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Heaviness   Listen
noun
Heaviness  n.  The state or quality of being heavy in its various senses; weight; sadness; sluggishness; oppression; thickness.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Heaviness" Quotes from Famous Books



... all sorry to part with me. Elinor says nothing; but there is a heaviness in her countenance delightful to my soul. This morning she got a scolding from Aunt Bethiah for putting more sand on the floor, when it was on new yesterday, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... the greatest reluctance that he left his friend alone; but Dudley had given him intimations, in every look and tone and movement, that he wished to be by himself; and this fact increased the heaviness of heart with which Max, full of forebodings on his friend's account, had gone reluctantly ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden

... climbing slowly up the hushed heaven. In the shadow of that strange cloud the leaves drooped in the trees, the birds ceased their calling, and the cattle and the sheep gathered cowering under the hedges. A gloom fell upon all the land, and men stood with their eyes upon the strange cloud and a heaviness upon their hearts. They crept into the churches where the trembling people were blessed and shriven by the trembling priests. Outside no bird flew, and there came no rustling from the woods, nor any of the homely sounds of Nature. ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... whom he was writing, he not only acquired tranquillity, that virtue for which his whole life long he strove; but his loving nature received new life, and only by slight intimations did he betray the heaviness and dejection which weighed upon his soul. He was, in the full sense of the word, "philanthropic," in the sight of good men; and in thoughts for their welfare, there was for him a real happiness ...
— Christian Gellert's Last Christmas - From "German Tales" Published by the American Publishers' Corporation • Berthold Auerbach

... any vote or voice in their municipal or national affairs. Jews and Roman Catholics as such were absolutely disfranchised by them; and their singing, which later on we often heard, by its droning heaviness would have delighted the hearts of those Highland crofters who, at Aldershot, said they could not away with the jingling songs of Sankey. "Gie us the Psalms of David," they cried. The Dutch Reformed Church and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry

... cold chills and flushes, lassitude, heaviness, pain in the head, and drowsiness, cough, hoarseness, and extreme difficulty of breathing, frequent sneezing, deduction or running at the eyes and nose, nausea, sometimes vomiting, thirst, a furred tongue; the pulse throughout is quick, and sometimes full and soft, at others hard and small, with ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... "Quawk!" said the yellow thing, and wobbled off sideways. It was this oblique movement that enabled Jackanapes to come up with it, for it was bound for the Pond, and therefore obliged to come back into line. He failed again from top-heaviness, and his prey escaped sideways as before, and, as before, lost ground in getting back to the ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing

... of bed, her eyes still half shut with the heaviness of sleep, extending her arms towards the corner ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... truncated and rounded off above. In the females, however, the cheek is so extremely plump as perfectly to pad these broad jaws, giving, instead of the prize-fighter physiognomy, an aspect of smooth, gentle heaviness. Even without this fleshy cheek, which is not noticeable, and is sometimes noticeably wanting, in the men, there is the same look of heavy, well-tempered lameness. The girls have a rich blood color in their swarthy cheeks, and some of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... Truth. For what is it to me to know, that such a quality resides in such a Principle or Element, whilst I remain altogether ignorant of the Cause of that quality, and the manner of its production and Operation? How little do I know more then any Ordinary Man of Gravity, if I know but that the Heaviness of mixt bodies proceeds from that of the Earth they are compos'd of, if I know not the reason why the Earth is Heavy? And how little does the Chymist teach the Philosopher of the Nature of Purgatition, if he only tells him that the Purgative Vertue of Medicines ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle

... then supported his feeble steps back to the Rectory. She made no reference to the sermon, but endeavoured to divert her father's mind into a different channel. She set about preparing their light midday repast, talked and chatted at the table, and exhibited none of the heaviness which pressed upon her heart. Only after she had coaxed her father to lie down, and knew that he had passed into a gentle sleep, did she give way to her pent-up feelings. How her heart did ache as she sat there alone in the room, and thought of her father standing in the ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody

... made a bold attempt to break through the heaviness of the evening. "We are not so badly off, at any rate," said he, "as we were on that night when Santerre and his men were here; are ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope

... tying up his rose-trees; we were watching him from our seat on the green bench. Here in the garden, beneath the blue vault, the roses were drooping from very heaviness of glory; they gave forth a scent that made the head swim. It was a healthy, virile intoxication, however, the salt in ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... pony and waited until Benson came up. The man moved with a slack heaviness, and his face was worn and tense. He was tired with the journey, for excess had weakened him, and now the lust for drink which he had ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss

... very low, and thrust it at the nose of the animal, who thereupon made off: This done, the man awoke us, and related, with horror in his countenance, the narrow escape he had of being devoured. But though we were under no small apprehensions of another visit from this animal, yet our fatigue and heaviness was greater than our fears, and we once more composed ourselves to rest, and slept the remainder of the night without any further disturbance. In the morning, we were not a little anxious to know how our companions ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr

... been laid down that he should acquire and practise a measure of virtue less by a fourth part. So, a Vaisya should acquire a measure less (than a Kshatriya's) by a fourth and a Sudra less (than a Vaisya's) by a fourth. The heaviness or lightness of sins (for purposes of expiation) of each of the four orders, should be determined upon this principle. Having slain a bird or an animal, or cut down living trees, a person should publish his sin and fast for three nights. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... and on being asked to sit down to breakfast, he unbuckled his sword, threw it from him with a clash on the floor, and then, with all the grace in the world, addressed himself to discuss the comestibles. He tried a slight approach to jesting now and then; but seeing the heaviness of heart which prevailed amongst the women, he, with the good breeding of a man of the world, forbore to press ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... him that this is not his rest. We seldom enjoy prosperity without a sensible mixture of adversity; or without somewhat adverse following in quick succession. "Even in laughter, the heart is sorrowful, and the end of mirth is heaviness." Neither are special trials or sorrows sent alone; comforts and consolations are usually joined with the, or soon succeed them. If we consider the matter, we shall observe this in ourselves; and may often discover ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee

... of his work is solidity, but it is a solidity which rarely becomes heaviness. Even in his most lightsome efforts, such as the ribbon-backed chair, construction is always the first consideration. It is here perhaps that he differs most materially from his great successor Sheraton, whose ideas of construction were eccentric in the extreme. It ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... sharp jags Cut brutally into a sky Of leaden heaviness, and crags Of houses lift their masonry Ugly and foul, and chimneys lie And snort, outlined against the gray Of lowhung cloud. I hear the sigh The goaded city gives, not day Nor night can ease her heart, ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell

... coiled like a dark serpent on a hillside; his heart was filled with dolor, for he thought continually of Eleanor, his mother, and he wept softly to himself through love of that dear mother. While thus he walked in vast heaviness of soul, he was beheld of Membril, the fairy that with her goodly subjects dwelt in the ruin of the Pict's house hard by the Druid circle. And Membril had compassion upon Harold, and upon the exceeding fine down of a tiny sea-bird she ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field

... to the Bug, some to the Borer, and to leaf disease, while others blamed the heaviness of the tropical rains, which washed away the valuable surface soil, the flight of which towards the western sea was much expedited by weeding with the mamoty (a digging hoe), which loosened the soil, and so prepared the way for its ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot

... evening together; for all but Jones were heartily merry, and even he put on as much constrained mirth as possible. Indeed, half his natural flow of animal spirits, joined to the sweetness of his temper, was sufficient to make a most amiable companion; and notwithstanding the heaviness of his heart, so agreeable did he make himself on the present occasion, that, at their breaking up, the young gentleman earnestly desired his further acquaintance. Miss Nancy was well pleased with him; and the widow, quite charmed ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... failure, the poverty to which I had brought Sally and the child through my inordinate ambition, and the weight of the two hundred thousand dollars of debt on my shoulders—all these things returned to my memory, with an additional heaviness, like a burden that has been lifted only to drop back more crushingly. And as always in my thoughts now, this sense of my failure came to me in the image of George Bolingbroke, with his air of generous self-sufficiency, as if he needed nothing because he had been born ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow

... their shoulders, the heaviness of their steps, the silence in which they went, trumpeted misery. Anything, however, was better than the dull sightless stares with which the news that their work was over had been received. Every, who was no coward, had been prepared for suspicion, defiance, violence. Instead, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... here, with three rolls of bread and a score of potatoes. What is the meaning of it? How is the stomach of man to be brought to desire and to receive all this quantity? Do not gastronomists complain of heaviness in London after eating a couple of mutton-chops? Do not respectable gentlemen fall asleep in their arm-chairs? Are they fit for mental labor? Far from it. But look at the difference here: after dinner here one is as light as ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and understood it and fell down in joy. A man one day named God and emptied his heart to Him in prayer. And he told the discovery to his brothers, and men all began to pray. The world lost half its heaviness at once. Men learned that their prayers were nearly all the same, that God heard the same story from thousands and hundreds of thousands of hearts. Thus men came nearer to one another, and knew themselves one in the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... was near his fiftieth year, there fell on him a heaviness of spirit which daily increased upon him. He began to question of his end and what lay beyond. He had always made pretence to mock at religion, and had grown to believe that in death the soul was extinguished like a burnt-out ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson

... fated to be disappointed. For scarcely had I got beyond the village when the weather suddenly changed. The chill morning air freshened to a wind which brought snow with it, light at first, but increasing in heaviness as the day went on. The road rapidly became covered, and my horse, unable on the treacherous foothold to maintain the canter of the morning, was compelled to ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed

... composition; the graceful waving of the hair, the fine shadows of the little face, of the eyes and lips especially, like the shadows of a flower—a flower risen noiselessly from its dwelling in the dust—though still with that fulness or heaviness in the brow, as of sleepy people, which, in the delicate gradations of Greek sculpture, distinguish the infernal deities from their Olympian kindred. The object placed in the hand may be, perhaps, a stiff, archaic flower, but is probably the partly consumed pomegranate—one morsel ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... others that I hear, And binds them up together into one, Until the mingled murmur of the world Sounds through the inner temple of my heart Like an eternal question, vainly asked By every human soul that thinks and feels. This is the heaviness that weighs me down, And this the pain that will not let me rest. Therefore, dear Master, shut the gates again, And let me live in silence as before! Or else,—and if there is indeed a gate Unopened yet, through which I might receive An answer ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke

... much like himself, matter of fact, materialistic, kind, and good. Devoid of imagination, uneducated in mind, her thoughts had not ranged far from what she touched and saw. She touched them with something of their own heaviness, she saw them as objects—just what they were—and was incapable of obtaining from them much suggestion or enjoyment. She knew when the cherry and plum trees were in blossom just as she knew it was April. The beautiful ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe

... in the two countries is not the same, and should the editor of Engineering undertake to transfer his system of intellectual labor to this side of the Atlantic, he would not be long in making the discovery that those wandering Bohemian engineers, who, he tells us, are in sorrow and heaviness over the short-comings of American technical journals, would turn out after all to be slender props for him to lean upon. We think it probable, however, that with a little more snap, a journal like Engineering ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various

... The heaviness of the gallop told him that his horse was plainly spent and would not be capable of a long run before the morning. Riley Sinclair accepted the inevitable with a sigh. All his strong instincts cried out to find ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand

... this romance—something like which the muletress seemed to think might well happen concerning herself—we passed lightly to speak of kindred things, the muletress responding gayly between the blows she bestowed upon her beast. The accent of these Capriotes has something of German harshness and heaviness: they say non bosso instead of non posso, and monto instead of mondo, and interchange the t and d a good deal; and they use for father the Latin pater, instead of padre. But this girl's voice, as I said, was very musical, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... satisfied with their own characters and conduct? Yet St. Paul declares concerning those of whom he speaks, as concerning persons whose sad situation could not be too much lamented, that he had great heaviness and continual sorrow in his heart, adding still more emphatical expressions ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... up from his seat and grasped the young man's hand; but his first thought was, What would Audrey say when she saw him? Could one night have effected such a change? There was a wanness, a heaviness of aspect, that made him look ten years older. Somehow Dr. Ross found it necessary to take off his spectacles and wipe them ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... Mr. Forster, 'that he also meant slowness of motion? The first point of the picture is that. The poet is moving slowly, his tardiness of gait measuring the heaviness of heart, the pensive spirit, the melancholy of which it is the outward expression and sign.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... said, 'is a very expensive thing.' If the taste for pleasure diminishes, the necessity for comfort increases. Men become more dependent and more fastidious, and hardships that are indifferent to youth become acutely painful. Beside this, money cares are apt to weigh with an especial heaviness upon the old. Avarice, as has been often observed, is eminently an old-age vice, and in natures that are in no degree avaricious it will be found that real money anxieties are more felt and have a greater haunting power in age than in youth. There is then the sense of impotence which ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... and while she stood there before the wood fire, she looked as if she had absorbed the beauty and colour of the house as a crystal vase absorbs the light. Only when she spoke to me, and I went nearer, did I detect the heaviness beneath her eyes and the nervous quiver of her mouth, which drooped a little at the corners. Tired and worn as she was, I never saw her afterwards—not even when she was dressed for the opera—look quite so lovely, so much like an exquisite flower, as she did on that first afternoon. When I ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... earth; and sculptures rude In ponderous stone, developing the mood Of ancient Nox;—then skeletons of man, Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan, And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw Of nameless monster. A cold leaden awe These secrets struck into him; and unless Dian had chaced away that heaviness, 140 He might have died: but now, with cheered feel, He onward kept; wooing these thoughts to steal About the labyrinth in his ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... my turn, looked hard at her, and thought I could perceive, notwithstanding the coarseness of her features, and especially the heaviness of her eyebrows, a something unusual—I could hardly call it grace, and yet it was an expression that strangely contrasted with the form of her features. I noticed too that her hands were delicately formed, though ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... to think about besides marvelling at the old Finn. No sooner did the heaviness of slumber quit his eyes than he strolled down to ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie

... what seemed to her a long time, watching all of them; her heart throbbing with a dread heaviness that threatened to choke her; her body in a state of ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer

... the which correcting, henceforward he is ware of them; and so he brings righteousness busily to birth, until he is led to God and may sit with heavenly citizens in everlasting seats. Therefore he stands clear in conscience and is steadfast in all good ways the which is never noyed with worldly heaviness nor ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... is to use soap and silk for cleaning. The one way to see cotton is to have a design concentrating the illusion and the illustration. The perfect way is to accustom the thing to have a lining and the shape of a ribbon and to be solid, quite solid in standing and to use heaviness in morning. It is light enough in that. It has that shape nicely. Very nicely may not be exaggerating. Very strongly may be sincerely fainting. May be strangely flattering. May not be strange in everything. May not ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein

... noticing the context,—an omission which I regretted,—he proceeded at once to state the doctrine of the text to be, that nothing can excuse the putting off of religion—that it is every man's duty to follow Christ immediately. This subject, notwithstanding the heaviness of the day, the infirmities of more than threescore years and ten (74), and the frequent necessity of adjusting his spectacles to consult his notes, he handled with much vigour and zeal. Some of his pronunciations were rather antiquated; but they ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies

... he was standing at the grey, cloudy sky looking down upon him so unfeelingly. He yawned and lay down. "There's nothing else to be done. I can't go back to St. Petersburg, to prison," he thought. A kind of pleasant heaviness spread all over his body. .. He threw away his cap, took up the revolver, and ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev

... cost of excluding common air. It was dusky noon there through the hours of light, and thrice night when darkness fell. The atmosphere, during the sun's short passage overhead, hung with a glittering heaviness, like the twinkling iron-dust in a subterranean smithy. On the lower window of one of the houses there was a board, telling men that Barto Rizzo made and mended shoes, and requesting people who wished to see him to make much noise at the door, for he was hard of hearing. It speedily ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... yellow roses Flavia had put in her hair dilated to a stifling heaviness that hindered breath; she covered her eyes with her small cold fingers, seeking the dark, mute under torture. He was alive—that niggard concession was made to Allan Gerard, whose rich fullness of vigor and dominant presence last night had seemed ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram

... away, and walked as quickly as she could up one of the side streets. Not daring to turn round, she was alarmed by hearing steps rapidly nearing her in pursuit; and, from the heaviness of the sound, concluded at once that there was more than one person close behind. It turned out, however, to be nobody but her portly, and now breathless companion, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... two volumes down the throats of other subscribers. I don't want to force anything down their throats. They aren't obliged to take what they don't want. There are lots of books circulated by Mudie's that I strongly object to—books that make me furious—as regards both moral and physical heaviness and tediousness and general tommy-rot. But do I write and complain, and ask Mudie's to withdraw such books altogether? If Mudie came along with a pistol and two volumes by Hall Caine, and said to me, 'Look here, I'll make you have these,' then perhaps I might begin to ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett

... with sudden sweat as he unclasped them from the pistol-butt and let the weapon fall; sweat was on his forehead, and a heaviness on his chest as if a man sat on him. He felt backwards through the open door with one foot, like an old man distrustful of his limbs, and steadied himself with his shoulder against the jamb, for there was a trembling in his ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden

... yet," he said. "But there is a storm coming. Do you not feel the heaviness of the air, and the ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton

... Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!—when ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... every week to see the baron before the latter went out; for Baron Robert was a little anxious about his health, and liked to be told by the physician, who was also his friend, that certain trifling symptoms—great thirst on a hot day, slight fatigue after a ball, a little heaviness in his limbs after a long walk, were of ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau

... understood to be terrible, but which she could not in truth comprehend. He had blurted it all out roughly,—the story as told by his father of his mother's dishonor, of his own insignificance in the world, of the threatened loss of the property, of the heaviness of his debts,—and added his conviction that his father had invented it all, and was, in fact, a thorough rascal. The full story of his debts he kept back, not with any predetermined falseness, but because it is so difficult for a man to own that he has absolutely ruined himself by his own ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope

... body or element is that to which it has a tendency to move, or in which it has a tendency to rest, when left to itself. Hence a body will always move to its natural place when away from it and under no restriction; and its heaviness or lightness does not change with ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik

... use ... Plenish the cup for me ... Not now, not now, But in a while; for I am heavy now ... Old Wynoc's potions loiter in my veins, And tides of heaviness pour over me Each time I wake and think. I could ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)

... creature, to whom he clung capriciously with the silent and apparently causeless obstinacy to which very old persons are subject, and which makes them resemble children. In order to sit down beside the young lady he needed a folding-chair. His slightest movements were marked by the inert heaviness, the stupid hesitancy, which characterize the movements of a paralytic. He sat slowly down upon his chair with great caution, mumbling some unintelligible words. His cracked voice resembled the noise made by a stone falling ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac

... membranes of the nose, the throat, and the eyes, with consequent snuffling and blinking and complaints of sore throat. These are followed, or in severe, swift cases may be preceded, by flushed cheeks, complaints of headache or heaviness in the head, fever, sometimes rising very quickly to from one hundred and four to one hundred and five degrees, backache, pains in the limbs, and, in very severe cases, vomiting. In fact, the symptoms are almost identical with those of an attack of that commonest of all ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... readers will equal Goethe's unsparing appetite. The reader sighs in thinking of the brilliant and unflagging wit, the verve, the wicked graces of Candide, and we long for the ease and simplicity and light stroke of the Sentimental Journey. Diderot has the German heaviness. Perhaps this is because he had too much conscience, and laboured too deeply under the burdensome problems of the world. He could not emancipate himself sufficiently from the tumult of his own sympathies. At many a page both of Jacques le Fataliste, and of others of his pieces, we involuntarily ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... for our manifold sins and wickednesses have deserved the anger of the Judge, by the aid of her ever-acceptable supplications may merit His forgiveness; that her pious hand may depress the scale of the balance in which our small and few good deeds shall be weighed, lest the heaviness of our sins preponderate and cast us down to the bottomless pit of perdition. Moreover, let them ever venerate with due observance the most deserving Confessor Cuthbert, the care of whose flock we have unworthily undertaken, ever devoutly praying ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury

... bucket of warm water, happily clean, was emptied on each of our heads; and the next moment all was bright again. A thunder-shower, without a warning thunder-clap, was to me a new phenomenon, which was repeated several times that day. The suddenness and the heaviness of the tropic showers at this season is as amusing as it is trying. The umbrella or the waterproof must be always ready, or you will get wet through. And getting wet here is a much more serious matter than in a temperate climate, where ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... spirit by the publication of his journal had been unwittingly opened anew. The old slowness had crept again into his gait since the evening before. Over night his countenance had resumed its wonted heaviness; and his slender shoulders bent again beneath ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... not matter. The girl handed me the cup, and I put my lips to it. The first taste was bitter and acrid, like the liquor of long-steeped wood. At the second taste a shiver of pleasure ran through me, and I opened my eyes and stared hard. The third taste grossness and heaviness and chagrin dropped from my heart; all the complexion of Providence altered in a flash, and a stupid irresistible joy, unreasoning, uncontrollable took possession of my fibre. I sank upon a mossy bank and, lolling my head, beamed ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... himself out, and next moment each child felt a funny feeling, half heaviness and half lightness, on its shoulders. The Psammead put its head on one side and turned its snail eyes from one ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit

... its frosts of ever increasing heaviness. The park flowers drooped; baseball failed to drive the cold from chilled fingers; and lunching in the open had to be abandoned. It was then that notices were posted in all the tanneries saying that ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett

... moment, then moved towards the door. The heaviness of his step smote upon Oswald's ear and caused ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green

... describes vividly the miserable, jolting journey through Livonia, where the carriage road was marked out by boughs thrown down in the midst of a sandy plain, and all around was depressing poverty and desolation. Berlin, peopled with Germans of "brutal heaviness," he detested, and he loathed the society dinner parties, with no conversation—nothing but tittle-tattle and Court gossip; and complained of the trains, which travelled he said no quicker than a French diligence. Nevertheless, in contrast to Russia, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... fever-flush that tinged the patient's pale cheeks and the cough that racked her wasted frame seemed very like danger signals to good Mrs. Fipps, and though she did not realize the hopelessness of the case, her spirits were oppressed by a heaviness that would not be ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... bright that Phil cheered at the sight of her, and lost the long morning face he had got up with, while even Mrs. Watson caught the contagion, and became fairly hopeful and content. A little leaven of good-will and good heart in one often avails to lighten the heaviness of many. ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge

... in time," he said. "All this heaviness and cloudiness foretells a storm and I think we'll sleep under a roof tonight. What ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... on a bearing of 251 degrees until at 15 miles and 45 chains we reached the bank of the Darling. The cattle had been at some places rather distressed from the heaviness of the ground, having had scarcely any food for the last two days except a hard, dry, composite plant which usurped the place of grass. The camp I had left, which was in other respects a fine position, could not possibly have served as a depot for the cattle. We ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... Were as a carrion's cry To lullaby Such as I'd sing to thee, Were I thy bride! A feather's press Were leaden heaviness To my caress. But then, unhappily, I'm ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert

... active service. I do not talk of courting danger and seeking death. That would be either a senseless commonplace, or a threat, as it were, to Heaven! But I need some vehemence of action—some positive and irresistible call upon honour or duty that may force me to contend against this strange heaviness that settles down on my whole life. Therefore, I entreat you so to arrange for me, and break it to Mr. Darrell in such terms as may not needlessly pain him by the obtrusion of my sufferings. For, while I know him well enough to be convinced that nothing could move ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... o' childhood! O, the loudly laughin' years! When contentment brings the moments neither heaviness ner tears! When the pleasures jine the longin's an' the fairy fingers roll All the heaps o' angel music in upon the blazin' soul! O, my Joe an' Bill an' Jerry! Trustin' comrades, you wus won Whar my bare feet brushed the grasses on the banks ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller

... Instead of the majestic but monotonous declamation of Timon, we have every variety of that ironical humour (indicating some yet unconquered province of the soul) that guards and embalms the purer strength of feeling, keeps it airy and spiritual, and frees it from moan and heaviness. Here we have no insistance on suffering, no literary heart-breaks, no dilettante pessimism; but those indefinable harmonies of freedom and law, of the ascendency of the soul and the sovereignty of fate, of Nature and the spaces of the mind, that in the works of the great ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... enough; it was only the hour or two before dawn when the heaviness of sleep troubled us; but just as we began nodding, and felt in danger of falling off our camels, the keen change in the temperature which freshens the desert in the early morning braced us up, and, fully awake, we watched for the coming of Venus. As ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various

... mirth and sadness followed each other many times, "to learn me that it is speedful to some souls to feel on this wise." Once especially she was left to herself, "in heaviness and weariness of my life, and irksomeness of myself, that scarcely I could have pleasure to live.... For profit of a man's soul he is sometimes left to himself; although sin is not always the cause; for in that time I sinned not, wherefore I should ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... burden either of arms or of fatigue duty. The other, having worked all his men to a stand-still, would send for hounds and horses for to begin a hunt; and when his horses could go no farther, he would run down the game afoot. The former communicated his heaviness and his maladies to his army, undertaking no enterprise that he could not support in person; the other communicated his own liveliness to those about him, and his captains imitated him from ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... see what Connie saw—the heaviness about those eyes, the suggestion of tears during the night, when she came down silently to her breakfast. She had changed, and yet he did not see it, and if he had seen it might ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper

... hath a weary pilgrimage, As through the world he wends; On every stage, from youth to age, Still discontent attends; With heaviness he casts his eye, Upon the road before, And still remembers with a sigh The days that are ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper

... of one's unpardonable heaviness.... I slipped on her hand as on a piece of orange-peel, and, jumping like a chamois, sent the next pail all over the heels of ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold

... begun to feel—if any sensation while asleep can be so called—a sense of suffocation, accompanied by a heaviness of the limbs and torpidity in the joints,—as if some immense weight was pressing upon their bodies, that rendered it impossible for them to stir either toe or finger. It was a sensation similar to that so well known, and so much dreaded, under the name of nightmare. It may have been the ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid

... dressed with the utmost care, and he set his feet upon the broad walk as though the action were in some way a condescension. He was alert, well-groomed, and yet—perhaps in contrast with the more volatile French type—there was a suggestion of weight about him, not to say heaviness. He too looked at the girl, slackened his pace and looked at her again through his eye-glasses, looked over his shoulder after he had passed, and finally came to a dead stop. He scratched ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... heaviness, not as Balshazzar's with a handwriting on the wall, nor like that of Job's children with a wind from the wilderness, but by the folly of the king, with an unhappy falling out between the queen and himself, which ended the feast abruptly ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... his own reflections, pressed forward. Under the arch of trees the darkness was such that the edge of the road even could not be seen. Not a sound in the forest. Both animals and birds, influenced by the heaviness of the atmosphere, remained motionless and silent. Not a breath disturbed the leaves. The footsteps of the colonists alone ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)

