"Flatness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rote. But Italy is slim and all articulate; her most characteristic trees are those that are distinct and distinguished, with lines that suggest the etching-point rather than a brush loaded with paint. Cypresses shaped like flames, tall pines with the abrupt flatness of their tops, thin canes in the brakes, sharp aloes by the road-side, and olives with the delicate acuteness of the leaf—these make keen lines of slender vegetation. And they own the seasons by a gentle confession. Rather than be overpowered by the clamorous proclamation of summer ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... into his private sitting-room and carefully examined it, back and front, before slitting it open. The envelope was of the cheapest kind, the big splotch of red wax at the flap had been pressed into flatness by the summary method of forcing a coarse-grained thumb upon it; the address was inscribed in ill-formed characters only too evidently made with difficulty by a bad pen, which seemed to have been dipped into watery ink at every ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... snow. The sun was going down golden red, folding up the sky a wide, soft curtain of pink and mauve and deep purple merging into the fathomless blue, where already the stars were beginning to quiver. The house stood on the edge of a little forest, which had boldly asserted itself in the wide flatness. At this point in the west the prairie merged into an undulating territory, where hill and wood rolled away from the banks of the Saskatchewan, making another England in beauty. The forest was a sort of advance-post of ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... almost wishes the sea would roll in and submerge him, argues a want of confidence in their country, tantamount to a confession of failure. Had they a little more trust in the attractive qualities of their land, a little more imagination to realise that in other eyes its flatness and quaintness might be even alluring, they would accept and acknowledge the compliment by doing as little as possible to make ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... confession no longer exists, that there had been something about Adela that, pet-child of mine as she was, had troubled me. In all her behaviour, so far as I had had any opportunity of judging, she had been as good as my desires at least. But there was a want in her face, a certain flatness of expression which I did not like. I love the common with all my heart, but I hate the common-place; and, foolish old bachelor that I am, the common-place in a woman troubles me, annoys me, makes me miserable. Well, it was something of the common-place in Adela's expression that had troubled ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... people, therefore, principally breed this species of cattle, and instead of idle shepherd boys amusing themselves with little flutes, and guiding the sheep by throwing stones at them, the herds here are driven by mounted horsemen with long poles. The flatness of the country and the frequency of oxen will serve to illustrate the exactness of Bible narratives, particularly in the matter of the wheeled carriage and the kine used for conveying the ark of God from this place, Ekron, ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... thou thinkest. Meanwhile be assured that there are two Neros,—one such as people know, the other an artist, whom thou alone knowest, and if he slays as does death, or is in frenzy like Bacchus, it is only because the flatness and misery of common life stifle him; and I should like to destroy them, though I had to use fire or iron. Oh, how flat this world will be when I am gone from it! No man has suspected yet, not thou even, what an artist I am. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... flatness of the banks of the Mississippi continued unvaried for many miles above New Orleans; but the graceful and luxuriant palmetto, the dark and noble ilex, and the bright orange, were every where to be seen, and it was many days before ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... about me," he said, and the sudden rapture had all gone out of his voice; it had the flatness of utter weariness. "I shall be ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... accompaniment to bread and cheese, is naturally awful, but garlic used as it should be used is the soul, the divine essence, of cookery. The palate delights in it without being able to identify it, and the surest proof of its charm is manifested by the flatness and insipidity which will infallibly characterise any dish usually flavoured with it, if by chance this dish should be prepared without it. The cook who can employ it successfully will be found to possess the delicacy of perception, the accuracy of ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... it is I who have hardened your hearts, I am more guilty than I thought." Vittoria said no more. She knew that she had been speaking badly, or ineffectually, by a haunting flatness of sound, as of an unstrung instrument, in her ears: she was herself unstrung and dispirited, while the recollection of Anna's voice was like a sombre conquering monotony on a low chord, with which she felt insufficient ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nervous. H. of C. 41/2-9. I was kindly spoken of and heard, and I hope attained practically purposes I had in view, but I think the House felt that the last part by taking away the sting reduced the matter to flatness. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... is one too common out here, I am told: infants born in Christchurch during the autumn very often die. Owing to the flatness of the site of the town, it is almost impossible to get a proper system of drainage; and the arrangements seem very bad, if you are to judge from the evil smells which are abroad in the evening. Children who are born on a station, or taken there as soon as possible, almost invariably thrive, but ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... emotion fairly oozing from every pore, and for a solid hour he wrestles with his tools and vocabulary. The result probably does not altogether please him. He feels that he has said too much about his lack of socks, the toughness of his fare, the flatness of his purse. All the love and tenderness he meant to set down have somehow refused to leave him, even in description. But he knows he will be massacred if he goes howling for more paper; and so he sends off what he has written, counting the ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... coming just as they had finished their building, they took shelter under it, and remarked for some time, with infinite pleasure, how dry and comfortable it kept them; but at last the straw that covered it being completely soaked through, and the water having no vent to run off, by reason of the flatness of the roof, the rain began ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... by the central plates of the interior surface when the light is made to fall along their higher protuberances, leaving the hollows in the shade. You see how truly your prediction regarding the flatness of the creature's head is substantiated by these casts; it is really not easy to know how, placed on so flat a surface, the eyes could have been very available save for star-gazing; but as nature makes no mistakes in such matters, it is possible ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... whose nearest living relatives now have their home in the sea, we infer that it was on the flat sea floor that the sandstone was laid. Its present position hundreds of feet above sea level proves that it has since emerged to form part of the land; while the flatness of the beds shows that the movement was so uniform and gentle as not to break or strongly bend them from their ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... earth, scraped together for a pillow, is ground down into flatness, after a few minutes. A bag filled with earth, or it may be with grass, keeps its shape. Many people use their saddles as pillows; they roll up the flaps and stirrups, and place the saddle on the ground with a stone underneath, at its hindmost end, to keep it level ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... couch; but as boxes of equal height could not be found, her position was not enviable. The third lady preferred an uneasy posture among the ribs and cordage of the boat, and I lay down on the