most trivial of pursuits as if he had an eternity ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... for a moment, and he saw near him the face of Timmendiquas, who had followed him down the line, seeking, it seemed, to give a blow on his account. Beside him, a warrior held a heavy club poised to strike. Henry saw that he could not escape it, and his heart sank, like a plummet in a pool. But the great chief, so sure of foot, stumbled and fell against the warrior with the poised club. The blow went wide, and Henry was untouched. He ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... should make a decided hit, and cover my temples with unfading laurel. I rehearsed at all times, seasons, and places, until I was a perfect nuisance to everybody, and my acquaintance, I am sure, to a man, wished both me and her bloodthirsty ladyship, deeper than plummet ever sounded, at the bottom of the sea. Even the brute creation did not escape the annoyance. One morning my English pointer "Spot" ran yelping out of the room, panic-stricken by the vehement manner with which I exclaimed, "Out damned spot, out, I say!" and with the full conviction, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... drink! And thy soul shall sink Down into the dark abyss, Into the infinite abyss, From which no plummet nor rope Ever drew up the silver ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... exactness, and purity, and strictness as to all acts of good that any poor creature hath done in this life, whereby he in the judgment will think to shelter, or secure himself from the wrath of God. This is the rule, and line, and plummet, whereby every act of every man shall be measured (Rom 3:21,22); and he whose righteousness is not found every way answerable to this law, which all will fall short of, but they that have the righteousness of God by faith in Jesus Christ: he must perish, as he saith, "Judgment ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... like a plummet of lead. Shawn! Had anything happened to Shawn? Had this stammering, purple-faced gentleman come to prepare her? Her heart gave a cry of anguish, while her eyes rested with apparent calmness on Sir Felix's unhappy face. Of course it was Mustapha. Would he ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... to the only real emancipation. Historically, it was the vital element in all other emancipating movements; it was their logical antecedent: the hidden spring feeding all their rivers with the water of life. It enables us to analyze them and gauge their values; it is their measure and plummet. And this, not because it is the final or the highest word justifying the ways of God to man—for it has not proved to be so: but because it indicated, once for all, in what direction the real solution of the riddle of man was to be sought: a riddle never ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... where the impatience of Max and George would be bestirring Itself. Ahead and below lay Red Deer Lake, a thousand dizzy feet down, seeming impossible of achievement from where Drennen stood. He pushed a stone over the rocks with his boot. He saw it leap outward and drop, plummet wise, saw the white spray of the lake leap upward as the stone plunged ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... balm to Susan's soul, but with Lucy's next words she lost all hope that her old friend would cast her lot wholeheartedly with women at this time. "Woman has an ocean of wrongs too deep for any plummet," Lucy continued, "and the Negro too has an ocean of wrongs that cannot be fathomed. But I thank God for the Fifteenth Amendment, and hope that it will be adopted in every state. I will be thankful in my soul if anybody can get ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... world's pleasures for my soul sufficed, Ere my heart's plummet sounded depths of pain, I called on reason to control my brain, And scoffed at that old ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the boat plummet down, as if the sea was snatched from under her; it was the undertow—the wave was drawing the waters back beneath it. By the gunwale the blue-green sea frothed white as it poured back from the skerries near the ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... the bridge to the end of the rock, leaning tremblingly over and looking down into the misty gulf below with that Jacob's Ladder of faith set therein—it is not strange that the journalist for one moment wished for a line and plummet to drop into that reservoir of golden glory and bring up some memento of what seemed so near to the celestial;—just as one wishes, sometimes when the midnight heaven is darkest and the stars are burning most purely there, to be able to stretch ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... afterward, I found myself. The hand of change had been here also. The first object that attracted my attention was the sign-post, which at my earlier arrival, some eight or nine years before, stood up in its new white garment of paint, as straight as a plummet-line, bearing proudly aloft the golden sheaf and gleaming sickle. Now, the post, dingy and shattered and worn from the frequent contact of wheels, and gnawing of restless horses, leaned from its trim perpendicular at an angle of many degrees, as if ashamed of ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... us about half a mile out to sea, till he came to a place where he hoped to find something. Here he immersed a plummet in the sea to sound its depth, and on finding that some thing was to be gained here, he dived downwards armed with a knife to cut the sponge he expected to find from the rocks; and