... our remembrance with a heaviness that's gone?" Why recall the memory of those acheful days, when all the pleasant and restful features of the island are uncatalogued? Before the rains began we had comfortable if circumscribed shelter. Does not that suffice? Our dwelling consisted of one room ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... an evident desire to avoid an effect of heaviness and ostentation, and this was especially noticeable in the dining-room, where the pure tone of the panels and the moulding doubled the intensity of the light thrown upon them. Upon the table the illumination of the apartment was aided by ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... was born in 1803 at another station of the regiment, East Dereham. He calls himself a gloomy child, a "lover of nooks and retired corners . . . sitting for hours together with my head on my breast . . . conscious of a peculiar heaviness within me, and at times of a strange sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror, and for which I could assign no real cause whatever." A maidservant thought him a little wrong in the head, but a Jew pedlar rebuked her for saying so, and said the child had "all the ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... shadow was deep they waited with held breath; when it somewhat lifted they sorrowed that the tide had brought him back. He was of those changelings from a fortunate land to whom Love clings when Faith has covered her head and turned away. They that in heaviness of heart loved him still grieved that he might not touch the dark shore. Better, far better, to lay hold of it so, to go quietly in the not unhappy fever-dream, wandering of old days, recking naught of the new. So ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston

... evening he withdrew with Gowan to the bunkhouse, reluctant to leave, yet aglow with pleasure. Isobel had so charmed him that he lay in his bunk forgetful of all else than her limpid blue eyes and dimpled cheeks. But after his two nights of broken rest he could not long resist the heaviness that pressed together his eyelids. He fell asleep, smiling at the recollection of the girl's gracious, "Good-night ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet

... my immaterial being with the repose or decease of the waking body, also lost the heaviness and the aches, the melancholy and dejection proceeding from the mortal, defective nature of this body: but I also knew that its joys and transports are dependent upon the happiness obtained by the day body through an active, wise life brought into harmony with ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... but too well that evening, and when he saw the countess, in her black dress and with her quiet smile, seated in that Old World drawing room, he certainly had his doubts. A lamp which had been placed behind her threw into clear relief her dark, delicate, plump side face, wherein a certain heaviness in the contours of the mouth alone indicated a species ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... is not crooked. He alone of all white men has never lied to us. He says the prisoner is gone, and it must be so. But it is not well. Our hearts are heavy at the escape of so brave a captive. What, then, will my brother give us in his place, that the heaviness of ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... of the Lord will take that veil from their hearts. His light will burn it away. His presence gives liberty. Where he is, there is no more heaviness, no more bondage, no more wilderness or Mount Sinai. The Son makes free ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... girl. No, it couldn't be Madame Clifford and her petit choux; and yet—and yet—as they came nearer, near enough for Mademoiselle to recognise the man with them, she felt a horrid sensation as if something which she called her heart were dropping out of her bosom from sheer heaviness, leaving ...
— Rosemary in Search of a Father • C. N. Williamson

... weight, n. heaviness, ponderousness, gravity, ponderosity, poise, heft; encumbrance, pressure, incubus, clog, burden; importance, consequence, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... take in one melody or theme at a time. The melody might be in an upper part, a middle, or in the bass. In one or another it always is, and the rest of the musical tissue is only accompaniment. Hence a heaviness, a lumbering motion of the harmonies, which is irritating to our ears now that we are accustomed to webs he spun in later days when music no longer consisted to him of top parts and bottom parts, but of a broad stream of parts, all of equal importance, and all flowing ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... dignified. Strange to say, he made no friends. Perhaps he was just a thought too perfect for a district like the Five Towns; a sin or so might have endeared him to the entire neighbourhood. Perhaps his loneliness was due to his imperfect sense of humour, or perhaps to the dull, unsmiling heaviness ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... hour I lay perfectly still, with my eyes closed, in the semi-sleeping, semi-wakeful state which is so curiously characteristic of the ordinary repose of a dog. As the night wore on, such a sense of heaviness oppressed my eyelids that it was literally impossible for me to open them—such a masterful languor possessed all my muscles that I could no more move on my pillow than if I had been a corpse. And yet, in this somnolent condition, my mind was able to pursue lazy trains of pleasant ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins

... mine had an effect on my temper, moderating the ardor of my chimerical fancies, for as I grew weaker they became more tranquil, and I even lost, in some measure, my rage for travelling. I was not seized with heaviness, but melancholy; vapors succeeded passions, languor became sorrow: I wept and sighed without cause, and felt my life ebbing away before I had enjoyed it. I only trembled to think of the situation in which ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... sound to us like exaggerated rhetoric when a prophet breaks out, 'Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep night and day!' or when an Apostle in calmer tones declares, 'I have great heaviness and continual sorrow of heart'? Some seeds are put to steep and swell in water, that they may be tested before sowing. The seed which we sow will not germinate unless it be saturated with our tears. And yet the sorrow must be blended with joy; for it is glad labour which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... character and simple and dignified attitude of the figure, is a careful and distinct modelling of the features, with the half-shadows, though not dark, yet never slurred over—which in other hands would produce heaviness; but Titian counteracts this by the intense darkness of his dresses and backgrounds, so that the features, often modelled with the firmness of sculpture, are rendered comparatively gentle by the treatment of the other parts of the picture. The portraits of Sir Joshua have this ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet

... on the open space of rock that is before the cave, and great heaviness and fear came into their hearts, so that they had no desire ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard

... the apparently never ending forest, the monotony of rank vegetation, the absence of a breath of wind to rustle a leaf, were most oppressive, and the feeling was not lessened by the dampness and heaviness of the air, and the malarious exhalation and smell of decaying vegetation arising from ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty

... melancholy, bred of ardent desire, needs must it with grievous annoy abide therein, except it be done away by new discourse; more by token that they are far less strong than men to endure. With men in love it happeneth not on this wise, as we may manifestly see. They, if any melancholy or heaviness of thought oppress them, have many means of easing it or doing it away, for that to them, an they have a mind thereto, there lacketh not commodity of going about hearing and seeing many things, fowling, hunting, fishing, riding, gaming and trafficking; ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... pleasant hour with the son of a former intimate. Carrington, on the contrary, was of the grosser type of successful business man. A frock-coat sufficed him for the evening always. There was about him in every way a heaviness that indicated he could not be a leader, only a follower after the commands of wiser men. But, in such following, he would ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan

... words, produced upon my mind a more solemn and depressing effect than I believed possible to have been caused by the course which I had determined to pursue; it struck upon my heart with an awe and heaviness which will accompany the accomplishment of an important and irrevocable act, even though no doubt or scruple remains to make it possible that the agent should wish ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... infrequent result that they dropped beneath their packs on the trail. In like manner they loaded the animals they drove before them, and here was exhibited man's awful inhumanity to the dumb brutes. Pack horses, mules and dogs, loaded to top-heaviness and cinched until one could almost hear their bones crack, climbed, straining, struggling, panting, wild eyed and steaming from over-exertion under the lash of angry and profane drivers, until they sank to their haunches, helpless and exhausted, in some quagmire. Such common misfortune ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan

... of beginning, he raises his eyes to her again. This time there is a heaviness like sleep on both, a heaviness that draws both together inaudibly and down, and down, as if they were sinking through piled thickness on thickness of warm, sweet-scented grass. Odd faces come into both minds and vanish as if flickered off ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet

... Van Eyck's color, except the high lights, must have been equivalent to a glaze, while the great body of color in Rubens was solid (ultimately glazed occasionally, but not necessarily), it was possible for Van Eyck to mix his tints to the local hues required, with far less danger of heaviness in effect than would have been incurred in the solid painting of Rubens. This is especially noticed by Mr. Eastlake, with whom we ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... that told of an amplitude of nature and of quick and free motions and, though it had no regular beauty, was in the highest degree engaging and attaching. Madame Merle was a tall, fair, smooth woman; everything in her person was round and replete, though without those accumulations which suggest heaviness. Her features were thick but in perfect proportion and harmony, and her complexion had a healthy clearness. Her grey eyes were small but full of light and incapable of stupidity—incapable, according to some people, even of ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James

... needs know your heaviness; I have pity to see you in any distress; If any have you wronged ye shall revenged be, Though I on the ground be slain for thee,— Though that I know before that ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous

... certainly men are not equal, and a man can bring home wares only in proportion to the capital with which he goes to market. Carlo, by diligence, made the most of what he had; but there was undoubtedly a heaviness about him, which extended itself, uniformly to his invention, expression, his drawing, colouring, and the general effect of his pictures. The truth is, he never equalled any of his patterns in any one thing, and he ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds



Words linked to "Heaviness" :   oppressiveness, broadness, lightness, onerousness, heavy, ponderosity, massiveness, weight, sadness, preponderance, heftiness, heft



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