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More "Plummet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... this well of mournfulness profound, Unfathomable to plummet cast by man? Alas; for who can tell! Whence comes the wind Heaving the ocean into maddened arms That clutch and dash huge vessels on the rocks, And scatter them, as if compacted slight As little eggs boys star against a tree In wanton mischief? Whence, detestable, ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper; it did bass my trespass. Therefore my son i' th' ooze is bedded, and I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded, And with him there ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... right of feeling, while I, I have no longer any liberty of heart, which I think precious to exercise in love, even though the love itself may be eternal. I have no right now to that privilege of quarrelling in jest to which so many women cling, and justly; for is it not the plummet line with which to sound the hearts of men? I have no threat at my command. I must draw my power henceforth from obedience, from unlimited gentleness; I must make myself imposing by the greatness of my love. I would rather ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... a trifle of a flying machine, all its delicate gears tangled and disrupted, Cocky fell to the floor in a shower of white feathers, which, like snowflakes, eddied slowly down after, and after the plummet-like descent of the cat, so that some of them came to rest on her back, startling her tense nerves with their gentle impact and making her crouch closer while she shot a swift glance around and overhead for ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... northern part of the lake is very deep, the plummet having shown an abyss of thirteen hundred feet; but the southern end is shallow ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 sport And the strange Tritons—the ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... the king felt the horrible depth of this Well, "Tell me, Progers," cried Charlie, "where am I? oh tell! Had I sought the world's centre to find, I had found it, But this Well! ne'er a plummet was made that ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... my lamp high over my head, I could see neither roof nor sides nor bottom,—only the wall in which was the window through which I looked. Upward it was lost in the darkness, and from my breast it descended, perpendicular as a plummet line, until it vanished in the gulf below, from which arose a sound of dripping water. This, my guide informed me, was "Gorin's Dome." Taking then from his haversack a Bengal light, he ignited it and threw ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... Phlegethon of agony and fury and 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 mistress in his hand, slides into such reflections ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... replied Mannering, 'you are the only Ptolemy I intend to resort to upon the present occasion. A second Prospero, I have broken my staff and drowned my book far beyond plummet depth. But I have great news notwithstanding. Meg Merrilies, our Egyptian sibyl, has appeared to the Dominie this very day, and, as I conjecture, has frightened the honest man ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... out his commands. He raced downward toward the street. Men seemed to spring up like magic about him. A ship with one wing aflame was tottering in mid-air, and another was dropping like a plummet. ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... place. When that is done the XII o'clock line will be found by the intersection of the dial surface with the vertical plane which contains the style; and the most simple way of drawing it on the dial will be by suspending a plummet from some point of the style whence it may hang freely, and waiting until the shadows of both style and plumb-line coincide on the dial. This single shadow will be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... into these abominations a meaning for which we grope in vain. Do not think," he added to Jenny, "that I undervalue the labours of Mr. Brendon and the police, but they have come to naught, for there are strange forces of evil moving here deeper than the plummet ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... a glimmer of reason in the form of sudden suspicion seized upon Jerry's beclouded mind. One or two things occurred to him. He stopped his horse, raised the trap and dropped his phonographic voice, like a lead plummet, through the aperture: ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... (t. 1, p. 697,) he inveighs with great zeal against rioting and revels usual in that season, and strongly exhorts all to spend that day in works of piety, and in consecrating the year to God. As builders raise a wall by a ruler or plummet, that no unevenness may spoil their work, so must we make the sincere intention of the divine glory our rule in our prayers, fasts, eating, drinking, buying, selling, silence, and discourse. This must be our great staff, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... 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 were ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... exist, she recognized it not. No bridging, no descending; her attitude was that of perfect equality. She stood tranquilly on the ground of their common womanhood. And this maddened Freda. Not so, had she been of lesser breed; but her soul's plummet knew not the bottomless, and she could follow the other into the deeps of her deepest depths and read her aright. "Why do you not draw back your garment's hem?" she was fain to cry out, all in that flashing, dazzling second. "Spit upon me, revile me, and it were greater mercy than this!" ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... embrace about all there is in life worth knowing. A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining, he sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet than any ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... 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 in our ears, it ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... expect that! Nowadays no one really cares for anybody else's happiness but their own. Besides, I shall be much too busy to want company. I'm bent on all sorts of discoveries, you know!—I want to dive 'deeper than ever plummet sounded'!" ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... Atlantic then, as now, had a depth, as I said before, of two thousand fathoms; indeed, in some parts between the group and Portugal the plummet of your human navigators finds no bottom, I have often heard them say, till it reaches 2,500; and out of this profound sea-bed the volcanic energies pushed up my islands as a small submarine mountain range, whose topmost summits alone stood out ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... comes out o' the palace gate—her attendants following. The multitude of her suitors throng the vestibule; the air, now still an' sweet, rings with the sound o' fairy timbrels. Of a sudden she rises into the blue sky, an' her suitors follow. Her swift wings cleave the air straight as a plummet falls. Only the strong may keep in sight o' her; bear that in mind, boy. Her suitors begin to fall wearied. Higher an' still higher the good queen wings her way. By an' by, of all that began the ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... and what it could not; to restrain it from efforts beyond its ability, but to teach it how to advance as far as the faculties given to it by Nature, with the utmost exertion and most proper culture of them, would allow it to go. In the vast ocean of philosophy I had the line and the plummet always in my hands. Many of its depths I found myself unable to fathom; but by caution in sounding, and the careful observations I made in the course of my voyage, I found out some truths of so much use to mankind that they acknowledge me to ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... unusual baits for there to take, as their prey is small fish, while most people are of opinion that they will not touch perch on account of their sharp back fin; but we had proof this afternoon that they will. But the most curious thing that I ever knew a pike to take was a leaden plummet, which it seized one day when I was plumbing the depth in a canal previous to bottom fishing, as we have been to-day. As a matter of course I was much surprised, as no doubt the pike was also, when he felt himself hooked, and, after a struggle, I drew him to land. But come, boys, I think it is ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... 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 to be fully solved, but forever approximately ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... It is the love which embraces the whole world; which shines resplendent wherever the eyes of men beam upon it, which exults wherever it hears the human voice. It is the old, immeasurable love, a deep well which no plummet has ever sounded; a fountain of perennial richness. Whoever knows it also knows that in love there is no More and no Less; but that he who loves can only love with the whole heart, and with the whole soul; with all his strength and ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... Though he flew toward the setting sun; But just as the shot rang out, he soared Up and up through the splinters of golden light, Till he turned right over, feathers ruffled, With some of the down of him floating near, And fell like a plummet into the grass. I tramped about, parting the tangles, Till I saw a splash of blood on a stump, And the quail lying close to the rotten roots. I reached my hand, but saw no brier, But something pricked and stunned and numbed ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... scabbard, but the scabbard was a mass of jewels, and the handle a flaming ruby. The belt was webbed with pearls and glistening brilliants. Under the sword were the instruments sacred then and ever since to Master Masons—a square, a gavel, a plummet, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... again into his chair, burying his face in his hands. He plunged into a reverie so deep and so self-searching that it could have been fathomed by no plummet. ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... Minotaur. Minos was desirous of hiding this monster from the observation of mankind, and for this purpose applied to Daedalus, an Athenian, the most skilful artist of his time, who is said to have invented the axe, the wedge, and the plummet, and to have found out the use of glue. He first contrived masts and sails for ships, and carved statues so admirably, that they not only looked as if they were alive, but had actually the power of self-motion, and would have escaped from the custody of their possessor, if they had not been ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... creatures, unafraid, And feel no longing for the air of heaven To fill thy lungs, and send the warm, red blood Along thy veins. But thou shalt pass the hours In dances with the sea-nymphs, or go forth, To look into the mysteries of the abyss Where never plummet reached. And thou shalt sleep Thy weariness away on downy banks Of sea-moss, where the pulses of the tide Shall gently lift thy hair, or thou shalt float On the soft currents that go forth and wind From isle to isle, and wander through the sea.' "So spake ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... the other divisions of this precipice, below the ledge which stops the plummet, give it altogether a height of about five hundred feet,[81] the whole looks a mere step on the huge slope of the Breven; and it only deserves mention among Alpine cliffs as one of singular beauty and decision, yet perfectly approachable and examinable even ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... 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.
