"Symmetrical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was called The Mound, because it stood upon a little steep knoll, so smooth and symmetrical that it showed itself at once to be artificial. It had, beyond doubt, been built for Queen Elizabeth as a hunting tower—a place, namely, from the top of which you could see the country for miles on all sides, and so be able to follow with your eyes the flying deer and ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... of The Scarlet Letter into a snow-man, who would stand stanch for weeks. Snow-storms in Lenox began early and lasted till far into April. The little red house had all it could do, sometimes, to lift its upper windows above them. In the front yard there was a symmetrical balsam fir-tree, tapering like a Chinese pagoda. One winter morning we found upon one of its lower boughs a little brown sparrow frozen stiff. We put it in a card-board coffin, and dug out a grave for it beneath the fir, with ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... there was royal blood in his veins, and I have no reason to doubt it. One had only to watch him running in pursuit of a moth or other winged insect to be struck by the essentially aristocratic swing of his wattles and the symmetrical curves of his graceful lobes; and the proud pomposity of his tail feathers irresistibly called to mind the old nobility and the Court of LOUIS QUATORZE. Pimple, our tabby kitten, looked ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... all of whom shall be nameless here. Lastly come three of the "Auditor" or the Judge-Advocate sort: Mylius, the Compiler of sad Prussian Quartos, known to some; Gerber, whose red cloak has frightened us once already; and the Auditor of Katte's regiment. A complete Court-Martial, and of symmetrical structure, by the rule of three;—of whose proceedings we know mainly the result, nor seek much to know more. This Court met on Wednesday, 25th October, 1730, in the little Town of Copenick; and in six days had ended, signed, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... who called Wordsworth a dunce. Hazlitt was quite incapable of such a solecism. He knew, nobody better, that a telling caricature must be a good likeness. If he darkens the shades, and here and there exaggerates an ungainly feature, we still know that the shade exists and that the feature is not symmetrical. De Quincey reports the saying of some admiring friend of Hazlitt, who confessed to a shudder whenever Hazlitt used his habitual gesture of placing his hand within his waistcoat. The hand might emerge armed with a dagger. Whenever, said the same friend (Heaven preserve ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... unity, yet devoid of any strict arrangement, and formed on no carefully maintained principle. It is a set of cameos, loosely strung upon a thread, a structure with countless beautiful parts, which do not however cohere into any symmetrical whole. The poems are cast in many forms; allegory, narrative, vision, didactic poetry, lyric poetry, all find a place. There is little history, but much legend, some fiction, and a good deal of mythology. The series was not designed as a whole. La Chanson des Aventuriers de ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... end, the continents have grown steadily and consistently from the beginning, through successive accessions in a definite direction, to their present form and Organic correlations. If, indeed, there is any meaning in the remarkably symmetrical combinations of the double twin continents in the Eastern Hemisphere, so closely soldered in their northern half, as contrasted with the single pair in the Western Hemisphere, isolated in their position, but so strikingly similar in their Outlines, they must be the result of a progressive and predetermined ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... buffalo robes; his long hair, jet-black even now, though he had seen some eighty winters, hung on either side of his thin features. Those most conversant with Indians in their homes will scarcely believe me when I affirm that there was dignity in his countenance and mien. His gaunt but symmetrical frame, did not more clearly exhibit the wreck of bygone strength, than did his dark, wasted features, still prominent and commanding, bear the stamp of mental energies. I recalled, as I saw him, the eloquent metaphor of the Iroquois sachem: "I ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... made his first tour as a virtuoso, and met with such favor that numerous tours of the music-loving countries ensued. The critics praised his playing particularly for his great clarity, sanity, symmetrical appreciation of form, and unaffected fervor. For a time Sauer was at the head of the Meisterschule of Piano-playing, connected with ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... not an isolated incident in the history of Christianity, as the ecclesiastics would have us believe, but is a vital part of their religion. Witchcraft bears the same relation to Christianity that an arm bears to the body; neither can be removed without destroying the symmetrical aspect ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... presented the appearance of an immense lounging place, the entire floor being strewn with successive layers of mats, lying between parallel trunks of cocoanut trees, selected for the purpose from the straightest and most symmetrical the ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... scenes of his life first,—like a Hebrew Bible, of which the beginning is at the end; but the author's genius has triumphed over the perils of the task, and given us a delineation as consistent and symmetrical as it is striking and vigorous. Ignorant of books, simple, and credulous, guileless himself, and suspecting no evil in others, with moderate intellectual powers, he commands our admiration and respect by his courage, his love ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... and sweet, and Judas rose powerfully to his great twenty minutes' soliloquy. But the bulk of the players, though all were earnest and fervent, were clumsy or self-conscious. The crowds were stiff and awkward, painfully symmetrical, like school children at drill. A chorus of ten or twelve ushered in each episode with song, and a man further explained it in bald narrative. The acts of the play proper were interrupted by tableaux vivants of Old Testament scenes, from Adam and Eve onwards. There was ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... be taken that racial education be not one-sided for lack of adaptation to personal fitness, nor unwieldy through sheer top-heaviness. Education, to fulfil its mission for any people anywhere, should be symmetrical and sensible. ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... Instead of symmetrical public graveyards, as in the West, the Chinese cemeteries belong to the family or clan of the deceased, and are generally beautiful and peaceful places planted with trees and surrounded by artistic walls enclosing the grave-mounds and monumental tablets. The cemeteries ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... colour, and seem almost transparent. And the sun, scarcely emerged from the desert, lights them in a curious gradation, and orders their contours with a fringe of fresh rose-colour. And they are not rocks, in fact, for as we look more closely, they show us lines symmetrical and straight. Not rocks, but architectural masses, tremendous and superhuman, placed there in attitudes of quasi-eternal stability. And out of them rise the points of two obelisks, sharp as the blade of a lance. And ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... outwardly, inwardly its space too much occupied and its inmates embarrassed by passages and circuities. The abstractionist would at once demolish it, and replace it by a light, commodious and airy dwelling, more symmetrical and chaste in its appearance, better fitted for the comfort and usefulness of its inhabitants. The practitioner, who has become familiar with it, who observes and admires that silent legislation of the people, ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... and high, but symmetrical, and his distended nostrils, when excited at play, would remind you of a Kentucky racehorse in motion. His voice was sonorous and musical, and when stirred by passion or pleasure it rose and fell like the sound of waves upon a stormy or summer sea. His lips were ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... thoroughly, but she is a thought heavy in the hand; she is too literary, not to say professional; she is definite at all costs. She has "restored" Miss Coleridge as a German archaeologist might restore a Tanagra figure. Indeterminate lines have been ruthlessly rectified and asymmetry has grown symmetrical. Though we do not suggest that she misunderstood her friend, we are sure that the lady exhibited in the memoir is not the lady who reveals ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... or difference of focal distances.* The ellipse and the hyperbola have two foci and two directrices. The eccentricity, of course, is the same for one focus as for the other, since the curve is symmetrical with respect to both. If the distances from a point on a conic to the two foci are r and r', and the distances from the same point to the corresponding directrices are d and d' (Fig. 47), we have r : d r' : d'; (r - r') : (d - d'). ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... gives the natural descent. Thus, the real father of Salathiel was heir of the house of Nathan, but the childless Jeconiah (Jer. 22:30) was the last lineal representative of the elder kingly line. The omission of some obscure names and the symmetrical arrangement, into tesseradecads were common Jewish customs. It is not too much to say that after the labors of Mill (On the Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels, pp. 147-217) and Lord A. C. Hervey (On the Genealogies ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... sovereignty of organized power, and the independence of the separate or dis-united States. The fabric of the Declaration and that of the confederation were each consistent with its own foundation, but they could not form one consistent, symmetrical edifice. They were the productions of different minds and of adverse passions; one, ascending for the foundation of human government to the laws of nature and of God, written upon the heart of man; the other, resting upon the basis of human institutions, and ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... costume is neither very costly nor very fashionable, but, on the other hand, it is not markedly cheap or shabby; his complexion, like his height and his bearing, is inconspicuous. You would notice, perhaps, that, like the majority of people, his face was not absolutely symmetrical, his right eye a little larger than the left, and his jaw a trifle heavier on the right side. If you, as an ordinary careless person, were to bare his chest and feel his heart beating, you would probably find it quite like the heart of anyone else. But here you and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... out from the parlour door, and something like an echo of laughter rang out into the hall after one of those inspections. Nettie took no notice either of the look or the laugh. She built in those piles of baggage with the rapidest symmetrical arrangement, to the admiration of Smith, who stood wondering by, and did what he could to help her, with troubled good-nature. She did not stop to make any sentimental reflections, or to think of the thankless ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... faultless beauties, or that the men's coats have no rags, and the women's gowns are made of silk and velvet: the wild ugliness of the interior of Constantinople or Pera has a charm of its own, greatly more amusing than rows of red bricks or drab stones, however symmetrical. With brick or stone they could never form those fantastic ornaments, railings, balconies, roofs, galleries, which jut in and out of the rugged houses of the city. As we went from Galata to Pera up a steep hill, which newcomers ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... region is almost symmetrical in shape, extending nearly north and south with a tolerably even breadth from the haunted palace of the Santacroce, where the marble statue of the dead Cardinal comes down from its pedestal to pace the shadowy halls all night, to Santa Maria in Campo Marzo, and cutting off, as it were, the three ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... singular case," said the policeman, "her language is good, her appearance might be ladylike. But, see." The man pointed with a meaning smile at the symmetrical feet in their loose slippers. The blue veins were swelling under the white surface, and there was a faint spasmodic quiver of the muscles that seemed to spread ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... into some unknown regiment was a terror so great that the other alternative became less odious to the boys, and they trotted after Jack, as he stalked moody and distracted to Major Mike McGoyle's tent, now the only habitable spot left where a few hours before a symmetrical little city had stood. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Many of these trees are said to be 600 or 700 years old and their wood is much used for panelling in Graubuenden. It is recognized by the big dark knots. The panels are usually formed of boards reversed so that the knots form a symmetrical pattern. Larch is also used and is very red, while sycamore goes to the making of tables and chairs in the Buendner Stuebli. Good examples of the modern use of these woods may be seen in the hotels, Vereina and Silvretta, ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... although allied to the other rooms in an absence of fancy in its arrangement, shows prettily in contrast to them with its white cloth cheerful with flowers and ferns. The floor is covered with a tightly stretched red cloth, the chairs are set in symmetrical rows; with the exception of a black clock there is no ornament on the chimney-piece, and a red cloth screen conceals the door used ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... has impressed upon it the seal of mind, and the temple of the God, the house of his community, stands ready. Into this temple now enters the God himself. The lightning-flash of individuality strikes the inert mass, permeates it, and a form no longer merely symmetrical, but infinite and spiritual, concentrates and molds its adequate bodily shape. This is the task of sculpture. Inasmuch as in it the inner spiritual element, which architecture can no more than hint at, completely abides with the sensuous form and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... is fourteen his future usually can be predicted, and after he is twenty, few real changes are brought about in the character of the man. The schools can do little more than plant the seeds of culture; in the family must the young plants be watered, nourished and trained. Then will the growth be symmetrical and beautiful. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... incomplete, gives us merely vague impressions of parts of the whole. When the circle has been completed, you feel on your return that you have seen (of course only in the mass) all there is to be seen. The parts fit into one symmetrical whole and you see humanity wherever it is placed working out a destiny tending to ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... I pursued, equably, "you wouldn't have the gout if you did not habitually overeat yourself and drink more than is good for you. In consequence, here you are at thirty-two with a foot the same general size and shape as a hayrick, only rather less symmetrical, and quite unable to attend to the really serious business of life, which is to present me to the heiress. It is a case of vicarious punishment which strikes me as extremely unfair. You have made of your stomach a god, Peter, and I am the one to suffer ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... had before the run-away slave presented it to the missionary—from whom I first heard of it—no one knows. It certainly had not much hair on when it arrived, and there was an ominous scar on its head, and its ears were not wholly symmetrical. But the children were vastly delighted with it, and after much kind treatment the creature was restored to rude health, and, I must confess, to quite too rude spirits. The children wanted him baptized by the time-honoured title of 'Jacko'; but by a series of exploits in which the monkey distinguished ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... the top. In an artistic sense, the man could not draw, and the anatomical details of the skull are ridiculous. Yet the drawing is very neat. It has the clean, wiry line of a machine drawing, and is done with a steady, practised hand. It is also perfectly symmetrical; the skull, for instance, is exactly in the centre, and, when we examine it through a lens, we see why it is so, for we discover traces of a pencilled centre-line and ruled cross-lines. Moreover, the lens reveals a tiny particle of draughtsman's soft, red, rubber, with which ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... were symmetrical. Her mind was quick, penetrative, and in constant exercise. Truthful and upright, her soul shone through her form and features, as a clear flame, placed within a transparent vase, brings out the adornments of flower, leaf, and gem, ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... future life; that each cliff and crag and mountain-peak was to be to him an open book, whose secrets would leave their indelible impress upon his heart and brain, revealing to him the breadth and length, the depth and height of life, moulding his soul anew into nobler, more symmetrical proportions. ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... crowning the high ground which is covered by the residential quarter of Hanaford. Here the spacious houses, withdrawn behind shrubberies and lawns, revealed in their silhouettes every form of architectural experiment, from the symmetrical pre-Revolutionary structure, with its classic portico and clipped box-borders, to the latest outbreak in ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... cigarettes, the talk got away from Capes. The Scotchman informed Ann Veronica that your view of beauty necessarily depended on your metaphysical premises, and the young man with the Russell-like hair became anxious to distinguish himself by telling the Japanese student that Western art was symmetrical and Eastern art asymmetrical, and that among the higher organisms the tendency was toward an external symmetry veiling an internal want of balance. Ann Veronica decided she would have to go on with Capes another day, and, looking up, discovered ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... ended, or nearly so; my adventures on the Congo and the west coast terminating with the capture of the Black Venus; a few additional words, therefore, will suffice to fittingly dismiss the principal personages who have figured in this history, and to bring the history itself to a symmetrical conclusion. ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... woman cleared the little table, went out of the room, and quickly returned with a tray on which was a dish of little rusks and a small precise pat of butter, cool, symmetrical, white, and plump. The old man who had been standing by the door in one attitude during the whole interview, looking at the mother up-stairs as he had looked at the son down-stairs, went out at the same time, and, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... of the science of mechanics, philosophers in early times were forced to fall back on certain principles of more or less validity, which they derived from their imagination as to what the natural fitness of things ought to be. There was no geometrical figure so simple and so symmetrical as a circle, and as it was apparent that the heavenly bodies pursued tracks which were not straight lines, the conclusion obviously followed that their movements ought to be circular. There was no argument in favour of ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... clearing the beauty of the chapel so long obscured became again manifest: its symmetrical proportions, the remains of its ancient painting, the disclosure of two most interesting monuments, two aumbries, a double piscina, the chapel of Bishop Audley, but more important than all, two of the most beautiful specimens of transition arches to be found ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... the prize nest of the woods, if we except the nest of the hummingbird, is that of the wood pewee. It is as smooth and compact and symmetrical as if turned in a lathe out of some soft, feltlike substance. Of course, the phoebe's artistic masonry under the shelving rocks, covered with moss and lined with feathers, or with the finest dry grass and bark fibers, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... him. He was of the people and for the people. He had been poor and laborious; but greatness did not change the tone of his spirit, or lessen the sympathies of his nature. His character was strangely symmetrical. He was temperate, without austerity; brave, without rashness; constant, without obstinacy. His love of justice was only equalled by his delight in compassion. His regard for personal honor was only excelled by ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... into the plain. Alongside the plateau, arranged in amphitheatres, large square fields stripped of their harvest lay here and there in the primitive forest; in other places, innumerable oaks and elms had been dethroned to give place to plantations of cherry-trees, whose symmetrical rows promised ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... occupants of this plain constructed elaborate irrigating ditches, and that the waters of Oak creek were diverted from the stream and conducted over the adjoining valleys. There are several fortified hills in this locality. One of the best of these defensive works crowned a symmetrical mountain near Schuermann's house. The top of this mesa is practically inaccessible from any but the southern side, and was found to have a flat surface covered with scattered cacti and scrub cedar, among ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... discovering the goal of my journeyings, I inquired of a guardian in a peaked blue cap and a blue cloak, who informed me that it was in the twenty-sixth section of the other cemetery. Wonderfully precise, red-tape, bureaucratic, symmetrical people, the French, for all their superficial curvetings! I repaired to the other portion of the cemetery, to lose myself again among boundless black beads and endless chapels and funereal urns; and at last I besought another blue-cloaked guardian to show me the grave of Maupassant. "Par ici," ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Proportion.—Definite proportion of elements (Chemistry), symmetrical arrangement of parts (Crystallography), numerical and geometrical relation of the forms and movements of the heavenly bodies (Spherical Astronomy), all of which are capable ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... through his locks unconsciously, so that it was singularly wild and rough. In times when it was the mode to imitate stage-coachmen as closely as possible in costume, and when the hair was invariably cropped, like that of our soldiers, this eccentricity was very striking. His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other countenance. Nor was the moral expression less beautiful ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... not stint yourself of shadows, for an occasion. It needs but four candles to make a hanging Oriental bell play the most buoyant jugglery overhead. Two lamps make of one palm-branch a symmetrical countercharge of shadows, and here two palm-branches close with one another in shadow, their arches flowing together, and their paler greys darkening. It is hard to believe that there are many to prefer a ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... stair-door open for him. Sommers looked at her searchingly, curious to find where this power lay. Her face had grown white and set. The features and the figure were those of a large woman. Her hair, bronzed in the sunlight as he remembered, was dark in the gloom of this room. The plain, symmetrical arrangement of the hair above the large brow and features made her seem older than she was. The deep-set eyes, the quivering lips, and the thin nostrils gave life to the passive, restrained face. The passions of her life lay just beneath the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... speech statement stationary stationery statue stature statute steal steel stops stopped stopping stories stretch strictly succeeds successful summarize superintendent supersede sure surprise syllable symmetrical ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... enter, and seated themselves in a nervous circle in the largest room of the cottage. Here their eyes instantly became glued to a great bowl which was piled high with small rose-tinted cubes of some substance which resembled symmetrical and translucent crystals of pink quartz. That was Chaosite enough to blow the entire cliff into smithereens; and they were aware of it, and they eyed it ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... Parliamentary distinction of the good speaker, as contrasted with the good debater. The good speaker is he who unfolds the whole of a question in its affirmative aspects, who presents these aspects in their just proportions, and according to their orderly and symmetrical deductions from each other. But the good debater is he who 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, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... reduced that declaration to its foundation—i.e., their own destruction and overthrow. Ver. 16, too, would go far beyond what would be announced here, if we remove this clause. He announces destruction to the kings themselves. Finally, the symmetrical parallelism would be destroyed by striking out these words. The words: "If ye believe not, ye shall not be established," would, in that case, be without the parallel members. They are connected with the clause under discussion so much the rather, that in them it is not specially Judah's deliverance ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... skilfully extracted an olive from the symmetrical mound of chicken salad and took an almond and a macaroon and other detached dainties that were not made sacred and secure by their own architecture. But for the most part Pee-wee was faithful to his trust. He knew his time would come. And then, oh, then, that proud tower ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... dawn. The whippoorwills, the frogs and crickets, were silent, and the sharp, sweet song of a mocking bird throbbed from a hedge. It was dark in the valley, but, high above, the air was already brightening with the sun; a symmetrical cloud caught the solar rays and flushed rosy against silver space. The valley turned from indistinct blue to grey, to sparkling green. The sun gilded the peaks of the western range, and slipped slowly ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Nature, for the use of the Cave Man, and preserved for all time. How wonderful are the works of Creation, how exquisite the details. You have heard of the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian columns, and of the beauties of Greek architecture, but compare these white, symmetrical piers, raised in one solid piece, without join or crevice. Observe yonder alabaster gallery where the organ swells its harmonious tones; observe the vestry, where the preacher dons his sacerdotal garb—they are perfect. ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... history of Giotto's mind, exhibiting all his peculiar merits, although in a state as yet of immature development. They are full of fancy and invention; the composition is almost always admirable, although sometimes too studiously symmetrical; the figures are few and characteristic, each speaking for itself, the impersonation of a distinct idea, and most dramatically grouped and contrasted; the attitudes are appropriate, easy, and natural; the action ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... beautiful hands, with their tapering fingers, had a grip like a vise. They had discovered, in this wonderful land, that a body possessing perfectly developed muscles must, by the laws of nature, be symmetrical and graceful. They rode a great deal on small, two-wheeled vehicles, which they propelled themselves. They gave me one on which I accompanied Wauna to all of the places of interest in ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... In a corner are the mattress and bedding rolled up [two blankets, two sheets, and a coverlet]. Above them is a quarter-circular wooden shelf, on which is a Bible and several little devotional books, piled in a symmetrical pyramid; there are also a black hair brush, tooth-brush, and a bit of soap. In another corner is the wooden frame of a bed, standing on end. There is a dark ventilator under the window, and another over the door. FALDER'S work [a shirt to which he is putting buttonholes] ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... English pathologist, studying the cretinous idiots of Salzburg, written about centuries before by Paracelsus, discovered that with their defective brain and mentality there was associated an absence of the thyroid body, and accompanying symmetrical swellings of fat tissue at the sides of the neck. Then Sir William Gull in 1873 painted the singular details of a cretinous condition developing in adult women, a condition to which another Englishman, William Ord, of London, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... the wires to be thrown into contact with each other by the wind, but, on the other hand, it diminishes the geometrical symmetry of the wires—so very essential to insure silence. As a matter of fact, contacts do not occur on well constructed lines, and I think our English wires, being more symmetrical, are freer from external disturbance ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... begin with a town house, and our simplest procedure is to take a plan exhibiting those parts which were most usual for an establishment of even moderate pretensions. Let it be understood that it is but the symmetrical outline of a general scheme which was in practice submitted to indefinite enlargement or modification. In the house of Livia, the mother of Augustus, on the Palatine Hill at Rome, and in various houses at Pompeii—such ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... attached merely to the skin; but we here approach the doubtful subject of inherited mutilations. A man who is left-handed, and a shell in which the spire turns in the wrong direction, are departures from the normal though a symmetrical condition, and they are well known ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... presence on the scene. It is a strange fact of history that Descartes, the French philosopher who prided himself on having rid the soul of all dependence on nature, should have greatly contributed to this method. But it is perhaps not so strange when we consider that every dualism is, after all, symmetrical, and that consequently whatever rids the soul of nature at the same time rids nature of the soul. It was Descartes who first conceived the body and soul to be utterly distinct substances. The corollary to this doctrine was his automatism, applied ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... corps, and well it might. As gun after gun, with its complement of men and its lieutenant fireworkers, with a 'right wheel,' rolled out of the gate upon the broad street, not a soul could look upon the lengthening pageant of blue and scarlet, with its symmetrical diagonals of snowy belt and long-flapped white cartouche boxes, moving together with measured swing; its laced cocked-hats, leggings, and courtly white shorts and vests, and ruffles, and all its buttons and brasses flashing up to the sun, without allowing it ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a system originated by Dr. du Page, in alternate layers of glue and ordinary shavings, and the articulation of the joints almost equals that of nature. As a result the soldiers are sent out into the world provided with legs which are symmetrical, almost unbreakable, amazingly light, and so admirably constructed that the owner rarely requires the assistance of a cane. Another detail for which Dr. du Page has made provision is the manufacture of his own instruments. ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... clay" and stopped and watched. He, or she, sat on the ground with feet out in front and modelled bowls round the left hand, thumping and patting the stiff clay with a little wooden spade, and without any further appliance made complicated forms perfectly symmetrical. I'd no idea such symmetry could be attained without the ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... and warmth and reality of life is largely absent; there are no individualities, but only generalised people. In almost every Utopia—except, perhaps, Morris's "News from Nowhere"—one sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetrical and perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, happy, beautifully dressed, but without any personal distinction whatever. Too often the prospect resembles the key to one of those large pictures of coronations, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... elegant shape, swelling-breasted, with melting black eyes and smooth cheeks, slender-waisted and heavy-hipped, clad in the richest of clothes. The dew of her lips was sweeter than syrup, her shape more symmetrical than the bending branch and her speech softer than the morning zephyr, even as says one of those ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... by means of a dehiscence similar to that of the vegetable-pods whose seeds have attained maturity; it is the new-born grub itself that contrives an exit-way by gnawing a hole in its enclosure. In this manner, it obtains near the top of the cone a symmetrical dormer-window, clean-edged, with no joins nor unevenness of any kind, showing that this part of the wall has been nibbled away and swallowed. But for this breach, which is just wide enough for ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... non-vertebrated. Figs. 68 and 69 show these two types in form and structure. But there is still another type found only in the lowest and most generalized forms of fishes. In these the tail-fin is vertebrated and yet symmetrical. This type ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... he were to finish these latter first, they would assuredly, if delicate or sharp, be broken as he worked on; since, I say, he must work in this foreseeing and predetermined method, he is sure to reduce the system of his ornaments to some definite symmetrical order before he begins); and the habit of conceiving beforehand all that he has to do, will probably render him not only more orderly in its arrangement, but more skilful and accurate in its execution, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... later when Weston laid breakfast before them; and Ida, who regarded him unobtrusively with careful attention, decided that Arabella Kinnaird was right. The packer, with his lean, symmetrical litheness, his pleasant English face, his clear eyes, and his clean, bronzed skin, was certainly well-favored physically, and she began to wonder whether her companion could not have gone further in her comments; until she remembered again ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... less constantly; she had gone down the stairs to dinner with him; she floated before him throughout the torture of Miss Cornish's address; she was present even when he exploded and fled; she was with him now, in this desolate walk toward Talbot Potter's apartment—the pale, symmetrical little face and the relentless sweet voice commandeering the attention he wanted desperately to keep upon what he meant ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... to do about it," answered Letitia with genuine trouble, puckering her brow under one of her smooth waves of seal-brown hair. Letitia is one of the wonderful variety of women who patch out life, piece by piece, in a beautiful symmetrical pattern and who do not have imagination enough to admire anything about a riotous crazy quilt. She is in love with Clifton Gray, has been since she wound her brown braids about her head, and is piecing strips of him into her life-fabric by ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... principles of rectitude, he must have become the idol as well as the wonder of his contemporaries; his accomplishments must have dazzled them into admiration, for he possessed all the attributes of a Crichton. Beautiful in aspect, symmetrical in proportions, graceful in carriage, capacious in intellect, erudite as a Benedictine, agile as an Acrobat, daring as Scaevola, persuasive as Alcibiades, skilled in all manly pastimes, familiar with the philosophies ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... written so early as 1755, while the last belongs to his later years. But they are all characterized by the same combination of manly earnestness, rich invention and mirthful spirit. The form is concise and symmetrical, the part-writing is clear and well-balanced, and a "sunny sweetness" is the prevailing mood. As a discerning critic has remarked, there is nothing in the shape of instrumental music much pleasanter and easier to listen to than one ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... while yonder poop, perchance, was gay with its company of passengers whiling away the time with books, games, or flirtations, according to their respective inclinations. And over all towered the three masts, lofty and symmetrical, with all their orderly intricacy of standing and running rigging, and their wide-spreading spaces of snow-white canvas; the whole combining to make up as stately and beautiful a picture as a sailor's eye need care to rest upon. And now look at her! There she lies, clean shorn ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... hearing all three, of men similarly engaged in our country, W.H. Charming and Theodore Parker. None of them compare in the symmetrical arrangement of extempore discourse, or in pure eloquence and communication of spiritual beauty, with Charming, nor in fulness and sustained flow with Parker, but, in power of practical and homely adaptation of their thought to common wants, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... figure; and her court-dress displayed proportions which her humble costume at the New Forest had concealed, or which time had not matured. There was the same pensive, sweet expression in her face, which had altered little; but the beautiful rounded arms, the symmetrical fall of the shoulders, and the proportion of the whole figure was a surprise to him; and Edward, in his own mind, agreed that she might well be the reigning toast of ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... the speech Mrs. Copley was capable of. She sat and looked at the young man. So, furtively, did Dolly. He was enjoying his supper; yes, and the prospect too; for a slight flush had risen to his face. It was not a symmetrical face, but honesty was written in every line ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... has long since subsided, and much of what was then seething has gone off in vapor or other volatile products. But some very solid matters have also been precipitated, some crystals of poetry translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies, and sects founded only to dwindle away or to be re-absorbed ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... largely determined by how the fruit is to be used, and by individual taste. A round fruit is best for canning; a long one is the most economical for slicing, though some prefer a flat one for this purpose. It is always desirable that the outline of the horizontal section shall be smooth, flowing and symmetrical, and if there be any distinct sutures that they shall be shallow and broad; but the relative importance of this, and whether the outline be round or oval, is wholly a matter of individual taste. Some people and markets ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... meadows of alfalfa, unreclaimed reaches of sage-brush, and, far off among her shade-trees, the roofs of Ellensburg reflecting the late sun. Above the opposite range that hemmed the valley southward some thunder-heads crowded fast towards a loftier snow-peak. Far away across the divide, white, symmetrical, wrought of alabaster, inlaid with ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... the people of the household were expected to assemble. Rawdon sat down in the study before the Baronet's table, set out with the orderly blue books and the letters, the neatly docketed bills and symmetrical pamphlets, the locked account-books, desks, and dispatch boxes, the Bible, the Quarterly Review, and the Court Guide, which all stood as if on parade awaiting ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... also we noticed in the Cambrian shallows has now evolved into a more handsome creature, the sea-lily. The cup-shaped body is now composed of a large number of limy plates, clothed with flesh; the arms are long, tapering, symmetrical, and richly fringed; the stalk advances higher and higher, until the flower-like animal sometimes waves its feathery arms from the top of a flexible pedestal composed of millions of tiny chalk disks. Small forests of these sea-lilies adorn the floor of ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... nations, had surrendered unconditionally to the charm of Recha, the beautiful dark-eyed daughter of Rabbi Jeiteles. Recha was rapidly nearing her seventeenth year and each month, nay each day, added to her charms. Like most girls of her ancient race, she was well developed for her years, and her symmetrical figure, lustrous eyes and raven tresses presented a picture of oriental beauty, whose peer did not exist among the Slavonic types that lived and loved round about her. So at least thought Mendel, and so thought a score of enamored ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... to their despotic rule, and established a new constitution admirably calculated to reconcile all parties and save the country. She dreamed that she had brought forth a lion, and a few days afterwards was delivered of Perikles. His body was symmetrical, but his head was long out of all proportion; for which reason in nearly all his statues he is represented wearing a helmet, as the sculptors did not wish, I suppose, to reproach him with this blemish. The Attic ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... should be undertaken first—a kitchen cupboard of his own contrivance, with such an ingenious arrangement of sliding-doors and bolts, such convenient nooks for stowing household provender, and such a symmetrical result to the eye, that every good housewife would be in raptures with it, and fall through all the gradations of melancholy longing till her husband promised to buy it for her. Adam pictured to himself ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... financial world. Commerce, as they point out, made great advances, and our carrying trade grew so rapidly that in ten years from the day the tariff of 1846 was passed our tonnage exceeded the tonnage of England. The free-traders refer with especial emphasis to what the term the symmetrical development of all the great interests of the country under this liberal tariff. Manufactures were not stimulated at the expense of the commercial interest. Both were developed in harmony, while agriculture, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Walter Gilbey, is the purest survival of the Great Horse of mediaeval times, known also as the War Horse, and the Old English Black Horse. It is the largest of draught horses, attaining a height of 17 to 17.3 hands and a weight of 2,200 lb., its general characteristics being immense strength, symmetrical proportions, bold free action, and docile disposition. In 1878 the Shire Horse Society was established to improve the breed, and distribute sound and ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... was the only one in the room who was not keenly alert or distressingly tense. Even in her waxy whiteness and unnatural emaciation, her face was good. The forehead was high and, with the symmetrical black eyebrows and long, dark lashes, suggested at a glance the good quality of her breeding. The aquiline nose was pinched by suffering, the finely curving lips were now bloodless and drawn tight from time to time, as though to repress the cry of pain; these marks of suffering could not ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... is called in geometry, the symmetrical image; so that the writing, reversed on the blotter, was righted in the mirror and presented its natural appearance; and Jean Valjean had beneath his eyes the letter written by Cosette to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... after the death of his mother, and is a tribute to the memory of her to whom he was devotedly attached. The verses to most of these airs—to all the successful ones—were of his own composition. Indeed, he could seldom satisfy himself in his "settings" of the stanzas of others. If the metrical and symmetrical features of the lines in hand chanced to disagree with his conception of the motion and proportion befitting in a musical interpretation; if the sentiment were one that failed, whether from lack of appreciation or of sympathy on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... and the beautiful is the harmonious, the symmetrical; hence the essence of virtue consists in the balance of the affections and passions. Of the three classes into which Shaftesbury divides the passions, one, including the "unnatural" or unsocial affections, as malevolence, envy, and cruelty, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... some half-dozen stalks, and left each adorned throughout its length with a neat series of symmetrical bows, she felt that her task was done and that she was at liberty to accompany him. Together they learnt the brook from end to end. Sometimes they walked along the bottom, stirring to right and left of them a host of ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... beauty on earth. To her we ascribe the highest charms belonging to this wonderful element so profusely mingled in all God's works. Her form is molded and finished in exquisite delicacy of perfection. The earth gives us no form more perfect, no features more symmetrical, no style more chaste, no movements more graceful, no finish more complete; so that our artists ever have and ever will regard the woman-form of humanity as the most perfect earthly type of beauty. This form is most perfect and symmetrical ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... erect on his proud head, his two incongruous long auburn curls, that did duty as a "war-lock," floating backward in the breeze, he ran so deftly, so swiftly, with so assured and so graceful a gait that the mere observation of such symmetrical motion was a pleasure. The trader had scarcely a pulse of anxiety. Indeed, disingenuously profiting by the tip afforded by Herbert's Spring, he was heavily ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... with his eyes, but only with a symmetrical curving and lengthening of his finely cut, thin lips. He smiled so then. "Yes, I am willing to take some land for the debt, since you have not the money," ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... ends of the logs over each other, and securing them by notches at the corners, so deep as to allow the edges of the logs to meet. Lay two short logs first, and continue building until all the thirty-six logs are used, and we will now have four symmetrical sides about six feet in height. The place for the door should now be selected. The uppermost log should form its upper outline, and the two sides should be cleanly and straightly cut with a crosscut saw. The ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... came down the hill carrying his greatcoat slung at his back upon his crook, and balanced by the long handle projecting in front. He was very ready and pleased to show his crook, which, however, was not so symmetrical in shape as those which are represented upon canvas. Nor was the handle straight; it was a rough stick—the first, evidently, that ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... Milton's classification is an after-thought. The pamphlets that he names were all written by him much about the same time, between 1643 and 1645; but the true history of their origin is more interesting and less symmetrical than the later invented scheme of classification. The Divorce pamphlets were written because Milton was unhappily married. The Areopagitica was written because his heterodox views concerning marriage had ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... features there is nothing to distinguish them from the red race elsewhere, they have strong national traits. Physically they are rather undersized, averaging not over five feet four inches in height, but strong-limbed, agile, and symmetrical. Their foreheads are low, their noses more allied to the Aryan types than usual with their race, and their skulls of that form defined ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... house-cricket. The nature and object of this insect music are more uniform than the structure and situation of the instrument by which it is produced. This differs in each of the three allied families above mentioned. In the crickets the wing-cases are symmetrical; both have straight edges and sharply-scored nervures adapted to produce the stridulation. A distinct portion of their edges is not, therefore, set apart for the elaboration of a sound-producing instrument. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... miniature libraries as the ten-volume The Children's Hour or the eight- volume Children's Classics. This procedure has been both expensive and inconvenient for teacher and students, besides not supplying some of the material desirable in any symmetrical ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the English Channel to the south of France; it unites Australia to New Guinea on the north and to Tasmania on the south, connects the Malay Archipelago along the broad shelf east of China with Japan, unites north-western America with Asia, sweeps in a symmetrical curve outwards from north-eastern America towards Greenland, curving downwards outside Newfoundland and holding Hudson Bay in the centre of a shallow dish. In many places it represents the land planed down by wave action ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... I usually drew easy and simple crosses and squares. These were some of the set forms. My original designs were not always symmetrical nor sufficiently characteristic, two faults with which my mother had little patience. The quietness of her oversight made me feel strongly responsible and dependent upon my own judgment. She treated me as a dignified little individual ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... object is the symmetrical development of all the muscles, not one at the expense of the other. So, for that reason, don't pin your faith to dumb-bells and Indian clubs and neglect more necessary exercise. If you do you will in time find yourself possessed of big Sandow arms that will make the rest of you look as spindle-like ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... same subject before the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A little later, in 1890, it was again proposed at a meeting of the same Association that, in order to consider the question of the construction and adoption of a symmetrical and scientific language, a congress should be held, delegates being in proportion to the number of ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... appeared so beautiful to him before. Her face was as pure as a pearl; her glossy hair, falling loosely away from her white forehead, was simply coiled at the back of her small head, thus revealing its symmetrical proportions to the best advantages. Her great brown eyes glowed and scintillated, her nostrils dilated, her lips quivered with outraged pride ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... handsome man, with well-brushed hair, well-trimmed whiskers, a forehead rather low, but very symmetrical, a well-shaped nose, and a small, pursy mouth. The worst of his face was that you could by no means remember it. But he knew himself to be a handsome man, and he could not understand how he could be laid aside for so ugly a lout as this stranger from England. Captain M'Gramm was ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... blocks of stone, groups of workmen were busy with great chisels and heavy hammers, hewing and chipping and fashioning the material that it might be ready for use in the early spring. Even the river was changed. Men were standing upon the ice, cutting it into long symmetrical strips, to be hauled ashore. Some of the great pieces were already separated from the main ice, and sturdy fellows, clad in dark woollen, were poling them over the dark water to the foot of the gently sloping road where heavy carts stood ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... to draw a symmetrical pattern for the woodworker, take a piece of stiff paper of the right length and width, fold it down the middle, draw one half to suit and cut out with shears. The style of moulding called Ogee is to be preferred. A simple ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... Buddha spirit and themselves produce various reflexes, including Bodhisattvas, human Buddhas and goddesses like Tara. The date when these beliefs first became part of the accepted Mahayana creed cannot be fixed but probably the symmetrical arrangement of five Buddhas is not anterior to ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... and group his facts under inductive systems so as to reach the general laws which connect and explain them. He should, still further, be like the artist, and endeavor so to exhibit these connections under literary forms that they present to the reader the impression of a symmetrical and organic unity, in which each part or event bears definite relations to all others. Collection and collation are not enough. The historian must "work up his field notes," as the geologists say, so as to extract from ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... deepest rose, purple and white massed together without order or view to effect. In one of the little fortresses—for so these antique farmhouses may be called—we saw a rustic piazza, pillars and roof of rude unhewn stone blazing with petunias, no attempt whatever at making the structure whole, symmetrical or graceful to the eye. It seems as if these homely though rich farmers, or rather farmers' wives, could not do without flowers, above the street jutting many aerial gardens, the only touch of beauty in the work-a-day picture. These interiors ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... broke in a new voice. A portly man whose face was adorned with symmetrical scrolls of yellow hair had come out of a glass cage in the rear of the store and was bearing down upon Anthony. "See ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... to-day upon an eminence that overlooks more than two decades spent in efforts to ameliorate the condition of seven million immortal souls by opening before their hitherto dark and cheerless lives possibilities of development into a perfect and symmetrical manhood ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... battery of boilers, kettles, basins, and copper plates were hung in symmetrical order. On the dresser, near the clock, was a complete service of old Aprey china, in bright and varied colors, and not far from the chimney, which was ornamented with a crucifix of yellow copper, was a set of shelves, attached to the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the first hills of importance we had seen since leaving the lower Amazon. Those were the hills of Petronilla, where a mass of volcanic rocks and some interesting hot springs were to be found. A ridge ran from south-east to north-west in symmetrical undulations up to 1,000 ft. from Petronilla to Cancha Huayo. It rose quite abruptly from the flat alluvial land. Where a land-slide had occurred it showed an upper stratum of grey alluvial deposit 10 ft. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... diffused their mysterious influence over her countenance. Thick braids of soft, brown hair, were braided over her round, childlike forehead: and her dress of some dark, rich color, was in admirable harmony with her peculiar style. Her proportions were small and symmetrical, and it was wonderful to see the serious look of dignity with which she sat in that old crimson chair, knitting away on a comfort, as fast as her little white fingers could shuffle the needles. For what purpose could such a fragile small creature have been created? She looked as if it would ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... are more serviceable as models than any of their sister itinerants. They have symmetrical forms, which are partially revealed through the scantiness of their clothing. Their coffee-coloured features are, besides, regular and not ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... What was known of the world to Ptolemy in the second century made up the sum of knowledge possessed by the geographers of all the following centuries to the thirteenth. Indeed, the mediaeval tendency to establish symmetrical measurements, to adopt fanciful explanations, and to find analogies in all things, obscured earlier knowledge and made geographers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries less correct in their knowledge of the world than were those of the second or the third. [Footnote: ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... with the crimson plume in her brown hat; I believe the girl affects grays and brown with a dash of crimson, because they remind her of a linnet, and she is like a linnet in her low, sweet voice, not strong, but clear. She will be a lovely, symmetrical woman when she comes out of the fire purified. How do I know she will ever be put in any furnace? Because all God's children must suffer at some times, and then they know they are his children. And she loves Will so vehemently, so idolatrously, that I fear ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... corresponded strikingly to the conceptions we had formed of the Southern Semitic crania, and the whole make of the man was of the same character. The high cranium, so lofty especially in the dome,—the slight and symmetrical backward slope of the whole head,—the powerful level brows, and beneath these the dark, deep eyes, so full of shadowed fire,—the Arabian complexion,—the sharp-cut, intense lines of the face,—the light, tall, erect stature,—the quick axial poise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Munro), is a much better piece of work, as I saw when it reached me, than most of the Clyde things. "The Clyde amulets are," says Dr. Munro, "neither strictly oval," (nor are very many Australian samples,) "nor well finished, nor symmetrical, being generally water-worn fragments of shale or clay slate. . . ." They thus resemble ancient ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... of shades of color. There is no beauty without life, and life is movement, diversity. These elements are found in beautiful and also in sublime objects. A beautiful object is complete, finished, limited with symmetrical parts. A sublime object whose forms, though not out of proportion, are less determined, ever awakens in us the feeling of the infinite. In objects of sense all qualities that can produce the feeling of the beautiful ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... own peculiar domain, then becoming disagreeable, and is always a dangerous style in inexperienced hands. We think, however, paradoxical as the opinion may appear, that every one who is a true lover of nature, and has been bred in her wild school, will be an admirer of this symmetrical designing, in its place; and will feel, as often as he contemplates it, that the united effect of the wide and noble steps, with the pure water dashing over them like heated crystal, the long shadows of the cypress groves, the golden leaves ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... The symmetrical structure and artificial polish of contemporaneous French literature, while it was not without some good influence on English prose, was less beneficial to poetry, and its worst effect was on the drama, which soon ceased to be pictures of human beings in action and became only descriptive ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... one long avenue, and we were surprised to find, upon coming nearer, that the forest which at first appeared to be but a heterogeneous mass of stems, was set out and arranged in the most orderly and symmetrical manner, and we saw that we should be enabled to find our way about much more easily than we had at first feared. In accordance with our guide's directions, we began jotting down in our memory tablets the names of the different trees, and the ...
— Silver Links • Various
... lowest and most ancient marine organisms are the Foraminifera, little masses of living jelly, apparently structureless, but which secrete beautiful shelly coverings, often perfectly symmetrical, as varied in form as those of the mollusca and far more complicated. These have been studied with great care by many eminent naturalists, and the late Dr. W.B. Carpenter in his great work—the Introduction to the Study of the Foraminifera—thus ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... monsters of antiquity and mythology restored in life, with which the terrestrials had been thrown into such close contact, roamed about its polished walls. Not even the fiercest could affect them, and they would but see themselves reflected in any vain assaults. The domed symmetrical cylinder stood there as a monument to human ingenuity and skill, and the travellers' last thought as they fell asleep was, "Man ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... gardens, forming a dense mass of verdure, in the midst of which, and peeping out here and there in picturesque confusion, were the white walls and roofs of numerous buildings. Tall and graceful minarets, Hindoo temples and Mohammedan mosques, symmetrical in shape and gorgeous in colouring, appeared interspersed in endless numbers among the densely-packed houses inside the city, their domes and spires shining with a brilliant radiance, clear-cut against the sky. Above all, in the far distance towered the Jama Masjid, or Great ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... apparent; some with flat and perfectly smooth floors, variegated with streaks; others in which the flat floor is dotted with numerous pits or covered with broken fragments of rock. Occasionally a regularly-formed and unusually symmetrical circular formation makes its appearance; the exterior surface of the wall bristling with terraces rising gradually from the plain, the interior one much more steep, and instead of a flat floor, the inner ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... the world. Many of the vast carved and ornamental masses which diversify the canon have been fitly named temples, as Shiva's Temple, a mile high, carved out of the red Carboniferous limestone, and remarkably symmetrical in its outlines. Near it is the Temple of Isis, the Temple of Osiris, the Buddha Temple, the Horus Temple, and the Pyramid of Cheops. Farther to the east is the Diva Temple, the Brahma Temple, the Temple of Zoroaster, and the Tomb of Odin. ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... which were laid in mortar. The pyramid was an exact square at the base, each side being 82 feet in length, and the height about 60 feet. The stones were admirably cut and polished, and the structure was remarkably symmetrical. Six stages could be discerned by Humboldt, and his account of it says, "A seventh appears to be concealed by the vegetation which covers the sides of the pyramid." A great flight of steps leads to the level summit, by the sides of which are smaller nights. "The facing of ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... head "disposition of the subject," there is a somewhat unsatisfactory sentence. "It contributes to the 'goodness' of the picture," "if it avoid uniformity and positions that are too symmetrical; if it distribute the light well; if by means of it the groups pyramid and unite well; and if it give value to all the parts of the picture by means of each other, in such a manner as that the result shall be a satisfactory whole." There is much here ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... sailor; but the dock yard riggers and carpenters had fairly bedeviled her at least so far as appearances went. First, they had replaced the light rail on her gunwale by heavy, solid bulwarks four feet high, surmounted by hammock nettings at least another foot; so that the symmetrical little vessel, that formerly floated on the foam light as a seagull, now looked like a clumsy, dish-shaped Dutch dogger. Her long, slender wands of masts, which used to swing about as if there were neither shrouds nor stays to support them, were now as taut and stiff as church-steeples, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... chestnut, with a velvety depth and soft look about the hair indescribably rich and elegant. Many a time have I heard ladies dispute the shade and hue of her plush-like coat as they ran their white, jeweled fingers through her silken hair. Her body was round in the barrel and perfectly symmetrical. She was wide in the haunches, without projection of the hip bones, upon which the shorter ribs seemed to lap. High in the withers as she was, the line of her back and neck perfectly curved, while her deep, oblique shoulders and long, thick forearm, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... demoiselle, but as she drew towards sixty it had seemed more convenable to possess a mature label. Certainly Madame Depine had no visible matrimonial advantages over her fellow-lodger at the Hotel des Tourterelles, though in the symmetrical cemetery of Montparnasse (Section 22) wreaths of glass beads testified to a copious domesticity in the far past, and a newspaper picture of a chasseur d'Afrique pinned over her bed recalled—though only the uniform was the dead soldier's—the son she had contributed to France's colonial empire. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... from being ape like in appearance, some of the Aeta are very well-built little men, with broad chests, symmetrical limbs, and well-developed muscles hardened by incessant use. This applies of course only to the young men and boys just approaching manhood, and is especially noticeable in the southern regions, where the Aeta are generally more robust and muscular. The younger females are also as a rule ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... beautiful; there were oranges, lemons, sweet potatoes, and common potatoes, and English vegetables, and the Norfolk Island pine growing to a great height: 'but,' writes Coley, 'it is coarser in the leaf and less symmetrical in shape than I had expected. I thought to have seen the tree of Veitch's nursery garden on a scale three or four times as large, and so I might have done in any of the gardens; but as they grow wild in the ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from Illinois. "He had a herculean frame," writes a contemporary, "with the exception of his lower limbs, which were short and small, dwarfing what otherwise would have been a conspicuous figure.... His large round head surmounted a massive neck, and his features were symmetrical, although his small nose deprived them of dignity."[163] It was his massive forehead, indeed, that redeemed his appearance from the commonplace. Beneath his brow were deep-set, dark eyes that also challenged attention.[164] ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... (49) the (thin cylindrical) (50) neck, not stiff and of a moderate length; straight shoulder-blades, loosely slung above; the fore-legs attached to them, light and set close together; (51) the undistended chest; (52) the light symmetrical sides; the supple, well-rounded loins; the fleshy buttocks; the somewhat sunken flanks; (53) the hips, well rounded, plump at every part, but with a proper interval above; the long and solid thighs, on the outside tense and not too flabby on ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... which are essential to faith and Christian life, are fundamental and ought to be received by the heart and practised, while all other doctrines may be necessary more or less in order to perfect the Christian character and render it more symmetrical, but do not strike the heart of true religion." (L. u. W., 1864, 154.) Observer, March 12 and 19, 1869: "The doctrinal basis of the General Synod demands adoption of the fundamental doctrines of ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... Prussian anatomist remarks that the depression of the forehead (See Figure 3.), is not due to any artificial flattening, such as is practised in various modes by barbarous nations in the Old and New World, the skull being quite symmetrical, and showing no indication of counter-pressure at the occiput; whereas, according to Morton, in the Flat-heads of the Columbia, the frontal and parietal bones are always unsymmetrical.* (* "Natural History Review" Number 2 page ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... ears, nose, all four feet, and the upper side of tail, which are all brownish-black; but as they have red eyes, they may be considered as albinoes. I have received several accounts of their breeding perfectly true. From their symmetrical marks, they were at first ranked as specifically distinct, and were provisionally named L. nigripes[260] Some good observers thought that they could detect a difference in their habits, and stoutly ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... denial of matter that I lost the superfluous flesh, for since I was too fleshy to be of symmetrical ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... between the beats is one interval, one individual. If there were no recurrent impressions, no corresponding points, the field of perception would remain a fluid continuum, without defined and recognizable divisions. The outlines of most things are symmetrical because we choose what symmetrical lines we find to be the boundaries of objects. Their symmetry is the condition of their unity, and their unity of their individuality and ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... polishing pebbles,—a pretty art, but not vested with the glories of sculpture, nor the mathematical magnitude of architecture. He does not walk a demigod, but a stiff Anglicised imitator of French paces. He is a symmetrical, but a small invisible personage at rapier practice." Now, clever as this is, it only proves that Addison is not a Shakspeare or Milton. He does not pretend to be either. He is no demigod, but he is a man, a lady-man if you will, but the lovelier on that account. Besides, he was cut off in ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... not escaped, for a dozen boys had set after them, headed by the tall youth, and the boot-blacks and news-boys had proved themselves decidedly more efficient at stopping runaways than at making symmetrical hay-cocks. ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... forefathers built and our fathers knew. But it is encircled by streets and houses which are not the product of the vale, nor are they marked by any individual character. Rows upon rows of dwellings, symmetrical, mechanical, and monotonous, can give no pleasure to the eye, nor can the mind read in them any story save the commercial enterprise ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... idea in another way. He founded his series on gradations of form, placing together, in one division, all animals that he considered vague and indefinite in form, and in another all those that he considered symmetrical. Under a third head he brought together the Radiates; but his symmetrical division united Articulates, Mollusks, and Vertebrates in the most indiscriminate manner. He sustained his theory by assuming intermediate groups,—as, for instance, the Barnacles between the Mollusks and Articulates, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... a pine forest; the tall symmetrical stems of the trees seemed set by mathematical law, each at a given distance from the other. Whichever way you entered a twilight alley set with tree boles lay before you. Looking up you saw at an immense distance above a pale green roof patined with sparkling and flashing ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the wall, Ranged in rows symmetrical? Through the wall of things external Posterns they to the supernal; Through Earth's battlemented height Loopholes to the Infinite; Through locked gates of place and time, Wickets to the eternal prime Lying round the noisy day Full of ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... although quaint, and rather poor- looking at first sight, owing to its bricky complexion, will bear close examination; indeed, the more you look at it and the better you become reconciled to its proportions. In general contour it is symmetrical and strong; in detail it is neat and compact; and, whilst the colour of it may indicate some singularity, and strike you as being eccentrically variegated, there is nothing in any sense improper about the character of its materials, and as time goes on, and familiarity with them is increased, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... sweet and melodious that I listened to her with unmixed pleasure, the door bell rang, and Mr. Pickle, a man of straight person and medium height, entered. His hair was black, and curled down his neck, which was symmetrical. And, too, his face was singularly expressive, and his features prominent. In a word, his appearance was prepossessing. And in addition to dressing in the fashion of the day, he wore many jewels. His bearing also was graceful; and on entering the room, he addressed the lady with much courtesy, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... some ancestress, long since laid to rest in the family chapel. The very sheets had perhaps been woven by her shuttle. This bedroom, according to old custom, was still the living-room of the family. Sometimes the lord's house was modern, elegant, and symmetrical; it was flanked with pavilions and in front of it was a stone terrace, with a balustrade, on which stood vases for growing plants. Inside the house were high-studded rooms with white walls and gilded mouldings. High-backed, crooked-legged chairs, in ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... an untied shoe, or a dirty face. By thus making every written exercise an exercise in writing, his progress will be increased beyond your expectations, and you will soon see him looking with pleasure at the clean and symmetrical forms which flow so gracefully from his pen, as he goes from line to line over the virgin page, no half-formed or misshapen letters to embarrass, but all in every part as elegantly written ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart |
