"Flatness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... passages in which the flatness and tediousness of the narrative is relieved by no sort of beauty, nor elegance of diction, and which form an extraordinary contrast with the more animated and finished portions of the poem. We shall not afflict our readers ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
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... of the clerestory, the proportions, of the western bays at least, are almost the same as those of the nave, and the whole is covered again with a wooden vault, plastered and ribbed to look like stone; and yet that air of leanness, flatness, and emptiness, the chief fault of the ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
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... picture he has only succeeded in producing a surface enamel, or a mere reticulation of surface-patterns. This very defect has by some writers been held up to admiration as the true perfection of all illumination. Its flatness was applauded because it had to be shut up in a book, and was therefore the only appropriate way of making a picture for such a purpose. But whoever would dream that because a picture, painted in due perspective and proper light and shade, was ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
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... of the day before them. There was a latent unwillingness in Mrs. Egremont's mind to discuss the subject with either aunt or daughter; and when the post brought no letter, Ursula, after a moment's sense of flatness, was relieved, and returned to her eager desire to hurry after the water-soldier. It was feasible that very afternoon. Mary Nugent ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
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... might be a little after the hour of midday, we had come so close to it that we could distinguish with ease what manner of land lay beyond the shore, and thus we found it to be of an abominable flatness, desolate beyond all that I could have imagined. Here and there it appeared to be covered with clumps of queer vegetation; though whether they were small trees or great bushes, I had no means of telling; but this I know, ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
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... the glass, picked up his cap bearing the insignia of his rank, and went out through the kitchen to the land side of the house. The sky and sea—feathery clouds and still, oily flatness—did not interest him this September morning. It was the rolling dune that caught his eye, and the straggly path that threaded its way along the marshes and around and beyond the clump of scrub pines and bushes until it ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
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... depth give flatness. Life and love without feeling produce shallow, superficial natures. Feeling is the need of men to stretch out ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
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... will read something for your amusement": and he then read a few of the arguments which had been transmitted by the lecturer. The fact is worth noting that from 1849 to 1857, arguments on the roundness or flatness of the earth did itinerate. I have {89} no doubt they did much good: for very few persons have any distinct idea of the evidence for the rotundity of the earth. The Blackburn Standard and Preston Guardian (Dec. 12 and 16, 1849) unite in stating that the lecturer ran away from his second lecture ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
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... want of having something to be alarmed or to hope about,—I, who meddle not with politics, and wish all the world to be as quiet and as calm as myself. Every one I see appears to experience this same flatness, just like the reaction produced on the spirits the first day or two after the Italian Carnival, when the cessation of gaiety, though felt to be a relief to the frame, leaves ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
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... the fond hope that Mrs. Saltram had tendered me, as it were, her resignation and desired to embody the act in an unsparing form. To bring this about I would have feigned any humiliation; but after my eyes had caught the superscription I heard myself say with a flatness that betrayed a sense of something very different from relief: "Oh the Pudneys!" I knew their envelopes though they didn't know mine. They always used the kind sold at post-offices with the stamp affixed, and as this letter hadn't been posted they had ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
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... with regard to ourselves and love, always love, in our intercourse with others are therefore the foundation rules of Feuerbach's morality, from which all others lead, and neither the enthusiastic periods of Feuerbach nor the loud praises of Starcke can set off the thinness and flatness ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
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... than thou thinkest. Meanwhile be assured that there are two Neros,—one such as people know, the other an artist, whom thou alone knowest, and if he slays as does death, or is in frenzy like Bacchus, it is only because the flatness and misery of common life stifle him; and I should like to destroy them, though I had to use fire or iron. Oh, how flat this world will be when I am gone from it! No man has suspected yet, not thou even, what an artist I am. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
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... Mombasa and Bombay—and innumerable lesser craft. Basra itself lies up a creek, and is invisible from the river. What you see on the shore is properly called Ashar, but the two places merge into one another. Owing to the absolute flatness of the country, a sense of smallness is produced everywhere. There is no background to give perspective, and the great breadth of the sable ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
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... my lord, to the flatness of the mermaid's foot. But no; that can not be; for mermaids are all vertebrae ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
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... it came about that Abel was for ever sifting bits of flour through his finger and thumb, to obtain the required flatness and delicacy which marks the latter in a miller born; and playing lovingly with little Jan on the floor of the round-house, he would pass some through the baby's fingers ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