... attached to | the tompion. | Tube-pouch. | 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. |} With the basket. Pincers. |} ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... let her expand wings of prose. In verse, however irregular, her flight is lime-twigged, and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? Let the bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she seeks the stars. There is room and power of ascension for any quantity of ballast—fling it out, and up she ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... ground. Each story is divided by rows of columns, so that architecturally it has a resemblance to the other buildings near at hand. There are many theories as to the leaning position of this tower, but no two persons seem to quite agree upon the matter. A plummet and line depending from the top would strike the ground some ten feet from the base of the structure. It has stood here for more than six hundred years, and does not appear to be in any danger of falling. A view from the upper ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... porter left him. "It is a mystery deeper than the sea below the plummet line! Ah! it must be love; love only is so sagacious, so inventive as this. Ah! I shall ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... make ourselves central to every movement), had the 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—I ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... the 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 out of ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... And there it lies, my sibyl sister, still! Your plummet hath not reached it. Yes, 't is love Flaunts his triumphant colors in my cheek, And quickens my lame speech—but not for him, Not for the Prince—so may I vaunt his worth With ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... disturbed the water near the shore. I set out the same way I went at first, designing to sail two or three days out and as many home again, and resolved if possible to fathom the depth as I went. With this view I prepared a very long line with a large shot tied in a rag at the end of it, by way of plummet, but I felt no ground till the second night The next morning I came into thirty fathom water, then twenty, then sixteen. In both tours I could perceive no abatement in the height ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... 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 ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... should always see the stars at rest and the star which was in the zenith of any place, say a farm-house in New York, at any time, would be there every night and every hour of the year. Now the zenith is simply the point from which the plumb-line seems to drop. Lie on the ground; hang a plummet above your head, sight on the line with one eye, and the direction of the sight will be the zenith of your place. Suppose the earth was still, and a certain star was at your zenith. Then if you went to another place a mile away, the direction of ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... there was a long silence. In the damp south corners of the walls a frog began to croak at exact intervals. The little fountain rippled monotonously, and a magnolia flower dropped from one of the trees, falling straight as a plummet through the motionless air, and settling upon the gravelled walk with a faint rustling sound. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... 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 ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... let down a large portion of his sounding-line, he reaches no bottom. Whereby he knows the depth to be so many fathoms, and more; but how much the more is, he hath no distinct notion at all: and could he always supply new line, and find the plummet always sink, without ever stopping, he would be something in the posture of the mind reaching after a complete and positive idea of infinity. In which case, let this line be ten, or ten thousand fathoms long, it equally discovers what is beyond it, and gives only this confused and comparative ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... wrought by human hands. Surely human nature was great—greater than she had dreamed. If creatures like herself had wrought this, then she was more than she had dared to imagine, "deeper than ever plummet had sounded." She felt new courage, new faith. She wanted to leave the boat and merge with those buildings and those swarming streets. She was proud of the great captains who had engineered this masswork, proud of the powers that ruled ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... the talk everywhere; it was impossible to avoid it. Every soul in the place had her omen. Jane Restless had a magpie. That very morning the bird had stolen a leaden plummet belonging to Restless and carried it to her cage, where she promptly set to work to hatch it out. And she fought when Zac went to take it away. She made such a racket when it was gone that Jane was sorry, and picked out a small ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... imagine S. Mary's feelings at this first of the Joyful Mysteries when the meaning of her vocation comes clearly before her. Hail! thou that art full of grace, of the Living Grace, the very Presence of the divinity itself. The plummet of our thought fails always to reach the depth of that mystery of Mary's Child. It was indeed centuries before the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit thought out and fully stated the meaning of this Child; it was centuries ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... Pilgrims since the shout "Mark Twain!"—that serves you for a deathless sign —On Mississippi's waterway rang out Over the plummet's line— Still where the countless ripples laugh above The blue of halcyon seas long may you keep Your course unbroken, buoyed upon a love Ten ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... stood all parrot-toed In cowhide shoes arrayed, And his hair seemed cut across his brow By rule and plummet laid. ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... primal hymn rejoicing, as at first The morning stars together. Hast thou heard, In vast and silent spaces of the sky, What time the bead-roll of the universe God calls in heaven, every tiniest star— From myriad twinkling points—from plummet depths Of dark too vast for eye and sense to guess, Send up a little silver answer "I am here." Even so, the humblest of thy little ones, dear Lord, May through the darkness hear Thy still small voice, And answer with quick gladness "Here am I,— I love Thee,—I ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... rowed 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 ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... 'parceled and labeled.' But how do I know that all truth is not merely subjective? Ages ago, skepticism intrenched itself in an impregnable fortress: 'There is no criterion of truth.' How do I know that my 'true,' 'good,' and 'beautiful' are absolutely so? My reason is no infallible plummet to sound the sea of phenomena and touch noumena. I tell you, Beulah, it ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... earliest sign of dusk; at first, if a man on the street spoke to me, I would tremble for five minutes afterward; at first the odor of the continual boiling of mutton bones and onions that met me every time I opened the door of Mrs. Plummet's lodging-house used to make me feel sick to my stomach. I became hardened as time went on, but at first it was rather awful. I don't like to recall ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... arbitrary. Certain it is that we can never convict Shakspere of bad reasoning in person; and in his later plays we never seem to touch bottom in his thought. The poet of VENUS AND ADONIS seems to have deepened beyond the plummet-reach even of the deep-striking intelligence that first ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... unsuspected graces of mind and heart and speech. A sly sense of humour woke into life, and a positive talent for conversation, latent hitherto because she had never known any one who cared to drop a plummet into the crystal springs of her consciousness. When the violin was laid away, she would sit in the twilight, by Davy's sofa, his thin hand in hers, and talk with Anthony about books and flowers and music, and