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More "Rigid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him to move. And then, like a hand throttling him, there came a strange stiffness in the back of his neck, and his breath hissed chokingly out of his throat. The stiffness passed like a wave of fire through his body. Where his muscles had trembled and shivered a moment before they now became rigid and lifeless. The throttling grip of the poison at the base of his brain drew his head back until his muzzle was pointed straight up to the sky. Still he made no cry. For a space every nerve in his body was at the point ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... the Chinese leadership has been trying to move the economy from a sluggish Soviet-style centrally planned economy to a more market-oriented economy but still within a rigid political framework of Communist Party control. To this end the authorities switched to a system of household responsibility in agriculture in place of the old collectivization, increased the authority of local officials and plant managers ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... "I understand that. May I give you an instance, and you will see if I perceive your thought. The good Vicar here, my cousin Frank, Jack's father—you will meet him to-night—is a man who holds a rigid belief, or thinks he holds it. He preaches what he calls the sinew and bone of doctrine, and he is very stern in the pulpit. He likes lecturing people in rows! But in reality he is one of the kindest and vaguest ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... springing, diminishing about six inches at the crown. We have yet to learn why engineers have abandoned the arched bridge for the wrought iron girder system, except that the latter is considered more economical, and better fitted for bearing tensile stress. Cast-iron bridges constructed as rigid arches, subject to compression and composed of small parts, have all the mechanical advantages of stone without some of its drawbacks, while artistically they can be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... not wholly selfish: he would be of real service to some person—he would not care even if it were to Peet himself. It was quite possible it was Peet. He made such a fuss about the ruined summer-house, and was so rigid about keeping the door shut, that no doubt he did have something he valued there. It would be fun if Alan were to recover ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... with himself; the earth, meanwhile, slowly turning her warm shoulder to the western sun. A still half-light filled the conservatory as with a clear mellow liquor, and the rich leaves, and blossoms stood breathless with delight. The painfully rigid contraction of Balder's features was softening away; he was coming into harmony with the sensuous beauty of the scene, or its refined voluptuousness—serene, unambitious, content with time and careless of ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... to tap the king's letter with a rigid forefinger. "When your lordship tells me that you are ready to concert upon embarking your fortunes in this bottom, you shall find me disposed, perhaps, to answer questions concerning others. Meanwhile, our concern is ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... Karl and Spartan Mother Louise; her rigid character, its good and its bad side; her extreme punctilio and her pistol-shooting, to steady ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... spirit of the sect came from another source. That which grew out of official Judaism was the Talmud; but Christianity has no affinity with the Talmudic school. This is why Christianity found special favor among the parties the least Jewish belonging to Judaism. The rigid orthodoxists took to it but little; it was the newcomers, people scarcely catechized, who had not been to any of the great schools, free from routine, and not initiated into the holy tongue, which lent an ear to the apostles ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... wagons going into camp on the plaza and found that they had lately come through the hostile Indian country and had fared rather roughly. I made the best of the item that the circumstances permitted, and felt that if I were not confined within rigid limits by the presence of the reporters of the other papers I could add particulars that would make the article much more interesting. However, I found one wagon that was going on to California, and made some judicious inquiries of the proprietor. When I learned, through his short and surly ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... so cold that the world seemed as stiff and stark as a poet's hell. A little moon was frozen against a pallid sky. The old dark houses with their towers and gables wore the rigid look of iron edifices. The saint over the church door at the corner had an icicle on his nose. Even the street lights shone faint and ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... butter, are unrivalled elsewhere in Europe. The dairy business is largely controlled by a cooperative association of dairymen and farmers. Pastures, fodder, cattle, sheds, creameries, and all the processes involved are subject to a most rigid sanitary inspection. ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... arises in the mind, when the view either of our virtue, beauty, riches or power makes us satisfyed with ourselves: and that by humility I mean the opposite impression. It is evident the former impression is not always vicious, nor the latter virtuous. The most rigid morality allows us to receive a pleasure from reflecting on a generous action; and it is by none esteemed a virtue to feel any fruitless remorses upon the thoughts of past villainy and baseness. Let us, therefore, examine these ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... rigid, her wondrous eyes glowing with excitement, stood behind John Tullis, straight and strong, like a storm spirit glorying in the havoc that raged about her. Time and again she leaned forward to utter ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... candidate to be "a perfect youth," has in some jurisdictions been rigidly enforced to the very letter of the law, while in others it has been so completely explained away as to mean anything or nothing. Thus, in South Carolina, where the rule is rigid, the candidate is required to be neither deformed nor dismembered, but of hale and entire limbs, as a man ought to be, while in Maine, a deformed person may be admitted, provided "the deformity is not such as to prevent him from being instructed in the arts and ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... verbal answer. He merely looked at Soames and pointed with rigid forefinger to the door. Soames was wretchedly rising from his chair when, with a desperate quick gesture, I swept together two dinner-knives that were on the table, and laid their blades across each other. The Devil ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... short man with eyes that gleamed and blinked, a harsh voice, and a round, toneless, pock-marked face ornamented by a thin, dishevelled moustache, sticking out quaintly under the tip of a rigid nose. Schomberg made the reflection that there was nothing secretarial about him. Both he and his long, lank principal wore the usual white suit of the tropics, cork helmets, pipe-clayed white shoes—all correct. The hairy nondescript creature perched on their luggage ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... malignant design, and the whole trouble can be traced to the want of the proper police and sanitary regulations, and to the absence of intelligent organization and division of labor. The abuses were in a large measure due to the almost total absence of system, government, and rigid, but wholesome sanitary regulations. In extenuation of these abuses it was alleged by the medical officers that the Confederate troops were barely sufficient to guard the prisoners, and that it was impossible to obtain any number of experienced nurses from ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Content,' Anne Buller," explained the elder brother. Miss Aglonby's face, which had worn a look of mild interest during the first part of this speech, clouded perceptibly at its close. She murmured some mechanical speech of welcome in an almost inaudible voice, and sat down in a rigid and uncompromising fashion, while her heart contracted painfully. A gentleman to look at the place: there had been several such in the last year, who had come, and seen, and objected to the price, and ridden away again; but perhaps this one might not ride ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... most available means of producing new species." Yet the sterility of hybrids defeats that possibility, and rebukes the untruthful claim of the formation of new species. Nature, with sword in hand, decrees the death of hybrids, lest they might produce a new species. Moses wrote the rigid unchanging law of nature, when he said that every living creature would ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... coolly risked death many times, and had dealt it often, were white as no fear or pain could have made them. Then, on the moment, Yaqui raised his hand, not clenched or doubled tight, but curled rigid like an eagle's claw; and he shook it in a strange, slow gesture ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... realise that this danger is the root of all drama and romance. The strongest argument for the divine grace is simply its ungraciousness. The unpopular parts of Christianity turn out when examined to be the very props of the people. The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... perhaps Christopher might want to use the mare early," he explained to Cynthia, who was clearing off the table. There was a pleasant precision in his speech, acquired with much industry at the little country school, and Cynthia, despite her rigid disfavour, could not but notice that when he glanced round the room in search of Lila he displayed the advantage of an aristocratic profile. Until to-day she could not remember that she had ever seen him directly, as it were; she had looked around him and beyond him, much as she might have ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... State, and Garfield's last mission was to purge the Government of this taint. He was resolved to set his face against "the waste of time and the obstruction to public business caused by the greedy crowd of office-seekers." And he also announced that "rigid honesty and faithful service would be required from every officer ...
— The Story of Garfield - Farm-boy, Soldier, and President • William G. Rutherford
... comprehensively as the evolution of the earth and its inhabitants. The earth in itself is to be regarded as an organism and as the foster-parent of a great series of organisms that sprang into being and pursued their careers in the contact zones between its rigid body and its fluidal envelopes. These contact zones are, in a special sense, the province of geography in both its physical and its biotic aspects. The evolution of the biotic and the psychic worlds ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... strain is directly proportional to the stress producing it.[1] The same intensity of stress, however, does not produce the same strain in different materials or in different qualities of the same material. No strain would be produced in a perfectly rigid body, but such ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... fewer racial problems than either the Army or Navy during the war, but the difficulties that occurred were nonetheless important in the development of postwar racial policy. The basic cause of race problems was the rigid concentration of (p. 172) often undertrained and undereducated men, who were subjected to racial slurs and insensitive treatment by some white officials and given little chance to serve in preferred military specialties or to advance in the labor ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... resemble the romantic conception of a girl crossed in love. She looked very quiet, no paler than usual, quite self-possessed. The only change a keen eye could have noted was that now there was about her an atmosphere of slightly rigid dignity, which had not been there before. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... first, of course, for the lady of the house, and hearing she was in the grounds, joined her there. She looked ill and anxious, and she received me with rigid politeness. Fortunately, Mrs. Eyrecourt (now convalescent) was staying at Ten Acres, and was then taking the air in her chair on wheels. The good lady's nimble and discursive tongue offered me an opportunity ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... primitive conventions. To the checkered emblem of the rainbow she adds sweeping rays of color, typifying sunbeams. Below the many angled cloud group she inserts random pencil lines of rain; or she often softens the rigid lines signifying lightning, with graceful interlacing and shaded tints. Not confining herself alone to these traditional devices, she often creates realistic figures of common objects such as her grass brush, ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... and properties maintain. Mark what unvaried laws preserve each state, Laws wise as nature, and as fixed as fate. In vain thy reason finer webs shall draw, Entangle justice in her net of law, And right, too rigid, harden into wrong; Still for the strong too weak, the weak too strong. Yet go! and thus o'er all the creatures sway, Thus let the wiser make the rest obey; And, for those arts mere instinct could afford, Be crowned as monarchs, or as ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... the barren level of the cavalry plain the gilded hands of the tower-clock on "the old Academic" were blended into one in proclaiming to all whom it might concern that it was five minutes past the half-hour 'twixt seven and eight, and there were girls in every group, and many a young fellow in the rigid line of gray and white before them, resentful of the fact that dress parade was wofully late and long, with tattoo and taps only two hours or so away. The season for the regular summer "hops" had not yet ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... desperate chance, the current running like a mill-race with the ebbing tide, and, moreover, being choked with ice-floes. Ah, there was Blazer's bay, he must lose no time. Without another glance at that silent, rigid figure, he stepped quickly through the long window and gained the portico. Something snapped in the girl's throat, her lips quivered hysterically, and she laughed aloud, a ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... a little, and his mouth grew rigid as iron, but after some moments the lips relaxed, and with a sad, patient smile, he repeated those stirring words of Richter to Herman,—"Suffer like a man the Alp-pressure of fate. Trust yourself upon the broad, shining wings of your faith, and make ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... to crouch on the steps, holding her breath and stiffening herself into complete immobility. One motion of her hand, one tap on the pane, and she could picture the sudden change in his face. In every pulse of her rigid body she was aware of the welcome his eyes and lips would give her; but something kept her from moving. It was not the fear of any sanction, human or heavenly; she had never in her life been afraid. It was simply ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... hardness about the man, a rigid sense of honour that was almost a fault; for, if it be a virtue to cleave to truth and good faith above everything, to swear to one's neighbour and disappoint him not—even though it be to one's own hindrance—it is certainly not a fine or noble thing to mistake tenderness ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... Point Jackson was troubled with the return of the obscure complaint which had already threatened him, and he there began that rigid observance of the laws of health which afterwards developed to almost an eccentricity. His peculiar attitude when studying was due to the fear that if he bent over his work the compression of his internal organs might increase their tendency ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... favorable reputation, yet squeamishness in the choice of associates was never a characteristic of the Romans; and persons, the known perpetrators of the most atrocious crimes, so long as they were unconvicted, mingled on terms of equality, unshunned by any, except the gravest and most rigid censors. Arvina, too, was very young; and very young men are often fascinated, as it were, by great reputations, even of great criminals, with a passionate desire to see them more closely, and observe the stuff ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... continuance of those he had been so long employing had overcome at length the vitality of Wolkenlicht—one afternoon, as he was sitting at his work, he suddenly dropped from his chair, and his master hurrying to him in some alarm, found him rigid and apparently lifeless. Lilith was not in the study when this took place. In justice to Teufelsbuerst, it must be confessed that he employed all the skill he was master of, which for beneficent purposes was not very great, to restore the youth; but without avail. At last, ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... blood relation—a dispensation for which, at not infrequent intervals of Nan's career, Mrs. McBain had been led to thank the Almighty effusively. Born and reared in the uncompromising tenets of Scotch Presbyterianism, her attitude towards Nan was one of rigid disapproval—a disapproval that warred somewhat pathetically against the affection with which the girl's essential lovableness inspired her. For there was no gainsaying the charm of the Davenant women! ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... conditions that are simple and not very exacting, the others can become embodied only when they satisfy an ensemble of numerous, inevitable, rigorously determined conditions; the goal is fixed, the materials are rigid, there is little choice of the appropriate means. If there be added to the inflexible laws of nature unforeseen human passions and determinations, as in political or social invention, or the offensive combination of opponents, as in commerce and war; then the imaginative construction ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... what is called hivernage or winter fodder, i.e. lentils planted between rows of rye, the latter being grown merely to protect the other. On my query as to the school attendance of boys and girls employed in agriculture, my host said that authorities are by no means rigid; at certain seasons of the year, indeed, they are not expected to attend. Among some large landowners we find tolerably conservative notions even in France. Over-education, they say, is unfitting ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... is, whether he has succeeded in writing a book which will be readable by the class for whom he intends it. To make a lively and entertaining narrative for children, with such unmalleable material as is presented by the sombre, stern, and rigid characteristics of the Puritans and their descendants, is quite as difficult an attempt as to manufacture delicate playthings out of the granite, rocks on which ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Supreme Pontiff from a humiliating and intolerable position. But these considerations of expediency weighed nothing with Catherine. She was as immovable as Henry, and deaf to all Campeggio's solicitations. Her conscience was, perhaps, of a rigid, Spanish type, but it was as clear as Henry's and a great deal more comprehensible. She was convinced that her marriage was valid; to admit a doubt of it would imply that she had been living in sin and imperil her immortal soul. Henry (p. ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... little was accomplished beside noise and smoke. The practice of their gunners was so bad that many of their shot struck harmlessly against the face of the cliff. Their guns, too, were very light, and appear to have been charged with a view to the most rigid economy of gunpowder; for the balls failed to pierce the stone walls of the buildings, and did so little damage that, as the French boasted, twenty crowns would have repaired it all. [Footnote: Pere Germain, Relation de la Defaite ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... the moving period that brought us together, how I would that your sweet composure had been sometimes a little ruffled! It would have appeared to me of a finer quality had I found it more variable. A woman's reason should be less rigid; and I should loathe mine if it were not a leaven of indulgence and forgiveness ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... You stand rigid and mighty— granite and the ore in rocks; a great band clasps your forehead and ...