paving-stones of the quay, having found from experience that, in the matter of beds, flatness is the most indispensable of qualities, while hardness is not so awful as one might suppose. Where my comrade the collegian went to I ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... The uniform flatness of the terrain in this region and entire absence of cover for the attacker, whether the movement be frontal or enveloping, was responsible for the heavy losses the British incurred in this engagement. Here there were no protecting villages, hedges, or banks. A swift, headlong rush that could ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... People ceased to care how a thing was said, and began to take interest again in what was said. Those who had mimicked Amelie had grown into the habit of mimicry until they half forgot their scorn. The old-time flatness and burr began to soften from attrition, to be modified because they were conspicuous. You would have heard Arthur subduing his twang and unburring the "r." If you had asked him he would have told you his name was ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... N. horizontality^; flatness; level, plane; stratum &c 204; dead level, dead flat; level plane. recumbency, lying down &c v.; reclination^, decumbence^; decumbency^, discumbency^; proneness &c adj.; accubation^, supination^, resupination^, prostration; azimuth. plain, floor, platform, bowling green; cricket ground; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... me most," said Oxenden, "in all that has been read thus far, is the flatness of the South Pole, and the peculiar effect which this produces on ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... disagreeable parting to all of us. As I returned by the east side of the lake, the splendid high farming-lands that extend from the shore to the foot of the mountain were strikingly in contrast with the flatness and barrenness of the plain on the water-side, which is so slightly elevated above the level of the salt water that a few inches of rise in the laguna spreads out an immense sheet of saline water, and yet there is not a solitary evaporating vat where there is an unlimited demand ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... worn, Persis thought, more like the man who must settle for the spring finery of a family of grown daughters, than a complacent young husband paying for his wife's first new gown since the wedding. There was a flatness in his voice that matched the weariness in his eyes, and forthwith a dozen questions raced ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... animates all Disraeli's best sayings. The simple buffoonery of exuberant animal spirits is not in Disraeli's line. When he can neither be bitter nor rhetorical, he is apt to drop into mere mechanical flatness. But nobody has described more vigorously all the meaner forms of selfishness, stupidity, and sycophancy engendered under 'that fatal drollery,' as Tancred describes it, 'called a parliamentary government.' The pompous dulness which affects ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... he had broken down her obstinate resistance. Already he had noted the coarse, elemental formation of her hands, and now, the veil removed, he saw that she belonged to a type of character often found in Wales and closely duplicated in certain parts of London. There was a curious flatness of feature and prominence of upper jaw singularly reminiscent of the primitive Briton. Withal the girl was not unprepossessing in her coarse way. Utter stupidity and dogged courage are the outstanding characteristics of this type. But fear of the ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... full enjoyment of it, a certain abandonment of form is necessary; sometimes by reducing it to the shapeless glitter of the gem, as often Tintoret and Bassano; sometimes by loss of outline and blending of parts, as Turner; sometimes by flatness of mass, as often Giorgione and Titian. How far it is possible for the painter to represent those mountains of Shelley as the poet sees them, "mingling their flames with twilight," I cannot say; but my impression is, that ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... experienced the flatness which ensues when an expected excitement is postponed at the last moment, leaving the hours to drag along a slow, uneventful course. It was long since Miss Briskett had felt so consciously lonely and depressed as at her solitary dinner that evening. ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the stones; there was not a single blade of grass in sight anywhere, not a single lizard sunning himself on a boulder by the shore. When I looked again at Hermann's ship the girl had disappeared. I could not detect the smallest dot of a bird on the immense sky, and the flatness of the land continued the flatness of the sea to the naked ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... to the eye. The general greenness rivals that of England. The valleys are wide, and the views from the hill-tops very extensive. I am speaking chiefly of the western part of Normandy: the parts about Caen approach more nearly to the flatness, monotony, and dreary treelessness of ordinary French and German scenery. The air is pure and bracing,—especially in the little towns built on old castled heights. Why do we not always build our towns, when we can, on heights, in what Shakespeare calls ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... printing on bromide paper is one without excessive contrasts on the one hand, and without excessive flatness on the other. A moderately strong negative, such as will require from three to five minutes in the sunlight with a print out paper, fairly describes it. In other words, the negative should be fully exposed and so developed that there is a fair amount of density in the shadows. ...
— Bromide Printing and Enlarging • John A. Tennant
... great flatness of floor, with extreme breadth, carried well forward and aft, and possessing the utmost buoyancy, as well as capacity for stowage. They were carried as paddle-box boats (inverted), and thus protected the paddles as well as being ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the upper Rhine valley—which is by no means without charm but is nevertheless monotonous in its flatness—was considered a real paradise of natural scenic beauty, while the middle course of the river from Ruedesheim to Coblenz, with its rich splendor of gorges, rocks, castles and forests, was appreciated rather by way of contrast. In the upper Rheingau ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... Walpole and Pelham, the commercial war with Spain, the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy, the foolish prime minister Newcastle, the dull brawls of the Wilkes period, the miserable American war—everywhere alike we seem to remark a want of greatness, a distressing commonness and flatness in men and in affairs.' This would be very sad if it were true, but is it true? A plain man rubs his eyes in amazement at such reproaches. So far from most of us finding the eighteenth century uninteresting, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... country is uniformly well covered with trees and large grasses, which, in the rainy season, are too thick, tall, and green to be pleasant; though in the dry season, after the grasses have been burnt, it is agreeable enough, though not pretty, owing to the flatness of the land. The villages are not large or numerous, but widely spread, consisting generally of conical grass huts, while others are gable-ended, after the coast-fashion—a small collection of ten or twenty comprising one ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... uncle too," Urquhart said, and the fact formed a shadowy bond. But Peter's tone had struck a note of flatness that faintly indicated a lack of enthusiasm as to the menage. This note was, to Peter's delicately attuned ears, absent from Urquhart's voice. Peter wondered if Lord Hugh's brother (supposing it to be a paternal uncle) resembled Lord Hugh. To resemble Lord Hugh, Peter had always understood (till ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... would rise on the lines of Doctor Todd's faded blue-print. I should build Todd Hall and McGraw Library, but not one brick would I add to "Old Main." There would be the only condition of my gift of millions. They might suggest oriel windows to relieve the bare facade, buttresses to break the flatness of the wall and pinnacles to beautify the roof, but I