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... as—waking in the morning, and finding the schooner brought up under the lee of a wooden house, or—riding out a foul wind with your hawser rove through an iron ring in the sheer side of a mountain,—which took from the comparative flatness of ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
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... impropriety, and that from dread of relapse into rudeness this has ever since been the general object of their critical labours. When La Harpe says of the tragedies of Corneille, that "their tone rises above flatness, only to fall into the opposite extreme of affectation," judging from the proofs which he adduces, we see no reason to differ from him. The publication recently of Legouv's Death of Henry the Fourth, has led to the reprinting of a contemporary ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
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... wished to attempt this last effort asked by her companion. She found her way by the light from the flashes. They were then crossing a boundless desert, in the midst of which was lost the little river. Not a tree nor a hillock broke the flatness. Not a breath disturbed the atmosphere, whose calmness would allow the slightest sound ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
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... difference to which I refer is an indescribable something, which can only be compared to peculiarities of accent. They both speak the same language; perhaps in classical purity of phraseology the fashionable Scotchman is even superior to the Englishman; but there is a flatness of tone in his accent—a lack of what the musicians call expression, which gives a local and provincial effect to his conversation, however, in other respects, learned and intelligent. It is so with his manners; he conducts himself with equal ease, self-possession, ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
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... from Caxton Sam set about finding some new interest to occupy Sue's mind. He had spent an afternoon talking to Valmore, Freedom Smith, and Telfer and thought there was a kind of flatness in their jokes and in their ageing comments on each other. Then he had gone from them for his talk with Mary. Half through the night they had talked, Sam getting forgiveness for not writing and getting also a long friendly ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
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... of the Pastors of the Church," into "the avarice of some ecclesiastics," while throughout the passage, as indeed throughout every page of the work, the vigor of Benvenuto's style and the point of his animated sentences are quite lost in the flatness of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
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... its abdomen, the legs serving to drag it slowly along, and thus the flatness of its attitude serves still further to add to the appearance of a leaf. One of the most marvellous incidents connected with its organisation was exhibited by one which I kept under a glass shade on my table, it laid a quantity ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
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... his gloves crumpled up in one hand, and a large red book under the other arm. As to the churchwardens and overseers, we exclude them altogether, because all we know of them is, that they are usually respectable tradesmen, who wear hats with brims inclined to flatness, and who occasionally testify in gilt letters on a blue ground, in some conspicuous part of the church, to the important fact of a gallery having being enlarged and beautified, or an ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
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... Something in the level flatness of her tones almost broke the Sculptor Girl's heart. She reached out her hand and caught Felicia's and gripped it hard. She did not say much but what she said Felicia ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
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... journey lay through that brain-wearying plain whose endless flatness oppressed soul and body with its monotony and soon drove her back to her own thoughts. Towards evening there were signs of rain. Clouds were rising and then, at least, there would be something new to point at in the eternal ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
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... had said were answered only by his scorn, and she could see he was ineffably ashamed of her. What did he think of her—that she was base, vulgar, ignoble? He at least knew now that she had no traditions! It had not been in his prevision of things that she should reveal such flatness; her sentiments were worthy of a radical newspaper or a Unitarian preacher. The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his—attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil gently and water ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
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... managed an opportunity of seeing Osaka, which the disturbed conditions had prevented my doing during our winter stay. Description I shall avoid, as always; enough to say that the flatness of the site, in low land, six miles from the mouth of the narrow, winding river, makes the city one of canals, like Venice and Amsterdam. In visiting the great castle of the Tycoon, a stone fortification ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
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... N. horizontality[obs3]; flatness; level, plane; stratum &c. 204; dead level, dead flat; level plane. recumbency, lying down &c. v.; reclination[obs3], decumbence[obs3]; decumbency[obs3], discumbency|; proneness &c. adj.; accubation[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
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... some apiarians have straw-hives with flat wooden tops made, or use boxes, and have holes cut in them at the top, so that small glasses may be added, when the bees require room. But this does not prevent swarming, and besides, the flatness of the roof is prejudicial, as it allows the moisture which exhales from the bees to collect in the roof, and to fall in drops at different parts, to the great injury of the subjacent contents of the hive, and, like the common straw hive or square box, the bees cannot be examined, except ...