— Sea Garden • Hilda Doolittle
... unreality. After the colour, the moving multiplicity, the imaginative luxury of our early tragedies, which seem to have been moulded out of the very stuff of life and to have been built up with the varied and generous structure of Nature herself, the Frenchman's dramas, with their rigid uniformity of setting, their endless duologues, their immense harangues, their spectral confidants, their strict exclusion of all visible action, give one at first the same sort of impression as a pretentious pseudo-classical ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Hero Sutton, "the city maiden." When Hero assumed the guise of a quaker, Clever called himself Obadiah, and pretended to be a rigid quaker also. His constant exclamation was "Umph! "—S. Knowles, Woman's Wit, ...
— 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.
... fighting against the whole Persian cavalry. Nevertheless the enemy were not able either to rout them or in any other way to overpower them. For standing shoulder to shoulder they kept themselves constantly massed in a small space, and they formed with their shields a rigid, unyielding barricade, so that they shot at the Persians more conveniently than they were shot at by them. Many a time after giving up, the Persians would advance against them determined to break up and destroy their line, but they always retired ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... taste of Sir Peter Lely, rather than to that exhibited by the Beauties of Charles's court. "It was to his taste, as it was to that of a later artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds, that we are indebted for the freedom which characterized their treatment of the rigid and somewhat ungraceful costumes before them." Walpole, in his "Anecdotes of Painting," says, "Lely supplied the want of taste with clinquant; his nymphs trail fringes, and embroidery, through meadows and purling streams. Vandyke's habits are those ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... shook her head silently. She had been trembling as she asked the question, but she stood stiff and rigid as Cuthbert was brought up. She gave one short gasp when she saw his face as they lowered the litter to the ground. Then she hurried to the table on which the glasses were standing, poured some brandy into a ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... out, and an officer boarded us, subjecting us to a most rigid scrutiny. Since the great treason a savage suspicion had succeeded routine vigilance; the very guns among the rocks seemed alive, alert, listening, black jaws parted to launch a thunderous warning. A guard was placed ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... they subsist or have being, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence' as being timeless. The world of universals, therefore, may also be described as the world of being. The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... presently two big drops rolled slowly over her cheeks. Others gathered in quick succession like water dripping from a rock and splashed onto the ample curve of her bosom. She sat up very straight, her eyes fixed, her face pale and rigid, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Twice. A rain of blows given in a blind passion that drove her to her knees, but she clung stubbornly, with rigid fingers to the table-edge. Although she was dazed she retained consciousness by a sharp effort of her failing will. She had not yet achieved that for which ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... of books and papers to the toilet to read. It should be an imperative rule that no other place be used. A little carelessness will cause disagreeable as well as dangerous results. By way of reiteration: First, rigid prohibition of the pollution of the surface of the ground by the strictest rules, diligently enforced. Second, the provision of toilets or latrines of adequate size with proper precaution to prevent the dispersal of excreta by wind, flies, or ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... characteristics. It has a beauty apart from others in the quiet simplicity with which it has been designed. There is an evident restraint, almost severity, to be felt in studying the exquisite proportions of its parts. It does not exhibit the massive force and strength of Durham; but the rigid power in the square piers of the arcades is stern compared with the more subtle variations of light and shade produced by the curved surfaces of the circular piers either at Ely ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... woman lay locked in rigid silence. Only her cold eyes followed whoever came into her room. She gave no sign of knowing what they said, or of caring who came near her. Her husband's earnest pleas, Starr's tears, drew from her no faintest expression that might have been even imagined from a fluttering ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... hurt you," she began. "He's perfectly kind and harmless, aside from his mania for dimples. He still smells the piece under the Teacup." Then, all at once, she grew rigid, and her golden eyes began to leap up ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... mast-head, for want of something worse to do, became my study; and during the time spent there, I in a manner finished my education. Volumes after volumes were perused to while away the tedious hours; and I conscientiously believe it is to this mode of punishment adopted by my rigid superiors that the world is indebted for all the pretty books ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... the world upside down," said Hemstead. "The wrong side is up now, and it is our duty to turn the right side back again. We can't carry exclusiveness beyond this brief life. Why, then, make it so rigid here? The One who was chief of all was ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... being followed by all of the men and officers within hearing, and also by a scattering of French soldiers who were just emerging from the Catholic church. By the time the second verse was well under way three companies of infantry, marching from a rest camp toward the front, had also come to a rigid salute, blocking the road to a quartermaster's supply train, who had, perforce, to follow suit. The "Star Spangled Banner" has a deeper meaning to the man who has done a few turns in ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... About six feet from where he crouched was the dried and shriveled figure of a Hopi chief, propped against the wall of the cave. Beside the figure stood the painted olla untarnished by age. The dead Indian's head was bowed upon his breast, and his skeleton arms, parchment-skinned and rigid, were crossed ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... the giving me my compound name; taking me out the first time to see the sun; investing me with the triple thread by which I became one of the twice-born; my induction into the first order—were all celebrated with sacred texts and rigid ceremonies. I might not walk, eat, drink, or sleep without danger of violating a rule. And the penalty, O brethren, the penalty was to my soul! According to the degrees of omission, my soul went to one of the heavens—Indra's the lowest, Brahma's the highest; or it was driven back to ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... between the captain and the count that it would be desirable in every way to maintain the most rigid silence upon the subject of the inexplicable phenomena which had come within their experience. It was to them both a subject of the greatest perplexity to find that the shores of the Mediterranean had undergone no change, but they coincided in the opinion that it was prudent to keep their ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... household. Like every head of a prosperous Abbey, Abbot John, the fourth of the name, was a man of various accomplishments. Through his own chosen instruments he had to minister a great estate and to keep order and decorum among a large body of men living a celibate life. He was a rigid disciplinarian toward all beneath him, a supple diplomatist to all above. He held high debate with neighboring abbots and lords, with bishops, with papal legates, and even on occasion with the King's majesty himself. ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... esophagoscope (q.v.). It should be emphasized that with the lens-system gastroscopes, the tube should be introduced into the stomach under direct ocular guidance, without a mandrin, and the optical apparatus should be inserted through the tube only after the stomach has been entered. Blind insertion of a rigid metallic tube into the esophagus is an ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... new constituent of the atmosphere. It requires a great strain to admit the existence of a new constituent of the universe, a vast spiritual substratum to the domain of matter. Religion, with its ideal tests, has long maintained this to be a fact. Science, with its rigid material tests, sternly questions it, and demands that the existence of an inhabited spiritual realm shall be incontestably proved by scientific evidence before ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... too thrilling?" cried Viola. "Oh! Tom, aren't you perfectly rigid with excitement? It makes Tom rigid, Mr. Merryweather, and it makes me flutter; we are so different. ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... and wonderful hall of an austere, rigid, metallic and sepulchral magnificence, giving the impression of a Greek temple with columns, architraves, flagstones and ornaments of black marble, gold and ebony. The hall is trapezium-shaped. Basalt ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... she stood resolutely away from her father, holding herself rigid with her arms hanging straight at her sides. The rose tint of her cheeks had disappeared and her blue eyes ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... what she meant. For a few moments Mrs Gowler attempted to lull Mavis's uneasiness by extravagant praise of infants' ways, which culminated in a hideous imitation of baby language. Suddenly she stopped; her little eyes glared fiercely at Mavis, while her face became rigid. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... a heart which, in the absence of any religious faith, had, at any rate, the need of it. Her father, who entertained clear views of "the right thing" and "the wrong thing" in social ethics, was still too rigid a formalist in the exposition of his theories to reach an intelligence with whom the desire of virtues would have to come as a passion—inspiring and inspired or else be utterly repudiated. Utilitarianism, and the greatest happiness of the greatest ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... had been extravagant, she told Ruyler plaintively. It had been like a fairy tale, this sudden release from the rigid economies of her girlhood, when she had rarely had a franc in her pocket, and they had lived in a suite of the old family villa on one of the hills of Rouen, Madame Delano paying her brother for their lodging, and dressing herself and Helene with the aid of a half paralyzed seamstress with ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... say, introduced itself. And it was answered by another yell, more formidable still, and again by a chorus of yells. Then it seemed to Bucks's unaccustomed ears as if a thousand lusty throats were opened, and scared rigid he looked behind him and saw the canyon ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... all more or less influenced by the romantic currents of the times, seeking with Herder and Jacobi an approach to the heart of things other than through the categories of logic. Like Lessing and Goethe, they were also attracted to the pantheistic teaching of Spinoza, though rejecting its rigid determinism so far as it might affect the human will. They likewise accepted the idea of development which the leaders of German literature, Lessing, Herder, and Goethe, had already opposed to the unhistorical Aufklaerung, and which came to play such a prominent part ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... rather scrupulous, and intensely interested in the watching of two characters—her own and her adopted brother's. Mrs. Baxter's character needed no dissection; it was a consistent whole, clear as crystal and as rigid. ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... had unavailingly endeavored to awaken his master, the locked doors were burst in at last by the anxious servants, and they found only the tenantless shell of the mighty millionaire, as cold and rigid as the iron pillar which veils to-day its mystery of a forgotten past, when the jackals howl in the ruins ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... have been much earlier than totemism, as at this stage the different group-families would not be distinguished by totem names; but its action as a law would become much stronger when reinforced by the totem superstitions, and would become fixed in rigid sexual taboos.[36] The strongest of these taboos is the avoidance between brothers and sisters; this is Mr. Atkinson's primal law. It is a law that is still a working factor among barbarous races, and entails restrictions and avoidances ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... expose their grievances, before the tribunals of the civil magistrates, or even at the foot of the Imperial throne. The finances were diligently administered by two princes, who had been so long accustomed to the rigid economy of a private fortune; but in the receipt and application of the revenue, a discerning eye might observe some difference between the government of the East and of the West. Valens was persuaded, that royal liberality can be supplied only by public oppression, and his ambition never aspired ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... law whatever being repealed; and then, particularly, of that law which was made to restrain female luxury. His former argument, in support of the laws in general, appeared highly becoming of a consul; and that on the latter, against luxury, was quite conformable to the rigid strictness of his morals. There is, therefore, a danger lest, unless I shall show what, on each subject, was inconclusive, you may probably be led away by error. For while I acknowledge, that of those laws which are instituted, not ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... be made to the danger of those engaged in mathematical and physical investigations applying their conclusions in too rigid a manner to the animal body. It was held till recently that the pitch of a vocal tone was determined solely by the number of vibrations of the vocal bands, as if they acted like the strings of a violin or the reed of a ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... Mrs. Abramovitch pleading for me with her husband, saying they knew I was in trouble and therefore I ought to have more time to find lodging, another week—three days at all events. But the stern-natured man with his rigid religion was inexorable. It was God's will that I should be punished, and who was he to step in between the ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... that met our eyes. Beside the table, on a wooden chair, sat Doctor Grimesby Rylott, clad in a long dressing-gown. His chin was cocked upward and his eyes were fixed in a dreadful, rigid stare at the corner of the ceiling. Round his brow he had a peculiar yellow band, with brownish speckles, which seemed to be bound tightly ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... up of a plurality of parts. When wooden strips, of different or of the same kinds are glued and then laid together and put under heavy pressure until thoroughly dried, the mass makes a far more rigid structure than if cut ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... obstinately urges, your humanist will always have a greater liberty to play fast and loose with truth than will your believer in an independent realm of reality that makes the standard rigid. If by this latter believer he means a man who pretends to know the standard and who fulminates it, the humanist will doubtless prove more flexible; but no more flexible than the absolutist himself if the latter follows (as fortunately our present-day ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... commence, the very next morning, a copy of his honoured father's portrait, in which the artist's object was unusual; for it was his chief aim to make it as little like the original before him, as possible. Shall we reveal the fact that another image, wearing a gentler aspect than the stern, rigid features of the minister's portrait, seemed to flit before the young painter's fancy, coming