"Flatness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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, at its hindmost end, to ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... forty-seven or forty-eight. It was a remarkable face,—a most impressive face. If you could fancy some mighty serpent transformed into man, preserving in the human lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea of that countenance than long descriptions can convey: the width and flatness of frontal; the tapering elegance of contour disguising the strength of the deadly jaw; the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as the emerald,—and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... result in a majority of cases from the employment of some animal as a model. Thus, if an alligator or almost any quadruped is embodied in the vessel, the form tends to become elongated; if a crab or a fish is imitated, there is a tendency to flatness &c. The base is almost universally more or less conical, is rarely flat, and never concave, excepting as the result of the addition of an annular foot or stand. The radical shapes do not undergo any considerable change when rims, necks, handles, legs, and other appendages ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... well be estimated on account of its lowness, and the prevailing flatness of the country round, on which neither a hillock nor eminence of any kind can be discerned. However, it must be immense, and the Landers considered it to be one of the most extensive and thickly inhabited towns, as well as one of the most important ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... surroundings possessed no picturesque charms. The land stretched in uniform flatness from the sluggish Suderelbe to the equally sleepy Seeve, and the Fuchsberg at Ronneburg, with its height of two hundred feet, was a giant of the Alps or Cordilleras, compared to the floor-like evenness of the country round about. From the platform of the tower which Paul had built ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... never knows when events are upon the wing. Almost immediately there came into the flatness of his bored existence a victoria containing those two English ladies he had met—in the unconventional way which characterized his meetings with ladies ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... 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 containing thirty days' supplies ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... the front, and you'll find no difference; look to the rear, and there it is still.' I laughed, and replied that I saw no suitable profession in the whole prospect; which was perhaps to be attributed to its flatness. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... 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 to predict ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... 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
... 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 came in with ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fermentable matter, and render them transparently fine and preserving; thus immediately fitting them for the bottle, or putting up into tight casks, for home consumption or exportation, which will soon recover the beer or ale so treated from the flatness that will necessarily be induced by a long exposure to the air during the continuance of the operation; further to remedy which, I would recommend putting into each barrel, before the cask is filled with this beer, half ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... 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 form ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... sucking noise. But the prospect was dreary; the distant horizons were blotted under drifting mists of rain; the eternal monotony of the earth lay open to the sombre low sky without a single adornment, without a single variation from its melancholy flatness. Near at hand the wires between the telegraph poles vibrated with a faint humming under the multitudinous fingering of the myriad of falling drops, striking among them and dripping off steadily from one to another. The poles themselves were dark and swollen and glistening ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... could go from Dan to Beersheba and say that all was barren, and I must pity the man who travels from Bergen op Zoom to Amsterdam and says that Holland, with all its flatness, ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... sense of sudden motionlessness throughout all things; as if those who bore me (a ghastly train!) had outrun, in their descent, the limits of the limitless, and paused from the wearisomeness of their toil. After this I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness—the madness of a memory which ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... vibrations of different instruments, at intervals which can only jar. The n'est-ce que cela, the inability to enjoy, of successful ambition and favoured, passionate love, is famous; and short of love even and ambition, we all know the flatness of long-desired pleasures. King Solomon, who had not been enough of an ascetic, as we all know, and therefore ended off in cynicism, knew that there is not only satiety as a result of enjoyment; but a sort of satiety also, an absence of keenness, an incapacity for ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... 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], supination[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... a professional drunkard on Division street, and said that if he should happen to get drunk Monday night and Hatch should happen to arrest him, he would give the drunkard five dollars if the drunkard would mash Frank's new hat. The fellow said he would flatten it flatter than flatness itself. Just after dark Mr. Hatch was walking down Third street, "Whoop, hurrah for Tilden, (hic) 'endrix." The remark seemed so out of place that Frank went down there. The man was lying on the sidewalk, and telling the barrel to roll over and not take up all the bed. Mr. Hatch accosted the ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... print, from not being attached to the mount all over, is apt, especially when in a large size, to be somewhat wavy and wanting in flatness. Another plan recommended, as giving a surface resembling albumen paper, is to paste the back of the print without moistening the surface, and so mount. Some prints that have been shown thus treated had so strongly curled the cards upon which they were ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... 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
... of the Scotch patois, so full of terms flavor'd like wild fruits or berries. Then I should make an allowance to Burns which cannot be made for any other poet. Curiously even the frequent crudeness, haste, deficiencies, (flatness and puerilities by no means absent) prove upon the whole not out of keeping in any comprehensive collection of his works, heroically printed, "following copy," every piece, every line according to originals. Other poets might ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 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. ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... flatness of this depends on the construction of the rifle and the propulsive force employed, and varies as does velocity with the nature, excellence, and amount of the explosive, the correctness of the principles upon which the ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... range. All modern guns are capable of being made to shoot straight; but their precision of range depends partly on the successful designing of the gun and ammunition, so as to give uniform velocities, and partly on the flatness of the trajectory. The greater the velocity, the lower the trajectory, and the greater the chance of striking the target. Supposing a heavy gun to be mounted as in the fortresses round our coasts, and aimed with due care, the distance of the object being approximately known, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... am exceedingly fond of wild and lonely scenery, and believe that I have the faculty of being as much impressed by it as any man living. But the prairie fell, by far, short of my preconceived idea. I felt no such emotions as I do in crossing Salisbury Plain. The excessive flatness of the scene makes it dreary, but tame. Grandeur is certainly not its characteristic. I retired from the rest of the party, to understand my own feelings the better; and looked all round, again and again. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... functional setup or maybe the dead flatness of our voices in the damped room, but we do not have so much to talk about any more. We automatically take places at the table, all at one end, leaving seven ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... spread widely in Berlin, which had in the late blessed Nicolai its chief organ, and in the General German Library its arsenal. The most deplorable mediocrity began to show itself more repulsively than ever, and flatness and insipidity blew themselves up like ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... old and worn, Persis thought, more like the man who must settle for the spring finery of a family of grown daughters, than a complacent young husband paying for his wife's first new gown since the wedding. There was a flatness in his voice that matched the weariness in his eyes, and forthwith a dozen questions raced ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... mused for a considerable time. Then, becoming conscious of the flatness, staleness and unprofitableness of it all, as far as my elderly selfishness was concerned, I threw my extinct cigar end into the fire, and thanking God that I had come to an age when all this storm and fuss over a creature of the opposite sex was a thing of the past, and yet with an unregenerate ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... A deadly flatness, although Olga's absence made no difference, descended on the three. Lucia did not resume her arm-work, for after all these years her acting might be supposed to be good enough for Riseholme without further ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... The flatness of that, again! And she knew there were people who called her intelligent. Fortunately he did not seem to notice it; but her laugh continued to sound in her own ears—the coquettish chirp of middle age! She decided that if he spoke again—if he said anything—she ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... best of all about this later delight, was that it left no bitter taste behind it; in youth, a day of abandonment to elation, a day of breezy talk, hearty laughter, active pleasure, would often leave a sense of flatness and dissatisfaction behind it; but the later joy had no sort of weariness as its shadow; it left one invigorated ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... fish, which was a large one, sufficed for both breakfast and dinner for the three of them. The boy, a bright little fellow, with the ruddy brown cheeks of an Italian peasant boy, but with the slight squint of eyes and flatness of nose peculiar to these natives of the North, watched every move they ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... the Rhine reverts to its former flatness, the hills vanish, the shores are level, but the southern influence is felt, and the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... 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
... flatness of the terrain in this region and entire absence of cover for the attacker, whether the movement be frontal or enveloping, was responsible for the heavy losses the British incurred in this engagement. Here there were no protecting villages, hedges, or banks. A swift, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... appears to be formed from the fibres of the cirrus sinking into a horizontal position, at the same time that they approach each other sideways. This cloud is to be distinguished by its flatness and great horizontal extension, in proportion to its height; a character which it always retains, under all its various forms. As this cloud is generally changing its figure, and slowly sinking, it has been ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... almost entirely to themselves; the county 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 ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... bring them here in about an hour,' she thought to herself in great flatness of spirit. ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the queer-looking missive into his private sitting-room and carefully examined it, back and front, before slitting it open. The envelope was of the cheapest kind, the big splotch of red wax at the flap had been pressed into flatness by the summary method of forcing a coarse-grained thumb upon it; the address was inscribed in ill-formed characters only too evidently made with difficulty by a bad pen, which seemed to have been dipped into watery ink at every third or fourth ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... never seen a vessel of more beautiful lines. Sailors would find, I think, but one fault in 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 any walking ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... passed at about a quarter of a mile's distance from the eminence, called Haribee or Harabee-brow, which, though it is very moderate in size and height, is nevertheless seen from a great distance around, owing to the flatness of the country through which the Eden flows. Here many an outlaw, and border-rider of both kingdoms, had wavered in the wind during the wars, and scarce less hostile truces, between the two countries. Upon Harabee, in latter days, other ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... resignation. "I can't lie to you. I have only a broken heart. Beyond friendship and gratitude, I have nothing to offer you. I can't even promise that I will ever stop loving—him. But—" her words came with the flatness of unending soul-fag—"I suppose I can give you the lesser things; fidelity, respect; all the petty allegiance that can go ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... was more than two miles from the ranch did she show herself upon one of the numberless small ridges which, blended together in the distance, give that deceptive look of flatness to the mesa. Even two miles away, in that clear air that dwarfs distance so amazingly, Wagalexa Conka might recognize her if he looked at her with sufficient attention. But Wagalexa Conka, she told herself with a flash of her black eyes, would not look. Wagalexa ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... subjects one of the other, differed considerably in character and culture. But the scarcity of timber and the lack of good building-stone except in the limestone table-lands and more distant mountains of upper Mesopotamia, the abundance of clay, and the flatness of the country, imposed upon the builders of both nations similar restrictions of conception, form, and material. Both peoples, moreover, were probably, in part at least, of Semitic race.[4] The Chaldans attained civilization as ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... on the thirteenth of December to find everywhere the peculiar flatness that always follows a day which for weeks has been the focus of one's aims and thoughts ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... find ourselves on the prairie, amid the waving grass, with the land rolling on before us in a succession of gentle sweeps, never rising so as to impede the view, or apparently changing in its general level, but yet without the monotony of flatness. We were on the prairie, but still I felt no satisfaction. It was private property, divided among holders and pastured over by private cattle. Salisbury Plain is as wild, and Dartmoor almost wilder. Deer, they told me, were to be had within reach of Dixon, ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... strong as that on my feet behind: that I could not walk with any security, for if either of my hinder feet slipped, I must inevitably fail." He then began to find fault with other parts of my body: "the flatness of my face, the prominence of my nose, mine eyes placed directly in front, so that I could not look on either side without turning my head: that I was not able to feed myself, without lifting one of my fore-feet to my mouth: and therefore nature ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... more than a hamlet. There is not much that is picturesque in Beacon Hargate, or its neighbourhood. The Beacon Hill itself is as little like a hill as it well can be, and acquires what prominence it has by virtue of the extreme flatness of the surrounding country. A tuft of Scotch firs upon its crest is visible from a distance of twenty miles in some directions. A clear but sluggish stream winds among its sedges and water-lilies round the western side of the Beacon Hill, and washes the edge of a ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... were so bad.' 'What explanation did you give her?' I said. 'That men were born bad but women made themselves so,' and then she explained that I had been kept waiting because she had mistaken me for some man whose name resembled mine and who wanted to persuade her of the flatness ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... Post-Office authorities, with the sanction of the Treasury, Mr. Telford proceeded to make detailed surveys of an entire new post-road between London and Morpeth. In laying it out, the main points which he endeavoured to secure were directness and flatness; and 100 miles of the proposed new Great North Road, south of York, were laid out in a perfectly straight line. This survey, which was begun in 1824, extended over several years; and all the requisite arrangements had been made for beginning the works, ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... end of the third day they had their never-to-be-forgotten first glimpse of the mighty Spirit, the dream river of the North, whose name evokes the thought of a garden in a bleak land. The unvarying flatness of the portage with its standing pools, and the interminable lofty wood that had hemmed them in for three days, had given them the sense of travelling on the bottom of the world, and that somewhere ahead must be a hill to climb. What then was their astonishment this ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... clever, and devotedly affectionate, and indeed the atmosphere of mutual affection seemed to float over the circle like a fresh and scented summer air. One used to feel, as one drove away, that though one's visit had been a pleasure, there would be none of the flatness which sometimes follows the departure of a guest, but that one was leaving them to a home life that was better than sociability, a life that was both sacred and beautiful, full to the brim of affection, yet without ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... alive. One of his lungs began to heal, the other promised to follow its example, and he was