— A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive • W. Augustus Munn
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... many a sky, all gave to this man the appearance of some god of the forest who had just come forth from its primeval depths bringing with him the laurels of wood and mountain crag and sky, some king standing on the edge of the wood amazed at the flatness and tameness of the valley and plains. Umapine stood there the embodiment and glorification of Indian manners, costume, and tradition, a vivid picture of Indian life and story. The waymarks of such a life are, always tense with interest: they are more so as he points ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
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... are to come after them. Thus, not only a great portion of the country about Rouen—(especially in the direction of the road leading to Caen—) is gradually left desolate and barren, but even here, as you approach the town, there is a dreary flatness of country, unrefreshed by the verdure of foliage: whereas the soil, kind and productive by nature, requires only the slightest attention of man to repay him a hundred fold. What they will do some fifty years hence for fuel, is quite inconceivable. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
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... green yard and flower garden, not ugly, but quite innocent of any pretensions at comeliness. Neither was there, to many, a bit of picturesque beauty in the flat surroundings; and yet this very flatness did lend a charm peculiar to itself. My eyes ever found a delight in its purple distances and in the great, broad-armed trees marking the graceful curves of the river. The approach from the public road, which followed the bank ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
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... from any one at any time a single sentence that really enlightened her or remained fixed in her memory. It was the jejune insipidity of an entire age, the stale flatness of the world that she felt to the very depths of her soul. If she wished to make her heart glow, if she became unusually fearful of the empty air and the empty day, she stole secretly into the Church of Our Lady ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
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... make it real to others? To tell of aerial adventure one needs a new language, or, at least, a parcel of new adjectives, sparkling with bright and vivid meaning, as crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and delightful to it. For there is something new under the sun: aerial adventure; and the most lively ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
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... farther and the back begins to appear, and the outline of its right edge. Standing exactly at the back, there is a remarkable flatness at the lower end of the mesial groove. This flatness is somewhat in the shape of an elongated diamond; it is rather below the loins, and is, I think, caused by the commencement or upper part of the pelvis. In stooping ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
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... literary edifices, there is no need for us to give any very detailed study to Chesterton's critical work. Bacon said "distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things." A second distillation, perhaps even a third, suggests a Euclidean flatness. The sheer management of a point of view, however, is always instructive. We have seen an author use his exceptional powers of criticism upon society in general, and ideas at large. How is he able to deal with ideas and inventions stated in a more definite and particular manner? The latter task is ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
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... inserted in it 'The Soul's Errand,' with interpolations, as we have seen, which prove it not to be his own. His great work is the translation of the 'Divine Weeks and Works' of the French poet, Du Bartas, which is a marvellous medley of flatness and force—of childish weakness and soaring genius—with more seed poetry in it than any poem we remember, except 'Festus,' the chaos of a hundred poetic worlds. There can be little doubt that Milton was familiar with this ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
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... the carking anxieties, the vision of social breakers ahead, that had begun to take the gilding off her position now. Nicholas, on his part, had never ceased to be a lover; no personal worries had as yet made him conscious of any staleness, flatness, or unprofitableness in his admiration ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
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... well for you to know them. That knowledge would be a topography, and a history, and romance, walking by your side, and helping your discourse. Meath tells it flatness, Clonmel the abundant riches of its valley, Fermanagh is the land of the Lakes, Tyrone the country of Owen, Kilkenny the Church of St. Canice, Dunmore the great fort, Athenry the Ford of the Kings, Dunleary the Fort of O'Leary; and the Phoenix Park, instead of taking ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
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... too common out here, I am told: infants born in Christchurch during the autumn very often die. Owing to the flatness of the site of the town, it is almost impossible to get a proper system of drainage; and the arrangements seem very bad, if you are to judge from the evil smells which are abroad in the evening. Children who are born on a station, or taken ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
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... contrast to the colour of the hull, and they offered the variety and divergence from straight lines which are thought necessary to perfect beauty. Those that were set, presented the symmetry in their trim, the flatness in their hoist, and the breadth that distinguish a man-of-war; while those that were loose, floated in the air in every wave and cloud-like swell, that we so often see in light canvas that is released from the yards in a fresh breeze. The ship had ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
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... 'The unbroken flatness of the banks of the Mississippi continued unvaried for many miles above New Orleans; but the graceful and luxuriant palmetto, the dark and noble ilex, and the bright orange, were everywhere to be seen, and it was many days before we were weary ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