unbidden, and mingling more especially with recollections of the past? As a ray of moonlight stole into the low dormer-window, ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... began and each one danced up to us, keeping time with the music and shook our hands in time, until the measure changed and they passed on to the next, we realized that we had, indeed, been taken right in. Thus the meeting closed, and many left—two, rigid in their ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... gizzard and heart especially require long, slow cooking to make them tender enough to be eaten. Therefore, when poultry is broiled, fried, or roasted, some other cookery method must be resorted to, as these processes are too rigid for the preparation of giblets. In such cases, the best plan is to cook them in water until they are tender and then saute them in butter. When cooked in this way, they may be served with the poultry, for to many persons they are ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 3 - Volume 3: Soup; Meat; Poultry and Game; Fish and Shell Fish • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... of his mouth, for, as a rigid Presbyterian, he by no means approved of Marchurst's heretical opinions, but of course said nothing ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... in a trench around four sides of a square of very small proportions, and secured at the top by string-pieces stretched from one angle to another, in which half-notches hack been made at proper intervals to receive the uprights. The poles were then made rigid by strips nailed on half-way to the ground, giving the sides of the structure firmness, but the interstices were large and frequent; still, with the aid of some old condemned paulins obtained from the quartermaster, the walls were covered and the necessity for chinking obviated. This method of ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... simplicity of her languishing eyes almost made the poetical Sir Asinus imagine himself in love. He found himself endeavoring to recollect whether he had not been induced to pay this visit by the expectation of beholding her; but with that rigid truth which ever characterized the operations of his great intellect, was compelled to come to the conclusion that the motive causes of his visit were the hope of a good breakfast, and a morning lounge in ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... University pundits against a practice which they thought had become too general. For the last year or two it had been considered almost as much a matter of course that a Cambridge undergraduate should go to the Derby as that a Member of Parliament should do so. Against this three or four rigid disciplinarians had raised their voices,—and as a result, no young man up at Trinity could get leave to be ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... whose morning of life had been so bright and beautiful and, still in the sunny days of childhood, transformed into an image of decrepitude and decay. The fair blooming cheek and finely chiselled features were now shrunk and stiffened into the wan and rigid inflexibility of old age; while the black bandages which swathed the little pale sad countenance, gave additional gloom and harshness to the profound melancholy which clouded its most intellectual expression. Disease ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... Sir Amyas Paulet for the gruff old puritan was very rigid with his illustrious captive. "Thou hast had thy wish, boy, and obtained what was doubtless thy object: a chain for a kiss, a locket for an obeisance. It pays to give court to reduced royalty. Away with thee, and let me not see thy face at Chartley, ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... the almost certainty of failure and destruction, and attempted to dissuade him from the mad scheme; but to no purpose. They saw they were dealing with a foregone conclusion; he had convoked them, not to advise as to methods, but to furnish the means. All reasonable argument he met with his rigid dogmatic formulas, his selected proverbs, his favorite texts of Scripture. The following, preserved by various witnesses as samples of his sayings at other times, indicate his reasoning on this occasion: "Give a slave a pike and you make him ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... that I saw no effects of drink in the crowd, and in one of the great restaurants built out over the sea on piers, where there was perpetual dancing to the braying of a brass-band, the cotillon had no fire imparted to its figures by the fumes of the bar. In fact it was a very rigid sobriety that reigned here, governing the common behavior by means of the placards which hung from the roof over the heads of the dancers, and repeatedly announced that gentlemen were not allowed to dance together, or to carry umbrellas or canes while dancing, while all were ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... too?" said the Duchess as she saw Mr. Oakhurst apparently waiting to accompany him. "As far as the canyon," he replied. He turned suddenly, and kissed the Duchess, leaving her pallid face aflame and her trembling limbs rigid with amazement. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... the action is so delicately adjusted that it moves with absolute freedom and ease. The player but adds another joint, which should equal in ease and adjustment the ones already there. On the other hand a person with stiff joints and rigid muscles, thumping ragtime on a good piano, can ruin it in a week; whereas under the fingers of a player who understands the laws of relaxation, it would last ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... Contestants sit on the ground, facing each other, legs straight and the soles of the feet in contact. The cane is grasped as in 2 but close to the feet. Object: To pull the opponent to his feet. The legs throughout the contest must be kept rigid. ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... since the war has lived a well-beloved physician and druggist in Summerfield, Alabama; Dr. Reese, also of Alabama, and Dr. Yates, of Texas, now dead. For a few months Dr. Francis Thornton, of Kentucky, was surgeon of the post. He was a fiery, impetuous, manly man, a rigid disciplinarian, but always compelled to fight against the dictates of his large, warm heart when duty compelled him ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... again; but not so, Catherine. For her, a telegram had never contained any space limit. It meant less to her than a post-card to you or me. Not that the girl was consciously extravagant. No, had you asked her, she would have claimed rigid economy—she rarely, for instance, paid more than a hundred dollars for a morning gown, or more than a thousand for a ball-dress. It was simply that the idea of counting words had never yet occurred to her. And so now, she complacently handed this verbose message to the clerk, who—thoroughly ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... appears fortuitous; almost all the West African people have some such division, and they range upwards from three, as amongst the Kru-men, the Gallas, the Wakwafi,and the Wanyika.[FN11] 3. Exogamy or the rigid interdiction of marriage between clans and families nearly related; here again the Hindu and the Somal observe the custom rigidly, whilst the Jews and Arabs have ever taken to wife their first cousins. 4. Sacrifices with blood- sprinkling upon altars and door-posts; ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... sun. In these days, unhappily, the news of battle is familiar to us, but every shock and every charge is an application or misapplication of the mechanical force of the sun. He blows the trumpet, he urges the projectile, he bursts the bomb. And, remember, this is not poetry, but rigid mechanical truth. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... example, Kerk came close to the animal. He walked stiffly, as if on the way to his execution, and runnels of sweat poured down his rigid face. But he believed and kept his thoughts directed away from the stingwing and he ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... View of the State of Ireland shows that. But it shows, too, that he brought to them singularly little sympathy or imagination. Throughout his tone is that of the worst kind of English officialdom; rigid subjection and in the last resort massacre are the remedies he would apply to Irish discontent. He would be a fine text—which might be enforced by modern examples—for a discourse on the evil effects of immersion ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... mere circumstance in a fatalistic series, to which the clay of the potter was no sufficient parallel, he could not expect to be "loved in return." At first, indeed, he had a kind of delight in his thoughts—in the eager pressure forward, to whatsoever conclusion, of a rigid intellectual gymnastic, which was like the making of Euclid. Only, little by little, under [109] the freezing influence of such propositions, the theoretic energy itself, and with it his old eagerness for truth, the care to track ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... the old mystical writers is not surprising when we consider the whole trend of modern thought. Among recent philosophers—though Lotze, perhaps the greatest name among them, is unsympathetic, in consequence of his over-rigid theory of personality—the great psychologist Fechner, whose religious philosophy is not so well known in this country as it deserves to be, has with some justice been called a mystic. And our own greatest living metaphysician, Mr F.H. Bradley, has expounded the dialectic ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... sensitiveness to it. The beholder will not respond to the appeal of a painting of a landscape unless he has himself felt something of the charm or glory of landscape in nature; he will not quicken and expand to the dignity or force caught in rigid marble triumphantly made fluent in statue or relief until he has realized for himself the significance of form and movement which exhales from every natural object. Gesture is a universal language. ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... results to be effected by instruction in mathematical topics. But unfortunately, the tendency is to treat the statement as indicating powers inherently residing in the subject, whether they operate or not, and thus to give it a rigid justification. If they do not operate, the blame is put not on the subject as taught, but on the indifference and recalcitrancy ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... influence from Alexandria, though not independently of the Greek spirit, had already created a multitude of intermediate beings between God and the world, avowing thereby that the idea of God had become stiff and rigid. "Its original aim was simply to help the God of Judaism in his need." Among these intermediate beings should be specially mentioned the Memra of God (see also the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... eyes, but it was too late; she no longer had the power of utterance. She glanced from one brother to the other with a piteous, entreating look; her mouth moved convulsively; in the effort to speak, she sat upright for an instant, ghastly and rigid, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... Looking down a long line of decrepit stone wall, in the trimming of which the wind had fairly run riot, I saw, as for the first time, what a severe yet master artist old Winter is. Ah, a severe artist! How stern the woods look, dark and cold and as rigid against ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... increase of the public debt and the necessity which exists for a modification of the tariff to meet even the ordinary expenses of the Government ought to admonish us all, in our respective spheres of duty, to the practice of rigid economy. The objects of expenditure should be limited in number, as far as this may be practicable, and the appropriations necessary to carry them into effect ought to be disbursed under the strictest accountability. Enlightened economy ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... and nascent ideas is produced. The mass for the moment seems formless and lawless. Then new order supervenes, as the magma settles down and begins to crystallise; till at last, I'm afraid, the resulting social organism becomes for the most part just as rigid, just as definite, just as dogmatic, just as exacting, as the one it has superseded. The caterpillar has ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... to his plantation Jarvis Saunders waked with a boundless sense of freedom from care, which had not been his since his boyhood. Through all his short visits to the spot hitherto he had been haunted with the unpleasant thought of having to return to the city and the rigid demands of business. But it was different now. He lay in the wide, high-posted Colonial bed, stretched himself, looked at the sunlight on the small-paned windows, and sighed with complete content. From the outside came the chirping of birds, the crowing of roosters, the cackle of hens, the ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... although it was known that the smugglers had constructed places ashore for the concealment of contraband goods under the Sand Hills near to No. 1 and No. 2 batteries at Deal, yet these hiding-places were so ingeniously formed that they had baffled the most rigid search. However, his plan of landing crews from his Majesty's ships to guard this district (in the manner previously described) had already begun to show good results. For two midshipmen, named respectively Peate and Newton, commanding the shore parties in that ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... silent so long that she added: "The tie is not looser than the old-fashioned one. More rigid, perhaps, because ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... Should the party at first succeed, then the bolder spirit, which they have disguised or suppressed through policy, is left to itself; it starts unbridled and at full gallop. All this occurred in the case of the Puritans. We find that some of the rigid Nonconformists did confess in a pamphlet, "The Christian's modest offer of the Silenced Ministers," 1606, that those who were appointed to speak for them at Hampton Court were not of their nomination or judgment; they insisted that these delegates should declare ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... in higher civilization, it gets information by literature. The latter operation, however, affects only the literary classes, not the masses, and society never consciously sets about the task of making mores. In the early stages mores are elastic and plastic; later they become rigid and fixed. They seem to grow up, gain strength, become corrupt, decline, and die, as if they were organisms. The phases seem to follow each other by an inherent necessity, and as if independent of the reason and will of the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... down in the twenty-five fathom water, and the trawl-warp became as rigid almost as an iron bar, while the speed of the smack through the water was greatly reduced—perhaps to three miles an hour—by the heavy drag behind her, a drag that ever increased as fish of all sorts and sizes were scraped ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... thrown out to keep the hawk from other quarry. There was much in her subsequent conduct to justify such suspicions, but the utter shamelessness of her later years argues rather the self-abandonment of one in revolt against the rigid social restraints and personal annihilation of early life. The hours which Napoleon spent with her were so many that he laid himself open to the charge of uxoriousness. The physician attendant at the birth of the infant King of Rome declared that the mother would ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... throne, nor emergence into light, of the intellectual faculties which the full heart feeling allows not. Hence, therefore, in the indications of the countenance, they are only the hard cut lines, and rigid settings, and wasted hollows, that speak of past effort and painfulness of mental application, which are inconsistent with expression of moral feeling, for all these are of infelicitous augury; but not the full and serene development of ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... altogether of the particular position in which it may find itself at the time when the occasion for acting on the guarantee arises. The great authorities upon foreign policy to whom I have been accustomed to listen, such as Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston, never to my knowledge took that rigid and, if I may venture to say so, that impracticable view of the guarantee. The circumstance, that there is already an existing guarantee in force, is, of necessity, an important fact, and a weighty element in ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... the not more painful than troublesome business of his pecuniary affairs, his removal from Castle Street, etc., and taking one journey of some length in the summer of 1826 to London and Paris for materials. The feat was accomplished by a rigid system of 'so much per day'—by dint of which, no doubt, an amount of work, surprising to the inexperienced, can be turned out with no necessarily disastrous consequences. But Scott, disgusted with society, and avoiding ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... doing so; I mean, whereby Jewish generals and people were obliged to kill themselves, rather than go into slavery under heathens. I doubt this would have been no better than "self-murder;" and I believe it was rather some vain doctrine, or interpretation, of the rigid Pharisees, or Essens, or Herodiaus, than a just consequence from any law of God ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... who would then cause rain to fall. A Minister vigorously protested against this superstition, pointing out that the proper way to meet a drought would be to reduce the quantity of food consumed, and to practise rigid economy in all things. "What have these creatures to do with the matter?" he asked. "If God had wished to put them to death, He had better not have given them life. If they can really produce drought, to burn them ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... that he had already collected enough wood to last him, with small and carefully constructed fires, one day, and a survey of the island and its possibilities revealed the fact that all the additional fuel he could garner from the rocks would scarcely last him, even with rigid economy, another week. ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... The awful vampire, gathering its horrible legs under it, sprang clear of the carcass. It stood for a moment in rigid immobility, then ere the maniacal echoes of that shout had quavered into silence among the cliffs, it shoggled over the ridge and was lost ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... or less, and found fault with. Some thought her nose wuz too long. Some on 'em thought she wuz too religious, and some on 'em thought she wuzn't religious enough. Some on 'em thought she wuzn't sot enough on the creeds, and some thought she wuz too rigid. ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... mistaking mere knowledge for improvement. Knowledge fails of its best end when it does not minister to a high virtue. I do not say that we are never to think, read, or study, but for the express purpose of learning our duties. The mind must not be tied down by rigid rules. Curiosity, amusement, natural tastes, may innocently direct reading and study to a certain extent. Even in these cases, however, we are bound to improve ourselves morally as well as intellectually, by seeking truth and rejecting ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... and business-like about this gambling-hell. Early settlers doubtless remember in the days of "prohibition," when four per cent. beer was supposed to be the only beverage of the country, and before rigid legislation, backed by the armed force of the North-West Mounted Police, swept these frightful pollutions from the fair face of the prairie, how they thrived on the encouragement of gambling and the sale of contraband spirits. The West is a ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... clear understanding of which she was such a pronounced advocate was only to be compassed by silence, and not by speech. The roar of voices behind them came nearer and nearer as the horses approached the winning-post. The members of the club stood rigid beneath the pavilion awning, some with field-glasses, others with knitted brows and glittering eyes. All eyes were turned in one direction, except ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... with even a new majesty and calm; but we feel, nevertheless, that the melody is dying from his song; that he is hardening into self-repetition, into rhetoric, into sermonizing common-place, and is rigid where he was once profound. The Thanksgiving Ode (1816) strikes death to the heart. The accustomed patriotic sentiments—the accustomed virtuous aspirations—these are still there; but the accent is like that of a ghost who calls to us in hollow mimicry of a voice ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... that the temporal and spiritual, instead of lying parallel throughout their length, touch each other only at one point. They are like two straight rigid rods laid one upon another at right angles; all the weight of the upper rod lies on the under at one spot, and therefore presses there with tenfold intensity. The comparison has been chosen, I think, precisely because of this quality. Because ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... this year were Donaldson's, though some fancied Seymour's. Donaldson's had Trevor, whose leadership was worth almost more than his play. In no other house was training so rigid. You could tell a Donaldson's man, if he was in his house-team, at a glance. If you saw a man eating oatmeal biscuits in the shop, and eyeing wistfully the while the stacks of buns and pastry, you could put him down as a Donaldsonite without further ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... other hand, is stouter in texture. In Maria there is no love struggle; the struggle is with life and circumstance; in Innocencia there is not only the element of rivalry in love, but in addition there is the rigid parent who sternly, and at last murderously, opposes the natural desires of a child whom he has promised to another. Where Maria is idyllic, poetic, flowing smoothing along the current of a realism tempered by sentimentalism, Innocencia (by no means devoid ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... A few minutes after she had gone, his back strongly arched became rigid. His jaws locked and he died in the attitude of a wrestler ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... into layers called "cats," each eight inches long and three inches thick. Then he laid them against the logs and held them in place with a woven network of sticks. The first fire—a slow one—baked the clay into a rigid stone-like sheath inside the logs and presently the sticks were burned away. The women had cooked the meats by an open fire and spread the dinner on a table of rough boards resting on poles set in crotches. ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... to be found, Mr. Hamilton-Wells went peering through his eyeglass into every corner, removed the glass and looked without it, then dusted it, and looked once more to make sure, while Lady Adeline grew rigid with nervous anxiety. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... As you sit on the old Yale fence you realize what it means to Yale men. In the secret life of the campus men yearn most for this honor and the traditional gathering of seniors under the oak tree for receiving elections is a college custom that has all the binding force of a most rigid law. ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... no reason why the two confessions should not be united, for it was very plain that the adherents of both were not rigid in their attachment. The Calvinists were no longer tenaciously devoted to their founder's views of absolute predestination, while the Lutherans, having departed from the doctrine of the real presence in the Lord's Supper, had adopted the Zwinglian theory. The rigid authority ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... he reached Angela, her faculties were reawakening; but, though insensibility had yielded, sense had not returned. She sat upon the stone seat, upright indeed, but rigid and grasping its angles with her hands. The dog had gone. In the undecided way common to dogs, when two people to whom they are equally attached separate, it had at that moment taken it into its head to run a ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... of their shield. This, also, she noticed. The speech over, the woman wiped her eyes. The old man joined in the tumult of applause that swept over the galleries, but the old woman pulled his arm, evidently feeling that it was not decent for them to applaud. She sat rigid, with red cheeks and her eyes brimming; he was swaying and clapping and laughing in a roar of delight. But it was he that drew her away, finally, while she fain would have lingered to look at Tommy ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... written it, a union of character and talent was necessary. A Republican tried and proved, permitting his ideal to be tarnished and sullied; a patriot wronged by the vices of the times in which he lived; an honest, clean-handed man; the representative of a family of rigid morality; the strict impartiality of the artist who cares for nothing but his ideas of art, and who protects those ideas from being injured or influenced by the pretensions of any group or coterie; a close and long acquaintanceship with the ins and outs ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... those everlasting divisions to which the latter Jews were subjected by the zeal of their religious disputes. The city fell, after a brave defense of three months, and might not have fallen had the Jews been willing to abate from the rigid observance of the Sabbath, during which the Romans prepared for assault. Pompey demolished the fortifications of the city, and exacted tribute, but spared the treasures of the temple which he profaned by his heathen presence. He nominated Hyrcanus to the priesthood, but withheld the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... humiliating conditions appertaining to it and to the modern theatre in general. I saw every noble impulse stifled in those occupied with theatrical matters, and a combination of the vainest and most frivolous interests maintained by a ridiculously rigid and bureaucratic system; I was now fully convinced that the necessity of handling the business of the theatre would be the most distasteful thing I could imagine. Now that, through Rastrelli's death, the temptation to be false to my inner conviction came to me in ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... successful "house" in the most notorious district in Chicago, traces her career directly to a desperate attempt to conform to the standard of "bringing home good wages" maintained by her numerous brothers and sisters. One requirement of her home was rigid: all money earned by a child must be paid into the family income until "legal age" was attained. The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen heartily detested the dish-washing in a restaurant, which constituted her first place in America, and quite honestly declared that the heavy ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... introduced it was regarded as a startling novelty for any privacy or anything approaching solitude to be tolerated in a monastery. The Carthusian system never found much favour in England. The Carthusians never had more than nine houses, all told; the discipline was too rigid, the rule too severe, the loneliness too dreadful for our tastes and for our climate. In the thirteenth century, if I mistake not, there were only two monasteries in England in which monks or nuns could boast of having any privacy, any little corner ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... efforts to promote the welfare and prosperity of his kingdom that his life had exhibited before the war. He was engaged diligently and industriously in repairing injuries, redressing grievances, and rectifying every thing that was wrong. He exacted rigid impartiality in all the courts of justice; he held public servants of every rank and station to a strict accountability; and in all the colleges, and monasteries, and ecclesiastical establishments of every kind, he corrected all abuses, and enforced a rigid discipline, faithfully extirpating from ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... expression has every mark of laborious study, the line seldom seems to have been formed at once; the words did not come till they were called, and were then put by constraint into their places, where they do their duty, but do it sullenly. In his greater compositions there may be found more rigid ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... Wrayson turned back to the inn, but before he had taken half a dozen paces he stopped short. He had happened to glance towards the upper windows of the small hotel, and he caught a sudden vision of a man's face—a familiar face, transformed, rigid, yet with staring eyes following the departing carriage. Wrayson himself was conscious of a quick shock of surprise, followed by a sense of apprehension. What could there possibly have been in the appearance of Louise to have brought a look like that into the ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... than one convent since the day when she had closed the gates of Port-Royal against her father, M. Arnauld, in order to restore the strictness of the cloister, Mother Angelica carried rule along with her, for she carried within herself the government, rigid, no doubt, for it was life in a convent, but characterized by generous largeness of heart, which caused the yoke to be ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... must not expect to see Percy. He has rigid notions; he always avoids people who seek much after fashion and amusement, and (I must say it) he will not begin an acquaintance while you go on in ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... result of the establishment of the electronic conception of atomic structure would be an increase of our wonder at the complexity of nature's ways, and an increase of our wonder that it should be possible to substitute a simple, almost rigid, mechanical machinery for the ever-changing flow of experience, and, by the use of that mental mechanism, not only to explain very many phenomena of vast complexity, but also to predict occurrences of similar entanglement and to ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... home, he found his father sitting at the tea-table. The old parlour looked gloomy and dark, the bright afternoon sun, shining through the creepers which obscured the window, threw a green light over the table and the rigid, pale ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... continuance of his power was, "I am the State;" and in the exile of St. Helena he constantly talked of himself as having been, from necessity, the Dictator of France. In effect no despotism within many degrees so complete and rigid was every before established in a civilised and Christian country. The whole territory was divided into prefectures—each prefect being appointed by Napoleon—carefully selected for a province with which he had no domestic relations—largely paid—and entrusted with such a complete ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... addressed Mannering, but her eyes seemed suddenly drawn to Borrowdean. As though dazzled by the sun, she dropped her veil. Borrowdean was standing as though turned to stone, perfectly rigid and motionless. His face was like a ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thou enthroned of late, And they by whom the nation's laws were made, And they who filled its judgment-seats obeyed Thy mandate, rigid as the will of Fate. Fierce men at thy right hand, With gesture of command, Gave forth the word that none might dare gainsay; And grave and reverend ones, who loved thee not, Shrank from thy presence, and in blank dismay Choked down, unuttered, the rebellious thought; While meaner cowards, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... customs of the world. He eat with Pharisees, when they invited him he refused not, but he was more bold with publicans and sinners, to converse with them, as being their greatest friend. He was uncivil to none, would deter none through a rigid austere conversation, and indeed, to testify the truth of his human nature, he came so low as to partake of all human infirmities without sin, and to be subject to such extraordinary afflictions and crosses, as to the eyes of the world did quite ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... a dame, Stainless and faithful, would feel all the wrong Of such a slander; and less rigid ladies, Such as abound in Venice, would be loud And all-inexorable in their cry ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... bring you to trial, if you conduct yourselves properly," he would have acted in a legal