[UN-1 8.]
1. Not sounded or plummeted; unfathomed.
1592. Shaks., Two Gent., III. ii. 81. Orpheus Lute,… Whose golden touch could … Make Tygers tame, and huge Leuiathans Forsake vnsounded deepes, to dance on Sands.
1616. W. Browne, Brit. Past., II. i. 130. The tyde … whereon his carre should sweepe, Deckt with the riches of th’ unsounded deepe.
1651. T. Stanley, Poems, Venus Vigils, 77. Piercing through the unsounded sea.
1861. L. L. Noble, Icebergs, 243. Where with the surf around its shoulders … it stood far up from the unsounded valleys of ocean.
b. fig. or in fig. contexts.
1593. Shaks., 2 Hen. VI., III. i. 57. Glouster is a man Vnsounded yet, and full of deepe deceit.
1607. Chapman, Bussy d’Ambois, III. F 1. O the vnsounded Sea of womens bloods, That when tis calmest, is most dangerous.
1634. Jackson, Creed, VII. xix. § 6. I would request every ingenuous sober reader … not adventure to saile in a narrow … and unsounded sea only with the help of a generall carde.
a. 1750. A. Hill, The Muse to the Writer, xxxiii. This is a subject, that, outstretching thought, Through depths unsounded, wit’s long plummet draws.
1826. Mrs. Hemans, Forest Sanctuary, lxxi. Th’ unsounded gulfs of human woe!
1876. Swinburne, Erechtheus, 939. Mine unknown children of unsounded years.
1878. Emerson, in N. Amer. Rev., CXXVI. 409. To good men, as we call good men, this doctrine of Trust is an unsounded secret.
2. Unprobed, unexamined.
c. 1620. Robinson, Mary Magd., 534. Vaine woman!… shall thy heart vnsounded, still remaine vnsound?