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... her appearance and one peculiarity. With a white-painted hull, her bridge and the whole of her upper structure, except the masts and funnel, were also white, giving to her general features a certain flatness which masked her fine proportions. Her bridge, instead of being well forward, was placed so far aft that it was only a few feet from the funnel. The object of this departure from custom was to prevent ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
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... bleak, black, filthy, and such as only to make you feel all the more poignantly the utter desolateness of these mountains. No sadder way of entering Italy can well be imagined than landing at Ancona and crossing through the Apennines to Rome in the early spring. To a girl accustomed to the fat flatness of Flanders, to the market-bustle of a Flemish provincial town, this journey must have been overwhelmingly dreary and dismal. During those long hours dragging up these Apennine valleys, did a shadow fall across the mind of the pretty, fair-haired, brilliant-complexioned little Canoness ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
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... draw as well as we can. For examples of Heads nothing can be better than photographs from Botticelli and other early Tuscan, and from the early Siennese painters. Also from Holbein, and chiefly from his drawings. There is a flatness and firmness of treatment in all these which is eminently suited to stained-glass work. Hands also may be studied from the same sources, for though Botticelli does not always draw hands with perfect mastery, yet he very often does, and the expression of them, as of his heads, is always dignified ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
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... feverishly wretched than when Margot was near, and while planning to hurry on the marriage. He had been buoyed up with a rather youthful sense of defiance of the world, a hot desire to "get everything over." The flatness of the reaction which he felt on finding himself free, at least of Margot's society, was a surprise; and yet Stephen vaguely understood its real meaning. To be free, yet not free, was an aggravation. And besides, he ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
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... century; but in front of the main entrance was a double row of limes stretching for a quarter of a mile, and the whole of the park was broken up into soft swelling hills, from whose tops, owing to the flatness of the country round, an almost immeasurable distance could be seen, gradually losing itself in deepening mist of tenderest blue. The park, too, was not rigidly circumscribed. Public roads led through it. It melted on two or three sides into ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
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... the Cliff Dweller's skull is produced by some custom of the tribe in binding the infant upon a board or other substance. This is proved by the fact that the flatness of the back head is uniformly at the same angle, and that the upper tables of the skull give evidence of abnormal pressure. There is also in this collection one skull which is an exception, and shows exactly the development we would expect to find in a normal ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
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... remarkably small. the tail is about 4 inches long; the hair longest on it at it's junction with the body and becoming shorter towards it's extremity where it ends in an accute point. the hairs of the body are much longer on the side and rump than any other part, which gives the body and apparent flatness, particularly when the animal rests on it's belley. this hair is upwards of 3 inches in length particularly on the rump where it extends so far towards the point of the tail that it almost conceals the shape of ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
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... strung along the road. The modern pattern has a convex angle in the roof, and dormer-windows; it is a rustic adaptation of the Mansard. The antique pattern, which is far more picturesque, has a concave curve in the roof, and the eaves project like eyebrows, shading the flatness of the face. Paint is a rarity. The prevailing colour is the soft gray of weather-beaten wood. Sometimes, in the better class of houses, a gallery is built across the front and around one side, and a square of garden is fenced in, with dahlias ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
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... about, but the flatness of the country offered no opportunity for anything larger than a gopher to hide. Trees and bushes, alike too small for shelter, and little rises of land, hard enough to climb but easily visible to anyone on horseback, were all that offered themselves. In the distance an arroyo looked ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
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... and they have her legend by rote. But Italy is slim and all articulate; her most characteristic trees are those that are distinct and distinguished, with lines that suggest the etching-point rather than a brush loaded with paint. Cypresses shaped like flames, tall pines with the abrupt flatness of their tops, thin canes in the brakes, sharp aloes by the road-side, and olives with the delicate acuteness of the leaf—these make keen lines of slender vegetation. And they own the seasons by a gentle confession. ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
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... is now divided from the channel by marshy fields with nothing to break the flatness but Martello towers (thirteen may be counted from the walls), was, like Bramber Castle in the west, now also an inland stronghold, once washed and surrounded by the sea. The sea probably covered all the ground as far inland ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
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... magnates came dropping in later; and chiefest among them all was the lord-lieutenant from the Towers. But to-night they were unusually late, and the aristocratic ozone being absent from the atmosphere, there was a flatness about the dancing of all those who considered themselves above the plebeian ranks of the tradespeople. They, however, enjoyed themselves thoroughly, and sprang and pounded till their eyes sparkled and their cheeks glowed with exercise ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
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... to watch her husband. He had brought her straight into the drawingroom without staying to remove his leathern driving coat, which set off his big frame and the drilled flatness of his shoulders; everything he wore or used was expensive and fashionable. There came on her suddenly the impression of being shut up alone with a stranger, a man of whom she knew nothing except that in upbringing and outlook he was ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