manner; but instead of doing this, he said, "I shall send you to Bermuda; and if you leave that island, I declare you guilty of high-treason."' Lord Melbourne deprecated such rigid criticism. He owned that the clause in the ordinance which related to Bermuda was an error on the part of Lord Durham, but he declared his belief that the whole of the remainder was perfectly legal, and warranted by the powers ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... industries and seeing that the older ones kept to a high standard, which would make French goods sell readily in foreign markets. He argued justly that if foreigners could be induced to buy French goods, these sales would bring gold and silver into the country and so enrich it. He made rigid rules as to the width and quality of cloths which the manufacturers might produce and the dyes which they might use. He even reorganized the old medival guilds; for through them the government could keep its eye on all the manufacturing that was done, and this would ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... shutting out infection. Every other monastic establishment freely devoted itself. It was a time when party spirit ran high. The bishop, Henri Francois Xavier de Belzunce, a nephew of the Duke de Lauzun, was a strong and rigid Jesuit, and had joined so hotly in the persecution of the Jansenists that he had forbidden the brotherhood called Oratorian fathers to hear confessions, because he suspected them of a leaning to Jansenist opinions; but he and they both alike worked earnestly in the one cause of mercy. They were ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... true," said Colonel Parker, "that nothing short of the rigid dictates of Catholicism could have prevented the Irish from going completely mad. But don't judge every one from your own case, O'Grady; the Saxons possess ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... off his cap and his black overcoat, and threw them on the seat behind him. His black hair was short and touched with grey at the temples. He wore a well-cut, well-fitting suit of dark grey, American in style, and a turn-down collar. He looked well-to-do, a fine, solid figure of a man. The rather rigid look of the shoulders came from his having had his collar-bone ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... measuring at one glance the exact distance and angle, and securing magically that mysterious "give" so essential to well-being and comfort. Any one can sink them like fence-posts, so that they stand deep and rigid, a reproach and an accusation; but it requires a particular skill to judge by the pull whether or not they will hold through the night and at the same time yield with gentle and supple swing to the least movement of the sleeper. A Carib knows, instantly, worthy and unworthy ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... his eyes from Van Meter after his first assault they rested on the face of Kate Ransom, her magnificent figure tense, rigid, her cheeks scarlet, her blue eyes flashing with tears of excitement. She was stirred to her soul's depths, and no figure in all the throbbing crowd gave to the speaker such inspiring response. Her ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... difficulties by overriding them. There are some who describe the pioneers of Canadian self-government as philosophic radicals; but they were really not of that school. It was through the absence of any philosophy or rigid logic that ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... draught of nourishment; the giving me my compound name; taking me out the first time to see the sun; investing me with the triple thread by which I became one of the twice-born; my induction into the first order—were all celebrated with sacred texts and rigid ceremonies. I might not walk, eat, drink, or sleep without danger of violating a rule. And the penalty, O brethren, the penalty was to my soul! According to the degrees of omission, my soul went to one of the heavens—Indra's the lowest, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... 1560. He lost his father when quite young, and the merchants of Amsterdam undertook his education upon condition that he would not preach out of their city unless he got their permission. Having gone to Geneva, he sat at the feet of Theodore Beza, one of the most rigid of Calvin's followers. After travelling in Italy he returned to Holland, and was duly appointed a minister of religion in Amsterdam. About this time certain clergymen of Delft had become dissatisfied with the doctrine of predestination, and Arminius was commissioned to answer them. ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... "Rouse, man, and let your reason speak. In peril? Lost—for some poor rigid law broken to ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... by the admonitions of their parents, and oppressed by the severe and rigid effects of the house, turned into quiet little puppets, quite different from their usual ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... the one in order to understand that of the other. Hitherto Manasseh's self-control in foregoing all revenge had excited Blanka's wonder only; she had thought that the secret of this self-mastery was to be found in a rigid dogma only, but now she perceived that what really shielded the wretched culprit was the magic influence of a woman's faithful heart that could cease to love only when it ceased to beat. The pledge won from him by his sister Manasseh ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... Her words had fixed me there with horror. I heard from Falcone a sound that was between a growl and a sob. I dared not look at him, but the eye of my fancy saw him standing rigid, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... she then overturned the satirical headboard, and muttered "Beasts!"—an epithet which probably, at that moment, conveniently classified in her mind the entire male population of Red Gulch. For Miss Mary, being possessed of certain rigid notions of her own, had not, perhaps, properly appreciated the demonstrative gallantry for which the Californian has been so justly celebrated by his brother Californians, and had, as a new-comer, perhaps fairly earned the ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... For more than a year, his clothes, his shirt, and his shoes had never been changed. For six months his bed was not made, and the unhappy child, consigned to this living burial, remained silent and immovable upon the impure pallet, breathing his own infection. By long inactivity his limbs became rigid. His mind, by the dead inaction which succeeded terror, lost its energy, and became, not only brutalized, but depraved. The noble child of warm affections, polished manners, and active intellect, was thus degraded far below the ordinary condition ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... the brink of the rough water below. To have allowed the salmon to go down the rapid would have been to lose it, so Frank arrested the spinning of his reel and held on. For a second or two the rod bent almost in a circle, and the line became fearfully rigid. ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... shock of revelation, the amazement of discovery, the little figure at the table stood rigid and upright, then it relaxed and with a stifled sob Carmencita crossed the room and, by the side of her cot, twisted herself into a little knot and buried her face in her arms and ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... name, however, does not appear to be readily brought into harmony with the others. Dr Seler simply remarks that it may be related to the root e, "firm, rigid, hard." Pio Perez offers no explanation. Dr Brinton suggests that it is a figurative expression for the sacrificial knife, from nab, something anointed, or blood, and edz, to adjust, to ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... the little hut where they all lived—every man went armed or had his arms handy. In addition to this, sentinels were posted through the day at the entrance of the Creek, to warn them of the approach of any suspicious strangers to the camp; while Seth caused as rigid a watch to be kept at night, taking the first and fourth turns himself, as if he were still a first mate with the responsibilities of a ship on his hands and walking the deck of ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... quiet and repose. Like the sun-crowned summit of the mountain, it stands erect and sublime nor heeds the cloudy tumult at its feet. In the school, the teacher who exemplifies and typifies this quality of serenity is never less than dignified but, withal, is never either cold or rigid. Children nestle about her in their affections and expand in her presence as flowers open in the sunshine. She cannot be a martinet nor, in her presence, can the children become sycophants. Her very presence generates an atmosphere that is conducive to healthy growth. There ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... Church of Scotland, who, many years since, was obliged to retire from his profession, and from society, who hides himself under a borrowed name. This hypothesis seems to account satisfactorily for the rigid secrecy observed; but from what I can recollect of the unfortunate individual, these are not the kind of productions I should expect from him. Burley, if I mistake not, was on board the Prince of Orange's own vessel at the time of his death. There was also in the Life Guards such a person as Francis ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... had none of her own,—were as abrupt in her transitions from oak to maple as the heroine who went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; while yet there is no conceivable human logic so close and inexorable as her connections. How rigid, how flexible are, for instance, the laws of perspective! If one could learn to make his statements as firm and unswerving as the horizon-line,—his continuity of thought as marked, yet as unbroken, as yonder soft gradations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... numerous short-term reforms aimed at improving competitiveness and long-term growth. Italy has moved slowly, however, on implementing needed structural reforms, such as lightening the high tax burden and overhauling Italy's rigid labor market and over-generous pension system, because of the current economic slowdown and opposition from labor unions. But the leadership faces a severe economic constraint: the budget deficit has breached the 3% EU ceiling. The economy experienced ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... leave, well satisfied in visiting this little company, to strengthen them to hold up the cause of their Lord and Master, in the midst of darkness. Within about thirty English miles there are none but rigid Roman Catholics, not one Evangelical congregation. At our departure my wife said: "These words arise in my mind for thy comfort: Thy faith hath ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... Walter—the man who had held her so often in his arms and pressed his hot lips to hers, the man who was her father's firm friend and whose uprightness and honesty of purpose she had ever admired—crowded upon her. Should she write to him? Rigid and staring, she sat in her chair, her little white hands clenched, as she tried to summon courage. It had been she who had written declaring that their secret engagement must be broken, she who had condemned herself. ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... reign of Charles I and in the beginning of the civil wars raised by a number of rigid fanatics, who at last were the victims to it, a great many pieces were published against theatrical and other shows, which were attacked with the greater virulence because that monarch and his queen, daughter to Henry I of France, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... snow, and the rules and ceremonies of a great European court were almost as strange to her. Lady Bloomfield mentions her as if she were something of a spoilt child who could hardly keep from showing that the rigid laws of her new position fretted and bored her. She wore glowing pomegranate blossoms in her hair, and looked pensive, as if she were pining for the gorgeous little hummingbirds and great white magnolias—the mixture of natural splendour and ease, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... first of the two to speak. Elizabeth, white and rigid, said nothing, and even Mrs. Tidditt's talking machinery seemed to be temporarily thrown out of gear. So the captain made the attempt, a ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... partly material and partly metaphysical, but ever more and more subject to the inspiration and the purpose of the Brahman, alone versed in the knowledge of the gods, and alone competent to propitiate them by sacrificial rites of increasing intricacy, and by prayers of a rigid formalism that gradually assume ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... were shut out. All the time I was preaching, I could see this same man standing before the pulpit, with his elbow leaning on the end of a high pew. He maintained this position throughout the service, and at the end of the sermon was still there, rigid and stiff, looking at the pulpit as if in a trance. He would not move or speak; there he stood, till we feared he had gone out of his mind. His companions were awed and took him away as well as they could, but did not embark on their ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... approaching trial. The whole way along he walked with the piece of silver, which Mr. Paul Dangerfield had given him, griped tight in his crooked fingers, in his breeches' pocket—no change in his grim and sinister face—no turn of the head—no side glance of the eye—all dark, rigid, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... group among the reformed to whom Erasmus in his heart of hearts was more nearly akin than to the Lutherans or Zwinglians with their rigid dogmatism: the Anabaptists. He rejected the doctrine from which they derived their name, and abhorred the anarchic element in them. He remained far too much the man of spiritual decorum to identify ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... of the tract I have referred to—for they maintain their ground best in a rocky field—are thickly sprinkled with these little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or lichens, and you see thousands of little trees just springing up between them, with the seed still attached ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... 