would have "Old Main" always as I saw it on that September afternoon, when I had climbed the hill, paused, set down my bag and stood with arms akimbo while I scanned the amazing length and height of the splendid pile. My heart at each ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... relations would certainly have said that what he had at last both to recognise and to miss in those eyes must not a little have puzzled and tormented M. de Mauves. They took possession of him, they laid him out, they measured him in that state of flatness, they triumphed over him, they treated him as no pair of eyes had perhaps ever treated any member of his family before. The Count's scheme had been to provide for a positive state of ease on the part ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... freedom from coma in the third order is also of importance for telescope objectives; it is known as "Fraunhofer's condition.'' (4) After eliminating the aberration On the axis, coma and astigmatism, the relation for the flatness of the field in the third order is expressed by the "Petzval equation,'' S1/r(n'-n) 0, where r is the radius of a refracting surface, n and n' the refractive indices of the neighbouring media, and S the sign of summation for all refracting ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... shockingly, you get their secret from a careless something glancing out of the eyes. Most preposterous of all for some reason is a figure—one is maliciously disposed to present it as feminine and a little unattractive, goloshed for preference, and saying in a voice of cultivated flatness, "Why cannot we be perfectly plain and sensible, and speak quite frankly about this matter?" The answer to which one conceives, would be near the ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... two hundred thousand men could be drawn up in rank and file, horse and foot and guns. Excepting it be on some special occasion, there are rarely more than two or three hundred persons in sight. The paved emptiness makes one draw a breath of surprise, and human eyes seem too small to take in all the flatness below, all the breadth before, and all the height above. Taken together, the picture is too big for convenient sight. The impression itself moves unwieldily in the cramped brain. A building almost five hundred feet high produces a monstrous ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... with the deadly flatness of the mood which her mother so dreaded, that she wanted to go home to-night, and there had been no reasoning with her. Go home for what? Mrs. Heth had asked it twenty times, battling desperately against the menacing madness, now with argument ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... deficiency. But it is, and is commonly so called, a mean like that in music and harmony. For as in music there is a middle note between the highest and lowest in the scale, which being perfectly in tune avoids the sharpness of the one and the flatness of the other; so virtue, being a motion and power in the unreasoning part of the soul, takes away the remissness and strain, and generally speaking the excess and defect of the appetite, by reducing each of the passions to a state of mean and rectitude. For example, they tell us that bravery ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... quarrel with, and none to love, except good Mrs. Hockin, who went away by train immediately, I spent such a wretched time in that town that I longed to be back in the Bridal Veil in the very worst of weather. The ooze of the shore and the reek of the water, and the dreary flatness of the land around (after the glorious heaven-clad heights, which made me ashamed of littleness), also the rough, stupid stare of the men, when I went about as an American lady may freely do in America, and the sharpness of every body's voice (instead of the genial ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Practical self-control with regard to ourselves and love, always love, in our intercourse with others are therefore the foundation rules of Feuerbach's morality, from which all others lead, and neither the enthusiastic periods of Feuerbach nor the loud praises of Starcke can set off the thinness and flatness of this pair ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... A certain flatness of impression awaits you also, I think, at Marmoutier, which is the other indisuensable excursion in the near neighborhood of Tours. The remains of this famous abbey lie on the other bank of the stream, about a mile and a half from ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the reasons that children reject fairy tales this, that such very poor material is offered them? There is a dreary flatness about all except the very best which revolts the child of literary appreciation and would fail to strike a spark ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... side of the leaf of one of the pandanus palms (PANDANUS PEDUNCULATUS). The prickles having been sliced off with a knife or the finger nails, two distinct half-hitches are made in reverse order. Each end is shortened and roughly trimmed, the knots creased and squeezed to flatness between the teeth and lips, and the toy is complete, the making having occupied less than a minute. Before throwing the ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... reverts to its former flatness, the hills vanish, the shores are level, but the southern influence is felt, and the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... old masters," cried Miss Nancy as those of the first corridor began to slip past us on the walls, with no desire to interrupt. "What do you think of this Greek Byzantine style, Mr. Wick? Somehow it doesn't seem to appeal to me, though whether it's the flatness—or what——" ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... far-stretching distances, level meadows, intersected with grey willows and sedgy dikes, frequent spires, substantial watermills, and farm houses of white stone, and cottages of white stone also. Southward, a belt of wood, with a gentle rise beyond, redeems it from absolute flatness. Entering the town by the road from the east you come to a cross, standing in the midst of four ways. Before you, and to the left, stretches the town, consisting of wide streets or roadways, with irregular buildings on either ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... most impressive face. If you could fancy some mighty serpent transformed into a man, preserving in the human lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea of that countenance than long descriptions can convey: the width and flatness of frontal—the tapering elegance of contour disguising the strength of the deadly jaw—the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as the emerald—and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the consciousness ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... he suggested. "Are you sure that Adair—— What I mean to say is, he may be only philandering. Heaps of men do that—go through all the motions of making fools of themselves and actually do nothing. He may be only expressing the discontent of the moment, the revolt from suspense, the flatness of quiet after terrible excitements. One didn't need to be a fighting-man to share those excitements. You say that Phyllis made a nest of her home. Perhaps he didn't like nests. It may be that that's done it. Adair can't have altered so radically over night; he wasn't forceful ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... chair to watch her husband. He had brought her straight into the drawingroom without staying to remove his leathern driving coat, which set off his big frame and the drilled flatness of his shoulders; everything he wore or used was expensive and fashionable. There came on her suddenly the impression of being shut up alone with a stranger, a man of whom she knew nothing except that in upbringing and outlook he was entirely different from her and her family. The room seemed ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... breadth together without depth give flatness. Life and love without feeling produce shallow, superficial natures. Feeling is the need of men to stretch out ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... kind of progress, the progress towards a complete city of virtues and dominations where righteousness and peace contrive to kiss each other. An impersonal force might be leading you to a wilderness of perfect flatness or a peak of perfect height. But