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More "Rigidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she hesitated and he had time to add: "I shall not interrupt unless you pass the bounds where narrative ends and disclosure begins." And Harper and Ransom, glancing up at this, wondered at his rigidity and the almost marble-like quiet into which his restless eye and ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... novelty and stir of spirit had subsided,—when the new settlement, between the forest-border and the sea, had become actually a little town,—its daily life must have trudged onward with hardly anything to diversify and enliven it, while also its rigidity could not fail to cause miserable distortions of the moral nature. Such a life was sinister to the intellect, and sinister to the heart; especially when one generation had bequeathed its religious gloom, and the counterfeit ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her blouse, jerked her to her knees, and began to drag her. Joan fought his iron grasp. The twisting and tightening of her blouse choked her utterance. He did not look down upon her, but she could see him, the rigidity of his body set in violence, the awful shade upon his face, the upstanding hair on his head. He dragged her as if she had been an empty sack. Like a beast he was seeking a dark place—a hole to hide her. She was strangling; a distorted sight made objects ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... But it is only through the unfailing regularity and reliability of her fundamental laws—of her "constitution"—that freedom and progress are possible. If we could not depend upon perfect law we could make no advance whatever. We should all be abroad and uncertain. Yet in spite of her unbending rigidity over fundamentals, she does also show mercy and pity. A child toddling along downhill unregardful of the force of gravitation falls on its face and screams with pain. But Nature, represented by the mother, rushes up, seizes the little thing in her arms, presses it lovingly to her ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... from the others, where the strap of the sandal came; while the others gradually diminish and sweep round to the outside of the foot, with the greatest regularity of curve; the nails are short, and the toes broad at the points, indicative of pressure on the ground." Rigidity he considers to have been the character of the first epochs, changing ultimately as in the Elgin marbles, "from the hard characteristics of stone to the vivified character of flesh." He thinks Reynolds "would have acknowledged the supremacy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... fascinating to young men; and as Coningsby had never occasioned him any feelings but pleasurable ones, he was always disposed to make himself delightful to his grandson. The experience of a consummate man of the world, advanced in life, detailed without rigidity to youth, with frankness and facility, is bewitching. Lord Monmouth was never garrulous: he was always pithy, and could be picturesque. He revealed a character in a sentence, and detected the ruling ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... I should laugh!" said Richie, composing his countenance into its natural rigidity. "I did but smile, to bring my visage into coincidence and conformity with ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... avoid, knowing that it opened on a part of the court which, from its commanding a view of the scaffold, he justly feared would be crowded. He had paused but to speak one word of encouragement to Agnes, who, with a calmness appalling from the rigidity of feature which accompanied it, now stood at his side; he bade her only hold by his cloak, and he hoped speedily to lead her to a place of safety. She heard him and made a sign of obedience. They passed the gate unquestioned, traversed an inner court, and made for ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... and How to Obtain It which, designed particularly for commercial men engaged in sedentary occupations, were to be made with mental concentration in front of a mirror so as to bring into play the various families of muscles and produce successively a pleasant rigidity, a more pleasant relaxation and the most ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... oval face, with the large brown eyes, was colourless, delicately expressive, yet with something mysterious in its Sphinx-like immobility. A woman hard to read, who seemed to delight in keeping locked up behind that fascinating rigidity of feature the intense sensibility which had been revealed to him, her master, only in occasional and rare moments of enthusiasm. She reminded him sometimes of the one holy and ineffable Madonna, at others of Berode, the great courtezan of her ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... they come. But labor in England is uncertain, whereas in the States it is certain. In England the soldier with his shilling gets better food than the laborer with his two shillings; and the Englishman has no objection to the rigidity of that discipline which is so distasteful to an American. Moreover, who in England ever dreamed of raising 600,000 new troops in six months, out of a population of thirty million? But this has been done in the ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... gaze fell upon him I knew the truth. Cadaveric rigidity had supervened, and he had long been beyond hope of human aid. His furrowed face was as white as ivory, and his lower jaw had dropped in that manner that unmistakably betrays the presence ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... and gazed spellbound upon the dead child. Its brow was ideal in contour, the hair of wavy gold, the cheeks of angelic outline. "How beautiful!" exclaimed Bartolini; and drawing us to the bedside, with a mingled awe and intelligence, he pointed out how the rigidity of death coincided, in this fair young creature, with the standard of Art;—the very hands, he declared, had stiffened into lines of beauty; and over the beautiful clay we thus learned from the lips of a venerable sculptor how intimate and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... hull of finest beryl steel, the ship loomed in the screen. A mighty ship, braced into absolute rigidity by monster cross beams of shining steel. Glowing under the blazing lamps that lighted the scene, it towered into the shadows of the factory, dwarfing the scurrying workmen who swarmed ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... twisting red-hot iron bolts an inch and a half thick into the form of hooks with as much apparent ease as if they had been hair-pins. These, he said, were hooks for couplings, the hooks by which railway carriages were attached together, and on the strength and unyielding rigidity of which the lives of ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... A certain cold rigidity settled over Emma McChesney's face. She eyed her son in silence until his miserable eyes, perforce, looked ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... in upon him was the fact that he was clinging to a tree, and that he could not let go. His arms encircled the rough bark like bands of iron; they had divorced themselves from his will power, they held him there despite himself, not from muscular rigidity or spasm, but just because they refused to let go. They were doing the business of clinging to safety on their own account, and he had to think himself free. There was no use in ordering them to release him, he had to reason with them. Then, little ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... added between the clusters of leaves, and the leaves themselves curled over: and observe the well-directed thought of the sculptor in this curling;—the old incisions are retained below, and their excessive rigidity is one of the proofs of the earliness of the cornice; but those incisions now stand for the under surface of the leaf; and behold, when it turns over, on the top of it you see true ribs. Look at the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... The rigidity of my raging prick was almost painful; my previously exhausted forces requiring a long time to quite come to the spending point; but each flood of joy gushing from my mother added to my lustful sensations, till in about twenty minutes the ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... titles and epithets in the mystic hymns and litanies, which the artists endeavored to represent by various forms and characters of men and animals. The great characteristic attribute was represented by the organ of generation in that state of tension and rigidity which is necessary to the due performance of its functions. Many small images of this kind have been found among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, attached to bracelets, which the chaste and pious matrons of antiquity wore round their necks and arms. In these ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... I began to speak that I had won my case. There was no struggle to escape from my arms; and, as I went on, she relaxed even her rigidity, and reposed on ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... nor can anything else secure its endurance. In proposing or setting up a moral state, the moral law is relied upon as a real power, and free-will is drawn into the realm of causes, where all hangs together mutually with stringent necessity and rigidity. But we know that the condition of the human will always remains contingent, and that only in the Absolute Being physical coexists with moral necessity. Accordingly, if it is wished to depend on the moral conduct of man as on ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Had I only been content with my isolation and the splendour of the spectacle spread out before me! But no, I must look back upon that bed and the solitary woman standing beside it! I must watch the settling of her body into rigidity as a voice rose from beside the other Postlethwaite saying, 'It is a matter of minutes now,' and then—and then—the slow creeping of her hand to her husband's mouth, the outspreading of her palm across ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... great technical difficulties, which cost five years of efforts to overcome. Thus the levers require to be extremely light; this was secured by the use of an alloy of aluminium used in the construction of Zeppelins: this combines lightness with rigidity. Another difficulty almost unsuperable arises from the friction at the bearings of the fulcrum, the best watch jewels made of ruby were employed, but the supply was cut off from Germany by the war. This proved a blessing in disguise, for it forced the lecturer to devise ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... first complain of an intense headache with frequent vomiting and very high fever. Great prostration is seen, the pulse is weak, the respirations are irregular, the child may have convulsions, or it may have chills and fever, and rigidity of the body may be present. The position of the child is very characteristic. It does not want to lie on its back but usually rests on one side, with the spine more or less arched. It is a very serious disease and demands the early ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... returned to the fort, Putnam alone among them expecting reprimand. He had never before disobeyed the orders of his superior. He well knew the rigidity of military discipline and its necessity. Possibly General Lyman might not be content with a simple reprimand, but might order a court-martial. Putnam entered the fort, not fully ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... listened to other thoughts also. They reminded her of her children, the elation of power, love for the land of her ancestors, and the peril which menaced it without her, the bliss of seeing the light, and the darkness, the silence, the dull rigidity of death, the destruction of the body and the mind cherished and developed with so much care and toil, the horrible torture which might be associated with the transition from life to death—the act of dying. And what lay before her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... speedily with the wave, also standing still and lying down, hoping that the wave would pass me by; but in each and every case it gave me the same stirring treatment. Once I stood erect and rigid as the wave came on, but it intensified suddenly the rigidity of every muscle to a seemingly rupturing extent, and I did not try that plan again. The effect of each wave on me seemed to be slightly weakened whenever I lay down and fully ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... the nightmare a century after the stern-browed promulgators of them were dust. The early laws against crime in New England were severe, though death was seldom or never inflicted save for murder. But more irksome to one used to the lax habits of to-day would have been the punctilious rigidity with which they guarded the personal bearing, speech, and dress of the members of their community. Yet we may thank them for having done so; it was a wise precaution; they knew the frailties of the flesh, and how easily license ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... too definite and exclusive an opinion. For in matters of art, at any rate, thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed, and, recognising its dependence upon moods and upon the passion of fine moments, will not accept the rigidity of a scientific formula or a theological dogma. The critical pleasure, too, that we receive from tracing, through what may seem the intricacies of a sentence, the working of the constructive intelligence, must not be overlooked. As soon as we have realised ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... assurance doubly sure, natural selection here steps in to further the process. To prove this with all the rigidity of demonstration desirable is in the present state of erotics beyond our power. Until our family trees give us something more than mere skeletons of dead branches, we must perforce continue ignorant of the science of grafts. For the nonce we must be content to generalize from our own premises, ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... Bernard's day after the furnace of the eleventh century had poured its molten material out upon the world to settle and cool again in the castings of nations, separate and individual. There was less impulse, more rigidity; here and there, there was more strength, but everywhere there was less fire; and as interests grew in opposite directions and solidified apart, the chances of any universal rising or joint battle for ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... least, we can explain that rigidity, which Mr. Ruskin tells us, "is a special element of Gothic architecture. Greek and Egyptian buildings," he says—and I should have added, Roman buildings also, in proportion to their age, i.e., to the amount of the Roman elements in them—"stand for the most part, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... had been laid on a table supported by trestles in a sort of shed. A cavalry cloak that had been thrown over it covered it from head to foot, and fell in the shroud-like folds which all draperies assume that come in contact with the rigidity of death. A group of officers and several soldiers in duck trousers were looking on at a distance, whispering as if in a church; and an assistant-surgeon was writing a report of the death on a high ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... for the first time, and Laverick thought that he had never seen anything so wonderful as the change in her features. The strained rigidity passed away. An altogether softer light gleamed in her wonderful eyes. She was certainly by far the prettiest child he had ever seen. As yet he could not take ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... other words that the two personalities are entirely separate. This is an error. There is no such hard and fast line of demarcation between personalities, and the boundaries between one and another can be increased or reduced in rigidity according to will, in fact they may be temporarily removed so completely that, for the time being, the two personalities become merged into one. Now the action which takes place between healer and patient depends on this principle. The patient is asked by ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... pregnant and longing; they are possessed with an idea, and cannot be at peace until they have put it outside of them in some distinct embodiment. But with Charles literature was an object rather than a mean; he was one who loved bandying words for its own sake; the rigidity of intricate metrical forms stood him in lieu of precise thought; instead of communicating truth, he observed the laws of a game; and when he had no one to challenge at chess or rackets, he made verses in a wager against himself. ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... infinity hovering near. She was aware of nothing but the faint voice of the pines, the distant diminuendo of the frog's song, the firm elastic quality of the ground under her feet, so different from the iron rigidity of the winter earth, and the cool soft pressure of the night-air on her cheeks, when, like something thrust into her mind from the outside, there rose into her consciousness, articulate and complete, the reason why she had shrunk from looking at the photograph of Rocca di Papa. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... his works might, and I suppose certainly would, have impaired my relish for the great French dramatists, whose tragedies, noble and pathetic in spite of the stiff formality of their construction, the bald rigidity of their adherence to the classic unities, and the artificial monotony of the French heroic rhymed verse, would have failed to receive their due appreciation from a taste and imagination already familiar with the glorious freedom of Shakespeare's genius. As ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... paled and hardened with the rigidity of self-control. Sally peered out at her through lowered lashes, and judged that it was time for her to remove herself. She had known Beatrix from their childhood, and this was the first time she had seen her jarred from her self-possession. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... makes no machines like our own. She uses mechanical principles everywhere, in inert matter and in living bodies, but she does not use them in the bald and literal way we do. We must divest her mechanisms of the rigidity and angularity that pertain to the works of our own hands. Her hooks and hinges and springs and sails and coils and aeroplanes, all involve mechanical contrivances, but how differently they impress ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... say half way into the public's head, because you see, a few lines further on, the 'Pall Mall' hopes for a pause "half way between the rigidity of Ricardo and the ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... Now this rigidity of the spinal column will in no way help you in the emission of tone, nor will it increase the breath control. In fact, I don't think it would even help you to stand up straight, although it would certainly give one a stiff appearance and ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... convulsed by the attempted substitution of some inflexible law for a personal God with a living will, it is not strange that some phase of the same idea should creep into even the purest theology, and that in Mr. Robertson's theory of prayer we should find traces of the rigidity characterizing 'ultra predestinarian' as well ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... not pass through ice:—why not, since they are one and the same substance? Some years subsequently he answered this question by saying that the liquid condition enables the molecule of water to turn round so as to place itself in the proper line of polarization, while the rigidity of the solid condition prevents this arrangement. This polar arrangement must precede decomposition, and decomposition is an accompaniment of conduction. He then passed on to other substances; to oxides and chlorides, and iodides, and salts, and sulphurets, ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... with an inward drama and argument, occasionally moving in his seat, resting one arm on the table, and rubbing his hand against his hair. There was a conflux of emotions and thoughts in him that would not let him either give thorough way to his anger or persevere with simple rigidity of resolve. Rosamond took ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... a whiff of gloom and depression. Covered over with sodden slush, it stretched with irksome rigidity towards the misty quarter whence blew a languid, sluggish, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... are very convenient in cases of emergency. But as they relax when selfish ends are to be subserved, and retain their rigidity only when judging the conduct of others, the inference is, that the persons possessing them are either hypocritical, or else, as was acknowledged by Parson D., in similar circumstances, they have mistaken their ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... force. First of all, "don't" let any of your planting cut or split your place in two. How many a small house-lot lawn we see split down the middle by a row of ornamental shrubs or fruit-trees which might as easily have been set within a few feet of the property line, whose rigidity, moreover, would have best excused the rigidity of the planted line. But such glaring instances aside, there are many subtler ones quite as unfortunate; "don't" be too sure you are not unwittingly ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... passed the same judgment upon the opening sentences of the text, which somehow failed to ring out that challenge to the obstructionists she had confidently expected. As she read further, her vague disappointment gave way to a sudden breathless incredulity; that to a heartsick rigidity of attention; and when she went back, and began to read the whole article over, slowly and carefully, from the beginning, her face was about the color of the pretty white collar she wore. For what she was looking on at was, ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... had learned the fixedness of her ideas, the rigidity of her type of mind, the relentlessness of her will; and that independence on my part survived was due to sturdy stubbornness, to a refusal to be dominated, and an incapacity for subjection. But this, too, she ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... especially aesthetic empathy, like other intellectual and emotional activities, are at the mercy of a hostile mental attitude, just as bodily activity is at the mercy of rigidity of the limbs. I do not hesitate to say that we are perpetually refusing to look at certain kinds of art because, for one reason or another, we are emotionally prepossessed against them. On the other hand, once the favourable emotional condition is supplied ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... as he did—with just such sunken cheeks and ashen lips and frozen eyes; with just such a collapsed and shuddering form; yet, withal, could not have shown that terrific look of utter, incurable despair! His fingers, talon-like in their horny paleness and rigidity, clutched his breast, as if to tear some mortal anguish thence, and his glassy eyes were fixed in unutterable reproach upon her face! Thrice he essayed to speak, but a gurgling noise in his throat was the only result. With a last great effort to articulate, the ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... that he was not a sycophant, Forester, when he returned home with his friend Henry, took every possible occasion to contradict him, with even more than his customary rigidity; nay, he went further still, ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... without being a prime favorite for either home use or commerce. The grapes are not high enough in quality for a home vineyard, and, while they ship well, are hard to handle because of the large size and rigidity of the bunches. Another fault is that the vines are subject to root-knot. The chief asset of the variety is handsome appearance of fruit. This variety is remarkable for the number of second-crop bunches which it produces on the laterals. ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, and drove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which their limited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front escape him. He promised, and took his course out through Konigstrasse, and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Goldeyes, however, are not particular; and ere he could draw the line straight, a very large one darted at the fly, and swallowed it. The rod bent into a beautiful oval as Mr Russ made a futile attempt to whip the fish over his head, according to custom, and the line straightened with fearful rigidity as the fish began to pull for its life. The fisher became energetic, and the fish impatient, but there was no prospect of its ever being landed; till at last, having got his rod inextricably entangled among the neighbouring bushes, he ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... In the light of the big oil-lamp which hung suspended from the ceiling he noticed something in Whittemore's face he had not observed before, a tenseness about the muscles of his mouth, a restlessness in his eyes, rigidity of jaw, an air of suppressed emotion which puzzled him. He was keenly observant of details, and knew that these things had been missing a short time before. The pleasure of their meeting that afternoon, after a separation ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... direct kindling gaze; Janet showed no individuality yet beyond an entire willingness to conform to outward circumstance while pursuing deeply secret speculations within. But Camilla impressed the entire family by the rigidity of her correctness in personal and social niceties. At times, he felt, she would be a nuisance but for the firm hand of her mother and his own contribution to their well-being by an ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is there much under the influence of the priest, especially the women, and, indeed, among the upper classes the confessional and other priestly operations are attended with as much rigidity as in past centuries, although the male sex has very greatly emancipated itself therefrom, and receives any allusions to the priest with a shrug of the shoulders, or, at times, with coldness or open hostility towards that worthy. The Church has ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... gatherings of making some allusion to Mr. Fox. His father had sat in the House of Commons when Fox was there, and had sternly opposed the French war. I don't suppose that anybody not actually IN IT—no Londoner certainly—can understand the rigidity of the bonds which restricted county society when I was young, and for aught I know may restrict it now. There was with us one huge and dark exception to the general uniformity. The earl had broken loose, had ruined his estate, had defied decorum and openly lived with strange women ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... also that they were carrying heavy weights, because they stepped slowly and with a certain stiffness. There was a rigidity and tension that strong men walking easily would not have shown. Unquestionably they were successful hunters, carrying game to a great gluttonous band feasting ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... is made up of two hulls, one inside the other; between them, joining them together, are iron T-bars that give this ship the utmost rigidity. In fact, thanks to this cellular arrangement, it has the resistance of a stone block, as if it were completely solid. Its plating can't give way; it's self-adhering and not dependent on the tightness of its rivets; and due to the perfect union of its materials, the solidarity ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... wings are to be closed, use light wire in them. If to be spread, use strong wire to support with no wobbling. In the legs use as large wire as will go easily through the tarsus and not rip the skin open, to insure rigidity in the finished specimen. Use galvanized soft steel wires if possible. If ordinary black iron wire is used it should be waxed before placing. For the tail cut one wire of a length to go half way through the body and leave enough protruding ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray
... compared with that from immersion in strong and weak solutions of the salts of ammonia; for the former do not excite movement, whereas the latter act energetically. A temporary suspension of the [page 73] power of movement due to heat is called by Sachs* heat-rigidity; and this in the case of the sensitive-plant (Mimosa) is induced by its exposure for a few minutes to humid air, raised to 120o-122o Fahr., or 49o to 50o Cent. It deserves notice that the leaves ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... mocked her as it peeped furtively round the bedroom door. Thus she was brought back to her starting place, and finding the circle a giddy one, she determined to travel on it no more, and with her old rigidity, she kept this resolve. It was, however, less difficult than it would once have been, for her mind was weary and glad of an excuse to take the easiest path. She lay in bed according to Zebedee's bidding, hardly moving under the clothes, and listening to ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... the common. There would be a sudden twitch of the muscles of the face, an instant distortion, which in the next instant had passed and left no trace. These twitches gradually grew in frequency, but no muscle outside of the face lost any of its rigidity, or betrayed any interest in what was happening to Jim. I mean if something was happening to him, and I knew perfectly well that that was the case. At last a pair of tears began to swim slowly down his cheeks amongst the ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... the Civil War, I fancy, and seems for a decade or so to have led a wandering life in the Old World. As to Henry C-, the next in age and wisdom of our band, he had broken loose from the unyielding rigidity of his family, solidly rooted, if I remember rightly, in a well-to-do London suburb. On their respectable authority he introduced himself meekly to strangers as a "black sheep." I have never seen a more guileless specimen of ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... assent as well as we were able to do without losing our rigidity or speaking, which latter is strictly against rules when an officer is giving any order, except when an answer ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... after him. She was rather white, but she remained very erect and taut until the keeper had disappeared from view. Then the tense rigidity of her figure slackened, as a stretched wire slackens when the pull on it suddenly ceases, and she leaned helpless against the trunk of a tree, limp and shaking, every fine-strung nerve ajar with the strain of her recent encounter with ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... moved his lips in silence. Glover's face had the keen, anxious, watchful look of the sailor affronting shipwreck; and Thurstane's the set, enduring rigidity of the soldier who is tried ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... sending up a wailing cry at the sight of her distorted child. Dr. Mather came down from the pulpit and stood over her, exorcising the devil in possession, as one accustomed to such scenes. The crowd pressed forward in mute horror. At length, her rigidity of form and feature gave way, and she was terribly convulsed—torn by the devil, as they called it. By-and-by the violence of the attack was over, and the spectators began to breathe once more, though still the former ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... flexibility of the royal elbow, and the rigidity of the royal spine! More especially as we had been impressed with a notion of their debility. But, sometimes these seemingly enervated young blades approve themselves steadier of limb, than veteran ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... of prudence demands the addition of the element of elasticity to our currency system. The evil does not consist in an inadequate volume of money, but in the rigidity of this volume, which does not respond as it should to the varying needs of communities and of seasons. Inflation must be avoided; but some provision should be made that will insure a larger volume of money during the Fall and Winter months than in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... remained of the imperishable forms of the human face which appealed to the soul, even though the eye could see no more than a lifeless head. The firm outline of the face, the shape of the brow, the solemnity of the lines, the rigidity of the nose, the form of the bony structure which wounds alone had slightly altered,—all were signs of intrepidity without calculation, faith without reserve, obedience without discussion, fidelity without compromise, love without inconstancy. In him, the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... in their petals. Their perfume was the potent spell that now melted her to tears, and the tension of her overtaxed nerves gave way in a passionate burst of sobs. When she rose a few moments later, the storm had passed; the face regained its stony rigidity, and henceforth she fronted ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... with breakfast?" he asked. From where he stood he could not see Hannah's face, but gradually his eyes were drawn to her figure. His intuition was not quick, and some moments passed before the rigidity of the pose impressed itself ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... consequence was that these rude children of William Tell, put up to auction by the nations, and carried away from the humble, hardy life of a mountain people into cities of wealth and pleasure, had lost, not their ancient courage, but that rigidity of principle for which they had been distinguished before their intercourse with other nations. From being models of honour and good faith they had become a kind of marketable ware, always ready for sale to the highest bidder. The ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... decay. Sir Henry stepped over a dead body, and started, as a rat, scared from its prey, rustled through a wreath of withered flowers, and hid itself amid a mouldering heap of bones. But there were some forms lovely still! In them the pulse of life had that day ceased to beat. The rigidity of Death—his impressive stillness was there—but he had not yet "swept the ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... submit to education and improvement—that suttee, for example, was ever an honoured institution in the province now most advanced. But to the observant student of the Indian people, the evolution of India is almost as noteworthy as the more apparent rigidity. There is a flowering plant common in Northern India, and chiefly notable for the marvel of bearing flowers of different colours upon the same root. The Hindus call it "the sport of Krishna"; Mahomedans, "the flower ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... merely fanciful to compare Athens, the city of self-conscious political activity, variable, cultivated, and ill-adapted by its very freedom for prolonged stability, with Florence; Sparta, firmly based upon an ancient constitution, indifferent to culture, and solid at the cost of some rigidity, with Venice. As in Greece the philosophers of Athens, especially Plato and Aristotle, wondered at the immobility of Sparta and idealized her institutions; so did the theorists of Florence, Savonarola, Giannotti, Guicciardini, look with envy at the state machinery which secured repose and liberty ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... its presence. As if it were an irrevocable decree, the girl steeled herself to hear. But the man paused, gazing straight out before him. She felt his hand relax in hers, and she pressed it sympathetically, encouragingly. But she felt the rigidity going out of his tensed body, and she knew that spirit and flesh were relaxing together. His resolution was ebbing. He would not speak—she knew it; and she knew, likewise, with the sureness of faith, that it was ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... and that he was easy in his mind. I was not sure whether he had seen what was only too obvious from my position, that the door of the safe was imperfectly closed, and that Milverton might at any moment observe it. In my own mind I had determined that if I were sure, from the rigidity of his gaze, that it had caught his eye, I would at once spring out, throw my great-coat over his head, pinion him, and leave the rest to Holmes. But Milverton never looked up. He was languidly interested by the papers in his hand, and page after ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his jibing bronchos with steady hands. No light touch was his upon the reins, and the bronchos' wild plunging met with a check from those muscular hands of such iron rigidity as to fling them back helpless and ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... she confessed that she had lied and was in reality a boy, Willie Canning, who had died and "now is here because he wants to be." More than an hour passed in this "insane talk," as her weeping parents accounted it, and then, flinging up her hands, she fell headlong in a state of cataleptic rigidity. ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... as well as outward rigidity Van Landing waited. To the movements of Carmencita's hand waving him away he paid no attention. In thick, heavy throbs his heart sent the blood to his face, then it receded, and for a moment the room was dark and he saw nothing. To the "come in" of Carmencita the ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... walking to and fro through the rooms, came into the hall, the dog shook his head and gave two loud and insinuating taps on the floor with his tail, but alas! the whistle did not sound to release him. Kolya looked sternly at the luckless dog, who relapsed again into obedient rigidity. The one thing that troubled Kolya was "the kids." He looked, of course, with the utmost scorn on Katerina's unexpected adventure, but he was very fond of the bereaved "kiddies," and had already taken them a picture-book. Nastya, the elder, a girl of eight, could read, and Kostya, the boy, aged ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... philosophy of history is clearly stated, and so fully explained by Engels that there is no need to go over the ground again, and there only remains to call attention to some of the modern developments in the direction of rigidity of interpretation, and to the exaggeration of the broad theory of the predominance of the economic factor into a hard and fast doctrine ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... heard his son tell, that it was common with him, if any one observed that the soup was good, to taste it again, and say,—"Yes, {p.209} it is too good, bairns," and dash a tumbler of cold water into his plate. It is easy, therefore, to imagine with what rigidity he must have enforced the ultra-Catholic severities which marked, in those days, the yearly or half-yearly retreat of the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... (Ps. 36:15): "Let their sword enter into their own hearts." Now he that flatters another induces him to sin mortally: hence a gloss on Ps. 140:5, "Let not the oil of the sinner fatten my head," says: "The false praise of the flatterer softens the mind by depriving it of the rigidity of truth and renders it susceptive of vice." Much more, therefore, does the flatterer sin ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... either the sextant or a theodolite was used. The theodolite employed was a light 3 Vernier instrument by Carey Porter, intended for sledging work. This instrument was fairly satisfactory, although possibly rigidity had been sacrificed to lightness to rather too great an extent. Another point which appears worth mentioning is the following: The foot-screws were of brass, the tribrach, into which they fitted, was made of aluminium ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... and other noble women of whom history tells, and the man did not hesitate to hold the plow, as the example of Cincinnatus will show us. Time was precious, and thrift and economy were necessary to success. The father was the autocrat in the household, and exercised his power with stern rigidity. ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... ablution with a frugality not fully justified by its scarcity. A 'biled shirt' lasts a good while. I noted some in use which the dry, fine dust of that region must have been weeks in bringing to the rigidity and clayey yellow or tobacco-stain hue which they unchangeably wore during the days that I enjoyed the society of the wearers. Pilot-bread, a year or so baked, and ever since subjected to the indurating ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... up and making a venomous gesture at the Governor. Next to him, at the edge of the group, are Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky, gesticulating at each other, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. The other guests remain standing stiff. The whole group retain the same position of rigidity for almost a minute and a half. The ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... with alacrity, and Farrell crossed the hall to the drawing-room. He turned on the light as he opened the door, and was at once aware of Nelly's slight form on the sofa. She did not move, and something in her attitude—some rigidity that he fancied—alarmed him. He took a few steps, and then saw that there was no cause for alarm. She was only asleep, poor child, profoundly, pathetically asleep. Her utter unconsciousness, the delicate hand ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lesion specially affects certain situations, and the appearances vary with these: (1) On the inner aspect of the prepuce, and in the fold between the prepuce and the glans; in the latter situation the induration imparts a "collar-like" rigidity to the prepuce, which is most apparent when it is rolled back over the corona. (2) At the orifice of the prepuce the primary lesion assumes the form of multiple linear ulcers or fissures, and as each of these is attended with infiltration, the prepuce cannot be pulled back—a ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... down. It is a human being of no very Apollo-like form or face: short, squat, with its shoulders drawn up to its ears, and its hands delved into its breeches'-pockets. The hue of its face is a mixture of brick-dust and saffron; and the texture seems that of the skin of a dead frog. There is a rigidity and tension in the features, too, which would make you fancy, if you did not see that that were not the fact, that some one from behind was pinching it with a pair of hot tongs, and that it were ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... motion. True, the now imagined vortices are not the large whirls of planetary size, they are rather infinitesimal whirls of less than atomic dimensions; still a whirling fluid is believed in to this day, and many are seeking to deduce all the properties of matter (rigidity, elasticity, cohesion gravitation, ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... always retrospective or theoretical in character. It seems as if the intermittence of his inspiration filled the poet with a wistful curiosity as to his nature in moments of soaring. By continual introspection he is seeking the charm, so to speak, that will render his afflatus permanent. The rigidity in much of such verse surely betrays, not the white heat of genius, but a self-conscious attitude of readiness for the falling ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... mustn't." She was still more frightened by the discovery that he was shaking all over. Bewildered, shrinking into the far off corner, avoiding his eyes, she yet saw the quivering of his mouth and made a wild attempt at a smile, which broke the rigidity of her lips and set ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... favourite prey, be lacking, must the Pelopaeus therefore give up foraging? She will stock her warehouses all the same, because any Spider suits her. There you have discernment, whose elasticity makes up, in certain circumstances, for the too-great rigidity of instinct. Amid the innumerable variety of game, the huntress is able to discern between what is Spider and what is not; and, in this way, she is always prepared to supply her family, without quitting the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... know but I'm going to be like Aunt Marcia," she said to herself, and her fat face took on a long rigidity of fear. ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... the rigidity of the university student's scheme of study, and the vagaries and whims of the scholarly emotion. Contemplate the forcing of that most delicate of human attributes, i.e., interest, to bounce forth at the clang of a gong. To illustrate: the student ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... behind his ears on both sides, and he had an eyeglass cocked knowingly in one eye. Altogether he looked very different from what he was when we last saw him. His characteristic sang froid, that peculiar rigidity of the lips, that faint furrow in the middle of the forehead between the eyebrows, and the gravity of the somewhat languid face, made the metamorphosis complete. A savant, a scholar of practical experience, a ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... desk when Lord Coombe came in earlier than was his custom. The perfection of his dress, his smooth creaselessness and quiet harmony of color and line seemed actually to add to the aged look of his face. His fine rigidity was worn and sallowed. After his greeting phrases he stood for a space quite silent while the Duchess watched him as ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and these two facts seem to contradict each other. But it is to be noted, first, that the rigid geometrical symmetry belongs only to the "Madonna Enthroned," and general "Adoration" pieces; and secondly, that this very rigidity of symmetry in details can coexist with variations which destroy balance. Thus, in a "Madonna Enthroned" of Giotto, where absolute symmetry in detail is kept, the Child sits far out on the right knee of ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... matters in an—automobile is to treat them very unbecomingly. It is not," she continued, and all her unbending rigidity of demeanor ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... incapable of movement without an antecedent general crash and breaking up. No laws, he reasoned, could be made because there were no means by which the general will could express itself, such was the rigidity of absolutism and feudalism. The splendid studies of Montesquieu, which revealed to the French the eternal truths underlying the constitutional changes in England, had enlightened and captivated the best minds of his country, but they were ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... reach the count of three, I shall try to bend my arm, but it will be impossible to do so until I count to five. No matter how hard I try, it will be absolutely impossible. One ... My arm is stiff and rigid as a bar of steel. Two ... I can feel the rigidity in my arm. Three ... It is impossible for me to bend my arm until I count to five. Four ... I can feel the stiffness slowly leaving. Five ... I can now bend my arm easily and it feels ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... took out a tiny figure some two inches long by one inch high, mounted upon a polished wooden pedestal. It was that of a guinea-pig. The flaky fur gleamed like the finest silk, and one felt that the coat of the minute creature would be as floss to the touch; whereas in reality it possessed the rigidity of steel. Literally one could have done it little damage with a hammer. Its ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... she looked again at Sir Henry, she was startled to see that his cheek, which had gained some colour during his conversation with the King, had relapsed into earthly paleness; that his eyes were closed, and opened not again; and that his features expressed, amid their quietude, a rigidity which is not that of sleep. They ran to his assistance, but it was too late. The light that burned so low in the socket, had leaped up, and expired in one ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... a point still above the five-diameter limit of Walden. He interestedly switched on the control which made his drive-unit manufacture landing-grid-type force fields. He groped for Walden, and felt the peculiar rigidity of the ship when the field took hold somewhere underground. He made an adjustment, and felt the ship respond. Instead of pulling a ship to ground, in the setup he'd made, the new fields pulled the ground toward the ship. When he reversed the adjustment, instead of pushing the ship ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... alarmed me, and induced me to awake him at once. No sooner had I done this, than, with a bright smile irradiating all his features, he fell back upon his pillow and expired. I noticed that in less than a minute afterward his corpse had all the stern rigidity of stone. His brow was of the coldness of ice. Thus, ordinarily, should it have appeared, only after long pressure from Azrael's hand. Had the sleep-waker, indeed, during the latter portion of his discourse, been addressing me from out the region of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... because pity, like all other deep emotions, was regarded by the Stoics in the light rather of a vice than of a virtue. In this respect, however, both Seneca and Epictetus, and to a still greater extent Marcus Aurelius, were gloriously false to the rigidity of the school to which they professed to belong. We see with delight that one of the Discourses of Epictetus was On the Tenderness and Forbearance due to Sinners; and he abounds in exhortations to forbearance in ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... haemorrhage from the hands quickly stopped, and was not mortal. The true cause of death was the unnatural position of the body, which brought on a frightful disturbance of the circulation, terrible pains of the head and heart, and, at length, rigidity of the limbs. Those who had a strong constitution only died of hunger.[2] The idea which suggested this cruel punishment was not directly to kill the condemned by positive injuries, but to expose the slave nailed by the hand of which he had ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... enough to undervalue the severity of the early masters, the great motive struggling still with the minute and rigid hand. So the critics of the last century ignored, or underrated, the works of the earlier Tuscan sculptors. In what Cicero calls "rigidity" of Canachus, combined with what we seem to see of his poetry of conception, his freshness, his solemnity, we may understand no really repellent hardness, but only that earnest patience of labour, the expression of which is constant in all the best work of an early time, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... foreman's hut, and he sprinted this in even time, keeping the building between himself and a direct view of the barn, in the region of which lay his destination. And as he ran the set expression of his face boded ill for some one. Jaws and mouth were clenched to a fierce rigidity that said far more than ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... better), which he holds in his right hand, to make clearly distinct his mode of marking the commencement, the interior division, and the close of each bar. The bow, employed by some violinist conductors (leaders), is less suitable than the stick. It is somewhat flexible, and this want of rigidity, together with the slight resistance it offers to the air, on account of its appendage of hair, renders ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... silence. Mrs. Thropp pondered bitterly. She was the most moral of women. She had brought up her children with all rigidity. She had abused them for the least dereliction. She had upheld the grimmest standard of virtue, with "Don't!" for its watchword. Of virtue as a warm-hearted, alert, eager, glowing spirit, cultivating the best and most beautiful things in life, she had no idea. Virtue was to her ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... for answer, I went to Miss Oldcastle, and begged her to come and listen to something in which I wanted her help. She rose courteously though without cordiality, and accompanied me to her mother, who sat with perfect rigidity, watching us. ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... faces that they did not require as much freedom as many other nations do. This statement might, indeed, be dictated by forbearance and a desire to palliate, the true meaning being that they were utterly unable to endure so great freedom and that only a high degree of rigidity could prevent them from destroying one another. If, however, the words are taken as they are spoken, they are true under the presupposition that such a nation is entirely incapable of the natural life ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... "pride in progress," which led to the Revolution. His Grace has certainly a most original conception of history. Ordinary historians tell us that the Revolution was caused by hunger, bad government, and the rigidity of old institutions that could not accommodate themselves to new ideas. But whatever were the causes, look at the results. Compare the state of France before the Revolution with its condition now. The despotic monarchy is gone; the luxurious and privileged aristocracy ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... whatever his creed, I already doubted if he were the right one to sow it and make it grow in these new, wild fields. He seemed more the sort of gardener to keep old walks and vines pruned in their antique rigidity. I admired him for coming all this way with his clean, short, gray whiskers and his black, well-brushed suit. And he made me think of a powerful locomotive stuck ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... moment it seemed to him more than he could bear. He started to his feet and put his hands before his face. Then calming himself by a great effort, he sat down and his face became almost like a stone in its rigidity. When his wife finally succeeded in getting the woman into the rear room, his face relaxed and he breathed more easily; but as soon as possible he arose and went out and stood silent there until the body was brought out ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... cavity, inflates the lungs, promotes the inspiratory part of breathing, pushes the walls of the chest and abdomen outward from F to E, and lowers the pelvic roof at the same time the uterus sinks from C to D. When the effect of these respiratory motions is not diminished by muscular debility, rigidity of the thoracic walls, or by unsuitable clothing, they have so direct an effect on the pelvic contents that the uterus and its appendages make two distinct motions every time a woman breathes. When ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... his hasty tongue and ready hand—and swift repentances. Had an occasion come when the repentance was too late, too vain! And what repentance! To the sister who knew with life-long knowledge the ardent, passionate Corrie, his young rigidity in honor and high pride, his tenacious affections, this menaced downfall was almost as appalling as his death. She thrust the possibility from her with revolted condemnation of herself for crediting this libel, this slander of her brother. What had he ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... a tall, pompous-looking man, whose age appeared to verge close upon fifty. He was sitting bolt upright in a high-backed chair, and looked as if it would be quite impossible to deviate from his position of unbending rigidity. ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... of contempt, and so she got up, and coming round the table, she knelt down beside him and put her arms tightly about him. Still he did not move, except that his hands, which had been hanging at his sides, now gripped the edges of the chair with the rigidity of iron, and he said in a voice which sounded even in his own ears like that of a ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... youth, bringing with them the impression imparted to them in Spain, that they were sent to make a moral conquest of savages. In the course of years, after repeated rebuffs, and the obligation to participate in the affairs of everyday life in all its details, their rigidity of principle relaxed, and they became more tolerant towards those with whom they necessarily came in contact. They were usually taken from the peasantry and families of lowly station. As a rule they had little or no secular education, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... fluttered their handful of leaves, and shivered in every wind that blew. Lady Markland no longer sat on the terrace. She received her familiar visitor where only intimate friends were allowed to come, in the morning-room, to which its new distinction gave something of the barrenness and rigidity of a room of business. The big writing-table filled up the centre, and nothing remained of its old aspect except Geoff's little settlement within the round of the window; a low table for his few lesson books, where less lawful publications, in the shape of stories, were but too ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... broken, or chopped off, in parts. At Nuremberg this peculiarity is very observable; our specimen is selected from the church at Rottweil, in the Black Forest, which bears the date of 1340. The French (Fig. 44) is a favourable example of the Flamboyant style, which gave freedom to the mediaeval rigidity of the Gothic, and paved the way for the ready adoption of the style of Francis I., which was based on that of ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... of his voice Carrie started violently, and looked up at Max, staring with eyes full of wonder and something very like delight. The rigidity with which she had held herself, the automatic manner, the hard, off-hand tone, all disappeared at once; and it was a new, a transformed Carrie, the fascinating, wayward, irresistible girl he had remembered, who gave him a smile and a nod, as she said, in a voice ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... scientific outsiders, I always courted the fullest investigation, taking it as the first duty of the mesmerist to show cause why he should not be put down as a charlatan. So we had tests and counter-tests, evidence and counter-evidence; there were doctors to feel the pulse and to scrutinise the rigidity of the muscles, experts to propound scientific ifs and buts, and wiseacres generally to put spokes in the wheel of progress, as is their playful way, wherever they find that wheel in motion. It was doubly satisfactory, then, that the good faith of subject and mesmerist ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... correct and strict severity of classical forms. Napoleon had from the beginning of his career been under the spell of Greek and Roman examples. Thus it happened that the art of the First Empire was what it is—heavy, conventional, and reminiscent. With the ever-growing rigidity of censorship, literature sometimes took refuge in abstractions, or, what is much the same thing, in the contemplation of events so remote that their discussion could give no offense. Sometimes authors accepted the curious task of defending the external forms and results of the Revolution ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... passing that would have greatly astonished her. Sarah had taken the management of everything, including her master; and with iron composure and rigidity of demeanour, delighted in teasing him by giving him a taste of some of the cares he had left her mistress to endure. First came an outcry for keys. They were supposed to be in a box, and when that was found its key was missing. Again Arthur turned out the unfortunate ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of technical preparation there is, perhaps, too little attention being given to-day to the necessity for clean playing. Of course, each individual requires a different treatment. The pupil who has a tendency to play with stiffness and rigidity may be given studies which will develop a more fluent style. For these pupils' studies, like those of Heller, are desirable in the cases of students with only moderate technical ability, while the splendid ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... turmoil of the day had told on her, and she was so tired that she could scarcely drag herself about; her eyes kept closing as she moved. Tenney was still expectantly eager for an awakening of her leniency. At eight o'clock he brought out the Bible and stiffened himself into the rigidity that was the mail for his spiritual combats. He was always referring to himself, at these times of religious observance, as a servant of the Cross, and Tira used wearily to wonder whether he felt obliged to arrange himself for combats that, so far as she knew, never seemed to come off. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... be fresh by the rigidity of the muscles (or flesh), the redness of the gills, and clearness of the eyes. Crimping much improves ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... shock of the blow he has risen on his hind legs, with contorted spine, and beats the air with his fore paws, his head thrown back as though to free himself of the fatal shaft. Not far from him the lioness lies stretched out upon its back in the rigidity of death. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Deffand—so far as he could like anyone—and also by the fact that his vanity was highly flattered by her letters. Many courses were open to him, but the one he took was probably the most cruel that he could have taken: he insisted with an absolute rigidity on their correspondence being conducted in the tone of the most ordinary friendship—on those terms alone, he said, would he consent to continue it. And of course such terms were impossible to Madame du Deffand. She accepted them—what else could she do?—but ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... them—but Iroquois for certain. The man, you see, is Canayan—" Menehwehna began coolly to handle the corpse. "He has been dead for hours, but not many hours." He lifted an arm and let it fall, after trying the rigidity of the muscles. "Not many hours," he repeated; and signed to Muskingon, who began to crawl forward and, from the gap of the pass, ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... whiff of gloom and depression. Covered over with sodden slush, it stretched with irksome rigidity towards the misty quarter whence blew a languid, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... venomous gesture at the Governor. Next to him, at the edge of the group, are Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky, gesticulating at each other, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. The other guests remain standing stiff. The whole group retain the same position of rigidity for almost a minute and a ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... his lips in silence. Glover's face had the keen, anxious, watchful look of the sailor affronting shipwreck; and Thurstane's the set, enduring rigidity of the soldier who is tried to ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... to the control of the rich and powerful; but although the authority exercised was at first mild, and ensured to the bondsmen almost the same privileges with their masters, yet the idea of power soon crept in upon the mind, and at length lenity was converted into rigidity, and the gall of servitude became insupportable; the oppressed, soon found that that liberty, which they had just given up, was an inalienable privilege of man, and sought means to regain it: this was effected,—but ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... all the mischievous, taunting fairyland that I had anticipated, but rather the gaunt, intimidating home of ogres, rank and more than a trifle forbidding. It had an air of age that was not immortal, but stiffly declining into a stubborn resistance against the slow rigidity of death. These espaliers made me think of rheumatic veterans, obstinately faithful to ancient ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... the rapid, light footsteps, and turned his head. At all times slow of thought and slower of speech, he was galvanized into a sudden rigidity that differed only in degree from the symptoms displayed by his chief officer. Certainly he could not have been more stupefied had he seen the ghost ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... my lord and master so much that he scolded me, for the first time in his life. And when I poked his Adam's apple with my finger he got on his dignity. He was tired, poor boy, and I should have remembered it. And when I requested him not to stand there and stare at me in the hieratic rigidity of an Egyptian idol I could see a little flush of anger go over his face. He didn't say anything. But he took one of the lamps and a three-year-old Pall-Mall Magazine and shut himself up ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... five feet in diameter, were laid longitudinally in the river, about three feet apart to allow a water-way. Suspended from the lower side of these logs by heavy iron staples were two 21/2-inch iron cables, stretching from one side of the river to the other. To give the framework of trunks greater rigidity, large timbers, six by four inches, were pinned down on the upper sides. The cables were secured on the left bank to trees; on the right bank, where there were no trees, to great anchors buried in the ground. Between the two ends the raft was held up against the current by twenty-five ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... as the legitimate orphan of a distant relation; it would be made a great handle for gossip by Miss Pryinall. Added to all these reasons, one not less strong occurred to Mr. Morton himself—the uncommon and merciless rigidity of his wife would render all the other women in the town very glad of any topic that would humble her own sense of immaculate propriety. Moreover, he saw that if Catherine did remain, it would be a perpetual source ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... kindling gaze; Janet showed no individuality yet beyond an entire willingness to conform to outward circumstance while pursuing deeply secret speculations within. But Camilla impressed the entire family by the rigidity of her correctness in personal and social niceties. At times, he felt, she would be a nuisance but for the firm hand of her mother and his own contribution to their well-being by an occasional ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... custom then quickened and curiously shaped the blossoming,—as the gardener's untiring art evolves the flowers of the chrysanthemum into a hundred forms of fantastic beauty.... Though the general social tendency under pressure was toward rigidity, constraint left room, in special directions, for moral ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... Marsa's face, as if to read thereon a secret, to decipher a name—Menko's or his own. Her exquisite, delicate features had the rigidity of marble; her dark eyes were staring straight ahead, like two spots of light, where nothing, nothing was reflected. Zilah shuddered again; ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... as methodically as machines, the aero-sub pilots blasted the warships into nothingness. They had their orders, and they went about their performance with a rigidity of discipline which astounded the Secret Agents. They had been ordered to destroy the warships, and they were doing that first—would go on to completion of this task, no matter how many American planes ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... generals? Is it not that the helmsman acts through the medium of mechanism, while the generals act through the medium of men? A ship is not only made of rigid metal, but all her parts are fastened together with the utmost rigidity; while the parts of an army are men, who are held together by no means whatever except that which discipline gives, and the men themselves are far from rigid. In the nature of things it is impossible that an army should be directed as perfectly ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... athletic figure, old indeed and grey-haired, but with every muscle rendered as tough as whip-cord by constant exercise. He was dressed carelessly, and more like a Frenchman than an Englishman of the period, while, from his hard features and perpendicular rigidity of stature, he bore some resemblance to a Swiss officer of the guards, who had resided some time at Paris, and caught the costume, but not the ease or manner, of its inhabitants. The truth was, that his language and habits were as heterogeneous ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... been that the ideal should ever be different from what our vague hopes were expecting. So too when the ideal takes shape, as it comes into contact with life, will it soften, expand, and lose its rigidity, incessantly growing more noble. And then will you readily perceive, in the creature you love, all that which is eternally true in yourself, and solidly righteous, and essentially beautiful; for only the good in our heart can ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... lay on his back. His flaming red hair framed a greenish grey face ghostly in its rigidity. A few minutes before Captain Marschner had seen the man still running—the same face still full of vitality—from heat and excitement. His knees gave way. The sight of that change, so incomprehensible in its suddenness, gripped at his ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... in a hard and dry, but not unkind voice. In fact, the rigidity of her aspect, the hardness of her voice, and the singular blackness of her costume, seemed to be too monotonously uniform and resolute not to indicate something willful or unhealthy in the woman's condition, as if the whole had been ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Archibald, otherwise an immense pillar of grey-white smoky substance that appeared very suddenly to windward of us. It stretched up vertically from the ground to a height about level with ours, which was then only five and a half thousand feet. We watched it curiously as it stood in an unbending rigidity similar to that of a giant waxwork, cold, unnatural, stupidly implacable, half unbelievable, and wholly ridiculous. At the top it sprayed round, like a stick of asparagus. For two or three months similar apparitions had been exhibited to us at rare intervals, nearly always in the same neighbourhood. ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... very still. She was sure he understood her by the sudden rigidity of his pose, while his eyes stopped twinkling, and his fingers ceased to travel along the line of his mustache. Her eyes fell before the scrutiny in his, but she lifted them again for one of ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... rigidity of the spinal column will in no way help you in the emission of tone, nor will it increase the breath control. In fact, I don't think it would even help you to stand up straight, although it would certainly give one a stiff appearance and ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... speaking of Alfieri's youth I have already had occasion to remark that there was in this man's character something abnormal; he was, as I have said, a moral invalid from birth; his very energy and resolution had somewhat of the frenzy and rigidity of a nervous disease, and though he would seem morally stronger than other men when strictly following his self-prescribed rule of excessive intellectual exercise, and when surrounded by a soothing atmosphere of affection ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... should extend from the fetlock region to the elbow, but the cotton and bandages are to reach to the foot. When one considers that, with the supportive appliance placed on each side of the affected member, rigidity is accomplished as much from tensile strain put upon the leather as from its own stiffness, it is seen that the leather need not be of the heaviest—sole leather is unnecessary. Because of the more comfortable immobilizing appliance, the subject is less restive, and chances for a successful ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... beautiful, but pride gave her features a certain rigidity which scared her admirers away. The thought of marriage had never occurred to her. The young men were not fully qualified, and those to whose social position there was no objection, were too old. If she, the daughter of a general, had married a captain, then a major's ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... star-lit heaven. Had I only been content with my isolation and the splendour of the spectacle spread out before me! But no, I must look back upon that bed and the solitary woman standing beside it! I must watch the settling of her body into rigidity as a voice rose from beside the other Postlethwaite saying, 'It is a matter of minutes now,' and then—and then—the slow creeping of her hand to her husband's mouth, the outspreading of her palm across the livid lips—its steady clinging there, smothering ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... dead silence among the men as the soft white ball of smoke rose slowly and steadily, expanding the while and changing its shape till it became utterly diffused. The occupants of the schooner's deck were statuesque in their rigidity, the crew to a man gazing hard at the captain as they strained their hearing to catch his next command; the captain fixed his eyes from one side upon Uncle Paul, while Rodd stood upon the other with his lips apart, gazing questioningly in his uncle's half-closed lids, ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... it was impossible to explain, on account of the orphan's 'holding his breath': a most terrific proceeding, super-inducing in the orphan lead-colour rigidity and a deadly silence, compared with which his cries were music yielding the height of enjoyment. But as he gradually recovered, Mrs Boffin gradually introduced herself; and smiling peace was gradually wooed back to ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... matter with breakfast?" he asked. From where he stood he could not see Hannah's face, but gradually his eyes were drawn to her figure. His intuition was not quick, and some moments passed before the rigidity of the pose impressed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is clearly stated, and so fully explained by Engels that there is no need to go over the ground again, and there only remains to call attention to some of the modern developments in the direction of rigidity of interpretation, and to the exaggeration of the broad theory of the predominance of the economic factor into a hard and fast ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... to explain—" said Mrs. Pemberton, stiffly and a bit out of breath, seating herself with a rigidity of backbone that would have justified Sissy's bestowal upon her of the nickname Mrs. Ramrod, if she could have seen it. But Sissy, lying attentive beneath the open window, could not see; she could only hear. "I am here to ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... proper, would suffice. Men infinitely inferior to himself in genius and sense of form, a Perugino, a Francia, a Fra Bartolommeo, an Albertinelli, possessed more of the magic which evokes pictorial beauty. Nevertheless, with all its aridity, rigidity, and almost repulsive hardness of colour, the Doni Madonna ranks among the great pictures of the world. Once seen it will never be forgotten: it tyrannises and dominates the imagination by its titanic power of drawing. No one, except perhaps Lionardo, could draw like that, and Lionardo ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... for love or money. They procured about fifteen yards of cane from one of the creeping palms, from which they removed all the old leaf sheafs and adventitious rootlets, making it perfectly smooth. Crouching low, each holding an end of the cane, which was strained almost to rigidity, the boys, in their demonstration of the feat, were wont to sweep continuously over a considerable area with the idea of getting the cane on the nape of the neck of the assumed "debil-debil," and then to suddenly change places, so that ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... trouble that we succeeded in laying bare some portions of the temporal muscle which appeared of less stony rigidity than other parts of the frame, but which, as we had anticipated, of course, gave no indication of galvanic susceptibility when brought in contact with the wire. This, the first trial, indeed, seemed decisive, and, with a hearty laugh at our ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... held forth his right arm to the inspection of the other, who fingered the iron rigidity of muscle under the cloth ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... towards the penitent Peter, and from the tenderness of his immaculate purity said to the adulteress, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." There are some sectarians in whom the arbitrary narrowness, fierceness, and rigidity of their received creeds have so demoralized and hardened conscience and sensibility in their native healthy directions, and artificially inflamed them in diseased channels, that we verily believe, if the decision of the eternal destiny of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... dress. They have allowed themselves to be committed for life to a costume of ruthless utilitarianism, which takes no count of physical beauty, or of its just display. Comfort, convenience, and sanitation have conspired to establish a rigidity of rule never seen before, to which men yield a docile and lamblike obedience. Robert Burton's axiom, "Nothing sooner dejects a man than clothes out of fashion," is as true now as it was three hundred years ago. Fashion sways the shape of a collar, and the ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... sense of the benediction of God, when suddenly the beauty, all the beauty, of a certain tree spoke to my inmost heart. It told me of fairness that never fails; of the greenness of ivy and the redness of autumn, the rigidity of winter in the branches;—and then I understood that an instant of such contemplation is the whole of life, the very reward of existence, beside which all human expectation is ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... doubtless, are very convenient in cases of emergency. But as they relax when selfish ends are to be subserved, and retain their rigidity only when judging the conduct of others, the inference is, that the persons possessing them are either hypocritical, or else, as was acknowledged by Parson D., in similar circumstances, they have mistaken their prejudices ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... farms to which I presently came—buildings set back from the road, but not so far as to give them the air of aloofness—had again that friendly, old-country expression that I have already mentioned: here it was somewhat marred, though, by an over-rigidity of the lines. It is unfortunate that our farmers, when they plant at all, will nearly always plant in straight lines. The straight line is a flaw where we try to blend the work of our hands with Nature. They also as a rule neglect ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... between himself and a direct view of the barn, in the region of which lay his destination. And as he ran the set expression of his face boded ill for some one. Jaws and mouth were clenched to a fierce rigidity that said far more than any words ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... voice—and what a voice! The clicking of a telegraphic register in signals, that the whole world knew and used. I was quiet, preternaturally so, I think, as I took down the message. I became almost aged in the intense rigidity of my absorption. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... construction it was in the transverse bracing which connected the bottoms of his two pontoons, and he was therefore rather anxious for the first ten minutes or quarter of an hour after he found himself fairly in the open sea. But the bracing was found amply sufficient to give the required rigidity, and this fact once demonstrated he kept away before the wind, and coasted along the northern shore of his island, keeping at a sufficient distance from the tremendously lofty cliffs to prevent his being becalmed. With the wind over her quarter the raft travelled remarkably fast, and within an ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... to be the German Kobold, a goblin, the demon of the mines; so called by miners, because cobalt was troublesome to miners, and at first its value was not known.' Ah! but these terms were created before Science, in its rigidity, had taught us the truth in regard to these matters. Yes! and fortunate is it for us that we still have words, and ideas clustering around these words, that have not yet been chilled and exanimated by the frigid touch ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... looked at him, and, as their glances met, he saw a change come over her. Her eyes grew darker: her features acquired an almost stony rigidity utterly strange to her. His eyelids lifted quickly, and he shrank back from her as a man might do who had seen the wraith of one long dead, ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... elemental instinct for conquest and plunder, absorbing to itself the life of the nation, had simplified its aims and reduced them to materialism; or that the Prussian character was originally so made—it is certain that the idea of Prussia always evoked a vision of rudeness, of rigidity, of automatism, as if everything within her went by clockwork, from the gesture of her kings to the step ...
— The Meaning of the War - Life & Matter in Conflict • Henri Bergson
... the whole limb, and by intensifying the current still further, to half the body. Finally, on the application of a very strong current, the typical fit was produced with clonic spasms in all the body, unconsciousness, nystagmus, and rigidity of the pupils. ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... the metal case), by which they are supported and electrical connection is made. The frame is slit at the inner horizontal edges, and then folded in such a way as to make individual clamping-jaws for each end-flange. The clamping-in is done at great pressure, and the resultant plate has great rigidity ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... man-object we contemplate the world-object physical causation becomes but the phenomenal aspect of psychical causation; the invariability of its sequence becomes but the expression of intentional order; the iron rigidity of natural law becomes the sensuous manifestation of an unalterable consistency as belonging ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... its cultivation and use were prohibited on account of its supposed pernicious properties; as it was thought to induce rigidity of the limbs, and to ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... closely connected with the last, and tending in the same direction, is that such a calendar as this implies rigidity and routine in religious duties. A well-ordered city life under a strong government must, of course, be subject to routine; law, religious or civil, written or unwritten, forces the individual into certain stereotyped ways of life, subjects him to a certain amount of wholesome discipline. The value ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... a subsidiary feature; wills only being permitted, in early times, in cases where there was likely to be a failure of proper heirs. The subsequent popularity of wills, and the indulgence with which the law came to regard them, were due to a desire to correct the rigidity of the Patria Potestas, as reflected in the law of intestate succession, by giving free scope to natural affection. In other words, the conception of relationship as reckoned only through males, and as resting on the continuance of the ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... he had wished most particularly to avoid, knowing that it opened on a part of the court which, from its commanding a view of the scaffold, he justly feared would be crowded. He had paused but to speak one word of encouragement to Agnes, who, with a calmness appalling from the rigidity of feature which accompanied it, now stood at his side; he bade her only hold by his cloak, and he hoped speedily to lead her to a place of safety. She heard him and made a sign of obedience. They passed the gate unquestioned, ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... rough sea would not fail to give to a crew, thus exposed, the appearance of half-drowned rats. Luckily the wind began to subside, and by degrees old ocean wore a face of undisturbed serenity. Our crew was a motley one; but among them, an Abbess, with a visage of parchment-like rigidity, and with her broad streaming bands, seemed to experience particular distress. She was surrounded by some hale, hearty market women, whose robust forms, and copper-tinted countenances, formed a striking contrast to her own. A little beyond was an old officer ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... passion nor quarrel." And yet you shall see him the next day quite another man, chafing and red with fury, ranged in battle for the assault; 'tis the glittering of so much steel, the fire and noise of our cannon and drums, that have infused this new rigidity and fury into his veins. A frivolous cause, you will say. How a cause? There needs none to agitate the mind; a mere whimsy without body and without subject will rule and agitate it. Let me thing of building castles in Spain, my imagination ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the addition of the element of elasticity to our currency system. The evil does not consist in an inadequate volume of money, but in the rigidity of this volume, which does not respond as it should to the varying needs of communities and of seasons. Inflation must be avoided; but some provision should be made that will insure a larger volume of money during the Fall and Winter months than in the less active seasons of the year; ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Beaumont in the parish, but in the task of managing the humours and improving the inclinations of the lower orders, something beside zeal and activity is necessary, even granting (as was the case in this instance) that they are guided by right principles. There was an unfortunate degree of rigidity and austerity about Mrs. Mellicent that was less connected with her heart than her manner, unless we ascribe it to a latent conviction of her own wisdom and an inclination to govern by its acknowledged superiority rather than by acquired influence. The villagers allowed that the ladies ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... this wish, but failed to die at once; indeed he felt every moment the reviving forces of life throbbing through his tough young body. How could he look up and face his victorious foe? He decided rather to continue his efforts to die, and forthwith stiffened out into such rigidity as can be observed only in the bodies of those who have been dead ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... light. Her character acquired, necessarily, a secret misanthropy, which threw a tinge of bitterness into her conversation, and some severity into her eyes. Celibacy gave to her manners and habits a certain increasing rigidity; for she endeavored to sanctify herself in despair of fate. Noble vengeance! she was cutting for God the rough diamond rejected by man. Before long public opinion was against her; for society accepts the verdict ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... stood still as a carven man. Indeed, only by an added rigidity in his pose did he reward Paul Harley's intense scrutiny. A silence charged with drama was finally broken by the American. "Mr. Harley," he said, "you told me that you were up against the big proposition of your career. ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... remark, that the Polish theological literature of this period evinced much less of a polemical spirit than might have been expected, in an age when that of the neighbouring countries, Bohemia and Germany, abounded in controversial books and pamphlets, replete with unchristian bitterness and doctrinal rigidity. For productions of this character we have to look in Poland to the following period. The wise moderation of the two Sigismunds, and of Stephen Bathory, seems to have had a prodigious influence on the minds of the nation, to pacify them and keep ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... kicked the wreckage about the room, his glance fell upon his rifle with the fixed bayonet. And then the swine-dog ran amok. Boudru stood with his back to the door: the blood froze in his veins, and his little body stiffened into absolute rigidity. ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... movable guides placed on the sliders, D and D'. These guides, H and H', each consist of a cast iron box fixed by a nut to the extremity of the arms, h and h', and coupled by crosspieces, j and j', which keep them apart and give the guides the necessary rigidity. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... a little from his pale rigidity and sat down opposite his mother. He held out his hands to the fire and she saw that they were trembling. "Yes," he said, "I've thought of that. I've thought of that. Perhaps, when he gets to college—up at Stanford, away from Honor—I've ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... into his soul. Priesthood had brought night into Cimourdain. He who has been a priest is one still. What brings night upon us may leave the stars with us. Cimourdain was full of virtues, full of truths, but they shone in the midst of darkness" (i. 123). If the aristocrat had rigidity, so had the Jacobin. "Cimourdain had the blind certitude of the arrow, which only sees the mark and makes for it. In revolution, nothing so formidable as the straight line. Cimourdain strode forward with ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... he mustn't." She was still more frightened by the discovery that he was shaking all over. Bewildered, shrinking into the far off corner, avoiding his eyes, she yet saw the quivering of his mouth and made a wild attempt at a smile, which broke the rigidity of her lips and ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... that second that I swear those about us were not immediately aware of what had happened. Then Fortini gasped and coughed slightly. The rigidity of his pose slackened. The hilt and hand against my breast wavered, then the arm drooped to his side till the rapier point rested on the lawn. By this time Pasquini and de Goncourt had sprung to him and he was ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... control the lives of its adherents, as well as the Catholicism whose influence on her character he found himself beginning to fear. But he wished also that she should be repelled to some extent by the merciless rigidity she would find at Northampton, and thus, after an oscillation or two come to rest in the quiet eclecticism of that middle position which ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... too late? For a minute it seemed to be so; then the stony eyes softened and fell, the rigidity of her frame relaxed, and Carmel sank back again on the sofa and tried to read the headlines on the open sheet before her. But her eyes were unequal to the task. With a sob she dropped the paper and entreated the nurse ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... unfailing regularity and reliability of her fundamental laws—of her "constitution"—that freedom and progress are possible. If we could not depend upon perfect law we could make no advance whatever. We should all be abroad and uncertain. Yet in spite of her unbending rigidity over fundamentals, she does also show mercy and pity. A child toddling along downhill unregardful of the force of gravitation falls on its face and screams with pain. But Nature, represented by the mother, rushes up, seizes the little thing ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... into his bear again, while Wilfrid Pole, who was swinging his long cavalry legs to rearward, shouted; and Mr. Sumner, a rising young barrister, walking beside Cornelia, smiled a smile of extreme rigidity. Arabella was punished for claiming rights of birth. She heard the murmuring course of the dialogue between Cornelia and Mr. Sumner, sufficiently clear to tell her it was not fictitious and was well sustained, while ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fluid. The pressure must continue to increase toward the center. We do not know what is the temperature, but it is perfectly possible that at a greater depth the earth may become rigid once more if the effect of pressure in promoting solidity and rigidity continues, as Bridgman tells me he thinks probable. We do not even have to assume a change in the chemical composition of the earth's substance, though it is perfectly allowable. This, then, will be a third layer, once ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... but the hasty utterance had its effect upon her. Some of the rigidity went out of her attitude. "My dear Nick," she said, "what is the ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... hand, to make clearly distinct his mode of marking the commencement, the interior division, and the close of each bar. The bow, employed by some violinist conductors (leaders), is less suitable than the stick. It is somewhat flexible, and this want of rigidity, together with the slight resistance it offers to the air, on account of its appendage of hair, ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... will, draw to itself, by a sort of aspiration, the greater part of the living forces which animate the latter. One sees, then, by a singular inversion, life withdrawn from the body, which then exhibits a cadaverous rigidity, and transfers itself entirely to the phantom, which acquires consistency—sometimes even to the point of struggling with persons before whom it materializes. It is but exceptionally that it shows itself in connection with a living person. But as soon as death ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... in his characters a certain brooding rigidity. They're righteous, narrow, and cheerless, without infinite possibilities for great sorrow ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... society, with which they become pregnant and longing; they are possessed with an idea, and cannot be at peace until they have put it outside of them in some distinct embodiment. But with Charles literature was an object rather than a mean; he was one who loved bandying words for its own sake; the rigidity of intricate metrical forms stood him in lieu of precise thought; instead of communicating truth, he observed the laws of a game; and when he had no one to challenge at chess or rackets, he made verses in a wager against himself. From the very idleness of the man's ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... flung forth her child from the warmth of her own bosom to the cold, hireling kindness of the stranger. I think I hear some puritanical, world-observing, starched piece of female rigidity exclaim, "And therein she did a great wickedness." The fact I admit, but ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... to his business, his present place of abode, and so on, and Warburton was all but turning away in impatience, when at last she drew aside, and cautiously invited him to enter. Further acquaintance with Mrs. Wick led him to understand that the cold, misgiving in her eye, the sour rigidity of her lips, and her generally repellant manner, were characteristics which meant nothing in particular—save as they resulted from a more or less hard life amid London's crowd; at present, the woman annoyed him, and only the clean freshness of her ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... employed in preparing these ligneous fibres for the manufacture of a primitive kind of cordage, in large use among the fishermen, and which possessed a strength and flexibility that could scarce have been expected from materials of such venerable age and rigidity as the roots and trunks of ancient trees, that had been locked up in the peat-mosses of the district for mayhap a thousand years. Like the ordinary cordage of the rope-maker, it consisted of three strands, and was employed for ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... is utterly choked amidst a mass of subordinate interests. No representation is attempted of the growth of his opinions, or of their action upon his character: he is marked by the same singular rigidity of outline and fixedness of posture which characterized Adam Bede,—except, perhaps, that there is a certain inclination towards poetry in Holt's attitude. But if the general outline is timid and undecided in "Felix Holt," the different parts are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... degrees, the motions became convulsive,—till on a sudden he bestirred himself to such effect that the stranger was rolled right off him. I bent down,—to find that the young gentleman's condition still seemed very far from satisfactory. There was a rigidity about the muscles of his face, a clamminess about his skin, a disagreeable suggestiveness about the way in which his teeth and the whites of his eyes were exposed, ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... raised out of vacancy; beat twice upon the floor in death throes; fell back. Lakla shivered; gave a command. The frog-men moved about; peering here and there; lifting unseen folds revealing in stark rigidity torn form after form of ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... it. Nevertheless, to an observer enough remained of the imperishable forms of the human face which appealed to the soul, even though the eye could see no more than a lifeless head. The firm outline of the face, the shape of the brow, the solemnity of the lines, the rigidity of the nose, the form of the bony structure which wounds alone had slightly altered,—all were signs of intrepidity without calculation, faith without reserve, obedience without discussion, fidelity without compromise, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. "What have you to do with us?" that expression seemed to say. "The little power you might have once possessed over ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... greatest importance as a constituent of our food. It contributes to the welfare of the body in at least three ways; (1) it gives rigidity to the bones, (2) it supplies an essential ingredient of the living substance in all the tissues, (3) it is present in the blood and in the other body fluids, where it is of service in such vital processes ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... moistening his wavy hair, which clustered in short, thick curls around his brow, making him look so handsome, as more than one maiden thought, envying Ethelyn her good fortune, and marveling at the pallor of her lips and the rigidity of her form. ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... suddenly tightened to their old puritan rigidity. "Mr. Demorest has reasons—abundant reasons—to thoroughly understand and trust me," she replied ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... trembling. But when she saw, in the pale gloom, the face of an aged man peeping out from under a white sheet on a naked mattress, she started back, trembling no more—rather transfixed into an absolute rigidity. That was no conventional, expected shock that she had received. It was a genuine unforeseen shock, the most violent that she had ever had. In her mind she had not pictured Gerald as a very old man. She knew that he was old; she had said to herself that ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... decades unchanged, as has that of the Italian Statuto of 1848, and as did that of the American constitution between 1804 and 1865. No (p. 045) constitutional system, however, long stands still, and least of all one of the English variety, in which there exists but little of even the formal rigidity arising from written texts. Having no fixed and orderly shape assigned it originally by some supreme authority, the constitution of the United Kingdom has retained throughout its history a notably large measure of flexibility. It is by no means to-day what it was fifty years ago; ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... These were expressed by various titles and epithets in the mystic hymns and litanies, which the artists endeavored to represent by various forms and characters of men and animals. The great characteristic attribute was represented by the organ of generation in that state of tension and rigidity which is necessary to the due performance of its functions. Many small images of this kind have been found among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, attached to bracelets, which the chaste and pious matrons of antiquity wore round their ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... stern rigidity of the figure which stood between him and the moonlight, but clasped it warmly to his heart.—"Now I've got you, Ducky!" cried he, pressing all too affectionate kisses upon the face ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... one can survive a temperature of 45 deg. C. (113 deg. F.) or above for very long. Mammalian muscle becomes rigid with heat rigor at about 50 deg. C., and obviously should this temperature be reached the sudden rigidity of the whole body would render life impossible. H.M. Vernon has recently done work on the death temperature and paralysis temperature (temperature of heat rigor) of various animals. He found that animals of the same class of the animal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... at all warm there; the hall would have made a capital cellar. And the couples slowly advanced, their chins raised, their eyes blinking, between the gigantic stone figures, the black marble gods, dumb in their hieratic rigidity, and the monstrous beasts, half cats and half women, with death-like faces, attenuated noses, and swollen lips. They thought all these things very ugly. The stone carvings of the present day were a great deal better. An inscription in Phoenician characters amazed them. No one ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... Fasten your hold upon them, and facts will become your servants instead of your tyrants. No charm of detail will be lost, no homely picturesque circumstance, no touch of human pathos or humor; but all hardness, rigidity, and finality will disappear, and your story will be not yours alone, but that of every one who feels and thinks. Spirit gives universality and meaning; but alas! for this new gospel of the auctioneer's catalogue, and the crackling of thorns ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... neck of her blouse, jerked her to her knees, and began to drag her. Joan fought his iron grasp. The twisting and tightening of her blouse choked her utterance. He did not look down upon her, but she could see him, the rigidity of his body set in violence, the awful shade upon his face, the upstanding hair on his head. He dragged her as if she had been an empty sack. Like a beast he was seeking a dark place—a hole to hide her. She was strangling; a distorted sight made objects dim; and now she struggled ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... pumped. The dead body, lying in this receptacle for two hours, absorbs certain parts of the gas which enters the pores and touches those parts of the dead body not reached by the injected fluid. By this process no part of the body is subject to putrefaction and the muscles all retain their rigidity, so that one hundred years after burial the features ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... left you have all the Germanics, a great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a word to us others. They cannot long remain ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... of its qualities, distinctly akin to that of the home people. Moor, Hun and Turk—all the numerous folk we find in the present condition of the world so far from their cradle-lands—are still to a great extent what their primitive nurture made them. On this rigidity which comes to mature races in the lower life as well as in man, depends the vigor with which they do ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... perpetual fidget, and that the same re-action takes place as in the case of Munchausen's horn, which played for half an hour of its own accord when unfrozen. To speak seriously, nothing can be more piteously ridiculous than the state of a poor Languedoc child, swathed and bandaged into all the rigidity of a mummy, and totally motionless. Our friend H. declares, that his attention was once drawn behind a door by a faint cry, and that he there discovered and took down one of these little teraphims from the hook by which it hung suspended by a loop, like a young American savage. "C'est la ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... was nothing beyond this rigidity of his stern features, and a certain greyness of the complexion, to betray the turmoil of the emotions that were doubtless going on within; and the quality of these two men, each in his own way, so keyed me up that, by the time the door was shut and we had ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... true hostel; no one is refused admission and hospitality,—no restrictions on the gentler sex make it impossible for real parties of pleasure to visit its beautiful valley,—no Pharisaic rigidity of self-denial makes it imperative to refuse visitors good cheer, though the community observe their long and trying fasts with a severity which puts to shame abstinence in Catholic countries. (The Greek fasts two hundred and forty-six days ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... all—all—very interesting and commendable, no doubt. But for such a procedure to be of any real value it should be entered into by all. Gentlemen"—his rigidity was all gone now and so was his pallor—"I am unwilling to submit myself to what, in my eyes, is an act of unnecessary humiliation. Our word should be enough. I have not the coin——" Stopped by the absolute silence, he cast a distressed look into the faces about him, till it reached that of ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... textile art was of greater importance to the aborigines than basketry. This term may be made to cover all woven articles of a portable kind which have sufficient rigidity to retain definite or stable form without distention by contents or by other extraneous form of support. It will readily be seen that in shape, texture, use, size, etc., a very wide range of products is here to be considered. Basketry includes a number of groups of utensils ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes
... of container is the paper, or fiber, can which is made of fiber board with a slip cover. Fiber cans are also made with tin tops and bottoms, the metal parts supplying a measure of rigidity to the package. These composite packages are made round, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... thin, so bloodless, and so unprofitable to remember, in spite of its easy narrative and its "punch." Its success as literature, curiously enough for a new literature and a new race like ours, is limited, not by crudity, or inexpressiveness, but by form, by the very rigidity of its carefully perfected form. Like other patent medicines, it ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... itself. His face brought powerfully to my mind some of those uncouth visages of saints and abbots which are occasionally seen in the niches of the walls of ruined convents. There was not the slightest gleam of vitality in his countenance, which for colour and rigidity might have been of stone, and which was as rude and battered as one of the stone heads at Icolmkill, which have braved the winds of twelve hundred years. I continued gazing on his face till I became almost alarmed, concluding that life might have departed from its harassed and fatigued ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... that of the damned. I lay upon my back for days and nights on a small lounge, without sleeping a wink, so great was my suffering. For forty-eight hours my eyes were rolled upward and backward in my head in a set and terrible rigidity. In my delirium, I thought my room was overran by rats. I tried to fight them off as they came toward me, but when I thought they were gone I could detect them stealing under my lounge, and presently they would be gnawing at my knee, and every ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... word indicative of the fact the Lady Agatha had suffered for the cause of votes for women, a change took place in the expression of Miss Pringle's countenance. Cleggett thought she was about to speak. But she did not. Nevertheless, although she listened intently, some of her rigidity had gone. When Lady Agatha ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... the pathological effects of the rays of radio-activity and ultra-violet light. One finds a great geologist in collaboration with his distinguished colleague in physics, and from the latter comes a contribution on the rigidity of the earth. Astronomy answers nowadays to the name of astrophysics, and progressive observatories recognize in the laboratory a tool as essential as the telescope. In a word, the professional student of science not only finds that the subject matter of physics has many fundamental points ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... of my principal conclusions first, i. e., that the only types of infection that are associated with pain are those in which the infection may be spread by muscular action or those in which the fixation of parts by continued muscular rigidity is an advantage; and, further, as a striking corollary, that the type of infection that may cause muscular action when it attacks one region of the body may cause no such action ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... moved together into the waiting-room, and there at the farther end of it, beyond the vulgar, perfunctory chairs and tables, under the flaring gas, he saw Mrs. Tarrant sitting upright on a sofa, with immense rigidity, and a large flushed visage, full of suppressed distortion, and beside her prostrate, fallen over, her head buried in the lap of Verena's mother, the tragic figure of Olive Chancellor. Ransom could scarcely know ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... Mohamedoo, by a formal announcement of our arrival, the caravan made ready for reception by copious, but needed, ablutions of flesh and raiment. The women, especially, were careful in adorning and heightening their charms. Wool was combed to its utmost rigidity; skins were greased till they shone like polished ebony; ankles and arms were restrung with beads; and loins were girded with snowy waist-cloths. Ali-Ninpha knew the pride of his old Mandingo companions, and was satisfied that Mohamedoo would have been mortified had we surprised him ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... when he opened his dining-room door, there was no hint of emotion in his bearing. He bore himself with the rigidity of a man who knows he ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... had already been sitting bolt upright, but now she achieved an even greater rigidity. "Did you take my advice about your will? I don't suppose ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... startling innovation; we meet the same alternation of chorus, recitative, aria, and ensemble that we have known since the oratorio style was perfected. A change, howeer, has come over the spirit of the expression and the forms have all relaxed some of their rigidity. In the oratorios of Handel and Haydn there are instances not a few of musical delineation in the instrumental as well as the vocal parts; but nothing in them can be thought of, so far at least as the ambition of the design extends, as a companion piece to ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... into the pit. Then, having flung a few handfuls of clay over it, he unwound the sheet, and kneeling beside the body, prepared to remove the jewels. The rays of the moon and his dark lantern fell on the lovely, snow-white face together, and Sir Norman groaned despairingly as he saw its death-cold rigidity. The man had stripped the rings off the fingers, the bracelets off the arms; but as he was about to perform the same operation toward the necklace, he was stopped by a startling interruption enough. ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... Bishop's successors of today. It is hardly necessary to inform you that since his time the domain of the naturalist has been immensely extended—the whole science of geology, with its astounding revelations regarding the life of the ancient earth, having been created. The rigidity of old conceptions has been relaxed, the public mind being rendered gradually tolerant of the idea that not for six thousand, nor for sixty thousand, nor for six thousand thousand, but for aeons embracing untold millions of years, this earth has been the theatre of life ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... in those still and vacant streets. Even the crows were silent. But everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives-hundreds and hundreds. They lay stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, beads and all. Their attitude and their rigidity counterfeited death. The plague was not in Bombay then, but it is devastating the city now. The shops are deserted, now, half of the people have fled, and of the remainder the smitten perish by shoals every day. No doubt the city looks now in the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Boiled meat is generally preferable to roast meat, for nourishment and digestion. Boiling extracts more of the rank strong juices, and renders it lighter and more diluted. Roasting leaves it fuller of gravy, but it adds to the rigidity of the fibres. The flesh of young animals is best roasted. Fried and broiled meats are difficult to be digested, though they are very nourishing: weak stomachs had better avoid them. Meat pies and puddings cannot be recommended, but strong stomachs may sustain but little inconvenience from ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... sense of repulsion and fury, and lifted his eyes to the man as he approached. What the stranger saw in Clarence's blazing eyes no one but himself knew, for his own became fixed and staring; his sallow cheeks grew lanker and livid; his careless, jaunty bearing stiffened into rigidity, and swerving his horse to one side he suddenly passed Clarence at a furious gallop. The young American wheeled quickly, and for an instant his knees convulsively gripped the flanks of his horse to follow. But the next ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... she said, with a decided rigidity of countenance, "to tell you what we know of that girl, and now we leave the matter with you"; which was a falsehood, if Miss Calthea ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... mightily within him. Maria, whose keen eye and sure tongue seldom fail to hit the white of the mark, describes him as not being "any thing constantly, but a time-pleaser." And it is remarkable that the emphasized moral rigidity of such men is commonly but the outside of a mind secretly intent on the service of the time, and caring little for any thing but to trim its sails to the winds of self-interest and self-advancement. Yet Malvolio is really a man of no little talent and accomplishment, as he ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... bead-edged cover bearing acanthus-leaf decorations. The S-shaped stem is 21 inches long and only one-fourth inch in diameter. The great length of the stem was necessary to cool the smoke; the S-shape added rigidity to the silver. The piece undoubtedly is the work of a competent craftsman but it bears ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... changes were made. The Japanese military authorities decreed that Japanese time should be used for all public work, and they changed the names of the towns from Korean to Japanese. Martial law was now enforced with the utmost rigidity. Scores of thousands of Japanese coolies poured into the country, and spread abroad, acting in a most oppressive way. These coolies, who had been kept strictly under discipline in their own land, here found themselves masters of a weaker people. The Korean magistrates could not punish ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... who had slain her father, the storm giant, is an emblem of the unbending rigidity of the ice-enveloped earth, which, softened at last by the frolicsome play of Loki (the heat lightning), smiles, and permits the embrace of Nioerd (summer). His love, however, cannot hold her for more than three months of the year (typified in the myth by nights), as ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... to forgiveness I do not quite comprehend the term. It is one I do not often use. What is done cannot be undone. If you will alter your present habit, forgiveness, whatever you may mean by it, becomes superfluous.' His lips shut into their usual rigidity. Not a muscle in them would have stirred if I had kissed them with tears. No tears rose; I was struck into hardness equal to his own, and with something added. I HATED him. 'Henceforward,' I said to myself, 'I will not submit or ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... vortices are not the large whirls of planetary size, they are rather infinitesimal whirls of less than atomic dimensions; still a whirling fluid is believed in to this day, and many are seeking to deduce all the properties of matter (rigidity, elasticity, cohesion gravitation, and the ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... Eunice had taken faded, and her lethargy was replaced by an equally still, incredulous amazement. She followed Jasper Penny about with the mechanical rigidity of a minute sleepwalker. They went into a jewelry store beyond, with a square low bow window and white trimming, where he purchased a ring with a ruby, and small gold bracelets with locks and chains. His restless desire was ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and up here it's different—I mean, I feel that it may be different. Life in a place like this blows away the restraints of the artificial life at home. I know, oh, I know what I'm saying. I feel all untied in a place like this; the rigidity of one's nature begins to melt and flow. Surely you must understand what ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... countryside sings, and there is the beat of rhythm not merely in our hearts but in every particle of our body. Stillness is a delusion, and immobility a fiction of the senses. Life is movement and activity, and rigidity and stiffness come more near to what we understand as death. Yet even in death there is no stillness, there is but a change in the form of activity. The body is no longer alive as an organised community, but in its individual ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... close by; he blew down the chimney and save for the moonlight across the threshold it was dark in the cabin. With his other hand he lifted his crude mask from the lower part of his face. She sought again to strike, to batter his lips. But her heart sank as the relentless rigidity of his embrace baffled her attempt. He brought his face closer to hers, slowly closer until at last she knew the ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... Fig. 277, plate-racks, etc., are simply compound brackets. The shelf is the essential piece, the sides take the place of the supports, and the back is often reduced to strips merely wide enough to give rigidity. ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... longer act as a spring or buffer to the body, nor could it adapt its sole to the various kinds of surfaces on which we have to tread or stand. Nature, with her usual ingenuity, has succeeded in combining those opposing qualities—rigidity, suppleness, and elasticity or springiness—by resorting to her favorite device, the use of muscular engines. The arch is necessarily constructed of a number of bones which can move on each other to a certain extent, so that the foot may adapt itself to all kinds of roads and paths. ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
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