1829, the Collins case was taken into consideration by the Assembly. A Committee was appointed, and a rigid inquiry instituted into some of the most interesting features. Attorney-General Robinson was examined at considerable length. Judges Sherwood and Hagerman were summoned before the Committee, but both of them declined to answer any questions. A good many ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... of lax and soft tissues, or necessarily short-lived. The former had, it is true, a very thick inner bark; but their dense woody axis, their thick and nearly imperishable outer bark, and their scanty and rigid foliage, would indicate no very rapid growth or decay. In the case of the Sigillarioe, the variations in the leaf-scars in different parts of the trunk, the intercalation of new ridges at the surface representing that ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the reader and to set up a new one somewhere else; the method is no longer consistent, no longer purely dramatic. And the dramatic story is not only scenic, it is also limited to so much as the ear can hear and the eye see. In rigid drama of this kind there is naturally no admission of the reader into the private mind of any of the characters; their thoughts and motives are transmuted into action. A subject wrought to this pitch of objectivity is no doubt given weight and compactness ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... In all such matters, absolute accuracy, absolute literalness, wherever attainable, is surely the one thing necessary. Not all the charm of diction, not all the ingenious theories in the world, can for a moment be set in the balance against rigid exactness, even if some of the concomitants of rigid exactness are such as to spoil the subject for popular treatment. The truth, the stark naked truth, the truth without so much as a loin-cloth on, should surely be the investigator's sole aim when, ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... was conducted (in a circuit court) with rigid impartiality by Chief-Justice John Marshall, one of the greatest judges our country has known. As head of the Supreme Court for thirty-four years (1801-35), he rendered many decisions ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... from cross-fertilization with the ordinary type. Moreover, I have brought them under such conditions as are necessary for the full development of their characters. And last but not least, I have tried to improve this character as far as possible by a very rigid and ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... a little peace, in a little peace, Thou dost rebate thy rigid purposes Of imposed being, and relenting, mend'st Too much, with nought. The westering Phoebus' horse Paws i' the lucent dust as when he shocked The East with rising; O how may I trace In this decline that morning when we did Sport 'twixt the ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... inglorious, and devoid of poetry. What would have been in itself sordid, gained a sweetness from the light of love and duty, and never in all her dreamy ease had she been as cheerful and lighthearted as in the midst of hardship and rigid economy. Her equable temper and calm composure came to her aid; and where a more nervous and excitable woman would have preyed upon herself, and sunk under imaginary troubles, she was always ready to soothe ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... indulgences, is to distribute this excess, these superfluous merits, as he feels disposed, at the same time dipping out for himself and his shorn fat swine the riches of the world; indeed, the ecclesiasts distribute their own merits and works. This is the refined monastic chastity, poverty and rigid obedience of the orders—nothing but shameless falsehood and scandalous vice, practiced under that covering, both privately and publicly, with the exception of a few who were sincere in their desire to be monks, of whom I was one. These falsehoods the orders readily sold to the laity on deathbeds ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... so much good sense and propriety in what she said, that I knew not how to contradict her; and, at length, I acknowledged, that she had reason to prefer the Mahometan manners to our ridiculous customs, which form a confused medley of the rigid maxims of Christianity, with all the libertinism (sic) of the Spartans: And, notwithstanding our absurd manners, I am persuaded, that a woman who is determined to place her happiness in her husband's affections, ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... throat. He stepped to the bush where he had left his canteen and groped for it. When he did not find it, he looked elsewhere, supposing that he had made a mistake in the bush. When the truth dawned upon him his whole body grew rigid, he stood motionless, even for a little his lungs suspended their function. His hands clenched; for some reason and apparently without any act of his will, they were lifted slowly until they were above his head. ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... occasion, that species which had a wide range in space had a narrow range in time; which is the reverse of the fact. The tendency to systematize overrides the evidence, and thrusts Nature into a formula too rigid to fit her ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... come singly. We marched to the (Middle Barrier) depot fairly easily yesterday afternoon, and since that have suffered three distinct blows which have placed us in a bad position. First we found a shortage of oil; with most rigid economy it can scarce carry us to the next depot on this surface (71 miles away). Second, Titus Oates disclosed his feet, the toes showing very bad indeed, evidently bitten by the late temperatures. The third blow ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... and navy of the United States can not keep three million hungry people quiet. What then? Will this war between capital and labor be settled by human wisdom? Never. The brow of the one becomes more rigid, the fist of ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... struck a match within the shelter of its flap, and by its flare scanned the small face from which he had brushed away the snow. Then he uttered another exclamation of surprise and lifting the little, rigid figure in his arms, folded his great-coat about it and ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... the sweetest, purest in temper, and lo! you are regarded as one mentally askew. Chopin invented many new harmonic devices, he untied the chord that was restrained within the octave, leading it into the dangerous but delectable land of extended harmonies. And how he chromaticized the prudish, rigid garden of German harmony, how he moistened it with flashing changeful waters until it grew bold and brilliant with promise! A French theorist, Albert Lavignac, calls Chopin a product of the German Romantic school. This is hitching ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... leaving the Bay, we had some rough weather. "Stables" used to be a comical function. My diary for the first rough day says:—"About six of us were there out of about thirty in my sub-division; our sergeant, usually an awesome personage to me, helpless as a babe, and white as a corpse, standing rigid. The lieutenant feebly told me to report when all horses were watered and feeds made up. It was a long job, and at the end I found him leaning limply against a stall. 'Horses all watered, and feeds ready, sir.' He turned on me a glazed eye, ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... stand rigid and mighty— granite and the ore in rocks; a great band clasps your forehead and its ...
— Sea Garden • Hilda Doolittle
... benign heaven deliver us from those buckram individuals who imagine that Nature is as narrow and rigid as their own contracted selves, and who would seek to array her in their own exquisite bottle-green bifurcations and a gilet a la mode! These characters always put us in mind of the statues of Louis XIV, in which he is represented as Jupiter or Hercules, nude, with the exception of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... barons seven hundred years ago; which fact leads us to infer that the degenerate monk might be to us most interesting when he was most condemned by the reformers of his day, since he was more humane, genial, and free than his brethren, chained to the rigid discipline of his convent. Even a Friar Tuck is not so repulsive to us as an unsocial, austere, narrow-minded, and ignorant ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... intervals for the deep, full note of the red-billed shrike, as he sat hidden in the thicket; bright yellow weaver-birds twittered in crowds on the boughs, whilst from the depth of the shade came the cooing murmur of the turtle-dove. Stark and rigid, like the stem of an old tree, the crocodile took his rest, sometimes with wide-open jaws: here and there the hippopotamus lifted his giant head from the troubled waters, now scattering them in showers of spray, now raising ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... and a humble reception of the "last rites" of the Church. Early in life McAravey had married a Presbyterian girl, and the almost inevitable estrangement that results from a "mixed marriage" had cast its shadow over the lives of the pair. The Kanes had belonged to the small and rigid body of "Covenanters," and never a Sabbath from childhood till her marriage had 'Lisbeth failed to walk the four rough, up-hill, dreary miles that separated her father's home from the meeting-house that rose alone, and stern as the Covenant itself, on the bleak moorland above Glenariff. ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... actor for disturbing the conjugal felicity of an alderman? What there was in the circumstances either of the offender or of the sufferer to vindicate the zeal of the audience we could never conceive. It has never been supposed that the situation of an actor is peculiarly favorable to the rigid virtues, or that an alderman enjoys any special immunity from injuries such as that which on this occasion roused the anger of the public. But such is the justice of mankind. In these cases the punishment was excessive, but the offense was known and proved. The case ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the whole transaction pale and rigid in the centre of the room, looking haughty and defiant as long as her parents and Herr Ebenstreit were present. Now, as the door closed, life and action were visible in this marble form; she rushed to the old gentleman, scarce respiring, ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... the world became tired of Raphaelism it inevitably became unjust to Raphael. It forgot that it was not he who had made his art the test of that of others—who had erected what, with him, was a spontaneous and original creation into a rigid system of laws. It confounded him with his followers and imitators, and, being bored by them, began to find ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... I not assured him that his honourable wounds, though painful (as a matter of fact, after they had set, they kept him stiff as a mummy for some days, so that unless he stood upon his feet, he had to be carried, or lie rigid on his face) would probably not prove fatal? And had he not actually survived to reach the upper air again, which was more than he ever expected to do? No wonder ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... blood and woe! when wilt thou end? Thou bright-haired angel, must the doom be thine! Fair lady of the stately brow! oh! let me see no more!" His lips quivered, but he uttered not another word. He remained fixed, rigid, statue-like, as if chilled into stone, bereft of life and motion, by the terrible vision. At length his extended arm dropped by his side; and, heaving a long, shuddering sigh, he leaned his drooping frame upon his ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... be taken to have done so, or else why were they introduced?—we have a noble and unselfish man murdering out of paltry vanity. In Plutarch, where Brutus is depicted as an austere republican, the incident of the letters only throws a natural shade of doubt on the rigid principles by which alone he is supposed to be guided. We all feel that rigid principles rest on pride, and may best be led astray through pride. But Shakespeare's Brutus is pure human sweetness, and the letters are worse than out of place when addressed to him. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... restoring our wasted fortunes, some said in jest that the best plan would be for one of us to marry the beauty of Dauphiny. I at once said that I would be the man to do it; the ideas was a wild one, and a roar of laughter greeted my words. Her father was known to be a stern and rigid man, and it was certain that he would not consent to give his daughter to a spendthrift young noble like myself. When the laughter had subsided I repeated my intention gravely, and offered to wager large sums with all around the table that I ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... His tall, thin form became rigid in the intensity of his service. In the silence, that deepened, the ticking of the clock in the front of the gallery, could be heard plainly in ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... the mantel, were burning, and in the dim, weird light, Mrs. LaGrange, still elegantly attired for her interview with Harold Mainwaring, lay upon the low couch near the grate, her features scarcely paler than a few hours before, but now rigid in death. Upon the table beside her, the supper ordered by the maid stood untasted, while on the same table a small vial bearing the label of one of the deadliest of poisons, but empty, told the story. Underneath the vial was a slip of paper, on ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... pangs of hunger with selections from the tray of anchovies, sardines, pickled beet, and sliced sausage, when his host entered, voluble and irrepressible as ever. The dignified Ogams shuddered inwardly as his strident voice awoke the echoes of the room, and their already stiff limbs became rigid with disapproval. ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... blind to what he thought the defects of his own College; and I have, from the information of Dr. Taylor, a very strong instance of that rigid honesty which he ever inflexibly preserved. Taylor had obtained his father's consent to be entered of Pembroke, that he might be with his schoolfellow Johnson, with whom, though some years older than himself, he was very intimate. This would have been a great comfort to ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... supervisors, head of the department of public works, state senator, and Grand Sachem of Tammany, Tweed had a large and seductive influence over the city and state. The story of how he earned a scanty livelihood by stealing a million of dollars at a pop, and thus, with the most rigid economy, scraped together $20,000,000 in a few years by patient industry and smoking plug tobacco, has been ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... old steamships, for a principal port, in spite of the transformation of Ireland; the total weight of the boats when the gas was out of them; above all, the incredible speed that could be attained and kept up, with a good following wind. He learned also how, by the very rigid laws of air-way, enforced now by all nations under very heavy penalties, the danger of collisions was practically abolished; and so forth. The canon talked fluently and well; but the mass of new information was so great, and the interest of watching so intense, that the ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... Johnsonville to be near her sister Annie, Miss Abigail gave up her "help" and paid Miss Molly for the time spent in the empty reading-room of the library. But the campaign soon called for more than economy, even the most rigid. When the minister had a call elsewhere, and the trustees of the church seized the opportunity to declare it impossible to appoint his successor, Miss Abigail sold her woodlot and arranged through ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... most lovely lady in Bagdad, but very proud, and of difficult access. You know how strict our judges are, in enjoining the punctual observance of the severe laws that confine women; and they are yet more strict in the observation of them in their own families; the cauzee you saw is more rigid in that point than any of the other magistrates. They are always preaching to their daughters what a heinous crime it is to shew themselves to men; and the girls themselves are so prepossessed with the notion, that they make no other use of their own eves ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... outside my cavern,—I looked around the empty vehicle. On the forward seat lay a woman's hairpin. I picked it up with an interest that, however, soon abated. There was no scent of the roses to cling to it still, not even of hair-oil. No bent or twist in its rigid angles betrayed any trait of its wearer's character. I tried to think that it might have been "Mariar's." I tried to imagine that, confining the symmetrical curls of that girl, it might have heard the soft compliments ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... moving period that brought us together, how I would that your sweet composure had been sometimes a little ruffled! It would have appeared to me of a finer quality had I found it more variable. A woman's reason should be less rigid; and I should loathe mine if it were not a leaven of indulgence ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... of Lord Cornwallis and his galloping suite, Tarleton's famous light-horse legion was drawn up; and fronting it was the infantry, rank on rank, the glittering bayonets slanting in the October sunlight as the regiments moved into place, or standing in rigid groves of steel at the command to halt ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... the powers of the orator were not so cordially esteemed. To Matilda Pridden, his tales were barely decently the flesh and the devil smothering a holy occasion to penetrate and exhort. Dartrey sat rigid, as with the checked impatience for a leap. Nesta looked at Louise when some one was perceived on the stage bending to her father: It was Mr. Peridon; he never once raised his face. Apparently he was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that you have frankness enough to own to it. You, Mercer, knew better; but you, sir, had to learn that you have broken one of the most rigid rules of my establishment. I object to fighting, as savage, brutal, and cruel, and I will not allow it here. Mr Rebble, give these boys heavy impositions, and you will both of you stop in and study every day for a fortnight under Mr Hasnip's directions. Some principals ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... more began to walk up and down the room every now and then taking a stolen glance at Miss Horn, a glance of uneasy anxious questioning. She stood rigid—a very Lot's wife of immobility, her eyes on the ground, waiting ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... be scared. He refused absolutely to jump up and back off in wild-eyed terror, crying out "Ooh! Here comes a bear!" the way Marie had always done—the way every one had always done, when Lovin Child got down and came at them growling. Cash sat rigid with his face to the fire, and would ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... had taken, defeated my intentions by escaping with the object of his passion. For more than six months I have vainly endeavoured to discover where he has concealed himself, but I have now some reason to think he is at the Hague. The Count earnestly conjured the Marquis to make the most rigid search, in order to discover his son's retreat, and to endeavour to prevail upon him to return to his home. 