assured he might outweather a dozen winters if he would betake himself to those climates in which consumptives chiefly congregate. As he had grown extremely fond of London, he cursed the flatness of exile: but at the same time that he cursed he conformed, and gradually, when he found his sensitive organ grateful even for grim favours, he conferred them with a lighter hand. He wintered abroad, as the phrase is; basked in the sun, stopped at home when ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... at the town of Cheyenne, in Wyoming Territory. Cheyenne, once boasting the title (I was told) "The Magic City of the Plains," was located upon a dreary flatness, although from it one might see, far southwest, the actual Rocky Mountains in Colorado Territory, looking, at this distance of one hundred miles, like low dark clouds. The up grade in the west promised that we should soon ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... land! I never before grasped the charm of French colouring; the pinkish-yellow of the pan-tiled roofs, the lavender-grey or dim green of the shutters, the self-respecting shapes and flatness of the houses, unworried by wriggling ornamentation or lines coming up in order that they may go down again; the universal plane trees with their variegated trunks and dancing lightness—nothing more charming than ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... the river, as they could tell by the gradual sloping of the land to the east, and the flatness of the country. ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... pedigree would no doubt bear me out: there is as much of the Magyar as of the Pole in your anatomy. Athlete, and yet a tangle of nerves; a ferocious brute at bottom, I dare say, for your broad forehead inclines to flatness; under your bristling beard your jaw must protrude, and the base of your skull is ominously thick. And, with all that, capable of ideal transports: when that girl played and sang to-night I saw the ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... Mortimer," answered Mary, turning quickly with a bright face. "Flatness has its own beauty. I sometimes feel as if room was all I wanted; and of that there is so much there! You see over the tree-tops, too, and that is good— ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... manners, by his lurking and stealthy habit of surprising his victims. His eyes are partially encircled by a disk of feathers that yields a peculiarly significant expression to his face. His hooked bill turned downwards, so as to resemble the nose in a human countenance, the general flatness of his features, and his upright position, give him a grave and intelligent look; and it was this expression that caused him to be selected by the ancients as the emblem of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Phrase pass unregarded; but where the Verse is not built upon Rhymes, there Pomp of Sound, and Energy of Expression, are indispensably necessary to support the Stile, and keep it from falling into the Flatness ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... had a faintly foreign sound, but his English was faultless. The very slight peculiarity which marked it was rather a level flatness in the tone than an accent It suggested a time when it had cost him an effort to speak the language, though the time had long passed away. The good-nature with which he accepted Paul's rebuff lulled the youngster's suspicions, and lulled it the more completely ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... south of San Nicolas and Rozario, the country is really level. Scarcely anything which travellers have written about its extreme flatness can be considered as exaggeration. Yet I could never find a spot where, by slowly turning round, objects were not seen at greater distances in some directions than in others; and this manifestly proves inequality in the plain. At sea, ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... depth give flatness. Life and love without feeling produce shallow, superficial natures. Feeling is the need of men to stretch out toward ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... 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 these, he said, at 'home,' meaning at Lord Scamperdale's—Amelia thought, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... excitable and passionate; but the excitation and passion had all been displayed for him till now. How different when she approached other affairs of life than love, and brought her emotional characteristics to bear upon them! A sensation of unutterable flatness overtook Raymond. She began talking of finding a house, and was not aware that his ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... least 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. ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... been so persistent in sociological thought and writings that 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 ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... graceful, as is usual with a vessel of war. Her sails were in soft 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 ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... fish-eye lens.' A globe refracts the light that reaches it from all directions, and if it is placed as the lens is in the detectascope so that one half of it catches the light, all this light will be refracted through it. Ordinary lenses, because of their flatness, have a range of only a few degrees, the widest in use, I believe, taking in only ninety- six degrees, or a little over a quarter of a circle. So you see my detectascope has a range almost twice as wide as ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... flatness which ensues when an expected excitement is postponed at the last moment, leaving the hours to drag along a slow, uneventful course. It was long since Miss Briskett had felt so consciously lonely and depressed as at her solitary dinner that evening. In the drawing-room, even ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... curtain of pink and mauve and deep purple merging into the fathomless blue, where already the stars were beginning to quiver. The house stood on the edge of a little forest, which had boldly asserted itself in the wide flatness. At this point in the west the prairie merged into an undulating territory, where hill and wood rolled away from the banks of the Saskatchewan, making