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... with Wauchope, General French reported to Headquarters on the 20th that Naauwpoort, which had already been re-occupied by the troops above-named, would be a better base than Hanover Road for a movement on Colesberg, considering both the flatness of the country, the fewer wire fences, and the railway and direct road. But for the moment Wauchope could spare no more troops except two companies of M.I. The telegram added that arrangements were being made for the formation at Naauwpoort of a depot ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
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... was to reduce them to a somewhat calmer and rather happy state of mind. Charley's sorrow was blunted by sympathy with Kate's joy, and Kate's joy was subdued by sympathy with Charley's sorrow; so that, after the first effervescing burst, they settled down into a calm and comfortable state of flatness, with very red eyes and exceedingly pensive minds. We must, however, do Charley the justice to say that the red eyes applied only to Kate; for although a tear or two could without much coaxing be induced to hop over his sun-burned cheek, ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
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... sand or earth, scraped together for a pillow, is ground down into flatness, after a few minutes. A bag filled with earth, or it may be with grass, keeps its shape. Many people use their saddles as pillows; they roll up the flaps and stirrups, and place the saddle on the ground with a stone underneath, ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
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... the projected lines between Chester and Holyhead, between Leeds and Bradford, and between Lancaster and Maryport by the western coast. This latter was intended to form part of a west-coast line to Scotland; Stephenson favouring it partly because of the flatness of the gradients, and also because it could be formed at comparatively small cost, whilst it would open out a valuable iron-mining district, from which a large traffic in ironstone was expected. One of its collateral advantages, in the engineer's opinion, was, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
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... contact printing on bromide paper is one without excessive contrasts on the one hand, and without excessive flatness on the other. A moderately strong negative, such as will require from three to five minutes in the sunlight with a print out paper, fairly describes it. In other words, the negative should be fully exposed and so developed that there is a fair amount of density in the ...
— Bromide Printing and Enlarging • John A. Tennant
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... would insinuate that those papers among the Tatlers and Spectators, where the whole order is abused, were not his own. I will appeal to all who know the flatness of his style, and the barrenness of his invention, whether he doth not grossly prevaricate? Was he ever able to walk without his leading-strings, or swim without bladders, without being discovered by his hobbling ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
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... garden, and every inch of the country in which he lived, rescued as it had been from invasions by armies and the sea. Many painters never left Holland, and found beauty enough there to fill well-spent lives in painting its flatness beneath over-arching clear or clouded skies. Although the earlier Flemings had had a great love of landscape, they had not conceived it as a subject suitable for a whole picture, but only for a background. In the sixteenth century the figures gradually get smaller ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
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... and can be bent in a very short time. The direction of the wind being nor'-east, we could sail up the Forth to Leith Roads; but if this should appear doubtful, after passing the May we can steer for Tyningham Sands, on the western side of Dunbar, and there run the ship ashore. From the flatness of her bottom and the strength of her build, I should think there would be no danger in beaching her even ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
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... we drove out five miles to Broek, the clean village; across the Y, up the canal, over flatness flattened. Broek is a humbug, as almost all show places are. A wooden little village on a stagnant canal, into which carriages do not drive, and where the front doors of the houses are never open; a dead, uninteresting place, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
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... was not a single blade of grass in sight anywhere, not a single lizard sunning himself on a boulder by the shore. When I looked again at Hermann's ship the girl had disappeared. I could not detect the smallest dot of a bird on the immense sky, and the flatness of the land continued the flatness of the sea to the naked line ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
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... discontent. Madison had known something of popularity during his long career; but never before had he felt the exultation of riding upon the very crest of a mighty wave of popular applause. But it was one of those waves that collapse suddenly into a surprising flatness. Canning repudiated all that Erskine had done and immediately recalled him. The ships that had gone to sea, under the sanction of the President's proclamation, were permitted by an order in council to complete their voyages unmolested; but otherwise all commerce ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
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... rejoined, alive to the flatness of the words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming desire ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
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... the dominions of the House of Este appear at first sight merely as part and parcel of Lombardy, and we should expect from them nothing very different from that which we expect from Milan or Bologna or Padua. But the truth is different; all round Ferrara, indeed, stretches the fertile flatness of Lombard cornfields, and they produce, as infallibly as they produce their sacks of grain and tuns of wine and heaps of silk cocoon, the intellectual and social equivalents of such things in Renaissance Italy: industry, wealth, comfort, scepticism, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
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... on the banks of a clear running mountain stream, brawling over rocks and boulders; and to eyes so long accustomed to the never ending flatness of the rich alluvial plains, and the terrible sameness of the rice swamps, the stream was a source of unalloyed pleasure. There were only a few places where the abrupt banks gave facilities for fording, and when a pig had broken ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