'It is an act of justice,' continued he, 'to provide for the, girl, if she consents to give up the written promise of marriage which she has received, and I leave it to your discretion ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... is evidently an effort to bring the deity, conceived as the abstract One, into closer union with man, an effort which is likewise visible in the later Yoga system of the Brahmins, in which, by the admission of Buddhistic elements, the visible world is recognized as real, the old rigid asceticism mitigated, Vishnu represented as the soul of the world, and immortality taught as a return of the ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... drew his heels together and became, though still pear-like, splendidly rigid. His eyes flashed with haughty, but a trifle vicarious ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... blade could be returned to her throat or her bosom it was twitched from her grip, sparked as it flew out of the shadow of the ship above, and fell flashing in the sunshine at the foot of the Statue fifty yards away. The outflung arm was arrested, rigid as a bar for an instant, till the releasing circuit permitted her to bring it slowly to her side. The other women shrank back silent among ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... in strictly governing our conduct toward other men by the rigid rules of legal right. If there were a community anywhere, in which all stood upon the strictness of this rule there should be written over its gates, as a warning to the unfortunates desiring admission to ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... misgiving or retreat, that she arrived too soon at the point where she meant to intercept the driver on his way to the house; for in her present mutiny she had resolved to gratify a little natural liking for manoeuvre, long starved by the rigid discipline to which she had subjected herself. She had always been awkward at it, but she liked it; and now it pleased her to think that she should give her letter secretly to the driver, and on her way to meet him she forgot that she had meant ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Hewson were serious; a lady who had a handsome forearm put up a lorgnette and inspected him through it; she had the air of questioning his taste, and the subtle aura of her censure penetrated to him, though she preserved a face of rigid impassivity. He returned her stare defiantly, though he was aware of not reaching her through the lenses as effectively as she reached him. Most of those who prepared themselves to listen seemed to be putting him on trial, and they apparently ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... other artists, even, are the public; and, according to Whistler, the public has nothing to do with art; it flourishes best when they are not aware of its existence. He is very contemptuous of taste. All judgment of art must be based on expert knowledge, for art, he says, "is based upon laws as rigid and defined as those of the known sciences." Yet whereas "no polished member of society is at all affected by admitting himself neither engineer, mathematician, nor astronomer, and therefore remains willingly discreet and taciturn ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Protestant faith. They had been very uneasy and restless under the progress which the queen had been making in silencing Protestant preachers, and bringing back Catholic rites and ceremonies; and now, if they found that their queen was going to marry so rigid and uncompromising a Catholic as Philip of Spain, they would be doubly alarmed. She must suspend, therefore, for a time, her measures for restoring papacy, unless she was willing to give up her husband. The queen saw that this was the alternative, and she decided ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Salzach flows down from the glaciers and divides the town. The place was thronged with soldiers, and the summit of the frowning Muenchburg was alive with activity. Here in the very heart of the Teutonic confederation, far from hostile frontiers, travelers were not subjected to such rigid scrutiny. It was deemed that everything was safely German, and John could travel at ease almost like ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Lady Suffolk, in 1767, had been an essential loss to her partial, and not too rigid neighbours. Two days before the death of George II. she had gone to Kensington not knowing that there was a review there. Hemmed in by coaches, she found herself close to George II. and to Lady Yarmouth. Neither of them knew her—a circumstance which greatly affected ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... like no weather that exists anywhere, save in Paradise and in Italy; certainly not in America, where it is always too strenuous on the side either of heat or cold. Young as the season was, and wintry, as it would have been under a more rigid sky, it resembled summer rather than what we New Englanders recognize in our idea of spring. But there was an indescribable something, sweet, fresh, and remotely affectionate, which the matronly summer loses, and which thrilled, and, as it were, tickled ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... clergymen. He might have been a sociable fellow, a man about town, even a gay young dog, and a radical writer before he was driven to accept the editorship of the aforesaid periodical. He probably came of a "good English family." He was now, very likely, either a rigid Presbyterian or an extreme freethinker. He thought a lot, anyway, and looked as if he knew a lot too—too ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... by the military was reorganized with Brigadier-General George H. Wood commanding and Captain Tyrus G. Reed as Adjutant General. The city was turned over into a military district of five military zones, and rigid orders were laid down for the ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... whom the purely physical is at all times the sole agent? We do not say that it does not generally predominate. But, in a compound being like man, it seems next to impossible that the nature within should not at times, in some degree, transpire through the most rigid texture of the outward form. We may not, indeed, always read aright the character thus obscurely indexed, or even be able to guess at it, one way or the other; still, it will affect us; nay, most so, perhaps, when ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... 'hypothesis' is often used also for the scientific device of treating an Abstraction as, for the purposes of argument, equivalent to the concrete facts. Thus, in Geometry, a line is treated as having no breadth; in Mechanics, a bar may be supposed absolutely rigid, or a machine to work without friction; in Economics, man is sometimes regarded as actuated solely by love of gain and dislike of exertion. The results reached by such reasoning may be made applicable to the concrete facts, if ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... an act of folly. To federalize the union was to combine the advantage of common action with liberty to each community to work out its own ideals in education, municipal government and all other matters of local concern. More than that, to federalize the union was to substitute for a rigid bond a bond elastic enough to allow of expansion, eastward to the Atlantic and westward to the Pacific. That principle which has been called provincial rights, or provincial autonomy, might be described more accurately and comprehensively ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... before they came to the Western wilderness, had made them what they were. Things have changed. In the progress of society, the fashions, the habits of life, and all its conditions, have changed. Their rigid sentiments, and their tenets, apparently harsh and exclusive, we are not called on, in every respect, to imitate or commend; or rather to imitate, for we should commend them always, when we consider that state of society in which they had been adopted, and in which they seemed necessary. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... evolution of man, and yet realises how diverse were morality and customs in matters of sex in the period which this essay treats of" (i.e. Mother-Age Civilisation), "will hardly approach modern social problems with the notion that there is a rigid and unchangeable code of right and wrong. He will mark, in the first place, a continuous flux in all social institutions and moral standards; but in the next place, if he be a real historical student, he will appreciate the slowness of this steady secular ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... come with them, if it must be so! Let me take the evil with the good, and live my rich wild life through bliss and agony, like a true daughter of the sun, instead of crystallising slowly here into ice, amid countenances rigid with respectability, sharpened by the lust of gain; without taste, without emotion, without even sorrow! Let who will be the stagnant mill-head, crawling in its ugly spade-cut ditch to turn the mill. Let me be the wild mountain brook, which foams and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... colored glass, etc., from Nineveh, which once formed part of the inlaid ornament of a throne, shewing how richly such objects were ornamented. This carving is said by the authorities to be of Egyptian origin. The treatment of figures by the Assyrians was more clumsy and more rigid, and their furniture generally was more massive than that of ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... his case had he remained in his own country. All the circumstances requiring attention from the invalid at home should be equally attended to abroad. If in some things greater latitude may be permitted, others will demand even a more rigid attention. It is, in truth, only by a due regard to all these circumstances that the powers of the constitution can be enabled to throw off, or even materially mitigate, in the best climate, a ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... and small, and a knack of graphically recording them, it has become a far more commonly and successfully cultivated form of art than any other. As to the question who are its practitioners, it would, of course, be the merest dogmatism to commit one's self to any attempt at rigid classification in such a matter. There are few if any writers who can be described without qualification either as realists or as idealists. Nearly all of them, probably, are realists at one moment and in one mood, and idealists at other moments and in other moods. ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... a rigid search of the deck, but the axe was gone. Nor was it ever found. It had taken its bloody story many fathoms deep into the old Atlantic, and hidden it, where many crimes have been hidden, in the ooze and slime ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... going to walk again?" "He thinks I'll hobble. It's both legs and feet." "They must be terrible—I mean to look at." "I haven't dared to look at them uncovered. Through the bed blankets I remind myself Of a starfish laid out with rigid points." "The wonder is it hadn't been your head." "It's hard to tell you how I managed it. When I saw the shaft had me by the coat, I didn't try too long to pull away, Or fumble for my knife to cut away, I just embraced ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... seemed congenial to George; he sat upon the copestone of the stone parapet, his back against a stone pilaster; his attitude not comfortable, but rigid, and his silence not comfortable, either, but heavy. However, to the eyes of his mother and his aunt, who occupied wicker chairs at a little distance, he was almost indistinguishable except for the stiff white shield ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... leaves himself no margin in matters of belief? No room for a wholesome, healthy doubt? No provision for an added enlightenment? No calculation for the inevitable progress of human knowledge? This is, in our eyes, the crying sin and danger of elaborate creeds, rigid formulas of exact statement on ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... one word, however, to be added. Your bedside friends should be dressed in soft leather and printed on thin paper. Then you can talk to them quite snugly. It is a great nuisance if you have to stick your arms out of bed and hold your hands rigid. ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... labourer of the lowest class.' A Reformed Poor Law, having for its 'object,' yes reader, its object, the restoration of the pauper to a position below that of the independent labourer.' This is their 'standard' of reference, by rigid attention to which they hope to fully carry out their 'vital principle,' and thus bring to a satisfactory conclusion the great work of placing 'the pauper in a worse condition than the independent labourer.' It appears, ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... Michel caught sight of the face, and regarded it distinctly. The old man's eyes were half closed, and he took no notice of anything; but there was something in that face which produced a profound impression on Pere Michel. He stood rigid, as though rooted to the spot, looking at the old man with a fixed stare. Then his arms sank down, his head also fell forward, and turning abruptly away, he walked forward to the bows. Upon this Jericho came forward; and he it was who lifted the old man on board ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... a chair. She was rigid; she did not speak; he would have thought she was in a fit but for the eyes which she never took off of him—eyes fixed with ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... so. For then I shall hope that they are facing one of the most difficult, and yet most necessary, of all problems; namely the difference between the Law and the Gospel. In my morning sermon I spoke of the eternal law of God—how it was unchangeable even as God its author, rigid, awful, inevitable by every soul of man, and certain, if he kept it, to lead him into all good, for body, soul, and spirit: but certain, too, if he broke it, to ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... adorned. The set was the inevitable modern drawing-room, and she sat well out on a sofa with her hands, in long black gloves, resting stiffly, palm downward, on each side of her. It was as if she pushed her body forward in an impulse to rise: her rigid arms thrust her shoulders up a little and accented the swell of her bosom. It was a vivid, a staccato attitude. It expressed a temperament, a character, fifty other things, but especially epitomised the restraints and the licenses of a world of drawing-rooms. In that first ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... obligation of submitting annually the needful estimates of expenses of such service. Congress properly exacts implicit obedience to the requirements of the law in the administration of the public service and rigid accountability in the expenditures therefor. It is submitted that a corresponding responsibility and obligation rest upon it to make the adequate appropriations to render possible such administration and tolerable such exaction. Anything short of an ample provision for a specified service ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... his ranks disseminated by grapeshot and musket balls, feeling that victory was slipping through his fingers, alarmed by the hesitation of his bravest followers, wrenched the tri-color from the rigid fingers of a dead color-bearer, and dashed toward the bridge, shouting: "Soldiers! are you no longer the men of Lodi?" As he did so he saw a young lieutenant spring past him who