only a personal God can possibly be leading you (if, indeed, you are being led) to a city with just streets and architectural proportions, a city in which each of you can contribute exactly the ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the forehead of an infant in such a way that it presses on the skull and forces the forehead up on to the top of the head. As a man whose head has been flattened in infancy grows older, the deformity partly disappears; but the flatness of the head is always regarded as a tribal badge of ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... resignation. "I can't lie to you. I have only a broken heart. Beyond friendship and gratitude, I have nothing to offer you. I can't even promise that I will ever stop loving—him. But—" her words came with the flatness of unending soul-fag—"I suppose I can give you the lesser things; fidelity, respect; all the petty allegiance that can go on without fire ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... centuries ago, when the Puritan hallucination was still strong, a certain fierce savor of religious intolerance; but now that that has died out, and no material prosperity has come to let them share in the larger life of their century, there is a flatness, a mean absence of warmth or color, a deadness to all ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the shore on account of the flatness of the beach, stuck fast about a bow-shot from dry land, and the men and boys at once tumbled over the edge and prepared to carry not only the luggage, but the female passengers ashore. Alden seeing this prospect, tore off his boots and stockings, and plunging into ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... to the first rough thicknesses of the back; and I damp the surface all over as I did the outside, and dry it carefully; for you will understand the necessity for this carefulness, there being some fear of slight warping from the true flatness now the wood is thin all over, if quick, artificial heat be adopted ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... consulted the glass, picked up his cap bearing the insignia of his rank, and went out through the kitchen to the land side of the house. The sky and sea—feathery clouds and still, oily flatness—did not interest him this September morning. It was the rolling dune that caught his eye, and the straggly path that threaded its way along the marshes and around and beyond the clump of scrub ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... considerable time. Then, becoming conscious of the flatness, staleness and unprofitableness of it all, as far as my elderly selfishness was concerned, I threw my extinct cigar end into the fire, and thanking God that I had come to an age when all this storm and fuss over a creature of the opposite sex was a thing of the past, and yet with an unregenerate ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... rivals and sometimes as subjects one of the other, differed considerably in character and culture. But the scarcity of timber and the lack of good building-stone except in the limestone table-lands and more distant mountains of upper Mesopotamia, the abundance of clay, and the flatness of the country, imposed upon the builders of both nations similar restrictions of conception, form, and material. Both peoples, moreover, were probably, in part at least, of Semitic race.[4] The Chaldans attained civilization ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... his long career; but never before had he felt the exultation of riding upon the very crest of a mighty wave of popular applause. But it was one of those waves that collapse suddenly into a surprising flatness. Canning repudiated all that Erskine had done and immediately recalled him. The ships that had gone to sea, under the sanction of the President's proclamation, were permitted by an order in council to complete their voyages unmolested; ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... cordage and tackle of every description being stored in the capstan-house. But this did not at all chime in with Lance's plans, so he merely remarked that it would do well enough if no better place could be found, but that the flatness of the ground and the consequent shoal water at that spot would prove serious difficulties in the way of launching; and that it would be advisable before deciding to give the entire shore of the bay a ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts—when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break—at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent—I am ever ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... to Rognes, when that commune decided to have a cure to itself. He came from a mountainous district, and disheartened by the flatness of the vast plain of La Beauce, and especially by the religious indifference of his parishioners, he soon fell into ill-health, on one occasion fainting while he was saying Mass. At the end of two years ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... without much enthusiasm. Now they had reached their object, a reaction had begun, and Agatha was sensible of a curious flatness. She knew that Drummond and the rock-borer could do nothing with their claims except sell them to somebody who could supply the money to develop the mines; but before they started Thirlwell had outlined a plan by which the holdings ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... in Berlin, which had in the late blessed Nicolai its chief organ, and in the General German Library its arsenal. The most deplorable mediocrity began to show itself more repulsively than ever, and flatness and insipidity blew themselves up like ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... village; Beacon Hargate is no more than a hamlet. There is not much that is picturesque in Beacon Hargate, or its neighbourhood. The Beacon Hill itself is as little like a hill as it well can be, and acquires what prominence it has by virtue of the extreme flatness of the surrounding country. A tuft of Scotch firs upon its crest is visible from a distance of twenty miles in some directions. A clear but sluggish stream winds among its sedges and water-lilies round the western side of the Beacon Hill, and ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... musty odor. The swallows had nested along the ridge-pole. They fluttered out of the door, chattering protest against the invasion. Rat nests littered the corners and the brown rodents scuttled out with alarmed squeaks. The floor was of logs roughly hewn to flatness. Upon four blocks stood a rusty cookstove. A few battered, smoke-blackened pots and pans stood on a shelf and hung upon nails driven in the walls. A rough bedstead of peeled spruce poles stood in ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and larynx eviscerated with punch forceps; recurrence of stenosis (not of web). Cure by laryngostomy. This view also illustrates the true depth of the larynx which is often overlooked because of the misleading flatness of laryngeal illustrations. 10, Direct laryngoscopic view; postdiphtheric hypertrophic subglottic stenosis. Cured by galvanocauterization. 11, Direct laryngoscopic view; postdiphtheric hypertrophic supraglottic stenosis. ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... never before grasped the charm of French colouring; the pinkish-yellow of the pan-tiled roofs, the lavender-grey or dim green of the shutters, the self-respecting shapes and flatness of the houses, unworried by wriggling ornamentation or lines coming up in order that they may go down again; the universal plane trees with their variegated trunks and dancing lightness—nothing more charming ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... as the character of its bed, without trees, more water-worn than the other rivers of the colony, its size, and the direction from which it comes, render it exceedingly interesting to determine how it is supplied. The sandy nature of the country on its banks, and for many miles east, and the flatness of the country, preclude the idea that it receives its supply of water from the immediately surrounding district. It must either be supplied by a country of a far better character to the eastward, or it is the outlet of another and larger ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... face,—a most impressive face. If you could fancy some mighty serpent transformed into man, preserving in the human lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea of that countenance than long descriptions can convey: the width and flatness of frontal; the tapering elegance of contour disguising the strength of the deadly jaw; the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as the emerald,—and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the consciousness of an ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... about that Abel was for ever sifting bits of flour through his finger and thumb, to obtain the required flatness and delicacy which marks the latter in a miller born; and playing lovingly with little Jan on the floor of the round-house, he would pass some through the baby's ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... themselves; the county magnates came dropping in later; and chiefest among them all was the lord-lieutenant from the Towers. But to-night they were unusually late, and the aristocratic ozone being absent from the atmosphere, there was a flatness about the dancing of all those who considered themselves above the plebeian ranks of the tradespeople. They, however, enjoyed themselves thoroughly, and sprang and pounded till their eyes sparkled and their cheeks glowed with exercise and excitement. Some of the more prudent parents, mindful ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... high color, brilliant blue eyes, and her yellow hair, often led those who glanced at her casually to think her good looking. Further inspection, however, revealed a fox-like expression, an irregularity in the position of the eyes, a hardness in the lines of the mouth and a flatness of the nose which belied the first impression. This was particularly true when, after being deprived of morphine in the Tombs, her ordinary high color gave way at her second trial to a waxy paleness of complexion. But ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... mould remains the same in each case, although there may be casual variations in the hue of the material poured out and moulded. All these forlorn folk are either verging toward the written-out condition or have reached the last level of flatness. Like the great painters who work for Manchester or New York millionaires, these novelists produce stuff which is only shoddy; they lower their high calling, and they prepare themselves to pass away into the ranks of the nameless millions whose works are ranged along miles of untouched shelves ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... form of the Cliff Dweller's skull is produced by some custom of the tribe in binding the infant upon a board or other substance. This is proved by the fact that the flatness of the back head is uniformly at the same angle, and that the upper tables of the skull give evidence of abnormal pressure. There is also in this collection one skull which is an exception, and shows ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... of the book, and probably that which at its appearance exasperated the critics, though it did not disturb the abonne—or, more surprisingly, the Immortals—is the flatness of style which has been already noted in the conversation, but which overflows insupportably into the narrative. M. Ohnet speaks somewhere, justly enough, of "le style a la fois pretentieux et plat, familier aux reporters." ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... well of the country. On the other hand, it not unfrequently publishes jokes the birth of which considerably antedates that of the United States itself; and it sometimes descends to a level of trifling flatness and vapidity which no English paper of the kind can hope to equal. It is hard—for a British critic at any rate—to see any perennial interest in the long series of highly exaggerated drawings and jests referring to the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... fire which did not warm them was a failure. But we have seen the process of secrecy and aristocracy introduced even into jokes. If a joke falls flat, a small school of aesthetes only ask us to notice the wild grace of its falling and its perfect flatness after its fall. The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualism into that one form of intercourse ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... but her expression testified to flatness within. The world no longer cared about her, and a ship was not a home. When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors went tumbling above her head, she had cried; she would cry this evening; she would cry to-morrow. It was not home. Meanwhile she arranged her ornaments in the room which ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... and then, touch and re-touch all the different parts of the feathers, in order to render them distinct and visible, correcting at the same time any harshness or unnatural risings or sinkings, flatness, or rotundity. This is putting the last finishing ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... the hot July streets with that feeling of flatness —of the want of a mild excitement apart from his own home. He saw Aylmer and persuaded him ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... antiquity—is to him an undying record of the days when man still walked hand in hand with nature. The history of the past is at once a storehouse of stirring themes ready to the hand of the artist, and the surest safeguard against both flatness and exaggeration in his work. [Footnote: See Essays xiii., xiv., xx.; Present State of Polite Learning, in particular, chap. xi.] It offers, moreover, the truest schooling of the heart, and insensibly "enlists the passions on the side of humanity". "Poetry", Byron said, "is the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... obstacle, came down lightly and strained forward into the shining mysteries at a furious gallop. The black speck grew larger. She was gaining. The crumbling, cliff-like bank on her left showed a rent in which a faint track rose sharply to the flatness beyond. She put her horse at it and came out among the tiny humps on which grew the halfa grass and the tamarisk bushes. A pale sand flew up here about the horse's feet. Androvsky was still below her ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... discourse seemeth to be a motley, inconsistent composition, made up of various shreds of equal fineness, although of different colours. It is a bundle of incoherent maxims and assertions, that frequently destroy one another. But still there is the same flatness of thought and style; the same weak advances towards wit and raillery; the same petulancy and pertness of spirit; the same train of superficial reading; the same thread of threadbare quotations: the same affectation of forming general rules upon ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... they journeyed to Verona, marveling greatly at the richness of the country. The footmen, however, grumbled at the flatness of the plain, and said that it was as bad as marching in the Holy Land. On their right, however, the slopes of the Alps, thickly clad with forests, reached down nearly to the road, and Cuthbert assured them that they would have plenty of climbing before they had done. At Verona they tarried again, ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... delightfully," he rejoined, alive to the flatness of the words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming desire ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... of p in pat, the sound of f in fat differs in a certain degree. This difference is not owing to a difference in their sharpness or flatness. Each is sharp. Neither is it owing to a difference in their continuity or explosiveness; although f is continuous, whilst p is explosive. This we may ascertain by considering the position of s. The sound ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... shall be at the end of this dreary plain presently,' Reuben cried. 'Its insipid flatness is enough to set the best of friends by the ears. We might be in the deserts of Libya instead of his most graceless ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... native dhows—which travel to Mombasa and Bombay—and innumerable lesser craft. Basra itself lies up a creek, and is invisible from the river. What you see on the shore is properly called Ashar, but the two places merge into one another. Owing to the absolute flatness of the country, a sense of smallness is produced everywhere. There is no background to give perspective, and the great breadth of the sable ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... the bank of the dry river-bed. Bud knew it by the flatness of the foreground and the general contour of the mountains beyond. But immediately they turned at a sharp angle, travelled for a few minutes with the river-bed at their backs, and entered a narrow slit in the mountains where two peaks had been ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... his squire, as he said, two thousand lashes on account of the three thousand three hundred. But Sancho was on his feet in an instant, and began to grapple with his master, and he crushed his emaciated body almost to flatness in his firm grip. Then he suddenly let him loose and despatched him with a kick to no mean distance, and, still pursuing his victim, he there sat upon him. Don Quixote managed at last to gather all the breath that had not been squeezed out of him by the combat, and supported ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... at the town of Cheyenne, in Wyoming Territory. Cheyenne, once boasting the title (I was told) "The Magic City of the Plains," was located upon a dreary flatness, although from it one might see, far southwest, the actual Rocky Mountains in Colorado Territory, looking, at this distance of one hundred miles, like low dark clouds. The up grade in the west promised that we should ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... fandangoes and tangos, the xylophone solos, the shakedowns and break-downs and the rags and tatters of their collection until they have thoroughly exhausted the delights thereof. Then, having had time to forget somewhat the flatness of "Tannhaeuser," and for want of anything better to do, they take out the despised record, dust it, and insert it into the machine. But this time, curiously enough, the thing does not sound quite so flat. After repeated playings, it even begins to rival ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... honest face of the European type, and a fine grey beard. The other important members of the little community followed. They were all swarthy in colour, and had the small eyes and prominent cheek-bones which are characteristic of the Tartar races, but they had little of that flatness of countenance and peculiar ugliness which distinguish the pure Mongol. All of them, with the exception of the mullah, spoke a little Russian, and used it to assure us that we were welcome. The children remained respectfully in the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... departure Amherst, for the first time, became aware of a certain flatness in his life. His daily task seemed dull and purposeless, and he was galled by Truscomb's studied forbearance, under which he suspected a quickly accumulating store of animosity. He almost longed for some collision which would release the manager's ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... white profile as he stood with hands clasped, near her music, on the chiffonier. She noticed again that strange flatness of the lower part of ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... passed at about a quarter of a mile's distance from the eminence, called Haribee or Harabee-brow, which, though it is very moderate in size and height, is nevertheless seen from a great distance around, owing to the flatness of the country through which the Eden flows. Here many an outlaw, and border-rider of both kingdoms, had wavered in the wind during the wars, and scarce less hostile truces, between the two countries. Upon Harabee, in latter days, other executions had taken ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... that night travelled hard towards the river. As the day broke Abou Fatma again bade them halt. They were in a desolate open country, whereon the smallest protection was magnified by the surrounding flatness. Feversham and Trench gazed eagerly to their right. Somewhere in that direction and within the range of their eyesight flowed the Nile, but they could ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... to guide me was the top of the roof of some sort of small building. I got in more by good luck than by good management. The sun had set some time before; my boat glided in a sort of winding ditch between two low grassy banks; on both sides of me was the flatness of the Essex marsh, perfectly still. All I saw moving was a heron; he was flying low, and disappeared in the murk. Before I had gone half a mile, I was up with the building the roof of which I had seen from the ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... Leach, P. Donovani,) from the Atlantic, under the Equator, the carina is remarkable from the extreme flatness of the upper part, and from the presence of an exterior, narrow, central ridge. In one specimen from Jersey, in the British Museum, the carina made an extremely near ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... apiarians have straw-hives with flat wooden tops made, or use boxes, and have holes cut in them at the top, so that small glasses may be added, when the bees require room. But this does not prevent swarming, and besides, the flatness of the roof is prejudicial, as it allows the moisture which exhales from the bees to collect in the roof, and to fall in drops at different parts, to the great injury of the subjacent contents of the hive, and, like the common straw hive or square box, the bees cannot be examined, ...
— A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive • W. Augustus Munn
... appearances, he will long occupy this honourable position. If there is something very fortunate for him in the way that he borrows an added relief from the absence of competitors in his own line and from the general flatness of the literary field that surrounds him, there is also, to a spectator, something almost touching in his situation. He was so modest and delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing from the lonely ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... nineteenth century. Alders and willows overhang the stream, which winds its way to the south-west, and about two miles farther on one arrives again at Cowley Bridge. The Valley of the Exe gets ever wider and flatter, and after Exeter has been passed the flatness on either side of the banks increases as the river ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... to the physical character of the Americans, it appears, according to Dr Martius, that the principal characteristic is the truncation, or flatness, of the occipital portion of the cranium; the forehead wide, but low, supposed upon rather insufficient data to be moulded to this shape by artificial means; and the nose arched. In the new as in the old continent, the diversities of physical character do not correspond with the ethnical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... reaches it from all directions, and if it is placed as the lens is in the detectascope so that one half of it catches the light, all this light will be refracted through it. Ordinary lenses, because of their flatness, have a range of only a few degrees, the widest in use, I believe, taking in only ninety- six degrees, or a little over a quarter of a circle. So you see my detectascope has a range almost twice as wide as that of any ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... world becomes mean, but if you dissipate the cloud and unveil heaven, earth is greatened. If the hope of the grave that is to be brought onto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ shines out above all the flatness of earth, then life becomes solemn, noble, worthy of, demanding and rewarding, our most strenuous efforts. No man can, and no man will, strike such effectual blows on things present as the man, the strength of whose arm is derived from ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... eyes blaze out at times was hushed and still; he had no idea of her self-tormenting, no notion of the almost southern jealousy which seemed to belong to her brunette complexion. Jemima was not pretty; the flatness and shortness of her face made her almost plain; yet most people looked twice at her expressive countenance, at the eyes which flamed or melted at every trifle, at the rich colour which came at every expressed emotion into her usually sallow face, at the faultless teeth which made her smile like ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... or fifteen yards wide, and runs over a pebbly bed, cutting a shallow channel through the deposits, down to the subjacent rock, which is in some cases scooped out six or eight feet deep by its waters. I do not doubt that the flatness of the floor of the Momay valley is caused by the combined action of the streams that drained the three glaciers which met here; for the tendency of retiring glaciers is to level the floors of valleys, by giving an ever-shifting direction to the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... out of it to Lambert as he looked across the verdant flatness with pensive eyes, that great, gray something that took hold of a man and drew him into its larger life, smoothed the wrinkles out of him, and stood him upright on his feet with the breath deeper in him than it ever had gone before. He felt that he never would be content to remain ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... She was scarcely more than fifteen, slight and lithe, with a boyish flatness of breast and back. Her flushed face and bare throat were absolutely peppered with minute brown freckles, like grains of spent gunpowder. Her eyes, which were large and gray, presented the singular spectacle of being also freckled,—at ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... in it; look to the left, and you'll see the same. Look to the front, and you'll find no difference; look to the rear, and there it is still.' I laughed, and replied that I saw no suitable profession in the whole prospect; which was perhaps to be attributed to its flatness. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... departure from symmetry in its convolutions. If further elucidation be needed, we may find it in every nursery. The infant European has sundry marked points of resemblance to the lower human races; as in the flatness of the alae of the nose, the depression of its bridge, the divergence and forward opening of the nostrils, the form of the lips, the absence of a frontal sinus, the width between the eyes, the smallness of the legs. Now, as ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... his attention about the same time, were the projected lines between Chester and Holyhead, between Leeds and Bradford, and between Lancaster and Maryport by the western coast. This latter was intended to form part of a west-coast line to Scotland; Stephenson favouring it partly because of the flatness of the gradients, and also because it could be formed at comparatively small cost, whilst it would open out a valuable iron-mining district, from which a large traffic in ironstone was expected. One of its collateral advantages, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... learning, Shakespeare did have art. He was too obsessed with the idea that Shakespeare, ignorant of the health-giving art of the ancients, was infected with the faults of his age, faults that even Jonson did not always escape. Shakespeare was often incorrect in grammar; he frequently sank to flatness or soared into bombast; his wit could be coarse and low and too dependent on puns; his plot structure was at times faulty, and he lacked the sense for order and arrangement that the new taste valued. All this he could and did admit, and he was impressed by the learning and critical standards of Rymer's ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... from five to twenty tons, and the smaller sort can proceed until they are stopped by a fall or cascade at Seluka, on the borders of Menangkabau. This extraordinary distance to which the influence of the tides extends is a proof of the absolute flatness of the country through which these rivers take the greater part of ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... together." I shall expect him to know much about the Broads and the sluggish rivers above them; to know about the shooting of water-fowl, and not to know too much about anything else. Of mountains he must be wildly and ludicrously ignorant. He must have the freshness of Norfolk; nay, even the flatness of Norfolk. He must remind me of the watery expanses, the great square church towers and the long level sunsets of East England. If he does not do this, I decline ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... maybe this very functional setup or maybe the dead flatness of our voices in the damped room, but we do not have so much to talk about any more. We automatically take places at the table, all at one end, leaving seven ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... selected included Miss Russell, Miss Conway, Hester Thornton, Cecil Temple, and two other girls of the second class. The conference then broke up, but there was a certain sense of flatness over everything, and Cecil was not the only girl who sighed for the merry meetings of last year—when Annie had been the life and soul of all the proceedings, and when one brilliant idea after another with regard to ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... them have been so persistent in sociological thought and writings that they must be briefly reviewed in order that the reader may be on his guard against them. Books which still have a wide circulation deal with the sex problem in terms of a biology now no more tenable than the flatness of the earth. ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... Zagozhi cannot well be estimated on account of its lowness, and the prevailing flatness of the country round, on which neither a hillock nor eminence of any kind can be discerned. However, it must be immense, and the Landers considered it to be one of the most extensive and thickly inhabited towns, as well as one of the most important trading places in the whole kingdom ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... have remedial qualities). The church has a tower with triple belfry windows, which is lofty and finished with pinnacles and spirelet. It should be compared with Winscombe, both being spoilt by the flatness of the buttresses. It is regarded as early Perp., and assigned to about 1380. The figures on the W. front are the Virgin and St Gabriel; note the lilies (there should be only one, as at Winscombe). The nave is lofty, with clerestory and ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... concert-room formulas, Wagner must not be compared with the miniaturist Mendelssohn. His form is the form of the music-drama, not the symphonic form.] Puvis adhered to one principle: A wall is a wall, and not an easel picture; it is flat, and that flatness must be emphasised, not disguised; decoration is the desideratum. He contrived a schematic painting that would harmonise with the flatness, with the texture and the architectural surroundings, and, as George Moore has happily said: "No other painter ever kept this end so strictly ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... color at all, and thus injured his perception of more delicate color harmonies; so that in innumerable instances it becomes very disputable whether monuments even of the best times were improved by the color bestowed upon them, or the contrary. But, in the South, the flatness and comparatively vague forms of the sculpture, while they appeared to call for color in order to enhance their interest, presented exactly the conditions which would set it off to the greatest advantage; ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... the proportions, of the western bays at least, are almost the same as those of the nave, and the whole is covered again with a wooden vault, plastered and ribbed to look like stone; and yet that air of leanness, flatness, and emptiness, the chief fault of the nave, is ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... line of dark water to guide the pirate captain on his bold and desperate course. He was obliged to trust almost entirely to his intimate knowledge of the coast, and to the occasional patches in the surrounding waste where the comparative flatness of the boiling flood indicated less shallow water. As the danger increased, the smile left Gascoyne's lips; but the flashing of his bright eyes and his deepened color showed that the spirit boiled within almost as wildly as the ocean ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... Lombardy, and we should expect from them nothing very different from that which we expect from Milan or Bologna or Padua. But the truth is different; all round Ferrara, indeed, stretches the fertile flatness of Lombard cornfields, and they produce, as infallibly as they produce their sacks of grain and tuns of wine and heaps of silk cocoon, the intellectual and social equivalents of such things in Renaissance Italy: industry, wealth, comfort, scepticism, art. But ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... his