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... that is the tuning-fork by which we test the flatness of our art. Here it is that Nature teaches and condemns, and still spurs us up to further effort and ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
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... the Island and Light of May, it might be advisable at once to steer for Tyningham Sands, on the western side of Dunbar, and there run the vessel ashore. If this should happen at the time of high-water, or during the ebbing of the tide, they were of opinion, from the flatness and strength of the floating light, that no danger would attend her taking the ground, even with a very heavy sea. The writer, seeing the confidence which these gentlemen possessed with regard to the situation of things, found himself as much relieved with this conversation as he had previously ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
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... before him a country of perfectly level marish, very lush and green, with many ponds of water and sluggish streams bordered by rushes and sedge, and with pollard willows standing in rows beside the waters. In the midst of this level plain of green (which was like to the surface of a table for flatness) there stood a noble castle, part built of brick and part of stone, and a town of no great size and a wall about the town. And this castle and town stood upon an island surrounded by a lake of water, and a long bridge, built ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
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... though I can look with happy admiration at the lowland flowers, and woods, and open skies, the happiness is tranquil and cold, like that of examining detached flowers in a conservatory, or reading a pleasant book; and if the scenery be resolutely level, insisting upon the declaration of its own flatness in all the detail of it, as in Holland, or Lincolnshire, or Central Lombardy, it appears to me like a prison, and I cannot long endure it. But the slightest rise and fall in the road,—a mossy bank at the side of a crag of chalk, with ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
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... lever of its apex. The cross-hatchings of rain cut the Tower obliquely, Scratching lines of black wire across it, Mutilating its perpendicular grey surface With the sharp precision of tools. The city is rigid with straight lines and angles, A chequered table of blacks and greys. Oblong blocks of flatness Crawl by with low-geared engines, And pass to short upright squares Shrinking with distance. A steamer in the basin blows its whistle, And the sound shoots across the rain hatchings, A narrow, level bar of steel. ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
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... whenever he could procure the means of becoming one. It was a cold, frosty night in November, when T——y was returning from a favourite alehouse, along one of the Thames Ditton lanes, some of which, owing to the flatness of the country, have deep ditches by their sides. Into one of these the unfortunate man staggered in a fit of brutal intoxication, and was drowned. When the body was discovered the next morning, the dog was seen using his best endeavours to drag it out of the ditch. He had probably been employed ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
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... nights) to a temperature ranging from 85 deg. to 90 deg. F. (inclusive), and during such exposure the cylinder shall not diminish in height by more than one-fourth of its original height, and the upper cut surface shall retain its flatness and the ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
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... to the physical character of the Americans, it appears, according to Dr Martius, that the principal characteristic is the truncation, or flatness, of the occipital portion of the cranium; the forehead wide, but low, supposed upon rather insufficient data to be moulded to this shape by artificial means; and the nose arched. In the new as in the old continent, the diversities of physical character do not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
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... fishing trade, as indeed it is of all the commercial enterprise on this side of the Peninsula. At the point where the Trengganu river falls into the sea, a sandy headland juts out, forming a little bay, to which three conical rocky hills make a background, relieving the general flatness of the coast. In this bay, and picturesquely grouped about the foot of these hills, the thatched houses of the capital, and the cool green fruit groves cluster closely. Innumerable fishing crafts lie at anchor, or are beached along the shore; gaily-dressed natives pass hither ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
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... is visible from below. The actual roof of oak and lead was so flattened as to be invisible in accordance with the ideas of the architect. "No Roofs almost but Spherick raised to be visible." "The Ancients affected Flatness." "No Roofs can have Dignity enough to appear above a Cornice, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
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... — N. horizontality^; flatness; level, plane; stratum &c 204; dead level, dead flat; level plane. recumbency, lying down &c v.; reclination^, decumbence^; decumbency^, discumbency^; proneness &c adj.; accubation^, supination^, resupination^, prostration; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
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... Miss Nancy as those of the first corridor began to slip past us on the walls, with no desire to interrupt. "What do you think of this Greek Byzantine style, Mr. Wick? Somehow it doesn't seem to appeal to me, though whether it's the flatness—or what——" ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
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... rose a line of hills. They seemed to start and finish abruptly—an excrescence in the all-pervading flatness. On the top of the near end of the line, clear cut against the sky, the tower and spires of a great building; at the far end, on a hill separated—almost isolated—from the main ridge, a line of stumps, ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
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... famous, and his desire has been gratified in over-flowing measure. During his life he was chiefly known for his voyage to Lapland, and his observations there, by which he was able to substantiate the Newtonian doctrine of the flatness of the earth at the poles. He possessed considerable scientific attainments, he was honest, he was energetic; he appeared to be just the man to revive the waning glories of Prussian science; and when Frederick succeeded in ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