another England in beauty. The forest was a sort of advance-post of that land ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... face—a most impressive face. If you could fancy some mighty serpent transformed into man, preserving in the human lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea of that countenance than long descriptions can convey: the width and flatness of frontal—the tapering elegance of contour disguising the strength of the deadly jaw—the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as the emerald—and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... figure! She was in black, carrying her only ornament, an embossed silver girdle and chatelaine, the gift of her husband in their first year of marriage. As she paused, motionless, in the clear sunshine, her great height and her great thinness and flatness brought out with emphasis the masculine carriage of the shoulders and the strong markings of the face. In this moment of solitude, however, the mistress of Coryston Place and of the great domain on which she looked, allowed herself an expression which ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it idly, through the course of supper. At intervals he heard her voice, a little, high-pitched laugh with a curious, underlying flatness: not of tone, her modulations were delicate and exact; but deeper. Again he was dimly conscious of an aspect of her which eluded every effort to fix and define. He could not even comprehend his dwelling upon the immaterial traits ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... her sheets, but her expression testified to flatness within. The world no longer cared about her, and a ship was not a home. When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors went tumbling above her head, she had cried; she would cry this evening; she ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... 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 with more than one specimen of this falling off. We select it from the Abbess's ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... one hand against the flannel that enveloped her face. She made the usual polite speeches of hope, expectation, and promise concerning the new-comer, and stayed about until the gentlemen went. Then an inexpressible flatness fell upon Bessie, and she would probably have wept in earnest, but for the sight of Janey Fricker standing aloof and gazing at her wistfully for an invitation to draw near. Somebody to succor was quite in Bessie's ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... at once that neither Priscilla nor Jimmy Kinsella understood them. He felt a warm affection for Miss Rutherford rise in his heart when she told Jimmy, who sat humped up over his oar, to keep his back flat. Jimmy merely smiled in reply. He had known since he was two years old that the flatness or roundness of the rower's back has nothing whatever to do with the progress of a boat in Rosnacree Bay. A few minutes later she accused Priscilla of "bucketing," and Frank loved her for the word. Priscilla ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... judged—and rightly—that he was already there. The fact was that he had been there ever since entering the saloon. After two hours the train, greatly diminished in length, came to rest in the midst of a dark flatness, and the entire population of the coach vanished out of it in the twinkling of an eye, and Mr. Prohack saw the name 'Frinton' on a flickering oil-lamp, and realised that he was at the gates of the most fashionable resort ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... upper Rhine valley—which is by no means without charm but is nevertheless monotonous in its flatness—was considered a real paradise of natural scenic beauty, while the middle course of the river from Ruedesheim to Coblenz, with its rich splendor of gorges, rocks, castles and forests, was appreciated rather by way of contrast. In the upper Rheingau ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... stretched on a rough bed with wrists and feet heavily ironed. These manacles were hardly needed, for he was severely wounded, and seemed incapable of rising from his pallet. I never saw so repulsive a countenance; and the flatness of the head was quite remarkable. His eyes were very prominent, and had the restless look of a hunted animal, which was painful in the extreme; but there was absolutely no redeeming expression of human feeling in the dark coarse face. Well, there was something human about him though. I was ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... close to the spot, and all the cordage and tackle of every description being stored in the capstan-house. But this did not at all chime in with Lance's plans, so he merely remarked that it would do well enough if no better place could be found, but that the flatness of the ground and the consequent shoal water at that spot would prove serious difficulties in the way of launching; and that it would be advisable before deciding to give the entire shore of the ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... case, although there may be casual variations in the hue of the material poured out and moulded. All these forlorn folk are either verging toward the written-out condition or have reached the last level of flatness. Like the great painters who work for Manchester or New York millionaires, these novelists produce stuff which is only shoddy; they lower their high calling, and they prepare themselves to pass away into the ranks of the nameless millions whose works are ranged along ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... 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 ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Centerpieces.—Lace that is used on centerpieces is not fulled, but is just held in enough to lie flat. The best way to get this flatness is to draw the thread of the lace and fasten one end to the linen, leaving enough to make a neat seam, and then to adjust fullness so that it lies evenly. When right side is up one cannot ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... peasant-woman has labored out-of-doors for many generations. The result has been the gradual approach to each other of her hips and shoulders, the extinguishment of that portion of her person known as the waist, and some noticeable flatness over the cerebral organs; but the German peasant-woman has her right, and that is worth any sacrifice, you know. If she prefers hoeing cabbages to spinning flax, who shall hinder her? If all women should prefer hoeing cabbages to spinning ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... beginning of the nineteenth century. Alders and willows overhang the stream, which winds its way to the south-west, and about two miles farther on one arrives again at Cowley Bridge. The Valley of the Exe gets ever wider and flatter, and after Exeter has been passed the flatness on either side of the banks increases as the river draws near ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... my uncle too," Urquhart said, and the fact formed a shadowy bond. But Peter's tone had struck a note of flatness that faintly indicated a lack of enthusiasm as to the menage. This note was, to Peter's delicately attuned ears, absent from Urquhart's voice. Peter wondered if Lord Hugh's brother (supposing it to be a paternal ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... inimitable sort of easy self-confidence which, as he had said just now, enables its owner to float. Except in years he was not young; he could not manage to be "clubable"; he was serious and awkward at a supper party; he was altogether without the effervescence which is necessary in order to avoid flatness. He did his work also in the same conscientious but leaden way; officers and men alike felt it. All this Francis knew perfectly well; but instead of acknowledging it, he tried quite fruitlessly ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... which resembles the true Bos Caffer of South Africa has very massive convex horns that unite in front, and completely cover the forehead as with a shield; the other variety has massive, but perfectly flat horns of great breadth, that do not quite unite over the os frontis, although nearly so; the flatness of the horns continues in a rough surface, somewhat resembling the bark of a tree, for about twelve inches; the horns then become round, and curve gracefully inwards, like those of the convex species. Buffaloes are very dangerous and determined animals; but, although more accidents occur ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... hallucination was still strong, a certain fierce savor of religious intolerance; but now that that has died out, and no material prosperity has come to let them share in the larger life of their century, there is a flatness, a mean absence of warmth or color, a deadness to all ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... man gave up his business and was now a respected automobile man and mechanic; why the former saloon keeper was the happy owner of a stock farm; why Frank Burton no longer bragged about being an atheist but went to church with Jennie; why Mrs. Rosenwinkle no longer argued about the flatness of the earth. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... life in the slime. When he pounded on the tank, the stuff collapsed in upon itself in withering flatness. ...
— Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly? • Bryce Walton
... "a man must be married once in his life. The sooner he gets the ceremony over the better. My engagement has hung fire rather. There is always a kind of flatness about the thing between cousins, I daresay. Neither of us is in a hurry. Mabel has so many ideas and occupations, from ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... in the luminous space 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 greatest, town ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... 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 buildings rising in a superb amphitheatre ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... 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 ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... great flatness of floor, with extreme breadth, carried well forward and aft, and possessing the utmost buoyancy, as well as capacity for stowage. They were carried as paddle-box boats (inverted), and thus protected the paddles as well as being ready ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... love, except good Mrs. Hockin, who went away by train immediately, I spent such a wretched time in that town that I longed to be back in the Bridal Veil in the very worst of weather. The ooze of the shore and the reek of the water, and the dreary flatness of the land around (after the glorious heaven-clad heights, which made me ashamed of littleness), also the rough, stupid stare of the men, when I went about as an American lady may freely do in America, and the sharpness of every body's voice (instead of the genial tones which those who can ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... summit of a kind of table-land; vast bodies of ice, every block weighing hundreds and perhaps thousands of tons lay scattered over it; yet for the space of a mile or so the character was that of flatness. Southwards the range went upwards to a coastal front of some hundred feet, with a huddle of peaks and strange configurations behind soaring to an elevation from the sea-line of two or three hundred feet. Northwards the range sloped gradually, with such a shelving of its hinder part that I ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... girl's hands. They walked now silent, expectant every moment of the exit that somehow baffled, and at last they came upon the noble lawn. It stretched from their feet into a remote encroaching eve, no trees beyond visible, no break in all its grey-green flatness edged on either hand by wood. And now the sky ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... were 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 ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the people, therefore, principally breed this species of cattle, and instead of idle shepherd boys amusing themselves with little flutes, and guiding the sheep by throwing stones at them, the herds here are driven by mounted horsemen with long poles. The flatness of the country and the frequency of oxen will serve to illustrate the exactness of Bible narratives, particularly in the matter of the wheeled carriage and the kine used for conveying the ark of God from this place, Ekron, to Bethshemesh ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... height could not be found, her position was not enviable. The third lady preferred an uneasy posture among the ribs and cordage of the boat, and I lay down on the paving-stones of the quay, having found from experience that, in the matter of beds, flatness is the most indispensable of qualities, while hardness is not so awful as one might suppose. Where my comrade the collegian ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... lacking out of it to Lambert as he looked across the verdant flatness with pensive eyes, that great, gray something that took hold of a man and drew him into its larger life, smoothed the wrinkles out of him, and stood him upright on his feet with the breath deeper in him than ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... owing, my lord, to the flatness of the mermaid's foot. But no; that can not be; for mermaids are ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... that when he brushes up against the world." Jeff added his own criticism thoughtfully. "The weak spot in him is a sort of flatness of mind. This makes him afraid of new ideas. He wants to be respectable, and respectability is the ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... tributes to men who have deserved well of the country. On the other hand, it not unfrequently publishes jokes the birth of which considerably antedates that of the United States itself; and it sometimes descends to a level of trifling flatness and vapidity which no English paper of the kind can hope to equal. It is hard—for a British critic at any rate—to see any perennial interest in the long series of highly exaggerated drawings and jests referring to the gutter children of New York, a series in which the same threadbare motifs are ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... continued to gaze, the Moon, instead of presenting the usual flatness of her disc, began decidedly to show a surface somewhat convex. Had the Sun been shining on her obliquely, the shadows would have certainly thrown the great mountains into strong relief. The eye could then bury itself deep in the yawning chasms of the craters, and easily ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... return 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 lecture on his duty toward Sue. He thought she had in some way ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... early summer. Its architect seems to have feared this gloominess, for he planned great bay windows for three rooms, one above the other. He built the bay. It juts out for the whole height of the house, breaking the flatness of the northern wall. But his heart failed him in the end. He dared not put such a window in the house. He walled up the whole flat front of the bay. Only in its sides did he place windows. Through these there is a side view of the sea and a side view of the main wall of the house. They are comparatively ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... the rest of that night travelled hard towards the river. As the day broke Abou Fatma again bade them halt. They were in a desolate open country, whereon the smallest protection was magnified by the surrounding flatness. Feversham and Trench gazed eagerly to their right. Somewhere in that direction and within the range of their eyesight flowed the Nile, but ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... 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 ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... now and, if you like, I will send you some of them. I know one gets them early in London; but don't you like best to open yourself a box from the country and see them lying in bunches with their leaves. I like even the slight flatness they have; but mine are very little flattened; I am good at packing flowers! My guardian always tells me so! You are probably right in not caring to see the papers; they are always much alike in what they say. It was only the glimpse of the great enthusiasm they gave that I thought ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... away there were mountains, but he suddenly realized the remarkable flatness of the ground over which they were flying. From the edge of the world, behind, to the very edge of these far-distant hills, the ground was flat. There were gullies and depressions here and there, but no hills. ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... invaluable as a means of flattening zinc plate or shaping it in any way. During the work it may be held by means of an old cloth. Zinc sheet which has been heated between iron plates and flattened by pressure retains its flatness very fairly well ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... of the long island Oland on the left, and on the right by Schmoland. In front rose the mountain-island the Jungfrau, to which every Swede points with self-satisfied pride. Its height is only remarkable compared with the flatness around; beside the proud giant-mountain of the same name in Switzerland it would seem like a ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... Wolds, whose precipitous sides have, to my knowledge, astonished strangers, who, judging from the country traversed by the railway from Peterborough, expected to find the whole county as level as a billiard table. {27b} The flatness of the country, however, is amply made up for by other redeeming features. Within a mile of the Spa a view is obtained stretching more than 20 miles, with the grand Cathedral (which Ruskin says is “worth any two ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... be about again: but O, what a face did she carry! Her cheeks were deeply scratched, and her nose was bruised almost to flatness. The little girls with whom she formerly played could hardly believe that it was Jane Jones, and although they loved her much they could but pity her. Jane was never afterwards seen upon a fence: O, no! she knew she had done ...
— Pleasing Stories for Good Children with Pictures • Anonymous
... David. Time passed away. David, on the other side of the brook, revelling in the joys of battle, and all the more alive to them perhaps because of the watch kept on Louie by one section of his brain, was conscious of no length in the minutes. But Louie's mood gradually became one of extreme flatness. All her resources were for the moment at an end. She could think of no fresh torment for David; besides, she knew that she was observed. She had destroyed all the scanty store of primroses along the brook; gathered rushes, begun to ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