covered him ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the body carried in their hands broad, three-cornered bronze shovels, with short black handles, and these they had dropped upon the grass on arriving at the grave. Presently the old man stooped and drew the covering back from the dead one's face—a rigid, marble-white face set in a loose mass of black hair. The others gathered round, and some standing, others kneeling, bent on the still countenance before them a long earnest gaze, as if taking an eternal farewell of one they had deeply loved. At ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... him that his father noted, any remoteness or richness of fancy in his expressions, was set down as incidental to the Blossoming Season. There is nothing like a theory for binding the wise. Sir Austin, despite his rigid watch and ward, knew less of his son than the servant of his household. And he was deaf, as well as blind. Adrian thought it his duty to tell him that the youth was consuming paper. Lady Blandish likewise ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... God: that he is our witness every moment, and everywhere conscious, as we are ourselves, of our words, acts, and thoughts; and will bring us all to a strict account at last for whatever he has thus witnessed that has been contrary to that rigid law of holy living which he has established over us in Christ. Must not this act upon us most beneficially? We believe that in himself he is perfect purity, and that he demands of us that we be so in our degree also. We can impute to him none of the acts, such as the believers in the Greek and Roman ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... which attends it, but especially they insisted upon its intrinsic excellency, its dignity and beauty, and agreeableness to reason and nature, and its self sufficiency to happiness, which many of them, especially the stoics,—the most rigid moralists among them,—carried to a very high degree. Cicero, in his Offices, and those excellent philosophers, Epictetus and Marcus Antoninus, in their works, which seem to be the best moral treatises ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... of Independence to an Irishwoman keeping a boarding-house in Havana, from a minister of Louis XIV. or a judge of the High Court of Admiralty to the most illiterate sailor, from Governor John Endicott, most rigid of Puritans, to the keeper of a rendezvous for pirates and receiver of their ill-gotten goods. Witnesses or writers of many nationalities appear: American, Englishmen, Scots, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards, a Portuguese, a Dane or Sleswicker, a Bohemian, a Greek, ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... hands and set lips she moved away from Louis and stood apart in the moonlight, a fixed and rigid figure of despair. Louis stepped to where Villon stood in stricken ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... you, O'Moy. Because I remember that you've been a loyal friend to me. And because I must forget all this and remember only that my duty is absolutely rigid and inflexible. If I condoned your offence, if I suppressed inquiry, I should be in duty and honour bound to offer my own resignation to his Majesty's Government. And I have to think of other things besides my personal feelings, when at any ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... there a rigid rule with regard to the use of the preterite tense? When do you say "hung" and when do you say "hanged"? A. Two examples from a universally recognised authority will illustrate the flexibility of our language in the general use of tenses: (1) "'I know a gen'l'man, sir,' said Mr. Weller, 'as did ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... earnings of old Robert did not amount to more than twelve shillings a week; and, as there were six children to maintain, the family, during their stay at Wylam, were necessarily in very straitened circumstances. The father's wages being barely sufficient, even with the most rigid economy, for the sustenance of the household, there was little to spare for clothing, and nothing for education, so none of the children ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... alone she remained standing as he had last seen her, her gaze fixed on the heavy curtains through which he had disappeared. Gradually her face grew rigid, and the expression vanished from her deep eyes, till they looked dull and glassy. She tottered, lost her hold upon the chair and fell to the floor with an inarticulate groan. There she lay, white, beautiful and motionless as a marble ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... It held on for a second or two in a most remarkable manner to the mainmast, but another lurch of the vessel cast it loose again; a huge billow rolled under the stern; down went the bow, and the brute slid on its haunches, with its fore legs rigid in front, at an incredible pace towards the galley. Just as a smash became imminent, the bow rose, the stern dropt, and away he went back again with equal speed, but in a more sidling attitude, towards ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... State was wretchedly poor; for that very reason the Prussian rulers had to practise strict economy and unrelenting industry. It is true the country was always insecure and constantly threatened by powerful neighbours; for that very reason the people had to submit to a rigid discipline and a strong military organization. It is true the country was depopulated; for that very reason the rulers had to attract foreign settlers by a ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... face to him he saw that she had felt the universal contagion. Her keen eye sparkled, there was a flush on her matronly cheek, and she had evidently made up her mind what line to take. Olive Chancellor sat motionless; her eyes were fixed on the floor with the rigid, alarmed expression of her moments of nervous diffidence; she gave no sign of observing her kinsman's approach. He said something to Mrs. Farrinder, something that imperfectly represented his admiration of Verena; and this lady replied with dignity that it was no wonder the girl spoke so ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... entirely delightful, appropriate, seemly, and beautiful. It pleases every sense; it is done just as it should be done, easily, courteously, gently, pleasantly, with a confidence which is yet modest, and with a rightness that has nothing rigid or unamiable about it. To see a thing so done, whatever it may be, leaves us with an envious desire that we might do the thing in the same way. It seems easy and effortless, and the one thing worth doing; and this is where ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... partners turned quite the color of her hair; Jackson Wells alone remained white and rigid. She came on, her very short upper lip showing her white teeth ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... swelling, visibly. For an instant it stood thus; seeming to stare, fixedly, at something, in the direction of the door. Then, quickly, it began to back along the sill; until, reaching the wall at the end, it could go no further. There it stood, rigid, as though frozen in an attitude of ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... it seems to me, a journey, especially if it be for love or pleasure, should always have about it something of devotion, something a little rigid too, and dutiful, at least in its opening stages; and in thus determining my way I secured this. For I promised myself that I would start from the place whence they set out so long ago to visit and to pray at the tomb of the greatest of English saints, that I would sleep where ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... Barbara Uttmann, of Annaberg, Saxony, was the inventor of the art of making hand cushion lace, or only introduced it into Annaberg, in the Saxon mountains, has not yet been solved, notwithstanding the fact that the most rigid examinations have been made. It is the general belief, however, that she only introduced the art, having learned it from a foreigner in the year 1561. The person from whom she acquired this knowledge is said to have been a Protestant fugitive from Brabant, who was driven ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... disorderly conduct of some of the American settlers, and of not a few of the ragged volunteer soldiery as well. They hailed with sincere joy the advent of the disciplined Continental troops, commanded by officers who behaved with rigid justice towards all men and put down disorder with a strong hand. They were much relieved to find themselves under the authority of Congress, and both to that body and to the local Regular Army officers, they sent petitions setting ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... by the white sunbonnet drawn far over it. One arm was lifted, and her hand was passed between the unchinked logs in a convulsive grasp upon them. Her figure was tall and slender, and expressive in its rigid constraint; it was an attitude of despair, of repulsion, of fear. It might have implied grief, or remorse, or anxiety. Often the eyes of the prescient victims of circumstantial evidence rested dubiously upon ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... days wont to do in behalf of the aspiring Colored girls who sought for education, withholding themselves from such work only when a depraved and degenerate public sentiment upon the subject of educating the Colored people had compelled them to a more rigid line of demarcation between the races. Ellen Simonds and others conducted the school a few years, but with the loss of its original teacher it began to fail, and finally became extinct. Maria Becraft is remembered, wherever she was known, as a woman of the rarest ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... architectural structures, unapproachable, to use Schumann's word, in their magnificence. But the underlying feeling was always the same throughout; it might wax or wane in intensity: its character did not change. The themes, once announced, were rigid and unalterable; the music had always to be more or less like "a tune tied to a post." Dramatic changes of mood had no place. So later, a voice had to be found for shifting, complex, theatrically conflicting moods—states of mind characteristic of the modern ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... rigidity of the back of the neck, pain in various parts of the body, skin over-sensitive, irritable, and temperature about 102 degrees, with all symptoms of an active fever. Later, pains are very severe, especially in the head, neck and back; the head is drawn back; often the back is rigid; the muscles of the neck and back are tender and attempts to stretch them cause intense pain. The vomiting now is less prominent. Temperature is extremely irregular, 99 to 105 degrees or more. Pulse is slow, often 50 to 60, and full and strong at first. The delirium is of a severe and variable ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... an heritage from her father, and betokened a strong and determined nature, had become more rigid in the last few months, but over her face lay a new expression, one of pain and anxiety, as if some secret and hitherto unknown spring had been touched; the blue eyes lost their cold, passionate look, deep shadows lay in them, which told of strife and anguish, and the blonde head sank low, ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... affording his subjects on the marches marks of his royal justice and protection. [Sidenote: 1510] The clan of Turnbull having been guilty of unbounded excesses, the king came suddenly to Jedburgh, by a night march, and executed the most rigid justice upon the astonished offenders. Their submission was made with singular solemnity. Two hundred of the tribe met the king, at the water of Rule, holding in their hands the naked swords, with which they had perpetrated their crimes, and having each around his neck the ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... Etiquette is not rigid in Arundell Street; but, nevertheless, a girl in a first-floor front may be excused for showing surprise and hesitation when invited to a confidential chat with a second-floor front young man whom she has known only five minutes. But there is a freemasonry among those who ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... an act of 1887, the contract labor restriction was made even more severe. In 1903, anarchists were excluded and the bureau of immigration was transferred from the Treasury Department to the Department of Commerce and Labor, in order to provide for a more rigid execution of the law. In 1907 the classes of persons denied admission were widened to embrace those suffering from physical and mental defects and otherwise unfit for effective citizenship. When the Department of Labor was established in 1913 the enforcement ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... the tombs Have lost their rigid, frozen mien, The gradual glow of life illumes The Past ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... the sunshine one loves to see in a young face—the expression was too grave and impassive; there was the suggestion of future hardness, unless time should mellow instead of stiffening and accentuating the already somewhat rigid lines. ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... applicants. Moreover, in many trades, though by no means in all, restrictions are placed by the Unions upon the number of apprentices, with the object of limiting the number of those who should from year to year be qualified to compete for work. In other trades where no rigid rule to this effect exists, there is an understanding which is equally effective. Certain trades, such as the engineers, boiler-makers, and other branches of iron trade, place no restrictions, and in certain other trades the restrictions are not closely applied. But most of the strong Trades ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... should have its specified time, which should be adhered to with rigid accuracy. If any thing like the plan I have suggested for allowing rests of a minute or two every half hour should be adopted, it will mark off the forenoon into parts which ought to be precisely and carefully observed. I was formerly accustomed to think that I could not limit ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... caving away beneath his feet told him. Suddenly Mickey gave up struggling, set his teeth, and began fighting by instinct. He moved his shoulders gently, until he let the water flow in, then instead of trying to work his feet he held them rigid and flattened as he could, and with the upper part of his body still rolling, he reached higher, and kept inching up the branch as Junior backed away, until with sickening slowness he at last reached wood thick as his wrist. Then he dragged ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the dead dog," pursued Kiddie, "didn't look into her eyes an' see how the pupils were dilated; didn't handle her limbs an' feel how rigid they were. You've seen many an animal killed with a bullet, Rube, but you never saw one lookin' as Sheila looks. Why? Because she wasn't shot. It was poison that killed her—a quick an' deadly poison, injected on the point of a dart, a spear, or, perhaps even an arrow. And the bootprint ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... a spectacle to all the earth, which the fiercest assailant and the most rigid judge cannot long contemplate without yielding to a painful compassion which rends the heart. Why should all that faculty and force, all that wonderful being, with every capacity for happiness and making happy, for wise ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... succeeded by Alexander, his cousin-german,[4] who, being declared emperor without opposition, the senate, with their usual adulation, were for conferring new titles upon him; but he modestly declined them all. 2. To the most rigid justice he added the greatest humanity. He loved the good, and was a severe reprover of the lewd and infamous. His accomplishments were equal to his virtues. He was an excellent mathematician, geometrician, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... of being imprisoned between decks for four weeks, with this heterogeneous collection appalled him. His only safety lay in maintaining a rigid and uncompromising aloofness. He would discourage all advances from the start, he would promptly nip in the bud the first sign of intrusion. He had left the only country an Englishman regards as the proper place for existence, to cross two abominable seas and an even ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
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