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... merely symmetry, observe, but extreme flatness. Feathers are smoothed down, as a field of corn by wind with rain; only the swathes laid in beautiful order. They are fur, so structurally placed as to imply, and submit to, the perpetually swift forward motion. In fact, I have no doubt the Darwinian theory on the ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
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... had stopped the champagne tap, though the needle-case glasses stood to tantalize the party till about the time that the beverage ought to have been flowing, when Spigot took them off. The flatness then became flatter. Nevertheless, Jack worked away in his usual carnivorous style, and finished by paying his respects to all the sweets, jellies, and things in succession. He never got any of ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
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... stateliness, what the French call "la vraie hauteur." This elevation of style, this dignity, is foreign to democracies, and it is hard to sustain it in the rude air of modern life. It easily degenerates, as Europe saw it degenerate for a century and a half, into pomposity relieved by flatness. It is apt to become a mere sonorous rhetoric, a cultivation of empty fine phrases. If we examine the serious poetry of the end of the seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth century—especially ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
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... intended for it, it was evident that the direct rays of the sun could never reach the Panathenaic frieze. Being placed immediately below the soffit, it received all its light from between the columns, and by reflection from the pavement below. The flatness of the sculpture is thus sufficiently accounted for; had the relief been prominent, the upper parts could not have been seen; the shade projected by the sculpture would have rendered it dark, and the parts would have been reduced by their shadows. The frieze could only be seen in an angle ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
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... the thickness with the marking-gage all around the piece, F, 8-9-10. Plane to the center of the gaged line, G, Fig. 103. Test this face for flatness. ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
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... fall very far short of statues. Of such figures, we find two varieties—one representing the real animal, the other a monster with the body and legs of a bull, the head of a man, and the wings of an eagle. There is considerable merit in both representations. They are free from the defect of flatness, or want of breadth in comparison with the length, which characterizes the similar figures of Assyrian artists; and they are altogether grand, massive, and imposing. The general proportions of the bulls are good, the limbs are accurately drawn, the muscular development is well portrayed, and ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
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... column, no matter how beautiful, is supporting something. A floor, always a plane surface, must not be tiled or decorated in any way to express relief. This would apparently destroy the essential constructive quality of a floor, viz., flatness. For the same reason, all shams, such as painted arches, pillars, etc., are not legitimate. As long as they do not actually exist, they are evidently not necessary to the construction, and have no purpose save an imaginary decorative one, and in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
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... experience enough to be perfect in hospitality, and had forgotten his guest's wants in his own: it was plain that, if Gibbie was to have any, he must lose no time in considering the means. Had he had a long nose and mouth all in one like him, he would have plunged them in beside the dog's; but the flatness of his mouth causing the necessity, in the case of such an attempt, of bringing the whole of his face into contact with the food, there was not room in the dish for the two to feed together after the same fashion, so that he was driven to the sole other possible expedient, that of making ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
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... Artemus Ward and Mark Twain are familiar to multitudes who have never read the One Hoss-Shay or The Courtin'. And though it would be ridiculous to maintain that either of these writers takes rank with Lowell and Holmes, or to deny that there is an amount of flatness and coarseness in many of their labored fooleries which puts large portions of their writings below the line where real literature begins, still it will not do to ignore them as mere buffoons, or even ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
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... of the European type, and a fine grey beard. The other important members of the little community followed. They were all swarthy in colour, and had the small eyes and prominent cheek-bones which are characteristic of the Tartar races, but they had little of that flatness of countenance and peculiar ugliness which distinguish the pure Mongol. All of them, with the exception of the mullah, spoke a little Russian, and used it to assure us that we were welcome. The children remained respectfully in the background, and the women, with laces ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
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... the reasons that children reject fairy tales this, that such very poor material is offered them? There is a dreary flatness about all except the very best which revolts the child of literary appreciation and would fail to strike a ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
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... see about as much of what is going on in the La Bassee region as an ant can see of the surrounding landscape when promenading in the grass. The only variation in the flatness of the land is the overworked ditches which try to drain it. Look upward, and rows of poplar trees along the level, and a hedge, a grove, a cottage, or trees and shrubs around it, limit your vision. Thus, if a breeze starts timidly in a field it is ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
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... the Rhine reverts to its former flatness, the hills vanish, the shores are level, but the southern influence is felt, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
