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More "Smoothness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his own ground, saw that his work was properly done, and waited until the man courted his own punishment. In the meantime, the men mistook his forbearance, his quietness, his smoothness of tones and manner for weakness, and Marley, a bully by nature, and quite incapable of understanding his employer, grew elated ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... Sumatra, prevails without the mixture of any other in the inland country of Menangkabau and its immediate dependencies, and is understood in almost every part of the island. It has been much celebrated, and justly, for the smoothness and sweetness of its sound, which have gained it the appellation of the Italian of the East. This is owing to the prevalence of vowels and liquids in the words (with many nasals which may be thought an objection) and the infrequency of any harsh combination of mute consonants. These qualities ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... adorn them gracefully with various turns, and do not as those who plaster their faces with gum and make the faces seem as if they were of glass. This is a human folly which is always on the increase, and the mariners do not satisfy it who bring arabic gums from the East, so as to prevent the smoothness of the hair from being ruffled by the wind,—but they pursue their investigations still further ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... make-up was unexceptionable, his smile exquisite. Then he had dark moustaches, which he would gracefully finger into such an exact curve; and he had his small whiskers so neatly combed, and every hair on his head lay in unexceptional smoothness. The legation was not a little proud of Bolt, and on drawing-room days, when he blazed out in his gold lace and sword, would delight in watching the many dark, languishing eyes that would ogle him over the down of gorgeous ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... although Donatello, who afterwards made the ornament of the other organ, which is opposite to the first, made his with much more judgment and mastery than Luca had shown, as will be told in the proper place; for Donatello executed that work almost wholly with bold studies and with no smoothness of finish, to the end that it might show up much better from a distance, as it does, than that of Luca, which, although it is wrought with good design and diligence, is nevertheless so smooth and highly finished that the eye, by ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting, that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! Be our joys three parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... blemish more to be feared than sameness of numbers, and every art is useful by which it may be avoided. A line, rough in itself, has yet its recommendations; it saves the ear the pain of an irksome monotony, and seems even to add greater smoothness to others. Milton, whose ear and taste were exquisite, has exemplified in his Paradise Lost the effect of this ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... the anchor and haul up the sails, which filled immediately to a slight breeze that had just sprung up from the west. Leaving a still peaceful, if somewhat mutilated, Canvey Island behind us, we started off down the river, gliding along with an agreeable smoothness that fitted in very nicely with my state ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... scattered sea-shells and numerous small fragments of coarse red earthenware, more abundant at certain spots than at others. At first I was inclined to believe that this superficial bed, from its wide extent and smoothness, must have been deposited beneath the sea; but I afterwards found in one spot, that it lay on an artificial floor of round stones. It seems, therefore, most probable that at a period when the land ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... and we are in the midst of the eddying, rushing, foaming rapids. We seem to have been plunged from a lake of halcyon smoothness into a storm-lashed sea. Around us the waves rise with menacing force; now our little boat is flooded and tossed like a leaf on the turbulent waters; every moment it seems that in spite of our brave boatman we must be dashed against the rocks ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... twenty-five miles. Though apparently motionless as the mountains, it flows on forever, the speed varying in every part with the seasons, but mostly with the depth of the current, and the declivity, smoothness and directness of the different portions of the basin. The flow of the central cascading portion near the front, as determined by Professor Reid, is at the rate of from two and a half to five inches an hour, or from five to ten feet a day. A strip of the main trunk ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... blend into each other. In a fresh condition, the colours of this species, and of L. anserifera and L. Hillii are surprisingly alike, though in L. anatifera alone, the uppermost part of the peduncle is dark. As far as I have seen, the smoothness of the valves, together with the presence of a tooth beneath the umbo, on the right-hand scutum, and its entire absence on the left side, (in other species it is smaller on this, than on the right-hand side,) is an unfailing diagnostic mark. I believe this ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... come by practice. He pulls a strong oar, but there is a roughness and lack of smoothness about his work. Still, he gets over the ...
— Andy Grant's Pluck • Horatio Alger
... to himself his first sensation was delight in the softness and smoothness of the turf on which he lay. Then the strange colour of the grass commended itself to his notice, and presently he perceived that the thing under his head was a pillow, and that he was in bed. He was supported in this conclusion by the opinion of the young man who sat watching him a little way ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... sudden scramble to reach the floor of the throne-room, nor was Ko-tan far behind his warriors, though he managed to maintain a certain majestic dignity as he descended the broad stairs that countless naked feet had polished to a gleaming smoothness through the ages. "And now," said Tarzan as the king stood before him, "you can have no doubt that I am not of the same race as you. Your priests have told you that Jad-ben-Otho is tailless. Tailless, therefore, must be the race of gods that spring from his loins. But enough of such ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... That's why, one why, he was so glad to get me the burro. He hopes it will stop me some. But in a home a body must remember it isn't his home nor her home, but the home of everybody that belongs. If I should be naughty, it would throw things all out of—of smoothness, don't you know. I can't be naughty all by myself. If I could—no, I wouldn't like it either. When I'm selfish or bad, I always feel as if I had on a dirty apron, and I do just ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... counted too securely upon the ascendancy of his sentiments, when imperiously pronounced, to think it necessary to take precautions against a sinister event. For myself, I drew a favourable omen as to the final result of my project, from the smoothness of success that attended ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... if to inspect her work. Perhaps there was a slight lack of smoothness over the temple; she touched the spot with ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... became incapacitated for a month. Sir W. Robertson thereupon called me in to act as locum tenens. From many points of view this proved to be a particularly edifying and instructive experience. One could not fail to be impressed with the smoothness with which the military side of the War Office was working under the system which Sir William had introduced, and one furthermore found oneself behind the scenes in respect to the progress of the war and to numbers of matters only known ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... perceiving his young friend, scoured at full gallop the intervening space, and pounced upon him with an impetuous mirth that precipitated the child almost into the middle of the beck; but, happily, the stones preserved him from any serious wetting, while their smoothness prevented his being too much hurt to laugh at ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... relate all that he said." "You must not expect to always find people agreeable." Whether we shall place the adverb before the verb or after it must often be determined by considerations of emphasis and smoothness as well as of clearness and correctness. In the foregoing sentences it is better to place accurately after the verb, and always ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... for a few miles the boatmen came to a difficult part of the voyage. Here the river was divided by an island. The dark waters moved with great swiftness, and with the smoothness of oil, over the concealed rocks, breaking into foam at the foot of the rapids. Now for the first time the Indians had hard work. For quite half an hour they paddled as if in despair, and the canoe moved upward inch by inch. It was not only hard work, but it was work that did not allow of a moment's ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... was hardly more than a boy in years, though more than a man in physical development. In every respect he seemed to be especially adapted to the rigours of northern life. The broad arch of his chest, the plump smoothness of his muscles, above all, the full roundness of his throat indicated that warmth-giving blood, and plenty of it, would be pumped generously to every part of his body. His face from any point of view but one ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... has dominion over himself; whom neither poverty, nor death, nor chains affright; brave in the checking of his appetites, and in contemning honors; and, perfect in himself, polished and round as a globe, so that nothing from without can retard, in consequence of its smoothness; against whom misfortune ever advances ineffectually. Can you, out of these, recognize any thing applicable to yourself? A woman demands five talents of you, plagues you, and after you are turned out of doors, bedews you with cold water: she calls ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... days that had fled Deveny had said certain things to her that she had not repeated to her father; he had looked at her with a significance that no man could have understood; and there had been a gleam in his eyes at these times which had convinced her that behind the bland smoothness of him—back of the suave politeness of his manner—was a primitive animalism. His suave politeness was a velvet veil of character behind which he masked the slavering fangs of the beast he ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... "Norwegian Life" is the product of many, each inspired with feeling and admiration for the one or two subjects on which he has written better than on any others. Liberty has been taken to make a few verbal changes in order to give to the story the unity and smoothness desired, and a key-letter at the end of each chapter refers the reader to a page at the close where ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... all the changes on the vowel a—every sound of it used to give the impression—and then, in a moment, the verse runs into breadth, smoothness and vastness: for Bedivere comes to the shore ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... working a violin from the beginning, straight off the stocks, without being drawn away to some other work. Consequent upon this your work has not so much distinctive character, much effort at mere smoothness being apparent and in excess of good style. These old Italians were designing and making new violins day after day for their livelihood. Repairing, when they could make equally good, fresh instruments, was to them of secondary importance, and so we find restorations in the ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... of Liszt?