about the meaning of life too—its ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... have her sails filled. Notwithstanding the calm, yet the wind being by flashes large, they went the last night and the day before twenty leagues up and down, sometimes in their course and sometimes out of it. In the morning, sounding with the plummet, the pilot judged that they were about sixteen leagues from the Texel, and twenty-four from Orfordness, but he did not certainly know whereabouts they were. Between three and four o'clock in the afternoon the wind came to north-north-west, ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... deep waters now. That is the point I am making. They show that, dive you ever so deep, young man, present-day statesmanship has depths which not even the plummet of imagination has yet been able to sound. And can we doubt that to-morrow's national and world ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... be seen, if you look closely, to be moving—a most uncanny motion. The water wells up incredibly fast and quiet, and surely incredibly cold, from some unplumbed, invisible source below. It would be interesting to try to find the bottom with a plummet, but probably one would be caught by a policeman. All that I have tried to do is to throw in white stones, which disappear as if they were swallowed. But the swallowing is a puzzling thing. The stone strikes ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... 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," ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... had won for him the name of "Bunny." Ishmael threw himself on his back and lay staring up at the sky as it was slowly drawn past overhead, till with hard gazing the whole world seemed spinning round him and the plummet of his sight was drowned in the shifting heights that seemed to his reeling senses bottomless depths. When Killigrew spoke he plucked his eyes from their fixed stare with what was a physical effort and turned them giddily on to the other boy's usually pale face, now copper-pink ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the equinoctial storms,—all this monastic tranquillity did in fact hide an inner and tumultuous life, the life of ideas, the life of the spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how it is possible for young girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no blind mother to send her plummet line of intuition to the depths of the subterranean fancies of a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste opened her window, as it were to watch for the passing of a man,—the man of her dreams, the expected knight who was to mount her behind ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... leaning 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... teaches us to distinguish between the knowable and the unknowable. We cannot fathom the infinite "mystery of the universe" with our finite plummet, nor see aught behind the veil of death. Here is our ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... He threw the gravity bar over to the first notch. Earth dropped, plummet-like, away from him. He pushed the bar to the limit leg; and, at a rate of hundreds of miles a second, was repelled from Earth toward Z-40, and ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... hanging upon image after image of those deploring strains, and appropriating all their melancholy, intensified through the lens of his own dark imagination, he would sink from one depth of wretchedness to another, till he seemed lost away, where no ray of light could ever penetrate, or plummet sound. ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... living, when death has entered and removed the best friend, Fate has done her worst; the plummet has sounded the depths of grief, and thereafter nothing can inspire terror. At one fell stroke all petty annoyances and corroding cares are sunk into nothingness. The memory of a great love lives enshrined in undying amber. It affords a ballast 'gainst all ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... his dazzled eyes. His head fell back. Unnerved, his fingers lost their hold. And, whirling over and over in midair, he dropped like a plummet. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... Did Folly, heretofore, with Wealth conspire To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene Which once was called a garden! Britain still Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid From geometric skill, they vainly strove By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears To form with verdure what the builder formed With stone. . . Hence the sidelong walls Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms Trimmed into high arcades; the tonsile box, Wove in mosaic mode of many a curl Around the figured carpet of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... sight to see That venerable tree For o'er the lawn, irregularly spread. Fifty straight columns propt its lofty head; And many a long depending shoot, Seeking to strike its root, Straight like a plummet grew towards the ground. Some on the lower boughs which crost their way, Fixing their bearded fibres, round and round, With many a ring and wild contortion wound; Some to the passing wind at times, with sway Of gentle motion swung; Others of younger growth, unmoved, were hung ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... thank God, divine desires and discontents, and certain rudimentary wings. And neither school alone is competent to paint him as he is. The author of "La Bete Humaine" fails as completely as the visionary A Kempis. Neither realism nor romance alone will ever with its small plummet sound to its depths the human heart or its mystery; yet from the union of the two ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... 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 high water can hardly be ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... temperature. But if mountains do not really draw clouds and invisible vapors to them, they are an exception to the universal law of attraction. The attraction of the small Mount Shehallien was found sufficient to deflect from the perpendicular, by a measurable quantity, a plummet weighing but a few ounces. Why, then, should not greater masses attract to them volumes of vapor weighing many tons, and floating freely in the atmosphere within moderate distances of the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... no clay suitable for making it. Calabashes or gourds and wooden trays served as receptacles, though stone dishes or bowls are sometimes found. Along the coast occur sinkers, either plummet-shaped or half-ovoid like an egg divided lengthwise. This form has a groove around the longer diameter, crossing the flat face, and was tied to a white shell as a sinker in catching squids or cuttlefish, a hook being attached to ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... early days, and we have vague accounts of a person called DAEDALUS, who seems to have been a wood-carver. Many cities claimed to have been his birthplace, and no one can give any clear account of this ancient artist. He is called the inventor of the axe, saw, gimlet, plummet-line, and a kind of fish-glue or isinglass. He is also said to have been the first sculptor who separated the arms from the bodies of his statues, or made the feet to step out; he also opened their eyes, and there is a legend that the statues of Daedalus were ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... man will survive his blighted hopes and disappointments, take them for just what they are, lessons and perhaps blessings in disguise, and will march boldly and cheerfully forward in the battle of life. Or, if necessary, he will bear his ills with a patience and calm endurance deeper than ever plummet sounded. He is ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... to need, born of long centuries of experiment and aspiration, can do for a congregation what no man alone can ever hope to accomplish. The well of human needs and desires is so deep that, without these aids, we have not much to draw with, no plummet wherewith to sound its dark ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... I," spoke up young Mrs. Plummet, the mother of Benjy. "I never did believe in that; I don't believe in it, even for hosses; it only gets 'em to go a few rods, and then they're lazier'n ever. My father's broke more colts than any man in this ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... described him as having all the virtues of his sex with none of its frailties. She said she had his picture which she would show us some day. She described his mother as a "proud piece," almost putting her down on a level with "poor white trash," which wuz the deepest depth her plummet of contumely could reach. And she described her as holding her son by her apron string, ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... which was visible from the top of the cliffs here through the split in the rocks. The shelving of the ice put the wash of the ocean at a distance of a few hundred feet from the schooner; but I calculated that the vessel's actual elevation above the water-line, supposing you to measure it with a plummet up and down, did not exceed twenty feet, if so much, the hollow in which she rested being above ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... The economy is dominated by the bauxite industry, which accounts for upwards of 15% of GDP and more than 65% of export earnings. Following a dismal year in 1994 which saw the value of the Surinamese currency plummet by about 80%, inflation rise to more than 600%, and national output fall for the fifth consecutive year, nearly all economic indicators improved in 1995. The VENETIAAN government unified the exchange rate and the currency gained some of its lost value. In addition, ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... supporter of saloons, and that New York politics battened on all forms of vice. So a favorite son could hardly have retained the purity that women take as a standard of measurement. "Don't you find ward politics very hard?" she asked, dropping an experimental plummet, to see what depths of iniquity there ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... that sun, clear back to the first avant-courier trace of purple twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim—yes, as if it were the very butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven—ran that wall, always sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel might climb or sparrow fly,—so broad that it was just faint-lined like the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,—so lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... unconsciously elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as really to have found it in the plays. But, in a certain sense, she did actually find it there. Shakespeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many phases of truth, each with scope large enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hope, your opinion, that ignorance is the best security for female virtue. If this connexion between virtue and ignorance could once be clearly proved, we ought to drown our books deeper than ever plummet sounded:—I say we—for the danger extends equally to both sexes, unless you assert that the duties of men rest upon a more certain foundation than the duties of the other sex: if our virtues can be demonstrated to be advantageous, why should theirs suffer for being exposed ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... do we try to take the sea's mystery by storm. In vain do we search for its meaning with love. It lies beyond our mortal ken, deeper than ever plummet sounded. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... often seen gathered into heaps. Two bullets or plummets, suspended by strings near to each other, are found by the delicate test of the torison balance to attract each other, and therefore not to hang quite perpendicularly. A plummet suspended near the side of a mountain, inclines towards it in a degree proportioned to its magnitude; as was ascertained by the wellknown trials of Dr. Maskeleyne near the mountain Skehalion, in Scotland. And the reason why the plummet tends much more strongly towards the earth than towards the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... landing. Under the terrific power of the beams braking the descent of that unimaginable load of allotropic iron the water seethed and boiled; and instead of floating gracefully upon the surface of the sea, this time the huge ship of space sank like a plummet to the bottom. Having accomplished this delicate feat of docking the vessel safely in the immense cradle prepared for her, Nerado turned to the Terrestrials, who, now under guard, had ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... confounded with a tyrannical disposition—we refer to an exaggerated sense of justice. This is the abuse of a right feeling, and requires to be kept in vigilant check. Nothing is easier than to be one-sided in judging of the actions of others. How agreeable the task of applying the line and plummet! How quiet and complete the assumption of our own superior excellence which we make in doing it! But if the task is in some respects easy, it is most difficult if we take into account the necessity of being just in our ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... mountains, void of fear; Or falls immers'd into the depths below, Where the dead silent waters never flow; To the foundation of the hills convey'd, Dwells in the shelving mountain's dreadful shade: Where plummet never reach'd, he draws his breath, And glides serenely thro' the paths of death. Two wondrous days and nights thro' coral groves, Thro' labyrinths of rocks and sands, he roves: When the third morning with its level rays The mountains gilds, and on the billows plays, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... or ravine, choked with the mingled foliage of oaks, walnuts, and elms; while in its rocky depths a little brook creeps down to mingle with the river. From the rugged trunk of the stunted cedar that leans forward from the brink, you may drop a plummet into the river below, where the cat-fish and the turtles may plainly be seen gliding over the wrinkled sands of the clear and shallow current. The cliff is accessible only from behind, where a man may climb up, not without difficulty, by a ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... body and pushed it over the edge. Grimshaw, trembling violently, watched it fall. I think, from what Doctor Waram told me many years later, that the poet must have suffered the violence and terror of that plummet drop, must have felt the tearing clutch of pointed rocks in the wall face, must have known the leaping upward of the earth, the whine of wind in his bursting ears, the dizzy spinning, the rending, obliterating impact ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... I do not expect that! Nowadays no one really cares for anybody else's happiness but their own. Besides, I shall be much too busy to want company. I'm bent on all sorts of discoveries, you know!—I want to dive 'deeper than ever plummet sounded'!" ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... Ossip by saying to him: 'Do you call yourself a man? Why, regarded as a workman, you're as lifeless as a doornail, while, seeing that you weren't born to be a master, you'll all your life continue chattering in corners, like a plummet swinging at the end of a string!' Yes, and that ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... could not fade it; over miles of distance it held visible. It struck 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
... eighth of a mile of space it plunged plummet-like; then, perhaps caught in a flaw of wind, it turned sideways and began to revolve, at first slowly, but with increasing rapidity in its fatally ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... The porter left him. "It is a mystery deeper than the sea below the plummet line! Ah! it must be love; love only is so sagacious, so inventive as this. Ah! I shall ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Who dropped his plummet down the broad Deep universe, and said, "No God," Finding no bottom. [Footnote: A ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... artist 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 recess, on the walls of which the puny human image was easily reflected ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... crossed the mind of the most recent, and clear-sighted, and able investigator of the Baconian remains. It was buried in the lowest depths of the lowest deeps of the deep Elizabethan Art; that Art which no plummet, till now, has ever sounded. It was locked with its utmost reach of traditionary cunning. It was buried in the inmost recesses of the esoteric Elizabethan learning. It was tied with a knot that had passed the scrutiny and baffled the sword of an ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... met straight 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 Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... 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 ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... things to see at Pisa: one is the Leaning Tower, from which Galileo with his line and plummet made some of his most interesting experiments; and the other is the Cathedral where the visitor beholds the great bronze lamp that is suspended from the vaulted ceiling. When he was about twenty-one, sitting in the silence of this church (which the passing years have only made more beautiful), ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... which when affixed to the light solid causes it to sink. If W be the weight of the experimental solid in air, w the weight of the sinker in water, and W1 the weight of the solid plus sinker in water, then the relative density is given by W/(W w - W1). In practice the solid or plummet is suspended from the balance arm by a fibre—silk, platinum, &c.—and carefully weighed. A small stool is then placed over the balance pan, and on this is placed a beaker of distilled water so that the solid is totally immersed. Some balances are provided with a "specific gravity ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... another. The Spirit of Life seeks to express itself in our individuality, through the three avenues of reason, feeling, and will; but as in the Masonic legend of the murder of Hiram Abif, the architect of Solomon's Temple, it is beaten back on the side of reasoning, by the plummet of a logic based on false premises; on the side of feeling, by the level of conventional ideas; and on the side of will, by the hammer of a short-sighted self-will, which gives the finishing blow; and it is not until the true perception of the Principle of Life ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... the wasting of a year; And sailors panting on their warping decks Will watch the sea steam like broth about them. You'll know what I know then!—That towering star Hangs like a fiery buzzard in the night Intent over our earth—Ay, now his journey Points, straight as a plummet's drop, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... down the spider ladder, nestled into the foremost scout's cockpit and pressed the starting button. The motor spat out a wisp of smoke, then burst into its full-throated roar: the automatic clamp above loosened: the scout dropped plummet-like, bobbed to the flagship below, straightened out and zoomed six thousand feet up into the morning blue, where it hovered for a few moments like an eagle on taut wings. Lieutenant Christopher Travers, the pilot, ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... his light eyelashes, had won for him the name of "Bunny." Ishmael threw himself on his back and lay staring up at the sky as it was slowly drawn past overhead, till with hard gazing the whole world seemed spinning round him and the plummet of his sight was drowned in the shifting heights that seemed to his reeling senses bottomless depths. When Killigrew spoke he plucked his eyes from their fixed stare with what was a physical effort and turned them giddily on to the other boy's usually pale ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... ocean-floor, 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 isle to isle, and wander through ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... But how do I know that all truth is not merely subjective? Ages ago, skepticism intrenched itself in an impregnable fortress: 'There is no criterion of truth.' How do I know that my 'true,' 'good,' and 'beautiful' are absolutely so? My reason is no infallible plummet to sound the sea of phenomena and touch noumena. I tell you, Beulah, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... 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
... scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the plummet; scarce one but could speak with condescending approval of that prodigious intelligence so utterly without congener that our baffled language must coin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as to say ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... conspire To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene Which once was called a garden! Britain still Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid From geometric skill, they vainly strove By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears To form with verdure what the builder formed With stone. . . Hence the sidelong walls Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms Trimmed into high arcades; the tonsile box, Wove in mosaic mode of many ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... wholly devoid of subtlety of intellect, so that I willingly admit that there may be depths of alternative meaning in these propositions out of all soundings attainable by my poor plummet. Still there are a good many people who suffer under a like intellectual limitation; and, for once in my life, I feel that I have the chance of attaining that position of a representative of average opinion which appears to be the modern ideal of a leader of men, when ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... long before you leave the train in Leicestershire. I have known a fly-fisher wretched for a whole day because he had not brought the bit of indiarubber with which he was in the habit of straightening out his cast; and a roach-fisher refuse to be comforted because his plummet was not. ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... are getting into deep waters now. That is the point I am making. They show that, dive you ever so deep, young man, present-day statesmanship has depths which not even the plummet of imagination has yet been able to sound. And can we doubt that to-morrow's national and world ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... The miles of soft blue distance that stretch invitingly upward to the withdrawn stars of the zenith, stretch as soft and blue, but fearsomely deep beneath my feet to the nadir. Standing at the water's rim I am on the verge of a vast, deep gulf that no plummet might fathom, into which at another step I shall begin to fall, and once falling fall forever, for there is no bottom. It is all very well to say to one's self that an inch below the mirroring surface lies the good gray sand which was there by daylight. The midsummer moon is past the full and things ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... proper place. When that is done the XII o'clock line will be found by the intersection of the dial surface with the vertical plane which contains the style; and the most simple way of drawing it on the dial will be by suspending a plummet from some point of the style whence it may hang freely, and waiting until the shadows of both style and plumb-line coincide on the dial. This single shadow will be the XII ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... his commands. He raced downward toward the street. Men seemed to spring up like magic about him. A ship with one wing aflame was tottering in mid-air, and another was dropping like a plummet. ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... a cimeter had been laid. The blade was in its scabbard, but the scabbard was a mass of jewels, and the handle a flaming ruby. The belt was webbed with pearls and glistening brilliants. Under the sword were the instruments sacred then and ever since to Master Masons—a square, a gavel, a plummet, and an ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... 