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... elegant blossoms of this Chinese or Japanese beauty, possess a flatness and stiffness, which gives them an artificial air, to which their colour, which is exactly that of common red lead, may perhaps somewhat contribute; they make their appearance towards the close of the summer, and as ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 7 - or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
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... thousand men could be drawn up in rank and file, horse and foot and guns. Excepting it be on some special occasion, there are rarely more than two or three hundred persons in sight. The paved emptiness makes one draw a breath of surprise, and human eyes seem too small to take in all the flatness below, all the breadth before, and all the height above. Taken together, the picture is too big for convenient sight. The impression itself moves unwieldily in the cramped brain. A building almost five hundred feet ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
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... than the other rivers of the colony, its size, and the direction from which it comes, render it exceedingly interesting to determine how it is supplied. The sandy nature of the country on its banks, and for many miles east, and the flatness of the country, preclude the idea that it receives its supply of water from the immediately surrounding district. It must either be supplied by a country of a far better character to the eastward, or it is the outlet of another and larger lake far in the interior. From the natives we ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
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... a handsome woman, but she was a fair representative of that portion of the race that has poisoned whole generations by improving the frying-pan and perpetuating "fatty bread." The impression she made upon those who saw her for the first time was one of lank flatness—to convey a vivid idea rather clumsily. But she was neither lank nor flat. The total absence of all attempts at artificial ornamentation gave the future Mrs. Poteet an appearance of forlorn shiftlessness that was not even ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
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... would rise on the lines of Doctor Todd's faded blue-print. I should build Todd Hall and McGraw Library, but not one brick would I add to "Old Main." There would be the only condition of my gift of millions. They might suggest oriel windows to relieve the bare facade, buttresses to break the flatness of the wall and pinnacles to beautify the roof, but I would have "Old Main" always as I saw it on that September afternoon, when I had climbed the hill, paused, set down my bag and stood with arms akimbo while I scanned ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
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... greater; there his whole man, voice, mien, and gesture, was no longer Mountford, but another person; there, the insipid, soft civility, the elegant and formal mien, the drawling delicacy of voice, the stately flatness of his address, and the empty eminence of his attitudes, were so nicely observed, that had he not been an entire matter of nature, had he not kept his judgment, as it were a centinel upon himself, not to admit the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
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... the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
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... let any one compare the Hymn of the Archangels and other of the more highly-wrought passages, as rendered by him, with any of the better translations in verse,—with that of Mr. Brooks for example,—to perceive at once the insufficiency, the flatness and meagreness of even so verbally faithful a prose version. The effect on "Faust," or on any high passionate poem, of attempting to put it into prose, is akin to what would be the effect on an exquisite bas-relief of reducing its projection one half ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
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... they must be briefly reviewed in order that the reader may be on his guard against them. Books which still have a wide circulation deal with the sex problem in terms of a biology now no more tenable than the flatness of the earth. ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
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... they were—but they could come only from the human throat. Impersonal they were—and yet they were sexed, female and male. Frank looked about him carefully. A little distance away, the trail sent off a tiny feeler into the jungle. It dipped into one of the pretty glades which diversified the flatness of the island. Creeping ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
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... premises, they fare better, being paid by the piece. The minutest divisions of labor prevail, even more than with us—a shirt passing through many hands, the weekly wage differing for each. The "fitter," for instance, must be a skilled workwoman, the flatness and proper set of the shirt front depending upon correct fitting at the neck. For this fitting in West End houses, the fitter receives a penny a shirt, and can in a week fit twenty dozen—this meaning a pound a week. But slack seasons reduce the amount, so that often she earns ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
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... The extreme flatness of the town, built as it is on marshes, takes from its effect; and I was surprised that it struck me as so little deserving its great reputation, compared, as it has been, to Genoa, Venice, and Constantinople, and imagining, as I did, that I should see its ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
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... answered; "but this bread was of a ghostly pallor and flatness, as if it had been baked ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
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... Everyone will see the flatness of "Revenge thy father's most unnatural murder, if thou didst ever love him," as compared with the suspense that forces an expression of agony from ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
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... the paradoxical family. They experienced a practical rebuff, a few years since, which should to some degree have shaken their faith in the present chief of their order. To do this chief justice, he is probably far less confident about the flatness of the earth than any of his disciples. Under the assumed name of Parallax he visited most of the chief towns of England, propounding what he calls his system of zetetic astronomy. Why he should call himself Parallax it would be hard to say; unless it be that the verb from which the word ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
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