after remaining below the surface for two or three minutes, reappeared with his booty, When first ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... seeming-exception, in his metres; scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the plummet; scarce one but could speak with condescending approval of that prodigious intelligence so utterly without congener that our baffled language must coin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... line of jagged pinnacles, twelve or fifteen miles apart, with a trench or trough between, along a portion of the way, that is nearly fifteen hundred feet deep if we measure from the pass which the stages traverse, which is nearly three thousand feet deep if the plummet is dropped from the highest points of the snowy spires. Down into this trench we look, and opposite upon the eastern wall and crests, as we ride out to the eastern edge of the western summit. In a stretch of forty miles the chasm of it ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... genius; I even deny its exhaustibility. If the moral vegetation languishes, and the soil is parched for a while, the great source of refreshing and fertility still lies before us—the public mind, in its boundless expansion, and in its unfathomable depth; the intellectual ocean which no plummet has ever sounded, and which no shore has ever circumscribed, lies ready to restore ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... are just, But how can finite measure infinite? Reason! alas, it does not know itself! Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice. Whatever is, is in its causes just, Since all things are by fate. But purblind man Sees but a part o' th' chain, the nearest links, His eyes not carrying to that equal beam That poises ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... eyes, "Blessed is dey dat mou'n, fu' dey shall be comfo'ted." The old man, as he turned to go to bed, shook the young man's hand warmly and in silence; but there was a moisture in the old eyes that told the minister that his plummet of prayer had sounded ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... sincere regret that the notorious Miss CRAIG, of Chicago, once more threatens the unhappy SPRAGUE with another suit for breach of promise of marriage. We had thought that the forty thousand dollars awarded by the jury in the first trial were a plummet heavy enough to reach the lowest depths of "AMANDY'S" affections, and so in fact they were; but "ELISHA'S" lawyers, utterly disregarding the claims of true love, have interposed the absurd claims of what they call "justice to ELISHA," and so the thing ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... of communist central planning and management. TITO had pushed the development of military industries in the republic with the result that Bosnia hosted a large share of Yugoslavia's defense plants. The bitter interethnic warfare in Bosnia caused production to plummet by perhaps 90% since 1990, unemployment to soar, and human misery to multiply. No reliable economic statistics for 1992-96 are available, although output almost certainly is well below $1,000 per head. In the Federation, ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then like a chorus the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... hundred and twenty feet. The sunshine of every summer's day takes hold of that mighty pile of granite with its aerial fingers, lengthens the side affected, and bends the whole great mass as easily as one would bend a whipstock. A few years ago we hung a plummet from the top of this monument to the bottom. At 9 A.M. it began to move toward the west; at noon it swung round toward the north; in the afternoon it went east of where it first was, and in the night it settled back to its ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... undulation soft, Adrift on Vischer's ocean, And, from my cockboat up aloft, Sent down my mental plummet oft, In hope ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... Blessed be God, the Gospel has a provision for erring parents. If Sinai thunders, Calvary whispers peace. For men, as sinners, the righteousness of Christ prevails, and for sinners, as parents, not less shall it be found sufficient. Line and plummet can soon measure the extent of human perfection, but they cannot fathom the merit of that righteousness, and when laid side by side with the most holy law, there is no deficiency. If, then, we find ourselves daily coming short of the terms of that covenant which God has made with us as ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... I hate its sight and touch; Heap up my cars & waggons with the load And yoke my kine to drag it to the sea: Then crowned with flowers, ivy & Bacchic vine, And singing hymns to the immortal Gods, We will ascend ships freighted with the gold, [65] And where no plummet's line can sound the depth Of greedy Ocean, we will throw it in, All, all this frightful heap of yellow dirt. Down through the dark, blue waters it will sink, Frightening the green-haired Nereids from their ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... tea, or coffee, no butter, much less mild breakfast bacon), bath on alternate days, between eleven and noon. Something like a bath; on first investigation, seems bottomless; but plummet reaches conclusion at last. Here sit up to the chin for twenty minutes, shivering at thought of what would happen supposing bath sprang a leak. Luncheon at one, strictly supervised; between three and five, more tumblers of water at another Well, with more vigorous ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... arduousness of the task. The ladies of N. were—But no, I cannot do it; my heart has already failed me. Come, come! The ladies of N. were distinguished for—But it is of no use; somehow my pen seems to refuse to move over the paper—it seems to be weighted as with a plummet of lead. Very well. That being so, I will merely say a word or two concerning the most prominent tints on the feminine palette of N.—merely a word or two concerning the outward appearance of its ladies, and a word or two concerning their more ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... thoroughfare leading through the heart of the town, belonged to the world. I was obliged to walk there like other people, with mincing steps, and bonnet tied primly under the chin, according to the rule and plummet line of school-girl propriety. But in my own little by-path, I could do just as I pleased. I could run with my bonnet swinging in my hand, and my hair floating like the wild vine of the woods. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... carried out in England, it certainly has accomplished but little for the protection of animals. The published reports of experiments made in that country under one or another "certificate," are practically of no value whatever except to show the constant increase of such experiments every year. The plummet must sink to deeper depths. If Society is to grant to the physiological laboratory that isolation and freedom from interference which it craves, THEN SOCIETY HAS THE RIGHT TO ASK IN RETURN THE COMPLETEST DISCLOSURE THAT CAN BE GIVEN OF METHODS ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... though of less potency, Ronald strove to inspire him with his own strong love for literature. The young American had a passion for books which were the reflex of great minds. His quick hearkening to the voices breathing from their pages, and made prophetic by some sudden experience; the ready plummet with which he sounded their depths of reasoning; the sentient hand with which he plucked out their truths and planted them in his own rich memory, to grow like trees filled with singing-birds: these had rendered his communings with master-spirits ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the sword, that hath already learned to eat much of our flesh, but also for the special assistance and protection of the Father of lights, in this great Work unto which we are now called, and wherein we already finde many and potent adversaries: that seeing the plummet is now in the hands of our Zerubbabels, all mountaines may become plains, and they may bring forth the capstone of the Lords House with shoutings, crying, Grace, grace unto it: and that how weak and contemptible builders soever we be, the Lord would enable us to build with ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... which a heavy piece of lead was fastened. Round the roof of the castle ran a metal gutter, which terminated at the corners in old-fashioned dolphins. On to one of such dolphins Ivan threw the pack-thread noose, and seizing hold of the re-descending lead plummet, hoisted up the rope likewise. It was really a capital idea. Mekipiros was to clamber up the rope, he knew the trick of it. He was to be the anima vilis by means of whom they were to find out whether the folks in the castle ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... light line, the Doctor attached it to a plummet. Throwing the plummet across the space, he drew the line taut. He then marked the point where the ice-line crossed it. Then for five minutes he divided his attention between the line and his watch. As he rose ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... Nile, which has been sought after, at so much expense and labour. This spring, or rather these two springs, are two holes, each about two feet diameter, a stone's cast distant from each other. One of them is about five feet and a half in depth. Lobo was not able to sink his plummet lower, perhaps, because it was stopped by roots, the whole place being full of trees. A line of ten feet did not reach the bottom of the other. These springs are supposed, by the Abyssins, to be the vents of a great subterraneous lake. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... his errand sprang The storm-swift Iris; in the dark-blue sea She plung'd, midway 'twixt Imbros' rugged shore And Samos' isle; the parting waters plash'd. As down to ocean's lowest depths she dropp'd, Like to a plummet, which the fisherman Lets fall, encas'd in wild bull's horn, to bear Destruction to the sea's voracious tribes. There found she Thetis in a hollow cave, Around her rang'd the Ocean Goddesses: She, in the midst, was weeping ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... opposite coast, radiant in the sunlight, which are our ordinary guides, fail us in an excursion such as this; the lessons of antiquity, the determinations of authority, are here rather the needle, chart, and plummet, than great objects, with distinct and continuous outlines and completed details, which stand up and confront and occupy our gaze, and relieve us from the tension and suspense of our personal observation. And thus, in spite of the pains we may take to consult others ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... have line enough to go to his hold and pouch the bait And if you would have this ledger-bait to keep at a fixt place undisturbed by wind or other accidents which may drive it to the shore- side, for you are to note, that it is likeliest to catch a Pike in the midst of the water, then hang a small plummet of lead, a stone, or piece of tile, or a turf, in a string, and cast it into the water with the forked stick to hang upon the ground, to be a kind of anchor to keep the forked stick from moving out of your intended place till the Pike come: this I take to be a very good way to use so many ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... your theme: you have the start of me. I am dejected; I am not able to answer the Welsh flannel; ignorance itself is a plummet over me: ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... his plummet deeper. He found indeed in the working of the pure intellect an outcome of self-contradiction. But he recognized, as the most certain guide to reality which man's inner world affords, the commanding sense of duty,—the "moral ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... lies our refuge.' Some of us, alas! have been doing that all our lives. Let such hearken to the solemn words which may have rung in the ears of this unworthy king. 'Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet, and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies.' I come to you, dear friends! to press on your acceptance the true Guide and Helper—even Jesus Christ your Brother, in whose single Self you will find all that you have vainly sought dispersed 'at ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... lofty soul and a noble mind possessed by a great purpose, which control and triumph. The magical arts are simply the means by which a great end is served; when the work is accomplished, the staff will be broken and the book sunk beneath the sea, lower than any sounding of plummet." ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... help, Kehama! help!" he cried. But Baly tarried not to abide That mightier power. With irresistible feet He stampt and cleft the earth. It opened wide, And gave him way to his own judgment-seat. Down like a plummet to the world below He sank ... to punishment deserved ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... humour, and, what is far more rare, a keen vein of appreciation of the humour of others. He laughs as if he were amused, not like a man discharging a painful duty. It is true that he will not answer letters; but then his writing-paper is generally drowned deeper than plummet can sound; his pens are rusty, and his ink is of the consistency of tar; but he will always answer questions, with an incredible patience and sympathy, correcting one's mistakes in a genial and tentative way, as if a matter admitted of many opinions. If a man, ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... evil to the herdsmen," answered the man. "In yonder lake, which is so profound that no plummet has ever reached the bottom, there dwell huge monsters, neither beasts nor fish. No man has ever seen one near; but at night, when the moon is shining, they have been descried at a distance, prowling about in search of prey. When that noise is heard, which has just sounded ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... what they are, lessons and perhaps blessings in disguise, and will march boldly and cheerfully forward in the battle of life. Or, if necessary, he will bear his ills with a patience and calm endurance deeper than ever plummet sounded. He is ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... mangroves displaying their ankles in the way that shocked Captain Lugard. They look most respectable, their foliage rising densely in a wall irregularly striped here and there by the white line of an aerial root, coming straight down into the water from some upper branch as straight as a plummet, in the strange, knowing way an aerial root of a mangrove does, keeping the hard straight line until it gets some two feet above water-level, and then spreading out into blunt fingers with which to dip into the water and grasp the mud. Banks indeed at ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... gazing so intently at the swift rushing waters below him that you almost fancy he is attracted by the view. Suddenly he darts from his perch and, holds himself poised in mid-air until he sights a fish. He drops like a plummet and disappears. He quickly reappears and flies to a near- by rock with a fish, where he beats it to pieces ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... practical vagrant emotions and tendencies, and lop off and scorch out the idiosyncrasies of heredity and custom, and rouse the soul to a knowledge of its need of harmony with divine law. Into the real soul depths can no divulging line and plummet reach. This domain belongs to its Creator alone. It is only as the tests of living and doing manifest hidden motives and meanings that we catch glimpses of the ego that abides within and through this life, submerged as it is in the flesh. We can know but ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... things, with you, gentlemen, here preserve with scrupulons fidelity the sanctity of your oaths, and discharge your whole duty without fear and without favour. Put justice to the line and truth to the plummet, and act up fully to the obligations of that oath, and you will ever enjoy those rich consolations which always flow from a conscientious discharge of a ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... my islands the Atlantic then, as now, had a depth, as I said before, of two thousand fathoms; indeed, in some parts between the group and Portugal the plummet of your human navigators finds no bottom, I have often heard them say, till it reaches 2,500; and out of this profound sea-bed the volcanic energies pushed up my islands as a small submarine mountain range, whose ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... into a hundred hitherto unsuspected graces of mind and heart and speech. A sly sense of humour woke into life, and a positive talent for conversation, latent hitherto because she had never known any one who cared to drop a plummet into the crystal springs of her consciousness. When the violin was laid away, she would sit in the twilight, by Davy's sofa, his thin hand in hers, and talk with Anthony about books and flowers and music, and about the ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... star which was in the zenith of any place, say a farm-house in New York, at any time, would be there every night and every hour of the year. Now the zenith is simply the point from which the plumb-line seems to drop. Lie on the ground; hang a plummet above your head, sight on the line with one eye, and the direction of the sight will be the zenith of your place. Suppose the earth was still, and a certain star was at your zenith. Then if you went to another place a mile away, the direction ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... she recognized it not. No bridging, no descending; her attitude was that of perfect equality. She stood tranquilly on the ground of their common womanhood. And this maddened Freda. Not so, had she been of lesser breed; but her soul's plummet knew not the bottomless, and she could follow the other into the deeps of her deepest depths and read her aright. "Why do you not draw back your garment's hem?" she was fain to cry out, all in that flashing, dazzling second. "Spit upon me, revile ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... girl was chosen for me," Lone Chief was saying. His voice, shrill and piping, ever and again dropped plummet-like into a hoarse and rattling bass, and, just as one became accustomed to it, soaring upward into the thin treble—alternate cricket chirpings and bullfrog croakings, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... Arcot said grimly. "In formation, they're like sitting ducks!" He dropped the ship like a plummet while the ray operators prepared to sweep the formation with ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... ago, skepticism intrenched itself in an impregnable fortress: 'There is no criterion of truth.' How do I know that my 'true,' 'good,' and 'beautiful' are absolutely so? My reason is no infallible plummet to sound the sea of phenomena and touch noumena. I tell ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... Parisian sink with some indescribably hideous intermixture of the infinite. The sewer had no bottom. The sewer was the lower world. The idea of exploring these leprous regions did not even occur to the police. To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of discovery in that abyss—who would have dared? It was alarming. Nevertheless, some one did present himself. The cess-pool had its ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... envious Time, till thou run out thy race, Call on thy lazy, leaden-stepping hours, Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace; And glut thyself with what thy womb devours, Which is no more than what is false and vain, And merely mortal dross; So little is our loss, So little is thy gain. For when as each thing bad thou hast entomb'd, And last of all, thy greedy self ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... artist drop him from having made out that he wouldn't do? He really felt just to-day that he might do better than usual. Hadn't he done well enough, so far as that went, in being exactly so dazzled? and in not having too, as he almost believed, wholly hidden from his host that he felt the latter's plummet? Suddenly, across the garden, he saw little Bilham approach, and it was a part of the fit that was on him that as their eyes met he guessed also HIS knowledge. If he had said to him on the instant what was ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... from everywhere to watch. Here indeed will be a Crowd Picture with as many phases as a stormy ocean. Flying machines appear from the Fair Ground north of the city, and circle round and round as they go up, trying to reach the slowly descending plummet. ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... till thou run out thy race. Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours, Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace, And glut thyself with what thy womb devours— Which is no more than what is false and vain, And merely mortal dross: So little is our loss! So little is thy gain! For whenas each thing bad thou hast entombed, And last of all thy greedy self ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... As a plummet plunges into the sea, so the girl's look plunged into Warburton's soul; and had he been an officer of the law, he knew that he would have utterly ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... respect, gains audience so readily to the same august personages. Doors slammed in his face only flatter his self-importance. He becomes cynical as he sees how easily the spot light is made to flash upon the unworthiest figures by the flimsiest mechanism. He drops his plummet into shoal and deep water and from his contemplation of the wreck-littered shore grows skeptical of the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... measures 59 miles across; the circumference is 467 miles, and the surface is 334 feet below the level of Lake Erie. The depth of Ontario varies very much along the coast, being seldom more than from three to 50 fathoms; and in the center, a plummet, with 300 fathoms of line, has been tried in vain for soundings. A sort of gravel, small pieces of limestone, worn round and smooth by the action of water, covers the shores, lying in long ridges sometimes miles in extent. The waters, like those of the other ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... | Containing the priming-wire, friction-tubes, and | lanyard, attached to the tompion, and lying on the | mortar. | Gunner's Pouch. | Containing gunner's level, gimlet, vent-punch and | chalk, attached to tompion. | Quadrant. |} Plummet. |} Scraper. |} In a basket between the cheeks of the mortar-bed. Wiper. |} Shell-hooks. |} | Tompion. | In the muzzle. | Quoin. | Under the mortar upon the bolster, with handle to | the left. | Maul. |} Wrench. |} ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... plummet will never sound his depth. You often speak of his strength; but, Leo, hardness is not always strength; and he is hard, hard. I never saw a man with a chin like his, who was not tyrannical, and idolatrous ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... power of the beams braking the descent of that unimaginable load of allotropic iron the water seethed and boiled; and instead of floating gracefully upon the surface of the sea, this time the huge ship of space sank like a plummet to the bottom. Having accomplished this delicate feat of docking the vessel safely in the immense cradle prepared for her, Nerado turned to the Terrestrials, who, now under guard, had been ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... skillfully directed, hath the power to bestow—may easily understand how much that happy facility would be increased by a band carried by thongs of leather round the arm as high as the elbow, and terribly strengthened about the knuckles by a plate of iron, and sometimes a plummet of lead. Yet this, which was meant to increase, perhaps rather diminished, the interest of the fray: for it necessarily shortened its duration. A very few blows, successfully and scientifically planted, might suffice to bring the contest to a close; and the battle did not, therefore, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... centre of that sea of blackness, like the plummet of an engineer, like the lead of a storm-tossed sailor, shot a drop of rain. Down it came with unerring swiftness, right through one of the spectacled gentleman's improvised "sky-lights" in the roof, and splashed in the Cuban's face. Half-dreaming still, he sleepily rolled over ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... as a plummet falls. Each of us had his right hand in his overcoat pocket. I can't swear to what was in his fingers, but I felt a good deal safer for what was in mine. My back was still toward the bay, for I had a vision of the man who had disappeared—whoever he might be—slipping up through the ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... in man's nature and his possibilities which no plummet has ever sounded,—the wild, lonely joys of fanatical excitement, the perfectly ravenous appetite for self-torture, which seems able, in time, to reverse the whole human system, and make a heaven of hell. How else can we understand the facts related both in Hindoo and in Christian story, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... whose light they must see extinguished! Will not the most glorious among the beloved constellation of the Pleiades there disappear? Like drops of luminous dew the stars fall one by one into the nothingness of a yawning abyss, whose bottomless depths no plummet has ever sounded, while the soul, contemplating these fields of ether, this blue Sahara with its wandering and perishing oases,—is stricken by a grief so hopeless, so profound, that neither enthusiasm nor love can ever soothe ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... has only recently begun making progress on economic reform, and old economic ties and structures have yet to be replaced. Whereas the economies of most of the former Soviet republics had begun to bottom out in 1995, Azerbaijan's economy continued to plummet because of its ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere blind elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of Schehallion. Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster than so healthy a girl ought to breathe in a state of repose. The steady nerves of William Murray Bradshaw felt unwonted thrills and tremors tingling through them, as he came nearer ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... terrace-ground the Hermit tills and cultivates alone. And so thoroughly the work is done that hardly a stone can be seen in the soil. And so even and regular are the terrace walls that one would think they were built with line and plummet. The vines are handsomely trimmed and trellised, and here and there, to break the monotony of the rows, a fig, an apricot, an almond, or an olive, spreads its umbrageous boughs. Indeed, it is most cheering in the wilderness, most ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... of the sections out of office, when the general election was over, at once fetched forth line and plummet to take their soundings. 'The next few months,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 20), 'are, I apprehend, the crisis of our fate, and will show whether we are equal or unequal to playing out with prudence, honour, and resolution the drama ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... osprey circling in the sky dropped as a plummet, struck the water and, after a momentary struggle, arose with his fish, ingeniously holding it head-foremost to facilitate flight. From another point now came a scream, well known to me, and I turned to see an eagle approaching with tremendous ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris |