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 me, and it were greater mercy than ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... event will teach us in its hour." He spoke, and Rustum answer'd not, but hurl'd His spear; down from the shoulder, down it came, As on some partridge in the corn a hawk, That long has tower'd in the airy clouds, Drops like a plummet; Sohrab saw it come, And sprang aside, quick as a flash; the spear Hiss'd, and went quivering down into the sand, Which it sent flying wide;—then Sohrab threw In turn, and full struck Rustum's shield; sharp ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... head in every stake. The exact point of the plummet of your bog-line must centre on the middle of that nail head. You can't be too exact ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... try this cause," he said. "It was brought before us by the wish of this sinful man himself. But if we must judge, let us judge like God! We read of Him—that he 'lays righteousness to the line and judgment to the plummet.' Let us do the same. That a great wrong hath been done is evident to every mind. It is not meet that such wrongs should go unpunished! These two transgressors have suffered; but who believes that such wrongs may justly be so soon followed by felicity? It would ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... watched, I felt the boat plummet down, as if the sea was snatched from under her; it was the undertow—the wave was drawing the waters back beneath it. By the gunwale the blue-green sea frothed white as it poured back from the skerries near the entrance ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... high-water mark, down to abysses deeper than ever plummet sounded, is life, everywhere life; fauna after fauna, and flora after flora, arranged in zones, according to the amount of light and warmth which each species requires, and to the amount of pressure which they are able to endure. The crevices of the highest ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... convinced that I should make a decided hit, and cover my temples with unfading laurel. I rehearsed at all times, seasons, and places, until I was a perfect nuisance to everybody, and my acquaintance, I am sure, to a man, wished both me and her bloodthirsty ladyship, deeper than plummet ever sounded, at the bottom of the sea. Even the brute creation did not escape the annoyance. One morning my English pointer "Spot" ran yelping out of the room, panic-stricken by the vehement manner with which I exclaimed, "Out damned spot, out, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... hero is the victim of a remarkable hallucination; in the story of 'The Inner House' the plummet of suggestion plunges into depths not sounded before, and the soul's regeneration is unfolded ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... widest it 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 great lakes, are very pure and ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... her 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 ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... resigned her seat, went home, never appeared again in public, and died within a year. "My dear friend," she wrote to me, not a month before her death, "I have been trying all my life to get a thorough knowledge of the masculine nature, but my woman's plummet will not reach to the bottom of that chaotic pit of selfishness and principle, expedience and firmness for the right, brutality and tenderness, gullibility and devilish shrewdness, which I have tried to sound. Only one thing is clear—we women cannot do without what we have ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... 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; I knew not whether ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the door. From the threshold he remarked, "If you will come to my business-room about half an hour before luncheon, I shall hope to have the last bars polished off, and I 'll sing you something sweeter than ever plummet sounded. Lebe wohl." ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... big seal was plenty, succulent beluga-steaks graced the board, and the years followed one another as smoothly as glacial drift or the strip of walrus-blubber that the last baby drops down its red gullet as a plummet sinks in ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... interpreter, "We now run only one danger; it is a great one. Before us are shifting sandbanks, occasionally displaced by the high tides; the galleys might ground there. It is necessary, then, that I reconnoitre the passage plummet in hand, before bringing the fleet into it. Let them rest as they are on their oars. Order the smallest boat your galley has to be launched, with two rowers. My wife will take the tiller. If you have any ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... express this sentiment!" said the artist. "I can understand the feeling, without possessing it. Had I your opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to the full depth of my plummet-line!" ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... eyrie. And at each turn of his head Denver caught the flash of gold, though he was loath to accept it as a sign. He waited, fighting against it, marshaling reasons to sustain him; and then, folding his wings, the eagle descended like a plummet, shooting past him with a shrill, defiant scream. Denver flinched and stepped back, then he leaned forward eagerly to watch where the bird's flight would take him. No Roman legionary, going into unequal battle with ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... 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 ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... man towards the very gulf of doom. Bob Darbishire, the athlete, the delightful and exhilarating companion, was set gliding on the slope, and now he and his hopes and his unknown capabilities have passed away, deeper than ever plummet sounded. It is a big puzzle. I am a loafer, and I suppose I shall never be anything else, so it is not for me to solve ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... dead pine tree that hangs over the water. He is gazing so intently at the swift rushing waters below him that you almost fancy he is attracted by the view. Suddenly he darts from his perch and, holds himself poised in mid-air until he sights a fish. He drops like a plummet and disappears. He quickly reappears and flies to a near- by rock with a fish, where he beats it to ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... lightly. He understood that Joyce was flirting with him, but he divined that there had been moments when the tide of her emotion had swept the young woman from her feet. She was a coquette, of course, but when his eyes fell like a plummet into hers they sounded depths beneath the surface foam. At such times the beat of the surf sounded in his blood. The spell of sex, with all its fire and passion, drew him to this lovely creature so prodigal ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... slow circles, his broad vans steady to the breeze, as if he were an ordinary hen hawk, enjoying himself and contemplating the world from an indifferent distance. Suddenly, with one clear, sharp whistle to announce his intention, he would drop like a plummet for a thousand feet, catch himself in mid-air, and zigzag down to the nest in the spruce top, whirling, diving, tumbling, and crying aloud the while in wild, ecstatic exclamations,—just as a woodcock comes whirling, plunging, twittering down from a height to his brown mate in the alders below. ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... 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 out ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... of many Pilgrims since the shout "Mark Twain!"—that serves you for a deathless sign —On Mississippi's waterway rang out Over the plummet's line— Still where the countless ripples laugh above The blue of halcyon seas long may you keep Your course unbroken, buoyed upon a love Ten thousand ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... she made the sign of peace and farewell—and then the knife descended straight as a plummet to her heart. But even as she fell she spurned the dead Ramon with her feet, so that he rolled a little way while the black dog growled at him with bared teeth; even in death she would not touch him who had been ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... attendants following. The multitude of her suitors throng the vestibule; the air, now still an' sweet, rings with the sound o' fairy timbrels. Of a sudden she rises into the blue sky, an' her suitors follow. Her swift wings cleave the air straight as a plummet falls. Only the strong may keep in sight o' her; bear that in mind, boy. Her suitors begin to fall wearied. Higher an' still higher the good queen wings her way. By an' by, of all that began the journey, there is but one left with her, an' he the strongest of her people. An' they are wed, ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... of the beams braking the descent of that unimaginable load of allotropic iron the water seethed and boiled; and instead of floating gracefully upon the surface of the sea, this time the huge ship of space sank like a plummet to the bottom. Having accomplished this delicate feat of docking the vessel safely in the immense cradle prepared for her, Nerado turned to the Terrestrials, who, now under guard, had ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... pine, his heart dropped like a plummet. There were no men there, nor any tracks of men. Could it be that the factor had ignored his directions? No, hardly that, for the French trains had been captured. What, then, was the matter? With his eyes at their keenest, ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... everlasting stone. Cleaving its way westward to some far-off sea, a wide abyss, a dozen miles across from lip to lip, yawned down to the very vitals of the earth. We stood upon the rim of it—a sheer cliff that dropped a thousand feet of solid limestone, in one plummet line, to other cliffs below, that dropped again through furlongs of black gneiss, ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... depth; deepness &c adj.; profundity, depression &c (concavity) 252. hollow, pit, shaft, well, crater; gulf &c 198; bowels of the earth, botttomless pit^, hell. soundings, depth of water, water, draught, submersion; plummet, sound, probe; sounding rod, sounding line; lead. bathymetry. [instrument to measure depth] sonar, side-looking sonar; bathometer^. V. be deep &c adj.; render deep &c adj.; deepen. plunge &c 310; sound, fathom, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... itself appeared along the waters but as a slim strip of blue. And then when in mid-sea the sailors heaved the lead; and it went down, and down, and down, and the long line slipped swiftly away over the boat-edge coil after coil, till, ere the plummet rested on the ouse below, all was well-nigh expended. And was it not the great sea, asks the boy, that was so vastly broad, and so profoundly deep? Ah! my child, exclaims the father, you have not yet seen aught of its greatness,—you have sailed over merely one of its little arms. ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Lord God: "Judgment 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 shall pass through, then ye shall ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... the republic with the result that Bosnia hosted a large share of Yugoslavia's defense plants. As of February 1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina was being torn apart by the continued bitter interethnic warfare that has caused production to plummet, unemployment and inflation to soar, and human misery to multiply. No economic statistics for 1992-94 are available, although output clearly has fallen substantially below the levels of earlier years and almost certainly is well below $1,000 per head. The country ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... the lead?" came the mate's voice above me. "All ready with the lead, sir." "What have we now?" I gathered forward and swung the lead. I could not reach the umbrella-man, even with my spare line. Once, twice, thrice I swung, and pitched the plummet well ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... noon. The influx of so many strangers to the island for this work, and the novelty of the intended ceremony, caused most of the inhabitants to be present to witness it. Every thing being prepared, the engineer, assisted by the foreman of the works, applied the square and plummet-level to the foundation-stone in compliance with ancient custom. The phial was then deposited in the cavity prepared for it in the stone, and carefully covered up with sand, when the masonic ceremony was concluded in the usual ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... unfathomable blue of the June heavens—there! he is lost in the blue, so high that I cannot see any more. But even as I turn away he plunges down into vision again, dropping with folded wings straight down like a plummet, faster and faster, larger and larger, through a terrifying rush of air, till I spring to my feet and catch the breath, as if I myself were falling. And just before he dashes himself to pieces he turns in the ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us; for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves: Therefore, thus saith the Lord God, Judgment will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet; and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding-place: And your covenant with death shall be annulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... the greatest delver into the mysterious mind of man and Nature, and sunk his intellectual plummet deeper into the ocean of thought than any mortal that ever lived, before or after his glorious advent upon the earth. He was a universal ocean of knowledge, and the ebb and flow of his thoughts pulsated on the shores ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... just— But how can finite measure infinite? Reason! alas, it does not know itself! Yet man, vain man, would, with this, 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'the chain; the nearest links; His eyes not carrying to that equal beam, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... (which were struck with a wooden mallet), the drill, and two sorts of planes (one resembling a chisel, the other apparently of stone, acting as a rasp on the surface of the wood, which was afterwards polished by a smooth body, probably also of stone); and these, with the ruler, plummet, and right angle, a leather bag containing nails, the hone, and the horn of oil, constituted the principal, and perhaps the only, implements ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... Sir Granby Royland's happy country home, surrounded by its great estate with many tenants, while its heir was stretched out there in the sunshine upon his chest, kicking up his heels, and thinking at that moment that it would not be a bad amusement to bring up a very long line with a plummet at the end, to bait it, and then swing it to and fro till he could drop it right out where the great pike lay, ten or a dozen feet from ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... exaggerated sense of justice. This is the abuse of a right feeling, and requires to be kept in vigilant check. Nothing is easier than to be one-sided in judging of the actions of others. How agreeable the task of applying the line and plummet! How quiet and complete the assumption of our own superior excellence which we make in doing it! But if the task is in some respects easy, it is most difficult if we take into account the necessity of being just in our decisions. In domestic life especially, in which so much depends ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... to the earth, we would fain inquire into the relations that exist between the oscillations of the pendulum in air (the theory of which has been perfected by Bessel) and the density of our planet; and how the pendulum, acting the part of a plummet, can, to a certain extent, throw light upon the geological constitution of strata at great depths? By means of this instrument we are enabled to trace the striking analogy which exists between the formation of the granular ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... 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 ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... mine the seer-like power to show The secrets of the hear and mind; To drop the plummet-line below Our common world of joy and woe, A more intense despair or ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... consolidate and make practical vagrant emotions and tendencies, and lop off and scorch out the idiosyncrasies of heredity and custom, and rouse the soul to a knowledge of its need of harmony with divine law. Into the real soul depths can no divulging line and plummet reach. This domain belongs to its Creator alone. It is only as the tests of living and doing manifest hidden motives and meanings that we catch glimpses of the ego that abides within and through this life, submerged as it is in the flesh. ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... into the deep like a leaden plummet, which, set in the horn of ox that ranges in the fields, rushes along carrying death among the ...
— Ion • Plato
... look closely, to be moving—a most uncanny motion. The water wells up incredibly fast and quiet, and surely incredibly cold, from some unplumbed, invisible source below. It would be interesting to try to find the bottom with a plummet, but probably one would be caught by a policeman. All that I have tried to do is to throw in white stones, which disappear as if they were swallowed. But the swallowing is a puzzling thing. The stone strikes the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as really to have found it in the plays. But, in a certain sense, she did actually find it there. Shakespeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many phases of truth, each with scope large enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretation of his symbols; and a ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the sea in the equinoctial storms,—all this monastic tranquillity did in fact hide an inner and tumultuous life, the life of ideas, the life of the spiritual being. We sometimes wonder how it is possible for young girls to do wrong; but such as do so have no blind mother to send her plummet line of intuition to the depths of the subterranean fancies of a virgin heart. The Dumays slept when Modeste opened her window, as it were to watch for the passing of a man,—the man of her dreams, the expected knight who was to mount her behind him and ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... death, and making 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 22. When it was taken down in 1879 to be brought to America, all the emblems of the builders were found in the foundation. The rough Cube and the polished Cube in pure white limestone, the Square cut in syenite, an iron Trowel, a lead Plummet, the arc of a Circle, the serpent-symbols of Wisdom, a stone Trestle-board, a stone bearing the Master's Mark, and a hieroglyphic word meaning Temple—all so placed and preserved as to show, beyond doubt, that they had high symbolic meaning. Whether ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... afternoon Preston's heart kept sinking down, down, like a plummet let into the sea, and his father's heart sank with it, for a child cannot feel a sorrow that does not touch his ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... art thou? I see thee follow thy path without scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes, wet and sad as a plummet which has returned to the light insatiated out of every depth—what did it seek down there?—with a bosom that never sighs, with lips that conceal their loathing, with a hand which only slowly grasps: who art thou? what hast thou done? Rest thee here: this place has hospitality for every one—refresh ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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 before him. The youth and the dotard have alike succeeded in passing out of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... 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 consumed, Then long eternity ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... some of the rivers of the tableland between Jubbulpore and Mirzapore have a perpendicular fall of more than four hundred feet over these mural precipices of the northern face of the Vindhya range.[2] A man, if he have good nerve, may hang over the summits, and suspend in his hand a plummet that shall ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... billowes spoke, and told me of it, The windes did sing it to me: and the Thunder (That deepe and dreadfull Organ-Pipe) pronounc'd The name of Prosper: it did base my Trespasse, Therefore my Sonne i'th Ooze is bedded; and I'le seeke him deeper then ere plummet sounded, And with him ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... felt the horrible depth of this Well, "Tell me, Progers," cried Charlie, "where am I? oh tell! Had I sought the world's centre to find, I had found it, But this Well! ne'er a plummet was made ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... conversation which followed, old Jombatiste, exploring at last Cousin Tryphena's mind, leaned giddily over the abyss of her ignorance of political economy and sociology, dropping one exploring plummet after another into its depths, only to find them fathomless. He went shakily back to his own house, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... without success. This spring, or rather these two springs, are two holes, each about two feet diameter, a stone's cast distant from each other; the one is but about five feet and a half in depth—at least we could not get our plummet farther, perhaps because it was stopped by roots, for the whole place is full of trees; of the other, which is somewhat less, with a line of ten feet we could find no bottom, and were assured by the inhabitants that none ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... Samaria did of Christ when in the flesh, to be the Messiah, viz. It had told them all that ever they had done; shown them their insides, the most inward secrets of their hearts, and laid judgment to the line, and righteousness to the plummet; of which thousands can at this day give in their witness. So that nothing has been affirmed by this people, of the power and virtue of this heavenly principle, that such as have turned to it have not found true, and more; and that one half had not been ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... is a beautiful cylinder of eight stories, each adorned with a round of columns, rising one above another. It stands by the cathedral, and inclines so far on one side from the perpendicular, that in dropping a plummet from the top, which is one hundred and eighty-eight feet high, it falls sixteen feet from the base. For my part, I should never have dreamed that this inclination proceeded from any other cause, than an accidental subsidence of the foundation on this side, if some connoisseurs had not taken great ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... of two thousand feet. What had happened I could not conjecture, but even as we looked we saw her bow dip down lower and lower. Then the bulkheads of the various gas-chambers must have burst, for, quite perpendicular, she fell like a plummet to the earth. ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say "unprintable"; and in justice I must also say "unthinkable." They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation. It would take a deep plummet to reach bottom in the Erie County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and facetiously the surface of things ...
— The Road • Jack London
... face of Timmendiquas, who had followed him down the line, seeking, it seemed, to give a blow on his account. Beside him, a warrior held a heavy club poised to strike. Henry saw that he could not escape it, and his heart sank, like a plummet in a pool. But the great chief, so sure of foot, stumbled and fell against the warrior with the poised club. The blow went wide, and Henry was untouched. He ran on, but ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... part of the lake is very deep, the plummet having shown an abyss of thirteen hundred feet; but the southern end is ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... being opened, we find ourselves in a narrow passage, open to the heavens, perhaps a couple of hundred feet over-head, but walled in on either hand by rocks, perpendicular as the drop of the plummet. The passage being exceedingly tortuous, does not permit any extensive view to the front; but at each new turn some new wonder presents itself, either in the formation of some particular rock, or in the grotesque and striking combinations of masses. Here the guide stops us ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... promptly on 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 o'er the fate Her matchless son awaiting, doom'd to die Far from his home, ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... islands the Atlantic then, as now, had a depth, as I said before, of two thousand fathoms; indeed, in some parts between the group and Portugal the plummet of your human navigators finds no bottom, I have often heard them say, till it reaches 2,500; and out of this profound sea-bed the volcanic energies pushed up my islands as a small submarine mountain range, whose topmost ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... miles from its mouth, it reaches the Strait of Obydos, where it is narrowed to two thousand paces. Through this channel its waters rush with immense force, calculated at five hundred thousand cubic feet in one second—sufficient to fill all the streams in Europe, and swell them to overflowing. No plummet has hitherto sounded the depth of its bed at this point, the force of the stream probably rendering ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... with mystery, it is not blank, hopeless, fathomless mystery. Our plummet-lines are only too short; but they are growing longer. It is a lively mystery, that piques and tempts and rewards endeavor. It unfolds with an appetizing delay. Every year a new secret is laid bare, which, in the flush of triumph, seems a crowning development; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... sun," Lydia bloomed into a hundred hitherto unsuspected graces of mind and heart and speech. A sly sense of humour woke into life, and a positive talent for conversation, latent hitherto because she had never known any one who cared to drop a plummet into the crystal springs of her consciousness. When the violin was laid away, she would sit in the twilight, by Davy's sofa, his thin hand in hers, and talk with Anthony about books and flowers and music, and about the meaning ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... could have been justly angry and forever done with him. But I knew a man, a very near relation, with whom God might oftener have done the same, and had not; besides, I remembered that adroit petition in the Lord's Prayer, which is the plummet of the soul's sincerity—and I had read of One ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... thoroughly on his guard. He had never lifted an eyebrow at the mention of Miss Johnstone. He had dropped Justine Delande like a plummet into the lake of forgetfulness, and watched Hugh Johnstone's listless trifling with the dainties of the superb collation. The raw-boned old Scotsman leaned ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... Drink! drink! And thy soul shall sink Down into the dark abyss, Into the infinite abyss, From which no plummet nor rope Ever drew up ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... tremendous leap, and rose to 890. It was now thought impossible that it could rise higher, and many prudent persons sold out to make sure of their spoil. Many of these were noblemen about to accompany the king to Hanover. The buyers were so few on June 3rd, that stock fell at once, like a plummet, from 890 to 640. The directors ordering their agents to still buy, confidence was restored, and the stock rose to 750. By August, the stock culminated at 1,000 per cent., or, as Dr. Mackay observes, "the bubble was ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... be true; that he, the grand, the kind, the gentleman, was beneath the diver's reach, the plummet's sounding, where light could not pierce, nor Hope overtake? Her father, the first gentleman in Somerset, a drunkard, going ever downward towards the gutter, and no ray of heaven to beam upon ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
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