— infinite nuance and the mingling of silvery bells,—these are a few of the least exuberant notices. Was it not Heine who called "Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a sibyl, and Doehler—a pianist"? The limpidity, the smoothness and ease of Chopin's playing were, after all, on the physical plane. It was the poetic melancholy, the grandeur, above all the imaginative lift, that were more in evidence than mere sensuous sweetness. Chopin had, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... them Hannah, the pious mother of Samuel. Do not think it is absolutely impossible that your children may come up iniquitous. Out of just such fair brows and bright eyes, and soft hands, and innocent hearts, crime gets its victims—extirpating purity from the heart, and rubbing out the smoothness from the brow, and quenching the lustre of the eye, and shriveling up and poisoning and putrefying and scathing and scalding and blasting and ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... filled with a brilliant crowd. Within the large circle of armchairs were Madame de Wesson, about whom people told frightful stories, and who kept, after twenty years of half-smothered scandal, the eyes of a child and cheeks of virginal smoothness; old Madame de Morlaine, who shouted her witty phrases in piercing cries; Madame Raymond, the wife of the Academician; Madame Garain, the wife of the exminister; three other ladies; and, standing easily ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... best works cannot always be imputed to negligence. However they may appear to superficial observers, painters know very well that a steady attention to the general effect takes up more time and is much more laborious to the mind than any mode of high finishing or smoothness without such attention. His handling, the manner of leaving the colours, or, in other words, the methods he used for producing the effect, had very much the appearance of the work of an artist who had never learnt from others ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... and mystery. Shells, pink and pearly, brown and lilac, scarlet and cobalt, strew the flower-decked floor with infinite variety, concave and spiral, ribbed and fluted, fretted and jagged—the satin smoothness of convoluted forms lying amid rugged shapes bristling with spines and needles. We gaze almost with awe at the lovely vision of a dainty Nautilus, sailing his fairy boat down a blue channel fringed with purple and salmon-coloured ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... years of age; but five of those years had been passed in camps and battles; and the labours, passions, and privations of his profession had antedated the period of manhood. A frame tall and athletic, a countenance which, although retaining the smoothness and freshness of youth, was yet marked with the manly gravity and decision of mature life, added, in appearance, at least six years to his age. He wore a hunting-frock of the plainest green colour, with cap ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... them into its deepening embrace. The ripples of the lake had gradually widened and faded into a silken smoothness, and high above the mountains the moon was turning from gold to white in a sky powdered with vanishing stars. Across the lake the lights of a little town went out, one after another, and the distant shore became a floating blackness. A breeze that rose and sank ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... rhododendron; then there was the prickly, polished, dark-green holly, which I had never seen before, but which is, certainly, one of the most perfect of shrubs. The turf was of that soft, dazzling green, and had that peculiar velvet-like smoothness, which seem characteristic of England. We stopped at last before the door of a cottage, whose porch was overgrown with ivy. From that moment I ceased to feel myself a stranger in England. I cannot tell you how delightful ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... very obvious, that the first and principal objection to the antiquity of these poems is the smoothness of the versification. Aseries of more than three thousand lines, however disfigured by old spelling, flowing for the most part as smoothly as any of Pope's— is a difficult matter to be got over. Accordingly the learned Mythologist, Mr. Bryant, has laboured hard to prove, either, that ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... description nor figure is definitive. Even Bulliard fails us here, and is differently interpreted by different authors. Persoon's description is none too good, but is reenforced by Fries and Rostafinski. The capillitium is variable both in the degree of smoothness presented, and the number of free ends, and the amount of branching. The spores in all specimens we have examined are remarkably constant in size and surface. In typical specimens free ends are easily ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... said to her, as she entered the room. "I have this hour at least. Nothing else matters." Then, by aid of the sunset, the warm breeze in his face, the flowers on the table, the fragrance of her perfume and the smoothness of her hand, he tried to drown himself in a sea of sensation, like one who listens, in a glamour of stained glass and a cloud of incense, to the protracted sweetness of an organ ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... the situation did not change. The steersman returned on deck, and the captain, descending, watched the movement of the engines. Even when our speed increased, these engines continued working without noise, and with remarkable smoothness There was never one of those inevitable breaks, with which in most motors the pistons sometimes miss a stroke. I concluded that the "Terror," in each of its transformations must be worked by rotary engines. But I could not ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne
... table lies an idea of its use, and he discovers that that is made up of elements which are partly memory reproductions of earlier impressions, partly sensations of movement impulses; he also finds that the table feels smooth, and he discovers by his analysis that this impression of smoothness results from a special combination of tactual sensations and movement sensations; and again those movement sensations he analyzes further into sensations of muscle contraction and sensations of pressure ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... in what one may naturally enough term the condensation of thoughts. I think no other English poet ever brought so much sense into the same number of lines with equal smoothness, ease, and poetical beauty. Let him who doubts of this peruse his Essay on Man with attention.' Shenstone's Essays on Men and Manners. [Works, 4th edit. ii. 159.] 'He [Gray] approved an observation of Shenstone, that "Pope had the art of condensing a thought."' Nicholls' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... and never to alight from the fairy steed. And then he shook the golden reins and the horse threw its head aloft and snorted and bore him away in a pace like that of flowing water for speed and smoothness. Anon they came to the margin of the blue sea, and still the white steed galloped on, brushing the crests of the waves into glittering spray. The sun glared upon the sea and Oisin's head swam with the heat and motion, and ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... is recorded in the history of this journey:—Little Mozart one day, on a visit to the empress, was led into her presence by the two princesses, one of whom was afterwards the unfortunate Queen of France, Marie Antoinette. Being unaccustomed to the smoothness of the floor, his foot slipped and he fell. One of the princesses took no notice of the accident, but the other Marie Antoinette, lifted him up and consoled him. Upon which he said to her, "you are very good, I will ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... maybe," groaned Two Arrows, as he dodged around the hopeless side he came to. Away around, and the same mocking smoothness made his heart sink, while the fierce growl of the huge wild beast behind him thrilled ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... sky-line of a table-land, showing perfectly straight parallel strata of rock extending all along its face, but slightly undulated near the summit of the range. Otherwise its grassy slopes were quite undisturbed in their virgin smoothness. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... countenance of Juniper Graves while this brief conversation was being carried on. Rage, malice, fear, hatred—all were mingled in his mean and cunning features. But he controlled himself; and at last spoke with an assumed smoothness, which, however, could not quite hide the passion that ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... Regular Artillery, and those at New Orleans by the 1st and 2d Louisiana Regulars. But after the necessary garrison had been left in the most exposed points, every available man was ordered to Virginia. Here the work of organization went on with a smoothness and regularity scarcely to have been looked for. Occasionally a hitch occurred that threatened to get the threads of preparation into an ugly knot; but it was ever unraveled ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... had never before met such an attractive woman. He could not get the sound of her voice out of his ears; the very folds of her dress seemed to hang upon her differently from all the rest—more gracefully and amply—and her movements were distinguished by a peculiar smoothness and naturalness. ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... loitered about gazing aloft at the monster windows all aglow with brilliantly colored scenes in the lives of the Saviour and his followers. Some of these pictures are mosaics, and so artistically are their thousand particles of tinted glass or stone put together that the work has all the smoothness and finish of a painting. We counted sixty panes of glass in one window, and each pane was adorned with one of these master ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... smoothness, though almost every mind was ruffled; and the music which Sir Thomas called for from his daughters helped to conceal the want of real harmony. Maria was in a good deal of agitation. It was of the utmost consequence to her that Crawford ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... and are ground down into shapes so fantastic, that they seem but the wasted skeletons of their former selves; and we find almost every natural fissure in the solid rock hollowed into an immense cavern, whose very ceiling, though the head turns as we look up to it, owes evidently its comparative smoothness to the action of the waves. One of the most remarkable of these recesses occupies what we may term the apex of a lofty promontory. The entrance, unlike that of most of the others, is narrow and rugged, though of great height; but ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... woman, pale as a dying nun, irritated him. Blue glasses concealed her eyes, and an ugly costume concealed her figure; she came out of an obscure corner behind the nun, and fell back into it noiselessly, but her voice and manner had the smoothness of velvet. He looked at her hands patting his own, and found them very soft, white, untouched by age, and a curious contrast to her gray hair. Interest touching him faintly he responded to her warmth, and looked closely into the blue glasses ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... States there are thin forests, called pine-barrens, through which one can travel for miles on horseback. The white pine is easily distinguished by its leaves being in fives, by its very long cones, composed of loosely-arranged scales, and when young by the smoothness and delicate light-green color of the bark. It is known throughout New England by the name 'white pine,' which is given it on account of the whiteness of the wood. In England it ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... in a deplorable condition. The sensation, whilst in a gig, of rattling over the uneven stone blocks was as if the whole vehicle might at any moment be shattered into a hundred fragments. The improvement has come at last, and these streets are now almost of a billiard-table smoothness. The General Post Office has been removed from the congested thoroughfare of the Escolta to a more commodious site. Electric tramcars, in supersession of horse-traction, run through the city and suburbs since April 10, 1905. Electric lighting, initiated in Spanish times, is now in general ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... walls, owing to the solid foundation given by thorough working with polishing instruments, and the smoothness of it, due to the hard and dazzling white marble, will bring out in brilliant splendour the colours which are laid on at the same time ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... clearing station there was no excitement, the doctors and orderlies "carrying on" as usual, receiving the wounded, dressing their wounds, sending them down with the smoothness and ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... sun, and at the edges of her the fine outer hairs, gleaming transparent, made her seem outlined in flame—she was a glorified, a transfigured cow, a cow for the gods. In a newly-turned field beyond a man and a boy were planting young broccoli; they worked with the swiftness and smoothness of a machine, the man making a succession of holes with his spud as he walked along, the boy dropping in the plants on the instant. From where Ishmael sat the boy and his basket were hidden behind the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... All Isabella's smoothness and policy had dropped away from her, and the real woman stood there, plotting and unscrupulous, ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Mr. McQuiggan was running over some proofs which he had brought with him, Dr. Surtaine walked into the office. There was about him a formidable smoothness, as of polished metal. He greeted his old friend with a nod and a cool "Back again, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... y'understand, let me know; that's all." As he passed out of the door he laid the cigar on a side table and its bright red band immediately caught the eye of Uncle Mosha. He pounced on it and was about to hurl it after his departing visitor when something about the smoothness of the wrapper made him pause. Five minutes later he lolled back in a horsehair-covered rocker and puffed contentedly at Morris's cigar. "After all," he said, "I might get a good price ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... that Heine declared translation was betrayal,—the rhyme and smoothness have in every case been sacrificed when necessary to preserve the exact rhythm, and as far as possible the vigour and colour, as well as thought of the original; a task entirely beyond me save for the co-operation of an accomplished Russian linguist who has kindly assisted in the ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... nondescript room, sometimes vaguely called the safe-room, between the shop and what had once been the kitchen. It was a considerable safe, and it had the room practically to itself. As Edwin unlocked it, and the prodigious door swung with silent smoothness to his pull, he was aware of a very romantic feeling of exploration. He had seen the inside of the safe before; he had even opened the safe, and taken something from it, under his father's orders. But he had never had leisure, nor licence, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... matters of prime consideration, no less important is it to pay attention to the feet. A stable with a damp and smooth floor will spoil the best hoof which nature can give. (7) To prevent the floor being damp, it should be sloped with channels; and to avoid smoothness, paved with cobble stones sunk side by side in the ground and similar in size to the horse's hoofs. (8) A stable floor of this sort is calculated to strengthen the horse's feet by the mere pressure on the part in standing. In the next place it will be the groom's business to lead out the horse ...
— On Horsemanship • Xenophon
... Greater smoothness of diction and a saving of time might have been secured by the employment of a person accustomed to compilation; but my journals having been kept for my own private purposes, no one else could have made use of them, or have entered with ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... armaments now advanced, each in full view of the other, the sea was somewhat high, and the wind, blowing freshly from the east, was in the teeth of the Christians. But in the course of the morning the waves of the gulf fell to a glassy smoothness, and the breeze shifted to the west, a change fortunate for the sailors of the League, which their spiritual teachers did not fail to declare a special interposition of God in behalf of the fleet which carried the flag of his vicar ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... "Avance done!" gallantly slushed his way into the water alongside, in his Sunday trousers, lifted the gunwale and started her afloat, amidst a shower of final "Au revoirs," and the rose chaloupe moved with noiseless smoothness down the current. ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... the bottom of a cliff for ages, and imperceptibly wears its rugged projections to smoothness; but an earthquake overthrows it in an instant. The mind of Evellin, which for a period of seven years had contended with hope and fear, sometimes almost suspecting, and at other times rejecting distrust, was by this proof of ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... youth I dreamed in hues volcanic. I saw each day open Like a curtain of flame. Black slaves attended My waking moments; Three ebony slaves Washed sleep from my white body. Three ebony slaves Around my ivory smoothness Folded heavy robes Of crimson and white. And as I issued forth Into the blue vault of the daylight A grey ape pranced before me ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... not answer. He merely chirruped at the horses. The willing beasts increased their pace and the sleigh sped along with that intoxicating smoothness only to be felt when travelling with double "bobs" ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... a pin's head; our church and everybody in it appeared about the bigness of a cup, etc. These strange sensations terminate invariably with one still more singular and particularly pleasant. I can not describe it—it is a sense of smoothness and a little of dizziness. If you never had such feelings this will be all nonsense to you, but if you have and can explain them to me, why I shall be indeed thankful. I have been subject to them ever since I can remember. I never met with a physician yet who seemed to know what is the matter ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... AEsop's Fables, published by John Murray in 1848, was already a brilliant expert. The accomplished young draughtsman soon took keen delight in the smooth face of a block, and at once began—and ever continued—to demand a degree of smoothness that was the despair of Swain to procure. Tenniel, indeed, always drew with a specially-manufactured six-H pencil—which appears more impressive with its proper style of "H H H H H H"—and so delicate was the drawing that, firm and solid ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... down to the required size. Then over this corset was placed the steel apparatus shown in the illustration on next page. This corset-cover reached from the hip to the throat, and produced a rigid figure over which the dress would fit with perfect smoothness. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... fro willingly, gladly, from the highest to the lowest. To pick up our daily life and duties, our obligations to a physical world, in all humility, sweet reasonableness, and submission. He teaches us to willingly accept incessant interruptions, and with smiling face and perfect inward smoothness to descend from a high contemplation of God (and only those who know high contemplation can judge of the immensity of what I say) to listen and attend to some most trivial want of a fellow-creature! Reader, it is the hardest thing of all. No ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... other—though dull and heavy as all which seemed to inspire them—they had a kind of force. Each man seemed to have the faculty of getting, after some rude fashion, at the sense and feeling that was in him; and without glibness, without smoothness, without form or comeliness, still the object with which each one rose to speak was accomplished,—and what was more remarkable, it seemed to be accomplished without the speaker's having any particular plan for doing it. He was surprised, too, to observe how loyally every man ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... beautiful wild flowers from the ruined tombs that border the highways of antiquity, to make a garland for a living forehead;—in a word, we have been treating of nature as a teacher of truth through joy and through gladness, and as a creatress of the faculties by a process of smoothness and delight. We have made no mention of fear, shame, sorrow, nor of ungovernable and vexing thoughts; because, although these have been and have done mighty service, they are overlooked in that stage of life when youth is passing into ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... northward of Cape York, and, when close in, were completely becalmed. The boats of each ship were ordered ahead to tow; and thus we slowly progressed along one of the most picturesque scenes it has ever been my fortune to witness in the arctic regions. The water was of glassy smoothness, the sky of brightest blue, and the atmosphere of perfect transparency; while around floated numberless icebergs of the most beautiful forms, and of dazzling hues, while all around was glancing and glittering beneath a ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... brief upon the table, and hurried to his side. A few words passed between them, inaudible to the court; but they had the unexpected effect of apparently restoring the sufferer to complete tranquillity. He again stood erect; his brow, and it was a noble one, resumed its marble smoothness; his features grew calm, and his whole aspect returned to the stern and moveless melancholy of an ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... Father Baby; but, like a skittish girl, the friar hopped across the room, shook off his wooden shoes, picked up the skirt of his habit, and began to dance. The exhilarating drink, the ruddiness of the fire, the discomfort outside, the smoothness of the oak boards,—these were conditions of happiness for Father Baby. This was perhaps the crowning instant of his experience. He was a butterfly man. He saw his lodger, Dr. Dunlap, appear at the door as haggard as the dead. The ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... "I hate smoothness. It always means treachery and danger. I feel sure that there will be a great blow up before long. I smell it in the air. Don't you ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... handed his Majesty the piece of linen as simply as if it were but becoming that he should serve as lackey a royalty so important—and with such repose of natural dignity that 'twas he who seemed majestic, and not the man he waited on. Since then all goes with comparative smoothness. If a Queen's favoured counsellor and greatest general so serves him, the little potentate feels ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... every passing weakness that assails it. To know that other eyes looked out from a narrower sphere upon my individual portion, and found it rich in advantages over many others: to feel that in spite of all my harassing little cares, my life could assume an exterior aspect of smoothness and happiness, was a short-lived, though powerful stimulant, even to my childish heart; and I could not forfeit the small pleasure I took in the consciousness, that at least my sufferings were hidden, though ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... France should Hawkesworthify him. He did not object to being carefully edited, but he did not want to be decorated. He wrote excellent French narrative prose, and his work may be read with delight. Its qualities of clarity, picturesqueness and smoothness, are quite in accord with the fine traditions of the language. But, as it was likely that part of the history of his voyage might be published before his return, he did not want it to be handed over to anybody who would trick it out in ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... his coat off, but wearing a waistcoat to which were attached flannel sleeves, was busily engaged in his agreeable task of administering to their necessities. Such was his smoothness of manner, and the singular control which a long life of hypocrisy had given him over his feelings, that it was impossible to draw any correct distinction between that which he only assumed, and that which ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... charming, though twenty years later we call it ugly, and speak no more than truth. Beneath this straw hat very beautiful and plenteous brown hair escaped in defiance of authority, and frolicked into curls and wavelets, disporting itself on a forehead of creamy tone and smoothness, and just touching the eyebrows, which were of a slightly darker brown, faintly arched on the lower outline, and more prominently arched on the upper. Below the brows brown eyes, as honest as the day, and with a frank smile always ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... wick without opening the apparatus; this is accomplished by means of the rod 31, 32, 33, 34, which passes through a leather-box, and is connected with the support of the wick; and that the motion of this rod, and consequently of the wick, may be regulated with the utmost smoothness and facility; it is moved at pleasure by a pinnion which plays in a toothed rack. The rod, with its appendages, are represented Pl. XII. Fig. 3. It appeared to me, that the combustion would be assisted by surrounding the flame of the lamp with a small glass jar open at both ends, as represented ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... shaft of the spear is a sumpit or blow-pipe. This is a small wooden tube about eight feet long. The smoothness and straightness of the bore is remarkable. The hole is drilled with an iron rod, one end of which is chisel-pointed, through a log of hard wood, which is afterwards pared down and rounded till it is ...
— Children of Borneo • Edwin Herbert Gomes
... liking, trying the drop to see that the boards had not warped, and trying the rope for possible flaws in its fabric or weave, and proving to his own satisfaction that the mechanism of the wooden lever which operated to spring the trap worked with an instantaneous smoothness. To every detail he gave a painstaking supervision, guarding against all possible contingencies. Regarding the trustworthiness of the rope he was especially careful. When this particular hanging was concluded, the scaffold would be taken apart and stored away for subsequent use, but ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... debaters follow is to memorize portions of their argument and to extemporize the rest. This is open to two great objections: first, it is difficult to join together gracefully the memorized passages and the extemporized; and the second, the very smoothness with which the memorized passages are delivered betrays the crudeness and awkwardness of the ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... the full pride of her blossom-time—being as a young woman whose girdle is new loosed to the will of her lord—and in her arms was a naked child, finely wrought to the size of life. On either side of her a beautiful youth (in whom I must needs admire the smoothness of their chins and the bravery of their vesture shining in the clear light) did reverence to the Goddess and the child: and there were beings, winged like birds, with the faces of strong boys, but no bodies at all that I could see, who flew ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... clear of the door, moving with extended hands across its creaking parquet till he touched the cold smoothness of the tiled stove, and freezing to immobility as he heard the kitchen door open. Quick footsteps advanced along the passage; to him, checking, his breath in the dark, listening with every nerve taut, it was as though he saw her, the serene poise ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... made towards a river, across which Nature, the first of bridge-builders, many a generation ago afforded an easy, dry passage by throwing down a huge tree. It spans from bank to bank, and the wood is worn to slippery smoothness by the passing of shoeless feet. Thence it leads through forest and jungle and mangrove belts to another river, and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... round smoothness for a short moment, but cleared again before the Duke dropped back with a groan into ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... shall not mind that. I want it to be rough. I'm tired to death of the smug smoothness of my life so far. Oh, if you only knew how I have hated Fern Hill, these last three years, especially since I graduated. Just the same petty little lives lived in the same petty little way, day in and ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... it is the eyes, again the mouth and chin, or the turn of the throat; there is never any ensemble of features and adornments. And as for Hillard, he really had nothing definite to recall, unless it was the striking color of her hair or the mellow smoothness of her voice. And could he really remember these? He often wished that she had sung under any ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... the girl who had washed her mother's hair, however, was slight compared with M. Joseph's dexterity. The comb flashed in his white narrow hands; in no time at all every knot was urged out into a shining smoothness. "Just the front?" he inquired. Not waiting for Mrs. Condon's reply, he detached a strand from the mass over her brow, impaled it on a hairpin, while he picked up what might have been a thick steel knitting-needle with one end fastened in the middle of a ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... that one rectifies the mistakes of the eyes; one judges thus of smoothness and solidity. Let me kiss these two fair sources of life. I prefer them to the hundred breasts of Cybele, and I am ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of consonants certain points claim special attention. And first among these is the sounding of the doubled consonants. Whoever has heard Italian spoken recognizes one of its greatest beauties to be the distinctness, yet smoothness, with which its ll and rr and cc—in short, all its doubled consonants—are pronounced. No feature of the language is more charming. And one who attempts the same in Latin and perseveres, with whatever ...
— The Roman Pronunciation of Latin • Frances E. Lord
... and benevolence; eccentric he certainly was, as most bachelors usually are. Man is but a rough pebble without the attrition received from contact with the gentler sex; it is wonderful how the ladies pumice a man down to a smoothness which occasions him to roll over and over with the rest of his species, jostling but not wounding his neighbours, as the waves of circumstances bring ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... the smoothness of his way in those days, before her advent, when that group of canny pirates sat about the Beaubien's table and laid their devious snares. It was only the summer before she came that this same jolly company had merged their sacred trust assets to draw the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... could she be melancholy, and Antonio so near? The pines might be silvery and lofty, but the proud stature of majestic man, eclipsed in her eyes all their beauties. Not so Charles. He early began to lavish his abuse on the sterile grounds they passed, and gave any thing but encomiums on the smoothness of the road they were travelling. In the latter particular, even the quiet spirit of Miss Emmerson joined him, and Julia herself was occasionally made sensible that she was not reposing ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... questions, but stared about him. Everywhere he saw evidences of the taste and one-time tenancies of the two senior engineers. Heavy bear rugs lay on the board floor; the log walls, hewn almost to polished smoothness, were hung with half a dozen pictures; in one corner was a bookcase still filled with books, in another a lounge covered with furs, and in this side of the room was a door which Howland supposed must open into the sleeping ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... to be all that he could desire. Some sheets of India-rubber made by this process drew a medal at the fair of the American Institute in 1835, and were much commended in the newspapers. Nothing could exceed the smoothness and firmness of the surface of these sheets; nor have they to this day been surpassed in these particulars. He obtained a patent for the process, manufactured a considerable quantity, sold his ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... distance we walked along sands of the most perfect smoothness, and then had to make our way over slimy rocks and treacherous masses of seaweed, before we reached the fairy-like forest under the sea, where all the branches of the marvellous ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Commons. Of this fact the recent history of electoral legislation on the Continent and in the Colonies furnishes incontrovertible proofs. Proportional representation has been embodied in the laws of several countries, and these laws work with perfect smoothness. ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... rhetoric, his antitheses, his nettete, his command of every conventional and favourite artifice. Without Chapman's conceits, Homer's poems would hardly have been what the Elizabethans took for poetry; without Pope's smoothness, and Pope's points, the Iliad and Odyssey would have seemed rude, and harsh in the age of Anne. These great translations must always live as English poems. As transcripts of Homer they are like pictures drawn from a lost point of view. Chaque siecle depuis le xvi a ue de ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... of manner which consciousness produces; and acquired at once an easy and natural manner—careless, indeed, in the extreme, from its originating in a stern defiance of opinion, which I had convinced myself must be ever against me; rough and awkward, for smoothness and grace are quite out of my way, and, of course, tutorially pedantic; but unconscious, and therefore giving expression to that goodwill towards men which I really feel; and these, I believe, are ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... found in all literature than some of those we come across in Mrs. Browning's poems. But her ruggedness was never the result of carelessness. It was deliberate, as her letters to Mr. Horne show very clearly. She refused to sandpaper her muse. She disliked facile smoothness and artificial polish. In her very rejection of art she was an artist. She intended to produce a certain effect by certain means, and she succeeded; and her indifference to complete assonance in rhyme often gives a splendid richness ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... was a fox of the first quality. He lied with the smoothness of silk. He could show a dozen colors in as many moments. Come to the windward of Joe Rix? It was a delicate business! But since there was nothing else to do, she fixed her mind upon it, working out this puzzle. Joe Rix wished to destroy Donnegan for reasons ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... Laurence Stanninghame got out a hat and an umbrella, and set to work to brush the former and furl the latter prior to going out. The hat was not of that uniform and glossy smoothness which one could see into to shave, and the umbrella was weather-beaten of aspect. The morning coat, though well cut, was shiny at the seams. Yet, in spite of the wear and tear of his outer gear, with so unmistakably thoroughbred ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... hundred mean and dishonest Artifices employ'd to discredit this Edition, and to cry down its Editor, I have all the Grounds in Nature to be aware of Attacks. But tho' the Malice of Wit join'd to the Smoothness of Versification may furnish some Ridicule; Fact, I hope, will be able to stand its ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... as that the Whigs and the Radicals should be furnished with fresh occasion to fall out, and the dissolution of the Government be the final consequence of their dissensions. Also it is expedient that time should be given for the angry waters to become smooth and calm once more, albeit the smoothness ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... parts of the plains on which they stand. Hence we may say that the Maria are only level in the sense that many districts in the English Midland counties are level, and not that their surface is absolutely flat. The same may be said as to their apparent smoothness, which, as is evident when they are viewed close to the terminator, is an expression needing qualification, for under these conditions they often appear to be covered with wrinkles, flexures, and little asperities, which, to be visible at all, must be of considerable size. In fact, were it possible ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... sleep under an elder bush. We had a big one that was in full bloom. I robbed it of all its flowers, and then I put them in the big box where the oats were kept and lay down in them. Did you ever notice the smoothness of oats? Soft to the touch as the skin of the human body! However, I pulled down the lid and closed my eyes—fell asleep and was waked up a very sick boy. But I didn't die, as you can see. What I wanted—that's more than I can tell. Of course, there was not the least hope of winning you—-but ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... text is exquisitely beautiful. Notice the smoothness of its rhythm, the simplicity of its style, the harmony of its cadences: "Man that is born of woman, is of few days, and full of trouble." This is the direct opposite of what all naturally desire. All living human beings would ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... heat was stifling. Gervaise slept for some time; when he awoke the same stillness reigned, but there was a change in the appearance of the sky; its brightness was dulled by a faint mist, while, although the sea was of a glassy smoothness, there was an imperceptible swell that caused the felucca to sway uneasily. Gervaise had sufficient experience of the Levant to know that these signs were ominous of a change, and he at once set to work to prepare for it. Although he saw that it ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... coal-dust remained under the skin, and that his chest was too hairy. But he put his hand on his side ruefully. It was his fixed belief that, because he did not get fat, he was as thin as a starved rat. Paul looked at his father's thick, brownish hands all scarred, with broken nails, rubbing the fine smoothness of his sides, and the incongruity struck him. It seemed strange they were ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... later Rupert heard a loud squeal of fear, and saw a dark spot blotting the smoothness of the lake's frozen surface. The Sheep was struggling helplessly in an ice-hole of his own making. Rupert gave one loud curse, and then dashed full tilt for the shore; outside a low stable building on the lake's edge he remembered having seen a ladder. If he could slide it across ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... I was puzzled, but presently, of course, it struck me that he must have seen Ayesha, wrapped in her grave-like garment, and been deceived by the extraordinary undulating smoothness of her walk into a belief that she was a white ghost gliding towards him. Indeed, at that very moment the question was settled, for Ayesha herself was in the apartment, or rather cave. Job turned, and saw her sheeted form, and then, with a convulsive howl of "Here it comes!" sprang into ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... ladies—by modern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"—do not bear the test of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are as different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are from those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the "Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their cadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read Sir Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... whole world had been wrapped in a blanket of the whitest, fleeciest, shiningest wool. Sidewalks, streets, crossings were all leveled to one smoothness. The fences were so muffled that they had swelled to twice their size. The houses wore trim, pointy caps on their gables. The high bushes in the yard hung to the very ground. The low ones had become mounds. The trees looked as if they had been ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... day. It appeared to him that no time was to be lost. There lay the dim and shapeless object that seemed to be the boat, distant, as he thought, about a mile. It would not have been visible at all but for the perfect smoothness of the sea, and the low position occupied by the observer. At times it did disappear altogether, when it would rise again, as if undulating in the ground-swell. This last circumstance, more than any other, persuaded ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... For I might urge, that he seems not consonant to himself about the Red, which as you have seen in one place, he represents as somewhat more Asperous than the Blew; and in another, very Smooth: But because he speaks of this Smoothness in that place, where he mentions the Roughness of Black, we may favourably presume that he might mean but a comparative Smoothness; and therefore I shall not Insist on this, but rather Countenance my Conjecture by this, that he ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... draught of the wind has blown constantly down the strait. Such are my rough notes made during the day, as the "Pioneer" and "Intrepid" worked to the westward; but as evening drew on, the increasing smoothness of the water, and a hard icy blink to the west, prepared us for a report which came from the crow's nest about midnight, that there was very much ice to ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... a great thing for Fleeming to make, even thus late, the acquaintance of his father; but the harrowing pathos of such scenes consumed him. In a life of tense intellectual effort a certain smoothness of emotional tenor were to be desired; or we burn the candle at both ends. Dr. Bell perceived the evil that was being done; he pressed Mrs. Jenkin to restrain her husband from too frequent visits; but here was one of those clear-cut, indubitable ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reached the projecting angle all the loads were over, but the tusks still had to be passed up, and owing to their weight and the smoothness of their surface, this was a very difficult task. Of course I ought to have abandoned the tusks; often and often have I since reproached myself for not doing so. Indeed, I think that my obstinacy about ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... was of the darkest shade of brown, resting in soft wave-like smoothness above her high, pale forehead. Alas! that she was so lovely! had she been less so, either I might not have loved her, or I might have been permitted by fortune to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... she told me—of that." Mrs. Mason's voice was significant in its smoothness. "Your mother said she was going to get ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joys three-parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... wouldn't be too sure of that at all!" said Father Greer, with a smoothness that implied the laying aside of the ankus; "I think, my young friend, that your good father's house is as safe and happy a place for you as you could wish for!" He turned to the Doctor. "I may say that there is a belief among certain classes that no one ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... of numbers, and smoothness of sound, and endeavoured to make the sense plain and obvious. If the verse appears so gentle and flowing as to incur the censure of feebleness, I may honestly affirm, that sometimes it cost me labour ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts
... granddaughter knelt weeping. There was a strong family resemblance between them. Seeing them side by side, you thought of two beautiful Greek medals struck from the same matrix, but one old and worn and the other bright and clear-cut with all the brilliancy and smoothness of ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... the weather was a dead calm, and the water of glassy smoothness. Not a sound was to be heard save the distant thunder of bursting icebergs and the water swashing up against the field-ice that now and then passed with the current. It sounded for all the world like waves upon a rock-bound coast, or like the distant rumbling of a train of cars. About midnight ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... would fain, were it possible, have my tale run through from its little prologue to the customary marriage in its last chapter, with all the smoothness incidental to ordinary life. I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse. I would as lief have to do with a giant in my book—a real giant, such as Goliath—as ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... continued illness of her lingere, Diane had begged to be allowed to take charge of the linen-room of the hotel, not merely as a means of earning a living, but because she delighted in such work. Methodical in her habits and nimble with her needle, the neatness, smoothness, and purity of piles of white damask stirred all those house-wifely, home-keeping instincts which are so large a part of every Frenchwoman's nature. Her fingers busy with the quiet, delicate task of mending, her mind could dwell with the greater content on such ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... shape; and evenly and steadily the ranked fours swing off, turn out into the road, and go tramping down between the poplars. There has been no flurry, no hustle, no confusion. The whole thing has moved with the smoothness and precision and effortless ease of a properly adjusted, well-oiled machine—which, after all, is just what the regiment is. The pace is apparently leisurely, or even lazy, but it eats up the miles amazingly, and it can be kept up with the shortest ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... his own remissness when he perceived that he lay within the reach of the shot of his powerful foe, though still so distant as to render her also a little uncertain, more especially should a set get up. The felucca had burnt to the water's edge; but, owing to the smoothness of the water, her wreck still floated and was slowly setting into the bay, there being a slight current in that direction, where she now lay. The town was basking in the afternoon's sun, though hid from view, and the whole island of Elba had the appearance ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... whole body, we proceed to those of particular parts. The affections of the tongue appear to be caused by contraction and dilation, but they have more of roughness or smoothness than is found in other affections. Earthy particles, entering into the small veins of the tongue which reach to the heart, when they melt into and dry up the little veins are astringent if they are rough; or if not so rough, they are only harsh, and if excessively ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... in his account of riding from Albany to Utica on the new railroads. He spoke with enthusiasm of the smoothness ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... to Homer, and Pope gave them by aid of his dazzling rhetoric, his antitheses, his nettete, his command of every conventional and favourite artifice. Without Chapman's conceits, Homer's poems would hardly have been what the Elizabethans took for poetry; without Pope's smoothness, and Pope's points, the Iliad and Odyssey would have seemed rude, and harsh in the age of Anne. These great translations must always live as English poems. As transcripts of Homer they are like pictures drawn from ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... for zeal than polish; and since there is always a correspondence between habits of thought and feeling and the external appearance, the physique of the race is more remarkable for rigor of muscle and angularity of outline, than for accuracy of proportion or smoothness of finish. Neither Apollo nor Adonis was in any way related to the family; and if either had been, the probability is that his ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... low-pressure cylinder, frowning portly from above, emitted a faint wheeze at every thrust, and except for that low hiss the engines worked their steel limbs headlong or slow with a silent, determined smoothness. And all this, the white walls, the moving steel, the floor plates under Solomon Rout's feet, the floors of iron grating above his head, the dusk and the gleams, uprose and sank continuously, with one accord, upon the harsh wash of the waves against the ship's ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... on the bare stone floor of a huge cavern. It must have been of volcanic origin. The walls glistened with the sparkling smoothness of volcanic glass. It was a huge space. The black roof was a hundred feet high, or more; the cave was some hundreds of feet wide. And it sloped away from us into dim distance as though leading into huger ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... gravely, he thought; sometimes she looked at the stream. There was not the slightest hint of embarrassment in her manner as she stood there—a straight, tall, young thing, grey-eyed, red-lipped, slim, with that fresh slender smoothness of youth; clad in grey wool, hatless, thick burnished hair rippling into a heavy knot at the nape of the whitest neck he ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... give a fluent answer to them, perhaps a misleading answer. But try it yourself, Walter. You'll find you can't. You may start all right, but not all the words will be reacted to in the same time or with the same smoothness and ease. Yet, like the expressions of a dream, they often seem senseless. But they have a meaning as soon as they are 'psychanalyzed.' All the mistakes in answering the second time, for example, have a reason, if we can only get at it. They are not arbitrary ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... exercised voluntarily, for the purpose of conveying to the mind a knowledge of the qualities or properties of the surfaces of bodies; as when we feel of a piece of cloth to ascertain its qualities, or a polished surface, to prove its smoothness." ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... questions shall be answered in their proper places; here I will but say that I scorn and detest lying, and quibbling, and double-tongued practice, and slyness, and cunning, and smoothness, and cant, and pretence, quite as much as any Protestants hate them; and I pray to be kept from the snare of them. But all this is just now by the bye; my present subject is my Accuser; what I insist upon here is this unmanly attempt of his, in his concluding pages, to cut the ground from ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... a handsome girl, smartly dressed in white, with a fashionable hat that had a tall plume. Her hair and eyes were black, the latter marked by a rather hard sparkle; her nose was prominent and her mouth firm. Her face was colorless, but her skin had the clean smoothness of silk. She had a firmly lined, round figure, and her manner was easy and confident. Sadie Keller was ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... making yourself agreeable never comes amiss, Miss Kronborg. I should say you rather need a little practice along that line. When you come to marketing your wares in the world, a little smoothness goes farther than a great deal of talent sometimes. If you happen to be cursed with a real talent, then you've got to be very smooth indeed, or you'll never get your money back." Bowers snapped the ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... flour with cold water, to a smooth paste, and boil it gently. It answers all the purposes of wheat flour paste, while it is far superior in point of transparency and smoothness. This composition, made with so small a proportion of water as to have it of the consistence of plastic clay, may be used to form models, busts, basso-relievos, and similar articles. When made of it, they are susceptible ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous
... Rupert heard a loud squeal of fear, and saw a dark spot blotting the smoothness of the lake's frozen surface. The Sheep was struggling helplessly in an ice-hole of his own making. Rupert gave one loud curse, and then dashed full tilt for the shore; outside a low stable building on the lake's edge he remembered having seen a ladder. If he could slide ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... of a glacier has been computed at 64 inches for the four summer months; in other cases one inch a day. The progress, of course, varies with the slope or smoothness of its bed, and is more rapid in the centre than at the sides, where it ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! Be our joys three parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... which had been left bare by the efflux of the tide. He wished that the steamboat would stop, and let him land upon one of them. He also looked down over the bows, and admired the graceful form and beautiful smoothness of the ripple, or rather wave, which was formed by the cutwater of the boat as it urged its way rapidly through the water. After gazing upon this for some time, Marco turned to go away in pursuit of Forester, ...
— Forests of Maine - Marco Paul's Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge • Jacob S. Abbott
... Express'd, the dog with open mouth her throat Attempted still, and how the fawn with hoofs Thrust trembling forward, struggled to escape. That glorious mantle much I noticed, soft 290 To touch, as the dried garlick's glossy film; Such was the smoothness of it, and it shone Sun-bright; full many a maiden, trust me, view'd The splendid texture with admiring eyes. But mark me now; deep treasure in thy mind This word. I know not if Ulysses wore That cloak at home, or whether of his train Some warrior gave it to him on ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... he was too; one of those whom you know at a glance to have been tried hard and long in the furnace of affliction. His face was an absolute puzzle; though sharp and sallow, it had neither the wrinkles of age nor the smoothness of youth; so that for the soul of me, I could hardly tell whether he was ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... his patient, dressed in one of his own warm bathrobes—a present from Mrs. Munn—sitting in a cushioned rocking-chair by the fire. The place was exquisitely clean and tidy, and there was a subtle touch here and there—a blooming geranium in the window, a smoothness of the feather bed—that showed the recent mark of a woman's hand. Seated in the most comfortable chair, behind the stove, was the eldest Sawyer orphan, happily devouring the remains of a boiled chicken, and talking fast and furiously. John McIntyre was ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... here!" his eyes said to her, as she entered the room. "I have this hour at least. Nothing else matters." Then, by aid of the sunset, the warm breeze in his face, the flowers on the table, the fragrance of her perfume and the smoothness of her hand, he tried to drown himself in a sea of sensation, like one who listens, in a glamour of stained glass and a cloud of incense, to the protracted sweetness of an organ ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... in sentences which are combinations of simple sentences, made merely for convenience and smoothness, to avoid the tiresome repetition of short ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... Within the large circle of armchairs were Madame de Wesson, about whom people told frightful stories, and who kept, after twenty years of half-smothered scandal, the eyes of a child and cheeks of virginal smoothness; old Madame de Morlaine, who shouted her witty phrases in piercing cries; Madame Raymond, the wife of the Academician; Madame Garain, the wife of the exminister; three other ladies; and, standing easily against the mantelpiece, M. Berthier ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... grooves on the torso of the Venus de Medici or of the Venus of Cnidus; they are sculptured in attitudes chosen to allow of the body and the limbs presenting an unbroken smoothness. They have the roundness of the polished column. They are ideals, but do not live. Here the deep grooves and the large folds ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... begged to be allowed to take charge of the linen-room of the hotel, not merely as a means of earning a living, but because she delighted in such work. Methodical in her habits and nimble with her needle, the neatness, smoothness, and purity of piles of white damask stirred all those house-wifely, home-keeping instincts which are so large a part of every Frenchwoman's nature. Her fingers busy with the quiet, delicate task of mending, her mind could dwell ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... was said to equal, if not exceed, Sarasate in the wonderful celerity of his scales, and in lightness and certainty. His tone is not very full, but is sweet and clear. His playing is also marked by exceptional smoothness, scholarly phrasing, and graceful accentuation, but, in comparison with some of the other great players, he lacks breadth and passion. He appeals rather to the educated musician than to the general public, and for that reason many people were somewhat disappointed ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... entrenchment raised against the wind, as against an assaulting army. They passed through a gangway, cut in the embankment, to one of the seats built against the outer side of it. Below them lay the clean sands, stretching away on either side in unbroken smoothness—the sands ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... furze bushes. Altogether the effect was very singular the huge rough mass of jumbled rock and soil, the ruin wrought by Nature in one of her Cromwellian moods, and, scattered irregularly about its surface, the plots or patches of cultivated smoothness—potato rows, green parallel lines ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant cabbage-globes—each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion leaves, crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs. Here the villagers came by a narrow, steep, and difficult ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... True enough, their smoothness and pliant shape betrayed my disguise—the gay little captain was sharp-witted enough to note the contrast between them and the rough garb I wore, though no one else with whom I had come in contact had been as keen of ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... adopted a profession whose very first demand upon him is that he should destroy his own identity. It is not what you are, or what by study you may become, but how few obstacles you present to the getting of yourself up as somebody else, that settles the question of your fitness for the stage. Smoothness of face, mobility of feature, compass of voice—these things, but the toys of other trades, are the tools of ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... lifetime that deserves to be called a lifetime, and sweeps away every one of our landmarks, and changes all our coast-line. But though the waters do not subside, yet the crest of them falls rippling away into smoothness after the first mad rush, else should we all be but shipwrecked mariners in the sea of love. And so, after a time, Margaret drew away from Claudius gently, finding his hands with hers as she moved, and ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... living, several years ago, near the scene in which its events took place. There is a temptation to amplify it, and to give it a more recent date and a different setting; but (other considerations aside) the story might lose in force and weight more than it would thereby gain in artistic balance and smoothness. ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... or a sudden jet of flame in the Liverpool coal fire gave a sort of silent sound, rebuking the humanity that lived there. No noise was heard from below stairs; the middle-aged and well-trained servants did their work with the regularity and almost with the smoothness of machines. It occurred to Esther anew that her life was excessively quiet; and a thought of Pitt, and how good it would have been to see him, arose again, as it had risen so many times. And then came the thoughts of the afternoon. With Christ,—was not that enough? ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... business-like way that amused me. I ran across to the kitchen, and gave Mrs. Barton a carte blanche for a sumptuous tea, and when I returned I found Lady Betty quite divested of her walking-apparel, and patting her dark fluffy hair to reduce it to some degree of smoothness. She had a pretty little head, and it was covered by a mass of short curly hair that nothing ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... crowds who flocked to the water morning and evening. There were diversions for all,—hunting and fishing parties, yachting excursions, rides, music, games, promenades. Carriage wheels whirled flickering along the beach, seaming its smoothness noiselessly, as if muffled. Love wrote its ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... idle engine. This was done successfully, and under the extra power they were soon making the remarkable speed of three hundred miles an hour! John then slowed up and disconnected first one motor and then the other, the airplane continuing to fly with unimpaired smoothness. ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... The smoothness of the water was a great advantage to them, for had there been any sea their progress would have been ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... time, their habitations bear the appearance of a grove of willow trees, rude and natural without, but artfully constructed within. This animal can remain in or under water at its pleasure, like the frog or seal, who shew, by the smoothness or roughness of their skins, the flux and reflux of the sea. These three animals, therefore, live indifferently under the water, or in the air, and have short legs, broad bodies, stubbed tails, and resemble the mole in their corporal shape. It is worthy of remark, ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... two of them when he came here! And when I got a look at them my eyes nearly burst from their sockets through desire. Men never get—I hope we are alone —their tools so stiff; and not only that, but their smoothness was as sweet as sleep and their little straps were as soft as wool. If you went looking for one you would never find another ladies' cobbler cleverer ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... to his large hand. I shall never see a more reassuring one than his. It was broad, generous, supple. It had the little depressions and the smoothness to be noticed in the hands of truest charity; yet it had the ample outlines of the vigorously imaginative temperament, so different from the hard plumpness of coarseness or brutality. At the point where the fingers joined the back of the hand were the roundings-in ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... speechless, and Henry was coughing diligently. The service was placed on the piano; Henry touched the cool smoothness of a cream-jug, and tried to crystallize his ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... comfort I account for from the calm clearness, smoothness, and transparency which pervade the whole of your work, and which leave nothing to disturb or to dissatisfy the mind, and the mind is not more excited than is necessary to fan and maintain a joyous life. Of the individual ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... ledge. The rim of the vast pit, at the point where Leith was standing, was composed of porphyry of a dark-green shade, and as we neared the edge we noticed that this had been worn to that peculiar velvety smoothness that one notices on the pillars of Indian temples, where the sweaty hands of millions of worshippers have helped in the polishing process ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... months the net revenue receipts of the Federal Government have been about 20 billion dollars, almost as much as during the closing 6 months of 1944 when the country was still engaged in all-out warfare. The high level of these receipts reflects the smoothness of the reconversion and particularly the strength of consumer demand. But the receipts so far collected, it must be remembered, do not reflect any of the tax reductions made by the Revenue Act of 1945. These reductions will not have their full effect on the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... March in this latitude were exceedingly beautiful, and solemnly impressive was the liberal splendor of the sky. The full moon looked down upon and was reflected by waters of perfect smoothness. River navigation could not have been more quiet than were these nights on the blue Caribbean Sea. The air was as mild as June in New England, while at night the Southern Cross and the North Star blazed in ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... other fault is found in your picture than the roughness of the surface; for that part being of use in giving force to the effect at a proper distance, and what a judge of painting knows an original from a copy by—in short, being the touch of the pencil which is harder to preserve than smoothness, I am much better pleased that they should spy out things of that kind, than to see an eye half an inch out of its place, or a nose out of drawing when viewed at a proper distance. I don't think it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... birthday, he gave a sheep and wine to the people, which, with the smoothness of the sea, and the serenity of the sky, so enlivened them that they perfectly recovered from ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... must ascribe the praise, unless Spenser may divide it with him, of having first discovered to how much smoothness and harmony the English language could be softened. He has speeches, perhaps sometimes scenes, which have all the delicacy of Rowe, without his effeminacy. He endeavours indeed commonly to strike by the force ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... why, he was so glad to get me the burro. He hopes it will stop me some. But in a home a body must remember it isn't his home nor her home, but the home of everybody that belongs. If I should be naughty, it would throw things all out of—of smoothness, don't you know. I can't be naughty all by myself. If I could—no, I wouldn't like it either. When I'm selfish or bad, I always feel as if I had on a dirty apron, and I do just hate ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... England are incomparable for excellence, of a beautiful smoothness, very ingeniously laid down, and so well kept that in most weathers you could take your dinner off any part of them without distaste. On them, to the note of the bugle, the mail did its sixty miles a day; innumerable chaises whisked after the bobbing postboys; or some young blood would flit by ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... talk and act like a veritable madman. He had yet to learn the profound wisdom, for poets as well as actors, of Hamlet's rule to "acquire and beget, in the whirlwind of passion, a temperance that may give it smoothness." ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... fluidity which a translator only rarely can reproduce. Finally, a further difficulty in translating Shakespeare lies in the richness of the English language in words of one syllable. What literature can rival the grace and smoothness of: ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... summit of a mound which commanded a wide prospect of plain and morass, sat an Indian woman. She might have been taken for an old woman, so worn and thin was she, and so hollow were her cheeks; but the glossy blackness of her hair, the smoothness of her brow, and the glitter of her dark eyes told that she was yet in her ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... accomplishment of "bridling"—the head up and the chin in, with the pliant knees bent in a low curtsey. Dulcie "bridled," as she prattled, to perfection. She had light brown hair, of the tint of a squirrel's fur, and the smoothness of a mouse's coat, though it was twisted and twirled into a kind of soft willowy curls when she was in high dress. Ah! no wonder that Kit Cowper, the cloth-worker, groaned to see that bright face ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... pastoral beauty.—Beyond the city, in the alluring country places, we see a landscape that delights the senses, ornate with hedges, flowers, vine-clad cottages, highways of surpassing smoothness, fertile fields, and thrifty flocks and herds. There are carts and wagons on the roads bearing the products of field and garden to the marts of trade. Men, women, and children zealously ply the hoe, the plow, or the shovel, abetting Nature in her efforts ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... exclaimed Miss Panney, and then the doctor told his tale. As the old lady listened, her spirits rose higher and higher. What extraordinary good luck! She had never planned a match that moved with such smoothness, such celerity, such astonishing directness as this. She did not look upon Dora's disregard of tradition and ordinary custom as an undesirable point in her character. She liked that sort of thing. It was one of the ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... it were all honey. That table would be poorly set that had on it nothing but treacle. We need a little vinegar, mustard, pepper and horse-radish that brings the tears even when we do not feel pathetic. If this world were all smoothness, we would never be ready for emigration to a higher and better. Blustering March and weeping April prepare us for shining May. This world is a poor hitching post. Instead of tying fast on the cold mountains, ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, "hyacinthine!" I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose—and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... comfortably for almost any distance, provided you resist the first feelings of fatigue, and do not give way to it, as I have done to-day. The mountains are now huge towering masses, rising thousands of feet above the valley; they have lost all smoothness of outline, and their upper portions are bare and rough, cragged, and pine clad. Instead of having merely whitened peaks, snow fields extend down the sides. The scene is one of wild majestic grandeur. What tremendous agonies in past ages must have been employed to produce ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... of internationalism is possibly fraught with greater wonders than has been the past. The path will certainly not be laid out with the smoothness which some enthusiasts imagine. The idea and the hope are old as the hills. Cicero proclaimed a universal society of the human race. Seneca declared the world to be his country. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius declared themselves citizens of the world. St. Paul explained that there is neither ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... stiffly withstood the party that was not his, and upon some slur and insolence took from a man his office. Followed a week of glassy smoothness. Then suddenly, by chance, was discovered the plot of Bernal Diaz de Pisa—the first of many Spanish conspiracies. It involved several hundred men and was no less a thing than the seizure in the dark night of the ships and the setting sail for Spain, there to wreck the fame ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... silvery bells,—these are a few of the least exuberant notices. Was it not Heine who called "Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a sibyl, and Doehler—a pianist"? The limpidity, the smoothness and ease of Chopin's playing were, after all, on the physical plane. It was the poetic melancholy, the grandeur, above all the imaginative lift, that were more in evidence than mere sensuous sweetness. Chopin ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... if it were but becoming that he should serve as lackey a royalty so important—and with such repose of natural dignity that 'twas he who seemed majestic, and not the man he waited on. Since then all goes with comparative smoothness. If a Queen's favoured counsellor and greatest general so serves him, the little potentate feels his importance ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... wonders in this under-world of glamour and mystery. Shells, pink and pearly, brown and lilac, scarlet and cobalt, strew the flower-decked floor with infinite variety, concave and spiral, ribbed and fluted, fretted and jagged—the satin smoothness of convoluted forms lying amid rugged shapes bristling with spines and needles. We gaze almost with awe at the lovely vision of a dainty Nautilus, sailing his fairy boat down a blue channel fringed with purple and salmon-coloured anemones, beneath a hedge of rosy coral. The shimmering sail and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... not mind that. I want it to be rough. I'm tired to death of the smug smoothness of my life so far. Oh, if you only knew how I have hated Fern Hill, these last three years, especially since I graduated. Just the same petty little lives lived in the same petty little way, day in and day out. Every Sunday the class in Sunday school, and the bells ringing and the ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... the chef-d'oeuvre of the series is a statuette of one Ptahmes, first Prophet of Amen, now in the Gizeh Museum. The hieroglyphic inscriptions as well as the details of the mummy bandages are chased in relief upon a white ground of admirable smoothness afterwards filled in with enamel. The face and hands are of turquoise blue; the head- dress is yellow, with violet stripes; the hieroglyphic characters of the inscription, and the vulture with outspread wings upon the breast of the figure, are also violet. The whole is ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... sadder, graver face than the one I associated with her girlhood. Yet I could scarce forbear an impression that it was now a sweeter one, more womanly, faint lines beginning to mark its satin smoothness with impress of sorrow. To my thought a new, higher womanhood had found birth within, during weary days and nights of suspense and suffering. It was yet torture to me constantly beholding these two together, but, as I observed her then, I thanked the good God who had ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... that thing, held cheap as dust, Yet honor'd by the Emperor's hand? 'Tis made to pierce, with sword's keen thrust, But sheds no blood, tho' wounds like sand, In number deep inflicts; robs none; Enriches thousands; rules the earth; Makes life with ease and smoothness run; Has founded kingdoms; ended dearth; Most ancient cities it has built, But ne'er caused war, nor war's sad guilt. Answer my question (unveils). Look me in the face, Avow you're vanquished ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... importance in this climate; giving them lightness and transparency, without any diminution of depth. It is also agreeable to the eye, to pass from the sharp carving of the marble decorations to the ease and smoothness of the stucco; while the utter want of interest in those parts which are executed in it prevents the humility of the material from being offensive: for this passage of the eye from the marble to the composition is managed with the dexterity of the artist, ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... the nicht, Marget?" he said, still in a tone of conciliatory smoothness, through which, however, he could not prevent a certain hardness from cropping out plentifully. "Ye're busy as usual, I see. Weel, the hand o' the ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... is viewed as a whole that the teaching of Stradivari is evidenced. A similar assertion may, in a lesser degree, be made in the case of Carlo Bergonzi. To dissect the several points of difference is a simple matter. If we begin with the outline, that of Montagnana has not the smoothness and grace of the Stradivarian type; the upper and lower curves are flattened, while those of the centre are extended. The sound-hole partakes more of the character of Guarneri; the scroll is larger, and the turns bolder than in the Stradivari form. These, then, may be considered ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... Sometimes it is the eyes, again the mouth and chin, or the turn of the throat; there is never any ensemble of features and adornments. And as for Hillard, he really had nothing definite to recall, unless it was the striking color of her hair or the mellow smoothness of her voice. And could he really remember these? He often wished that she had sung under any ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... have him," declared Madero, in a voice that fairly made Jack's blood run cold. Its smoothness and velvety calmness ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... supplied me with provisions, and bade me farewell, and I set out with my new companions. I soon learnt that the object of our expedition was to fill our sacks with cocoa-nuts, but when at length I saw the trees and noted their immense height and the slippery smoothness of their slender trunks, I did not at all understand how we were to do it. The crowns of the cocoa-palms were all alive with monkeys, big and little, which skipped from one to the other with surprising agility, seeming ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... ending with the tallest, and setting them side by side like a long row of park palings between the same limits, their upper outline will be identical. Moreover, it will run smoothly and not in irregular steps. The theoretical interpretation of the smoothness of outline is that the individual differences in the objects are caused by different combinations of a large number of minute influences; and as the difference between any two adjacent objects in a long row must depend on the absence ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... day dawned fair, and by eight o'clock we set off with a guide for the ascent of the Hoheneck, rather, I should say, for a long ramble over gently undulating green and flowery ways. After climbing a little beechwood, all was smoothness under our feet, and the long detour we had to make in order to reach the summit was a series of the gentlest ascents, a wandering over fair meadow-land several thousand feet above the sea-level. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... perfection. The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairy-land. The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry, with silken streamers flying, and the course of our lives to ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... to such profound resentment and disgust. His vindictive ubiquity had ceased. When the spring came he could no longer drag himself up and down stairs. His feet and legs were swollen; they were like enormous weights attached to his pitifully weedy body. His skin had the sallow smoothness, the waxen substance that marked the deadly, unmistakable progress of his disease. He could not always lie down in his bed. Sometimes he lived, day and night, motionless in his invalid's chair, with his legs propped before him on a footrest. He would sit for hours staring ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... tediousness of highly civilized life comes from its smoothness and regularity. To-day is like yesterday, and we think that we can predict to-morrow. Of course we cannot really do so. The chances are still there. But we have covered them up so deeply with the artificialities of life that we lose sight of them. It seems as if everything in our neat little world ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... that though we had nine guns less, yet, at a broadside, they threw half as much metal again as those of our antagonist. With such odds in our favor it would have been a disgrace to have been beaten. The water was too smooth for our two brigs to show at their best; but this very smoothness rendered our gun-boats more formidable than any of the British vessels, and the British testimony is unanimous, that it was to them the defeat was primarily due. The American fleet came into action in worse form than the hostile squadron, the ships straggling badly, either owing to Perry ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the most brilliant, and he expected them to go as well as the opening night. He made small allowance for the strangeness of lights, scenery, and costuming, and that allowance was only for time, not in smoothness. As he willed, his cast generally performed. The cast of "The Purple Slipper" was of experienced actors, and he felt certain that they would meet his expectations. At six-thirty o'clock he seated himself in the middle seat of the sixth row center, ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... and comparing the readings of his many manuscripts, the thought occurred to Michelangelo that, between leaving the poems unpublished and printing them in all their rugged boldness, lay the middle course of reducing them to smoothness of diction, lucidity of meaning, and propriety of sentiment.[7] In other words, he began, as Signer Guasti pithily describes his method, 'to change halves of lines, whole verses, ideas: if he found a fragment, he completed it: if brevity involved the thought ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... perfect models in shape, of a complexion as delicate as that of the women, and, to appearance, of a disposition as amiable. Others, who were more advanced in years, were corpulent; and all had a remarkable smoothness of the skin. Their general dress was a piece of cloth, or mat, wrapped about the waist, and covering the parts which modesty conceals. But some had pieces of mats, most curiously varied with black and white, made into a sort of jacket without sleeves; and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... woman. He could not get the sound of her voice out of his ears; the very folds of her dress seemed to hang upon her differently from all the rest—more gracefully and amply—and her movements were distinguished by a peculiar smoothness and naturalness. ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... in a cul-de-sac. The first locomotives, apart from the heavy tradition of their ancestry, were, like all experimental machinery, needlessly clumsy and heavy, and their inventors, being men of insufficient faith, instead of working for lightness and smoothness of motion, took the easier course of placing them upon the tramways that were already in existence—chiefly for the transit of heavy goods over soft roads. And from that followed a very ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... ungrateful dear, for you are thinking of me I know, with my dear old "Sport" ready to point for you tomorrow, just to receive your pats of recognition and thanks. My feelings are worn into meaningless smoothness like the head on an old coin, and because I have added my quota of absurdity to the morning papers I am no longer interesting. But, pshaw! one can't buy cocaine for a nickel, and as I could live extravagantly ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... in modifying the severe classicism of Ingres into what has been called semi-classicism. It consists in the elevated, heroic, or historical theme, academic form well drawn, some show of bright colors, smoothness of brush-work, and precision and nicety of detail. In treatment it attempts the realistic, but in spirit it is ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... cabin, at one time, there had been a bunk. The flat shelf still projected out from the wall. Donald entered with an armful of spruce boughs, and threw them on the bunk. While he was arranging them to a semblance of smoothness for the blankets, his hand struck something hard and cold. He picked the object up and held it to the light of the fire. Then, with a cry, he leaned forward, and ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... Females were made out of the Sea. These are Women of variable uneven Tempers, sometimes all Storm and Tempest, sometimes all Calm and Sunshine. The Stranger who sees one of these in her Smiles and Smoothness would cry her up for a Miracle of good Humour; but on a sudden her Looks and her Words are changed, she is nothing but Fury ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... female appears. The common people here, as in all countries where they live poorly and dirtily, are hard-featured, and of very brown, or rather tawny complexions. As they seldom eat meat, their juices are destitute of that animal oil which gives a plumpness and smoothness to the skin, and defends those fine capillaries from the injuries of the weather, which would otherwise coalesce, or be shrunk up, so as to impede the circulation on the external surface of the body. As for the dirt, it undoubtedly blocks up the pores of the skin, and disorders ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... At three, more breakers appeared, extending from the low isles towards the S.E. We now hauled out close to the wind, and, in an hour and a half, were almost on board the breakers, and obliged to tack. From the mast-head they were seen to extend as far as E.S.E., and the smoothness of the sea made it probable that they extended to the north of east, and that we were in a manner surrounded by them. At this time the hill on the Isle of Pines bore N. 71 1/2 E., the foreland N. 1/4 W., and the most advanced point of land on the S.W. coast bore N.W., distant fifteen or sixteen ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... of his apology; where one man will run a mile to restore a lost franc, but if you ask him to change a gold piece he will steal five; where your eyes are ravished with the beauty, and the greenness, and the smoothness and apparent ease of living of all its inhabitants; where your mind is filled with the pictures, the music, the art, the general atmosphere of culture and wit; where the cooking is so good but so elusive, and where the shops ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... as wild as this are being received in silence every day. All strokes slip on the smoothness of a polished wall. All blows fall soundless on the softness of a padded cell. For madness is a passive as well as an active state: it is a paralysis, a refusal of the nerves to respond to the normal stimuli, as well as an unnatural stimulation. There are commonwealths, plainly to be distinguished ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... continued to gain. Halfway from home light was visible between the two horses. The pace became terrific, the excitement so intense that not a sound was heard but that of racing hoofs. The horses swept onward like projectiles, the same smoothness, the same suggestion of eternal flight. The bodies were extended until the tense muscles rose under the satin coats. Vitriolo's eyes flashed viciously; El Rayo's strained with determination. Vitriolo's nostrils were as red as angry craters; El Rayo's fluttered ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... channel, and the boys were astonished at the ease and smoothness with which the ship breasted the waves, and at the mass of snowy canvas that towered above her. As they sat one day at the bow watching the sheets of spray rise as the ship cut her way through the water, Tom said to his friend: "You are going up above me quick, Will. Anyone can ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... but intend serving it up in a large bowl or in glasses, it must still be frozen twice over; otherwise it can have no smoothness, delicacy, or consistence, but will be rough and coarse, and feel in the mouth like broken icicles. The second freezing (if you have no mould) must be done in the freezer, which should be washed out, and set again in the tub with fresh ice and salt. Cover it closely, and let the cream ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... recipe. He had gone into the woods and selected a blue beech, straight as could be found, and nearly an inch in thickness. From this he had cut a length of perhaps ten feet, which, with infinite labor and risk of jack-knife, he had whittled down to smoothness and to whiteness. Upon one end he left as large a head as the sapling would allow, and this, after shaving it into the fashion of a spear-blade, he had plunged into the fire until it had begun to char. He had scraped away the ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... such a soft, smooth, diabolical smile that I knew there was some trick behind his smoothness. He said, "And ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... assigned their position at the eastern end of the hall, with all their fine instruments in full tune, 'at the same identical moment' strike up one of our most admired 'national airs;' and forthwith a current of life flows in at the wide-spread outer door of the palace, and glides with the smoothness of music through the spacious hall by the Ionic screen into the royal presence. Here (to drop for a moment my liquid figure) each and every individual is presented and received with a gentle shake of the hand, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... play to the judicious, not to the crowd, whose opinion is worthless. He is to observe, like the author of Aeneas' speech, the 'modesty' of nature. He must not tear a 'passion' to tatters, to split the ears of the incompetent, but in the very tempest of passion is to keep a temperance and smoothness. The million, we gather from the first passage, cares nothing for construction; and so, we learn in the second passage, the barren spectators want to laugh at the clown instead of attending to some necessary question ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... planet. They climbed up into the centipede-machine's control room, their guide following, and then as the door snapped shut, the operator of the thing pulled and turned the knob in his grasp and the long machine scuttled forward with amazing smoothness ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... the principals that the author's strength lies. Exciting incidents develop their inherent strength and weaknesses, and if virtue wins in the end, it is quite in keeping with its carefully-planned antecedents. The N. Y. Sun says: "We commend it for its workmanship—for its smoothness, its sensible fancies, ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... evidence of the fact, if only she could have interpreted it; but she had failed to do so, his quiet undemonstrative manner having sufficed to deceive her superficial observation of him as effectually as the treacherous smoothness of her own placid face when in repose, upon the unruffled surface of which there was neither mark nor sign to indicate the current of changeful moods, ambitious projects, and poetical fancies, which coursed impetuously within, might excusably have imposed ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... deep lines are set in my forehead, the veins stand out upon my hands, and my shadow is the shadow of a stooping old man; and when, from frequent weariness, I rest my head on my hand, the fingers clasp only smoothness, or, at best, but a few scattered locks,—wisps, I might as well say. If ever I took pride in anything, it was in my fine head of hair. Well, what matters it? Since heart of youth is left me, I'll ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... suggested, going closer to the window for better light. "Oh, look, Mary," she exclaimed again, "this tells of an exploring expedition leaving New York. Maybe that is a report of your folks and the professor! See, it reads," and she pressed the very much crinkled pieces to something of smoothness. ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... Harriet had deserted him, and how the reconciliation was working along and Harriet getting her poem by heart; and still he was not happy, and Mary pitied him, for she had had trouble herself. But I am not satisfied with this. It reads too much like statistics. It lacks smoothness and grace, and is too earthy and business-like. It has the sordid look of a trades-union procession out on strike. That is not the right form for it. The book does it better; we will fall back on the book and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and took her hands from his shoulders and held them in front of him, absently contemplating their rounded smoothness. She bent closer, trying to read his eyes, and found them inscrutable. Then ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... looking straight to the front, gave no heed to the occupants of the Death Car. He was, by this time speeding too rapidly for either of his passengers to have leaped out without injury. Shirley understood the smoothness of the voice's system, by now. His hand slid to the top of the glass door pane, on the right. Down the glass, across the bottom, down from the other corner, and then over the top line, he cut with the diamond, using a peculiar pressure. He rose to his feet, ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... wide, into their clear, almost cold brilliancy, there came something-ill-natured ... something menacing. Her eyes gained a peculiar beauty from her eyebrows, which were thick, and met in the centre, and had the smoothness of sable fur). 'Don't you want me to buy your estate? You want money for your ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... overnight, the necessary orders, he awoke early, washed himself, rubbed himself from head to foot with a wet sponge (a performance executed only on Sundays—and the day in question happened to be a Sunday), shaved his face with such care that his cheeks issued of absolutely satin-like smoothness and polish, donned first his bilberry-coloured, spotted frockcoat, and then his bearskin overcoat, descended the staircase (attended, throughout, by the waiter) and entered his britchka. With a loud rattle the vehicle left the inn-yard, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... kindly man when not annoyed; there was Pedro, Yacob's nephew; and there was Medina-sarote, who was the youngest daughter of Yacob. She was little esteemed in the world of the blind, because she had a clear-cut face and lacked that satisfying, glossy smoothness that is the blind man's ideal of feminine beauty, but Nunez thought her beautiful at first, and presently the most beautiful thing in the whole creation. Her closed eyelids were not sunken and red after the common way of the valley, but lay as though they might open again at ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... brown backs, but to-day he had turned them all to face outward. Twilight, sunset, moonlight (the Court-house in moonlight), dawn, morning, noon (Main Street at noon), high summer, first spring, red autumn, midwinter, all were there—illimitably detailed, worked to a smoothness like a glaze, and all lovingly ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... believes that a series of observations on caissons sunk plumb under homogeneous conditions of ground and superficial smoothness will show a proportional increase of skin friction per square foot average for each increase in the size of caissons, as well as for increase of depth in the sinking up to certain points, where it may finally become constant, as will be ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... faces the negative aspects of the question, who meets sudden objections, has an answer for any momentary summons of doubt or difficulty, dissipates seeming inconsistencies, and reconciles the geometrical smoothness of a priori abstractions with the coarse angularities of practical experience. The great work of Ricardo is of necessity, and almost in every page, polemic; whilst very often the particular objections or difficulties to which it replies are not indicated at all—being spread through ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... nothing but grossness and barbarism, or insipidity and verbiage, in a writer that is the god of a nation's idolatry, it is we and not they who want true taste and feeling. The controversy about Pope and the opposite school in our own poetry comes to much the same thing. Pope's correctness, smoothness, etc., are very good things and much to be commended in him. But it is not to be expected or even desired that others should have these qualities in the same paramount degree, to the exclusion of everything else. If you like correctness ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... happy temper, retard their formation. Whatever tends to promote the general health and to increase the bulk of the body, and particularly the disposition of fat in the cellular tissues, also tends to remove them and to increase the smoothness and beauty of the skin. The free and frequent use of warm water and soap, followed by the daily use of mild, stimulating, cosmetic lotions or fomentations, or friction with warm oil of a like character, and cod-liver oil internally, is all that art ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... gales, while others are strong enough to endure many gales, and thus they break off a few at a time. The distance to which the fruit can be carried depends on the form of the bract, the velocity of the wind, and the smoothness of the surface on which the fruit falls. When torn from the tree the twist in the bract enables the wind to keep the cluster rapidly whirling around, and by whirling it is enabled to remain longer ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... was now moving rapidly, and there was a smoothness and lightness to its progress that was absent from a gasolene auto. There was no vibration from the motor. Faster and faster it ran, until it was moving at a speed scarcely less than that of Mr. Damon's car, when it was doing its best. Of course that was not saying much, ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... Hannah, the pious mother of Samuel. Do not think it is absolutely impossible that your children may come up iniquitous. Out of just such fair brows and bright eyes, and soft hands, and innocent hearts, crime gets its victims—extirpating purity from the heart, and rubbing out the smoothness from the brow, and quenching the lustre of the eye, and shriveling up and poisoning and putrefying and scathing and scalding and blasting and burning with ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... and pushed out into the lake. The sun had just set, and his expiring rays cast a glare upon the overhanging clouds in the west, whilst the shades of night gathered thickly over the eastern horizon. Not a breath of wind disturbed the glassy smoothness of the water, in which every golden-tinted cloud was mirrored with a fidelity that rendered it difficult to say which was image and which reality. The little bark darted through the water with the greatest ease, and as I passed among the deepening ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... hill at no great distance from its summit. It was a good-sized house, with stone walls and a corrugated iron roof. A few sheds and outhouses surrounded it, four or five blue gums afforded a little shade from the sun and a little relief to the grassy smoothness of the landscape. Two women met us at the door, one the wife, the other, I think, the sister of our host. Neither was young, but their smiling faces showed the invigorating effects of this delicious air. ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... the ancient race of the inhabitants of those districts." That system to which Mr Campbell refers, he afterwards explains to be the monopoly of sheep-stores, a subject scarcely poetical, but which he has contrived to clothe with considerable smoothness of versification. The last work which issued from Mr Campbell's pen was "Albyn's Anthology, a Select Collection of the Melodies and Vocal Poetry Peculiar to Scotland and the Isles, hitherto Unpublished." ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... giant trees, things he was leaving behind, he felt a sudden twinge of something akin to homesickness. He knew that he should miss these great humps of mountains and the ragged grandeur of the scenery. With the rich smoothness of the Bluegrass, a sense of flatness and heaviness came to his lungs. Level metal roads and loamy fields invited his eye. The tobacco stalks rose in profuse heaviness of sticky green; the hemp waved its feathery tops; and woodlands ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... something horrible, something that touched his nerves, in its irresponsiveness. He remembered that he might probably find matches in the lamp-locker, and staggered there to search. He had to grope in gross darkness about the place, touching brass and the uncanny smoothness of glass, before his hand fell on what he sought. At last he was on one knee by the mate's side, and a match shed its little illumination. The mate's face was odd in its quietude, and the sou'- wester ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... times, and one a summary of Drayton's literary opinions. He employs the couplet in his Elegies with a masterly hand, often with a deliberately rugged effect, as in his broader Marstonic satire addressed to William Browne; while the line of greater smoothness but equal strength is to be seen in the letters to Sandys and Jeffreys. He is fantastic and conceited in most of the threnodies; but, as is natural, that on his old friend, Sir Henry Rainsford, is least artificial and fullest of true feeling. The epistle to Henery Reynolds. ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... proved only what sailors call a catspaw, rising no higher than just to cause a ripple on the water, and lasting only about an hour. When it was over, the sea again fell into a dead calm; its surface assuming the smoothness of a mirror. ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... opportunity of working a violin from the beginning, straight off the stocks, without being drawn away to some other work. Consequent upon this your work has not so much distinctive character, much effort at mere smoothness being apparent and in excess of good style. These old Italians were designing and making new violins day after day for their livelihood. Repairing, when they could make equally good, fresh instruments, was to them of secondary importance, and so we find restorations ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... came to me. She held her head if anything higher than usual, and the expression of her face was out of keeping with the trouble in the air. But as she came nearer I saw that this gay face was white, its tissue had a sort of sick smoothness, and there were dark smears ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... with the deep, rich green colour of its broad leaves, which were twelve or eighteen inches long, deeply indented, and of a glossy smoothness, like the laurel. The fruit, with which it was loaded, was nearly round, and appeared to be about six inches in diameter, with a rough rind, marked with lozenge-shaped divisions. It was of various colours, from light pea-green to brown and ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... a road may that be?" says some eastern traveller, who has been accustomed to connect no ideas with a railroad, but those of smoothness or speed. ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was on our island under an assumed name," said Darrow in tones that had the smoothness and the rasp of silk. "Rather annoying. Not good form, quite, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... writing a poem entitled, "Tobacco battered, and the pipes shattered, (about their ears who idly idolize so base and barbarous a weed, or at least-wise overlove so loathsome a vanity,) by a volley of holy shot thundered from Mount Helicon." If the smoothness of the verses equalled the euphony of the title, this must ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... well-known mistakes to which one is subjected in blind touching. At the same time practice leads to considerable accuracy in touch and on many occasions the sense is trusted more than sight—e. g., whenever we test the delicacy of an object with our finger-tips. The fineness of paper, leather, the smoothness of a surface, the presence of points, are always tested with the fingers. So that if a witness assures us that this or that was very smooth, or that this surface was very raw, we must regularly ask him whether he had tested the quality by touching it with his fingers, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... for rats and searches for more palatable food. The rats, after I had killed four or five, had become cautious. They are at all times cunning fellows, and must have discovered my mode of trapping them. The ship all this time was gliding on with tolerable smoothness, and on some occasions, by putting my ear down to the planks, I could hear the rippling of the water. At other times, I guessed by the dashing of the sea against the sides, that there was a strong breeze. I knew also, ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... law was easily circumvented by a statement that the cattle were immune from having wintered in the north, which satisfied the statutes—as there was no doubt but they had wintered somewhere. Steer cattle of acceptable age and smoothness of build were in demand by feeders; all classes in fact felt a stimulus. My beeves were sold for delivery north of Cheyenne, Wyoming, the buyers, who were ranchmen as well as army contractors, taking the herd complete, including ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... Lambert's "Family of Cats" is considered one of the finest cat pictures in the world. In this painting the mother sits upon a table watching the antics of her four frivolous kittens. There is a wonderful smoothness of touch and refinement of treatment that have never yet been excelled. "After the Banquet" is another excellent example of the same smoothness of execution, with fulness of action instead of repose. And yet there is an undeniable lack of the softer attributes which should be evident in ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... at ease of numbers, and smoothness of sound, and endeavoured to make the sense plain and obvious. If the verse appears so gentle and flowing as to incur the censure of feebleness, I may honestly affirm, that sometimes it cost me labour ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts
... to reflection from the crests of the sea-waves. But this hypothesis is negatived by the fact, that the echoes were produced in great intensity and duration when no waves existed—when the sea, in fact, was of glassy smoothness. It has been also shown that the direction of the echoes depended not on that of waves, real or assumed, but on the direction of the axis of the trumpet. Causing that axis to traverse an arc of 210 ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... hold, and with an "Avance done!" gallantly slushed his way into the water alongside, in his Sunday trousers, lifted the gunwale and started her afloat, amidst a shower of final "Au revoirs," and the rose chaloupe moved with noiseless smoothness down the current. ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... hands to my brow, which ached, and discovered they were tied together. This startled me very much. I brought them up to my mouth and felt the cold smoothness of metal. They were chained together. I tried to separate my legs and made out they were similarly fastened, and also that I was fastened to the ground by a much thicker chain about the middle of ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
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