excellence was still greater; there his whole man, voice, mien, and gesture, was no longer Mountford, but another person; there, the insipid, soft civility, the elegant and formal mien, the drawling delicacy of voice, the stately flatness of his address, and the empty eminence of his attitudes, were so nicely observed, that had he not been an entire matter of nature, had he not kept his judgment, as it were a centinel upon himself, not to admit the least likeness of what he used to be, to enter into any part of his performance, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... garden the moment the visitors appeared, holding one hand against the flannel that enveloped her face. She made the usual polite speeches of hope, expectation, and promise concerning the new-comer, and stayed about until the gentlemen went. Then an inexpressible flatness fell upon Bessie, and she would probably have wept in earnest, but for the sight of Janey Fricker standing aloof and gazing at her wistfully for an invitation to draw near. Somebody to succor was quite in Bessie's way; helpless, timid things felt safe under covert of her wing. It gave her a ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... engaging, clever, and devotedly affectionate, and indeed the atmosphere of mutual affection seemed to float over the circle like a fresh and scented summer air. One used to feel, as one drove away, that though one's visit had been a pleasure, there would be none of the flatness which sometimes follows the departure of a guest, but that one was leaving them to a home life that was better than sociability, a life that was both sacred and beautiful, full to the brim of affection, yet without ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... giraffe there should be precisely the same number of vertebrae. Such, however, is the case, and the difference in length is caused by the great length of those bones in the giraffe, and their shortness and flatness in ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... cabin where the steep trail from Ore City dropped off the mountain to the sudden flatness of the river bar, some dead branches cracked and a horse fell over a fallen log, upsetting the toboggan that it dragged and taking Uncle Bill with it. Helen hurried to the place where he was trying to ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... had stopped the champagne tap, though the needle-case glasses stood to tantalize the party till about the time that the beverage ought to have been flowing, when Spigot took them off. The flatness then became flatter. Nevertheless, Jack worked away in his usual carnivorous style, and finished by paying his respects to all the sweets, jellies, and things in succession. He never got any of these, he said, at 'home,' meaning at Lord Scamperdale's—Amelia thought, if she ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... the way across, with the exception of one brief emotional disturbance between lunch and dinner-time, wore a smile of fatuous serenity. The sun shone; the vast pond-surface oilily undulated, or lay in absolute flatness, or at most defiled under our eyes in endless squadrons of low-riding crests. My mother, whose last experience of sea-ways had been the voyage to Cuba, in which the ship was all but lost in a series of hurricanes, was captivated ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions, had noted a sudden flatness of tone ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... silk or gold thread were laid in ordered flatness upon a material, and then sewn to it by long or short stitches at right angles. This is known as couching, and is a very effective way of economizing material by displaying it all on the surface. ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... this cord, I say, is doubtless the channel by which the milky fluid issues. After several plications, it terminates in a kind of bladder or fleshy sac, i. i. In different males this part is of various length and flatness. By calling it the lenticular body, or the lentil, it receives a name descriptive of the figure it presents in all males whose internal parts have acquired consistency in spirit of wine. The body, l. i. is therefore a lentil, a little thickened, of which one half, or nearly ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... upon my doodle kissing it. She asked me to kiss her black pussy, and now think she must have wanted me to lick it, but did not then see what she wanted. There was one thing I did with her which I had not done before, and which the flatness of her backside favored doing, fuck her from behind, both laying on our sides, and it became my favorite way. I used to go to sleep after my spend with my prick up her in that fashion; she with her long arm put between her ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... joys of battle, and all the more alive to them perhaps because of the watch kept on Louie by one section of his brain, was conscious of no length in the minutes. But Louie's mood gradually became one of extreme flatness. All her resources were for the moment at an end. She could think of no fresh torment for David; besides, she knew that she was observed. She had destroyed all the scanty store of primroses along the brook; gathered rushes, begun to plait them, and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thirteenth of December to find everywhere the peculiar flatness that always follows a day which for weeks has been the focus of one's ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... should bring them here in about an hour,' she thought to herself in great flatness of ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the oasis-city of the south, flat and vast as the great nomad camp it really is, its low roofs extending on all sides to a belt of blue palms ringed with desert. Only two or three minarets and a few noblemen's houses among gardens break the general flatness; but they are hardly noticeable, so irresistibly is the eye drawn toward two dominant objects—the white wall of the Atlas and the red tower of ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... dramatic representations." Part II. c. xi. The other translators have nearly the same words. But in employing the generic term they lose the species, that is, the thing itself; but what is less tolerable, in the flatness of the style, they lose that delightfulness with which Cervantes conveys to us the recollected pleasures then busying the warm brain of his hero. An English reader, who often grows weary over his Quixote, appears not always ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... return from Caxton Sam set about finding some new interest to occupy Sue's mind. He had spent an afternoon talking to Valmore, Freedom Smith, and Telfer and thought there was a kind of flatness in their jokes and in their ageing comments on each other. Then he had gone from them for his talk with Mary. Half through the night they had talked, Sam getting forgiveness for not writing and getting also a long friendly lecture on his duty toward Sue. He thought she had in some way missed the ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... any one at any time a single sentence that really enlightened her or remained fixed in her memory. It was the jejune insipidity of an entire age, the stale flatness of the world that she felt to the very depths of her soul. If she wished to make her heart glow, if she became unusually fearful of the empty air and the empty day, she stole secretly into the Church of Our Lady or into St. Sebaldus, where ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... chairs in the dining-room, the faded wool-work cushions, embroidered with figures of girls and dogs, on the sofa, the branching lamps, and the gloomy-looking portraits on the walls—everything inspired an involuntary melancholy, about everything there clung a sense of chill and flatness. On my arrival in Petersburg, I had thought it my duty to call on the Zlotnitskys. They were relations of my mother's. I managed with difficulty to sit out an hour with them, and it was a long while before I went there again. But by degrees I took to going oftener and oftener. ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... knows when events are upon the wing. Almost immediately there came into the flatness of his bored existence a victoria containing those two English ladies he had met—in the unconventional way which characterized his meetings with ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley |
