"Smoothness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this period, and Aramaic was his natural tongue. He was never able to speak Greek fluently or with sufficient exactness, because, as he says in the Antiquities, "Our own nation does not encourage those who learn the language of many peoples, and so color their discourses with the smoothness of their periods: for they look upon this sort of accomplishment as common, not only to freemen, but to any slave that pleases to learn it."[2] When, in his middle age, he set himself to write the history of his people in Greek, he was compelled to get the help of friends ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... of the low-pressure cylinder, frowning portly from above, emitted a faint wheeze at every thrust, and except for that low hiss the engines worked their steel limbs headlong or slow with a silent, determined smoothness. And all this, the white walls, the moving steel, the floor plates under Solomon Rout's feet, the floors of iron grating above his head, the dusk and the gleams, uprose and sank continuously, with one accord, upon the harsh wash of the waves ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... flour with cold water, to a smooth paste, and boil it gently. It answers all the purposes of wheat flour paste, while it is far superior in point of transparency and smoothness. This composition, made with so small a proportion of water as to have it of the consistence of plastic clay, may be used to form models, busts, basso-relievos, and similar articles. When made of it, they are susceptible of a very ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous
... corrupts the language, but it hits none more frequently and more sharply than the potentates by whom the liberty of the people is endangered. The short-lined and merry metres, often enlivened by a graceful refrain, are of finished art and yet free from the repulsive smoothness of the manufactory. These poems lead us alternately to the valleys of the Nile and the Po; but the poet is incomparably more at home in the latter. His poems are based on Alexandrian art doubtless, but at the same time on the self- consciousness ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Donizetti's opera called them into activity, at least, are of the highest rank. Her style is exquisite, and plainly the outgrowth of a thoroughly musical nature. It unites some of the highest elements of art. Such reposefulness of manner, such smoothness and facility in execution, such perfect balance of tone and refinement of expression can be found only in one richly endowed with deep musical feeling and ripe artistic intelligence. She carries her voice wondrously ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... wait with her questions. The way was long enough to let her think them all over several times. At last the cab stopped, Pitt handed her out, and led her into the Gardens. Here was a change. Trees of noble age and growth shadowed the ground, greensward stretched away in peaceful smoothness, the dust and the noise of the great city seemed to be escaped. It was fresh and shady, and even sweet. They could hear each other speak, without unduly raising their voices. Pitt went on till he found a place that suited him, and they sat down, in ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... a much more important fact, the keenly accurate observation of Aryan foresters at that early date; for the fact is that the breaking of the thin-beaten silver of the birch trunk is so delicate, and its smoothness so graceful, that until I painted it with care, I was not altogether clear-headed myself about the way in which the chequering was done: nor until Fors today brought me to the house of one of my ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... shapeless rags; she wore a full-length dress of quiet grey, which suited well with her hair and the pale tones of her complexion. As for her face—oh yes, it was still the good, simple, unremarkable countenance, with the delicate arched eyebrows, with the diffident lips, with the cheeks of exquisite smoothness, but ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... to assure herself that this thinking would die out. Looking round the world, her small world, how many women there were who had not married the men they had loved first! How few, perhaps, had done so! Life was not good-natured enough for smoothness such as that. And yet did not they, as a rule, live well with their husbands? What right had she to expect anything better than their fate? Each poor insipid dame that she saw, toddling on with half-a-dozen ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... within the range of linear expression. One would naturally use lines of totally different consistency and character to express rough or smooth surfaces: to express the difference of value, for instance, between the ivory-like smoothness of an egg and the scaly surface of a pine-cone, entirely different qualities of line are obviously wanted. The firm-set yet soft feathers of the plumage of a bird must be rendered by a very different touch from the shining scales of ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... wounded shoulder. He untied the silk scarf and the rope and carried her, still unconscious, into the bedroom where he laid her on the bed and bathed her face in water. Joan's crown of hair had fallen about her neck and temples. Her bared throat and shoulder had the firm smoothness of marble, her lifeless face, its pure, full lips fallen apart, its long lids closed, black-fringed and black-browed, owing little of its beauty to color or expression, was at no loss in this deathlike composure and whiteness. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... early, washed himself, rubbed himself from head to foot with a wet sponge (a performance executed only on Sundays—and the day in question happened to be a Sunday), shaved his face with such care that his cheeks issued of absolutely satin-like smoothness and polish, donned first his bilberry-coloured, spotted frockcoat, and then his bearskin overcoat, descended the staircase (attended, throughout, by the waiter) and entered his britchka. With a loud rattle the vehicle left the inn-yard, and issued into the street. A passing ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... face than the one I associated with her girlhood. Yet I could scarce forbear an impression that it was now a sweeter one, more womanly, faint lines beginning to mark its satin smoothness with impress of sorrow. To my thought a new, higher womanhood had found birth within, during weary days and nights of suspense and suffering. It was yet torture to me constantly beholding these two together, but, as I observed her then, I thanked the ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... Liszt?— infinite nuance and the mingling of silvery bells,—these are a few of the least exuberant notices. Was it not Heine who called "Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a sibyl, and Doehler—a pianist"? The limpidity, the smoothness and ease of Chopin's playing were, after all, on the physical plane. It was the poetic melancholy, the grandeur, above all the imaginative lift, that were more in evidence than mere sensuous sweetness. Chopin had, we know, his salon side ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... like a red furnace, and five black irons standing up before it; and clothes-baskets full of heaps of whiteness, and horses with vapoury webs of lace and cambric hanging on them; and the three ironing-boards, where smoothness ran along with the irons; and the heaps of folded clothes; and Betsey in her white apron, broad and red in ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tucked him up with delicate precision, and drew the snowy counterpane into absolute smoothness. "There!" she said, her gentle eyes beaming with maternal pleasure. "Is there anything else, dear ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... queer kettle of fish," muttered Orme. He was beginning to feel disgusted with the situation. He did not like Alcatrante's oily smoothness, and he wondered whether it would not have been better to hand the bill over to Poritol at the first demand. But it came to his mind that in a certain degree he stood committed to continue the policy he had adopted. He had sought adventure; it was coming to ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... a lens of surprising magnitude, polished to such a smoothness that the eye could scarcely meet its reflections. Here was a crystal in whose depths were to be seen more wonders than had been revealed by the crystals of all ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... fell steeply, shaded by trees and dappled by the sunlight, to a valley, at the bottom of which flowed the river swift and black under overarching boughs. There was a fall, where the water slid over rocks with a smoothness so unbroken that it looked solid except just at one point. There a spur stood sharply up, and the river broke back upon itself in an amber wave through which the sun shone. Opposite this spur they sat for a long while, talking at times, but for the most part listening to the roar of the water ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... said Jno. Peters, "is to learn to draw quickly. Like this!" he added producing the revolver with something of the smoothness and rapidity with which Billie, in happier moments, had seen Bream Mortimer take a bowl of gold fish out of a tall hat. "Everything depends on getting the first shot! The first shot, Miss ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... taught how I might youth prolong By knowing what was right and wrong; How from my heart to bring supplies Of lustre to my fading eyes; How soon a beauteous mind repairs The loss of changed or falling hairs; How wit and virtue from within Send out a smoothness o'er the skin Your lectures could my fancy fix, And I can ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... treatments will soon correct this condition and grass can again be made to grow there. As soon as the grass is of proper length begin to cut it with the lawn mower. Also, continued applications of the weighted iron roller throughout the spring will gradually improve the general contour and make for smoothness and ease ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... he who faces the negative aspects of the question, who meets sudden objections, has an answer for any momentary summons of doubt or difficulty, dissipates seeming inconsistencies, and reconciles the geometrical smoothness of a priori abstractions with the coarse angularities of practical experience. The great work of Ricardo is of necessity, and almost in every page, polemic; whilst very often the particular objections or difficulties to which it replies ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Even Nickleby—admirable as was his smoothness—had fallen right into the clever trap prepared for him. If Nickleby did discover the truth, Podmore could give him the laugh. Let Friend Nickleby just start something and he'd find himself in several varieties of hot soup before he knew it. For did not Little Hughey ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... South Australia as a tourist, whose curiosity had led him to make inquiries into the capabilities of the country through which he had travelled, and who could therefore speak to other matters, besides the description of landscape or the smoothness ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... from the nuts, and mixing it with water. A bunch of fruit weighs thirty or forty pounds. The beverage has a milky appearance, and an agreeable nutty flavour. The tree is very difficult to climb, on account of the smoothness of its stein; consequently the natives, whenever they want a bunch of fruit for a bowl of Bacaba, cut down and thus destroy a tree which has taken a score or two of years to grow, in order to ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... spreading larch, on the summit of a mound which commanded a wide prospect of plain and morass, sat an Indian woman. She might have been taken for an old woman, so worn and thin was she, and so hollow were her cheeks; but the glossy blackness of her hair, the smoothness of her brow, and the glitter of her dark eyes told that she was yet ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... remain, would have liked more tea, but Kate signified in this direct fashion that she had had enough of him. Herbert had seen things, in his walk of life—rough things, plenty; but never things smoothed with that especial smoothness, carried out as it were by the fine form of Captain Roper's own retreat, which included even a bright convulsed leave-taking cognisance of the plain, vague individual, of no lustre at all and with the very low-class guard of an ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... river. To represent his bow in its canvas case, and still to spare that weapon a wetting, Young went down the river bank to pick out a stick about the same size to put in his bow case. Taking the first piece that came to hand he started to place it in the case, when struck by its smoothness he looked at it and found he had a weatherbeaten old Indian bow in his hand. It seemed like a sign, a good omen,—for we playfully indulge in omens in these romantic adventures with ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... sudden jet of flame in the Liverpool coal fire gave a sort of silent sound, rebuking the humanity that lived there. No noise was heard from below stairs; the middle-aged and well-trained servants did their work with the regularity and almost with the smoothness of machines. It occurred to Esther anew that her life was excessively quiet; and a thought of Pitt, and how good it would have been to see him, arose again, as it had risen so many times. And then came the thoughts of the ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... The smoothness of the water was a great advantage to them, for had there been any sea their progress would have been ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... hills, your bitterness Of wind and storm. Stem ye the drift of herded men With your uncouthness So, tasting of your power, they press Back shrinking where upon their warm Safe ways of smoothness They feed ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... thee do a brother's honest part, John Birkenholt. A loving part I say not. Thou wert always like a very popple for hardness, and smoothness, ay, and slipperiness. Heigh ho! But what is right by the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... angle all the loads were over, but the tusks still had to be passed up, and owing to their weight and the smoothness of their surface, this was a very difficult task. Of course I ought to have abandoned the tusks; often and often have I since reproached myself for not doing so. Indeed, I think that my obstinacy about them was downright sinful, ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... To pick up our daily life and duties, our obligations to a physical world, in all humility, sweet reasonableness, and submission. He teaches us to willingly accept incessant interruptions, and with smiling face and perfect inward smoothness to descend from a high contemplation of God (and only those who know high contemplation can judge of the immensity of what I say) to listen and attend to some most trivial want of a fellow-creature! ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... not care to separate the figures that formed a joyous and brilliant whole; it was enough to gaze, and dream of the happy smoothness of the lives in which such music, and such profusion of flowers, of jewels, elegance of every description, and beauty of all shapes and hues, were everyday things. She did not want to know who the people were; although to hear a catalogue ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the sale crop to Plymouth, was also in the shop and did beautiful work. I was fond of visiting Jim's shop and ordering all sorts of wooden ware, pails, piggins, trays, etc.; these last, dug out of bowl-gum, were so white that they looked like ivory. Boat Frank was very proud of the smoothness and polish of his trays. Our children, with their mammy, were fond of visiting "Uncle Jim's" shop and playing with such tools as he considered safe for them to handle, while Mammy, seated upon a box by the small fire, would indulge in long talks about religion or plantation gossip. ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... hoe, and their steading becomes a poultry-yard—a consummation we are not yet in sight of, as is proved by the legions of pigs and beeves, barreled or bellowing, that roll in from the ancient realms of Pontiac and the Prophet with a smoothness and velocity unattained by the most luxurious coach ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... same thing with the singer. She cannot afford to do without scales and exercises. If she should, the public would soon find it out. She must be in constant practice in order to produce her tones with smoothness and purity; she must also think whether she is producing them with ease. There should never be any strain, no evidence of effort. Voice production must always seem to be the easiest thing in the world. No audience likes to see painful effort in ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... out for his kiss. A woman's hand, still moist from the scented bath, has a soft freshness, a velvet smoothness that sends a tingling thrill from the lips to the soul. And if a man is attracted to a woman, and his senses are as quick to feel pleasure as his heart is full of love, such a kiss, though chaste in appearance, may conjure ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... maybe," groaned Two Arrows, as he dodged around the hopeless side he came to. Away around, and the same mocking smoothness made his heart sink, while the fierce growl of the huge wild beast behind him ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... Lear signally exemplified, through every phase of passion, that temperance which should give it smoothness. The treatment of the curse scene, in particular, was extraordinarily beautiful for the low, sweet, and tender melody of the voice, broken only now and then—and rightly broken—with the harsh accents ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... picture, to give it an ideal remoteness and perfection. The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairy-land. The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry, with silken streamers flying, and the course of our lives to wind on before us like a green lane into a country maze, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... pastoral beauty.—Beyond the city, in the alluring country places, we see a landscape that delights the senses, ornate with hedges, flowers, vine-clad cottages, highways of surpassing smoothness, fertile fields, and thrifty flocks and herds. There are carts and wagons on the roads bearing the products of field and garden to the marts of trade. Men, women, and children zealously ply the hoe, the plow, or the shovel, abetting Nature in her efforts to feed the hungry. ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... impolished, not out of ignorance so much as humour. He is a great enemy to the fine gentleman, and these things of complement, and hates ceremony in conversation, as the Puritan in religion. He distinguishes not betwixt fair and double dealing, and suspects all smoothness for the dress of knavery. He starts at the encounter of a salutation as an assault, and beseeches you in choler to forbear your courtesy. He loves not any thing in discourse that comes before the purpose, and is always suspicious of a preface. Himself falls rudely still on his matter ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... hours there was not a breath to stir the surface of the water, and the heat was stifling. Gervaise slept for some time; when he awoke the same stillness reigned, but there was a change in the appearance of the sky; its brightness was dulled by a faint mist, while, although the sea was of a glassy smoothness, there was an imperceptible swell that caused the felucca to sway uneasily. Gervaise had sufficient experience of the Levant to know that these signs were ominous of a change, and he at once set to work to prepare for it. Although he saw that it would be difficult for him unaided to hoist ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... language, although I have so long accustomed myself to speak our own tongue, that I cannot pronounce Greek with sufficient exactness; for our nation does not encourage those that learn the languages of many nations, and so adorn their discourses with the smoothness of their periods; because they look upon this sort of accomplishment as common, not only to all sorts of free-men, but to as many of the servants as please to learn them. But they give him the testimony of being a wise man who is fully acquainted with ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... accomplishment of "bridling"—the head up and the chin in, with the pliant knees bent in a low curtsey. Dulcie "bridled," as she prattled, to perfection. She had light brown hair, of the tint of a squirrel's fur, and the smoothness of a mouse's coat, though it was twisted and twirled into a kind of soft willowy curls when she was in high dress. Ah! no wonder that Kit Cowper, the cloth-worker, groaned to see that bright face pass from his ninepin alley; but it was the way of the world, or ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... smoothness, seem to be terms indicating quality: yet these, it would appear, really belong to a class different from that of quality. For it is rather a certain relative position of the parts composing the thing thus qualified which, ...
— The Categories • Aristotle
... to do as she liked being evidence of the fact, if only she could have interpreted it; but she had failed to do so, his quiet undemonstrative manner having sufficed to deceive her superficial observation of him as effectually as the treacherous smoothness of her own placid face when in repose, upon the unruffled surface of which there was neither mark nor sign to indicate the current of changeful moods, ambitious projects, and poetical fancies, which coursed impetuously within, might excusably have imposed upon him. He was twenty years older ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... actually covering distance, and learn to associate these sensations with those of the eye before the eye alone can be able to say, "That tree is ten rods distant." Form and size are to be learned in the same way. The hands must actually touch and handle the object, experiencing its hardness or smoothness, the way this curve and that angle feels, the amount of muscular energy it takes to pass the hand over this surface and along that line, the eye taking note all the while, before the eye can tell at a glance that yonder object ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... feelings and passions which were going on in the little circle on which our eyes are fixed, the course of life had gone on with tolerable smoothness as far as Emily and Marlow were concerned, for about two months, when, one morning, Sir Philip Hastings received a letter in a hand which he did not know. It reached him at the breakfast table, and evidently affected him considerably with some sort of emotion. His daughters instantly ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... property of style which gives a smoothness to the sentence, so that when the words are sounded their connection becomes pleasing to the ear. It adapts sound to sense. Most people construct their sentences without giving thought to the way they will sound and ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... the silence and smoothness of their six-cylinder up the tree-hung road, through the sleeping village and along the narrow lane to Market Burnham. When they were within about a hundred yards of the gate, Granet brought the car ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sleepings and hunts for rats and searches for more palatable food. The rats, after I had killed four or five, had become cautious. They are at all times cunning fellows, and must have discovered my mode of trapping them. The ship all this time was gliding on with tolerable smoothness, and on some occasions, by putting my ear down to the planks, I could hear the rippling of the water. At other times, I guessed by the dashing of the sea against the sides, that there was a strong breeze. I knew also, by the steadiness of the movement, that the ocean was tolerably calm. ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... rising from the slate-colored beach in gentle undulation, and sleepily falling on the other side down to green pastures and into the cedar woods. The whole surface of this gradually undulating mountain desert is ribbed by little wavelets a few inches apart, but the general aspect is one of perfect smoothness. The sand is almost as fine as flour, and contains no admixture of dust The foot sinks only an inch or two in walking over it; children roll about on it and down its slopes, and, rising, shake themselves till their clothing loses every trace ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... to let those who were taking sides against him emphasize their satisfaction at this acknowledgment by half- suppressed exclamations; then, in a voice of cutting smoothness, he continued,— ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... Yuruk following. He stooped, raised an ewer of silver and began gently to pour over her shoulders its contents. Again and again he bent and filled the vessel, dipping it into a shallow basin from which came the bubbling and chuckling of a little spring. And again I marveled at the marble smoothness and fineness of her skin on which the caressing water left tiny silvery globules, gemming it. The eunuch slithered to one side, drew from a quaint chest clothes of white floss; patted her dry with them; threw over her shoulders a silken robe ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... and ruined fanes—all were colored in uniform tints; the lights were of a deep rich orange, and the shadows of dark crimson, with the deeper lines of purple. There was no variety in color between what nature and what man had set there. No whiteness shone from the marble, no smoothness showed upon the hewn and polished blocks; but the whole mass of orange and crimson stood out together into the pale, pure Attic air. There it stood, surrounded by lanes and hovels, still perpetuating the great old contrast in Greek history, of magnificence ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... pardoned. Your father has been kind to me, and I have not returned his advances; you shall tell him why. I have lived thirteen years by myself, and I have contracted strange ways and many humours not common to the world—you have seen an example of this. Judge for yourself if I be fit for the smoothness, and confidence, and ease of social intercourse; I am not fit, I feel it! I am doomed to be alone—tell your father this—tell him to suffer me to live so! I am grateful for his goodness—I know his motives—but have a certain pride of mind; I cannot bear sufferance—I loath indulgence. ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... expenses of the establishment being met by the members' initiation fees, ranging from L32 entrance fee and L11 annual subscription, to L9 and L6 for entrance and subscription. Being admirably officered and planned throughout, these gigantic households are systematized to the beautiful smoothness of small ones; their phrase of "fare-well" is one of epicurean invitation, not of dismissal; while such are the combined luxuriousness and economy that, says one authority, "the modern London club is a realization of a Utopian coenobium,—a sort of lay convent, rivalling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... was now moving rapidly, and there was a smoothness and lightness to its progress that was absent from a gasolene auto. There was no vibration from the motor. Faster and faster it ran, until it was moving at a speed scarcely less than that of Mr. Damon's car, when it was doing its best. Of course that was not saying much, for the car owned by ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... the ballroom should suggest gayety, light and beauty. The floor, of course, is the most important detail. A polished hardwood floor offers the most pleasing surface for dancing. If the wood seems sticky, paraffine wax adds a smoothness that actually ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... name was Quong Wo, but my brother Ajax always called him Mary, because the boy's round, childish face had a singular smoothness and delicacy. A good and faithful servant he proved during three years. Then he ran away at the time of the anti-Chinese riots, despite our assurance that we wished to ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... noticed it, not without a faint sense of sympathy. "Look here!" he said, with a certain brusqueness, which in a man of his character was less dangerous than his smoothness. "I know your feelings to that family—at least to one of them—and, if I've been playing it pretty rough on you, it's only because you played it rather rough on ME the last time you were here. Let's understand each other. I'll go so ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... we made sail, and at daybreak saw another of these low islands, situated in the latitude of 17 deg. 4', longitude 144 deg. 30' W., which obtained the name of Adventure Island. M. de Bougainville very properly calls this cluster of low overflowed isles the Dangerous Archipelago. The smoothness of the sea sufficiently convinced us that we were surrounded by them, and how necessary it was to proceed with the utmost ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... inquiry. Sylla began: One part will conduce to the discovery of the other; and if we rightly hit the cause in relation to the women, the difficulty, as it concerns the old men, will be easily despatched; for their two natures are quite contrary. Moistness, smoothness, and softness belong to the one; and dryness, roughness, and hardness are the accidents of the other. As for women, I think the principal cause is the moistness of their temper; this produceth a softness in the flesh, a shining smoothness, and ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... chair is. Don't I, Grandma?" and was groping my way out through the green curtained "keepin'" rooms, towards Grandma's culinary apartment, thankful for a momentary escape from the heated atmosphere of the "parlor," when I heard just behind me a voice of the most exquisite smoothness:— ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... the light it will receive. Thus, even if quite close to the eye, where, of course, its position warrants or demands a certain amount of finish, it must be remembered that real finish rather means perfection of form than smoothness of surface, so that even there it should still show its cuts and its tool marks fearlessly, and be deepened in parts to make it tell its proper tale in the combined scheme of decoration; while if it is going a great height or distance from ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... him well acquainted with the Latin tongue, but he had never discovered all its native smoothness of sound, and elegance of structure, until he had heard it spoken by Antonina. Word by word, he passed over in his mind her varied, natural, and happy turns of expression; recalling, as he was thus employed, the eloquent looks, the rapid ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... tall jet leaps into the air. But all this agitation only lasts for a moment; the bubbling subsides as the circles of the passing whirlpool grow larger and larger; the surface regains at last its customary smoothness; and soon no trace remains of the passage of the stone, now buried ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... each rebuff, That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting, that bids not sit nor stand ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... five sensations. If you think of an orange and analyse your thought of an orange, you will find in it: colour, which comes through the eye; fragrance, which comes through the nose; taste, which comes through the tongue; roughness or smoothness, which comes through the sense of touch; and you would hear musical notes made by the vibrations of the molecules, coming through the sense of hearing, were it keener. If you had a perfect sense of hearing. you would ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... defiant shake of her miniature fist in the direction her aunt had taken, Lucy turned to attack the duties before her. She washed the dishes and put them away; tripped upstairs and kneaded the billowy feather beds into smoothness; and humming happily, she swept and polished the house until it shone. She did such things well and delighted in the miracles her ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... colour, but the colour itself is a sense-datum, not a sensation. The colour is that of which we are immediately aware, and the awareness itself is the sensation. It is plain that if we are to know anything about the table, it must be by means of the sense-data—brown colour, oblong shape, smoothness, etc.—which we associate with the table; but, for the reasons which have been given, we cannot say that the table is the sense-data, or even that the sense-data are directly properties of the table. Thus a problem arises as to the relation of the sense-data to the real table, supposing ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... infinitive verb; as, "It is not necessary to accurately relate all that he said." "You must not expect to always find people agreeable." Whether we shall place the adverb before the verb or after it must often be determined by considerations of emphasis and smoothness as well as of clearness and correctness. In the foregoing sentences it is better to place accurately after the verb, and always ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... very dark, I found and lighted a candle, and came and stood beside her bed. Very white and trim it looked, yet I was glad to see its smoothness rumpled where I had laid her down, and to see the depression in the pillow that her head had made. And, while I stood there, up to me stole a perfume very faint, like the breath of violets in a wood at evening time, wherefore I sank down upon my ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... worth your attention do not think these things beneath your notice. For the acquirement of the bearing on the horse's mouth, the turning your horse on the proper rein, smoothness of indications, and, in shortening the reins, the power of making your horse collect himself, and the working together of your hands and legs, are the unseen and unappreciated foundation on which good riding stands. These, and not strength ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... Janice, rising meekly, meantime casting a quick glance at the bed, to see how far its smoothness had been disturbed. ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... the two men rooted to the spot, paralysed, and with feet deeply imbedded in the sand. Only their eyes seemed alive, roaming along the wall, all round to where on either side the silken ladders made vivid crimson streaks on the white smoothness of the marble. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and child who illustrate the statistics of the maternity exhibition have the grace and beauty of mediaeval madonnas. Russia is only now emerging from the middle ages, and the Church tradition in painting is passing with incredible smoothness into the service of Communist doctrine. These pictures have, too, an oriental flavour: there are brown Madonnas in the Russian churches, and such an one illustrates the statistics of infant mortality in India, ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... Rowens was now in the full bloom of ornamental sorrow. A very shallow crape bonnet, frilled and froth-like, allowed the parted raven hair to show its glossy smoothness. A jet pin heaved upon her bosom with every sigh of memory, or emotion of unknown origin. Jet bracelets shone with every movement of her slender hands, cased in close-fitting black gloves. Her sable dress was ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... two states; effected in June, 1575, required improvement. The administration of justice, the conflicts of laws, and more particularly the levying of monies and troops in equitable proportions, had not been adjusted with perfect smoothness. The estates of the two provinces, assembled in congress at Delft, concluded, therefore, a new act of union, which was duly signed upon the 25th of April, 1576. Those estates, consisting of the knights and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... (forgive our freedom) sometimes Flows In Lines too Rugged, and akin to Prose. Verse with a lively smoothness should be Wrote, When room is granted to the Speech and Thought. Like some fair Planet, the Majestick Song Should gently move, and sparkle as it rowls along. Like Waller's Muse, who tho' inchain'd by Rhime, Taught wondring Poets to keep even ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... below is the Boiler Rapid. It got its name not from its churning water but because the boiler of the steamer Wrigley was lost here and still remains at the bottom of the basin. The walls of this rapid are as clear-cut as if wrought into smoothness by mallet and chisel. The tar-soaked sands appear off and on all the way to McMurray. Next comes the Long Rapid (Kawkinwalk Abowstick), which we run ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... what he eats and drinks, he, at any rate, is not tormented by the thought that he has paid for that which he has not received. Still, it is not often that the fiords are in a ferment of waves under a heavy gale, and the worst that happens is a temporary deviation from the general smoothness when the course lies where there is open sea on one side. The voyage northwards from Stavanger, where the Hull boats first touch, is mostly between islands, and in continuous shelter. Sometimes the narrows are not wider than the Thames at Oxford; then you steam out ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... man was now so fatigued and overcome that he had hardly strength to swing himself to the top of the rock, where he lay as if dead. At this moment the stone, against which I was resting, gave way, and rolled down the mountain, leaving me swinging by one hand, and totally unable, on account of the smoothness of the rock, to get a resting place for my feet. The other sailors, it is true, were not far from me, but they were all so fatigued as to be totally unable to come to my assistance. In this fearful situation I passed several minutes, and my hand began to pain ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... at them. True enough, their smoothness and pliant shape betrayed my disguise—the gay little captain was sharp-witted enough to note the contrast between them and the rough garb I wore, though no one else with whom I had come in contact had been as keen of observation as he. At first I was slightly embarrassed by his remark—but ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... which looks on and sees this giant institution move through the ranks of business without noise or dissension and with the ease and smoothness of a creature one-millionth its size, it would seem that there must be some wonderful and complicated code of rules to guide and control the thousands of lieutenants and privates who conduct its ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... spite of the heavy sea. Drifting with wind and wave is a simple thing for a big vessel. There is no struggle, no tearing asunder of resisting forces. Thus might a boat caught in the pitiless current of Niagara glide towards the brink of the cataract with cunning smoothness. ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... observation, and my conjecture is strengthened by the consideration of his stile, which is equally unmusical and obsolete with Chaucer's; and tho' Dryden has told us that Chaucer exceeded those who followed him at 50 or 60 years distance, in point of smoothness, yet with great submission to his judgment, I think there is some alteration even in Skelton and Harding, which will appear to the reader to the best advantage by a quotation. Of Langland's family we have no account. Selden in his notes on Draiton's Poly Olbion, quotes him with ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... with the deep, rich green colour of its broad leaves, which were twelve or eighteen inches long, deeply indented, and of a glossy smoothness, like the laurel. The fruit, with which it was loaded, was nearly round, and appeared to be about six inches in diameter, with a rough rind, marked with lozenge-shaped divisions. It was of various colours, from light ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... building suggested how he might obtain that kind of oil which, cast upon the domestic billows that so often raged in his fourth-floor back room, was most effective in producing a little temporary smoothness. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... began to work seriously. Loeffler was a very strict teacher and very exacting, but he achieved results, for he had a most original way of making his points clear to the student. He started off with the Sevcik studies, laying great stress on the proper finger articulation. And he taught me absolute smoothness in change of position when crossing the strings. For instance, in the second book of Sevcik's 'Technical Exercises,' in the third exercise, the bow crosses from G to A, and from D to E, leaving a string between in each crossing. Well, I simply could not manage to get to the ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... of small vesicles filled with oily matter, in which there is no sensation, and a layer of which lies under the skin and gives smoothness and warmth to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... as a dying nun, irritated him. Blue glasses concealed her eyes, and an ugly costume concealed her figure; she came out of an obscure corner behind the nun, and fell back into it noiselessly, but her voice and manner had the smoothness of velvet. He looked at her hands patting his own, and found them very soft, white, untouched by age, and a curious contrast to her gray hair. Interest touching him faintly he responded to her warmth, and looked closely into the blue glasses with a ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... there was no excitement, the doctors and orderlies "carrying on" as usual, receiving the wounded, dressing their wounds, sending them down with the smoothness and ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... eyes as the realization came to her sharply that she was fading. There were lines and shadows and pallor that ought not to be in the face of a woman of thirty-five. She smoothed the vertical lines in her forehead, and then let her hands remain over her face, while behind their cool smoothness her mind ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... the due and proportionate development of all the vocal organs. Depth is increased by the expansion of the pharynx; roundness and volume are promoted by the enlargement of the oral cavity, especially its back part; and smoothness is the result of the free vibration of the vocal chords, while resonance is produced by the proper expansion of ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... eyes, again the mouth and chin, or the turn of the throat; there is never any ensemble of features and adornments. And as for Hillard, he really had nothing definite to recall, unless it was the striking color of her hair or the mellow smoothness of her voice. And could he really remember these? He often wished that she had sung under any window ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... ice the Luggie growls, And to the polished smoothness curlers come Rudely ambitious. Then for happy hours The clinking stones are slid from wary hands, And Barleycorn, best wine for surly airs, Bites i' th' mouth, and ancient jokes are cracked. And oh, the journey homeward, when the sun, Low-rounding to the west, in ruddy glow ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... time, there had been a bunk. The flat shelf still projected out from the wall. Donald entered with an armful of spruce boughs, and threw them on the bunk. While he was arranging them to a semblance of smoothness for the blankets, his hand struck something hard and cold. He picked the object up and held it to the light of the fire. Then, with a cry, he leaned forward, and ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... surface of the Earth consisted of one and the same homogeneous fluid mass, or of strata of rock having the same color, density, smoothness, and power of absorbing heat from the solar rays, and of radiating it in a similar manner through the atmosphere, the isothermal, isotheral, and isochimenal lines would all be parallel to the equator. In this ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... But before this he had shown them all the map, adding a rough sketch of his own. The next rapid appeared to be no more dangerous than the previous one. But below it the river widened out into a circular bay, a great tureen within which the waters moved with an oil-like smoothness. But when Milton threw a stick into this strange basin, it was whirled the entire circumference of the bay with a velocity that all the men agreed boded ill for any boat that did not cling to the wall. The west end ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... transparent body and delicate tints; and the varieties of fish occasionally seen, including the flying-fish, dolphin, boneta, and shark, all furnish to an inquiring mind subjects of deep and abiding interest. My wonder was also excited by the singularly glassy smoothness of the surface of the water in a dead calm, while at the same time the long, rolling waves, or "seas," kept the brig in perpetual motion, and swept past as if despatched by some mysterious power on a mission to ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... was a glorious one—not a cloud in the sky, and the sea almost oily in its smoothness. As the hospital was full of cases of measles, it was decided to operate on deck a little aft of the hospital. A guard was placed to keep inquisitive onlookers at a distance, and the two operations were carried out successfully. It was a novel experience to operate under these ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... England are incomparable for excellence, of a beautiful smoothness, very ingeniously laid down, and so well kept that in most weathers you could take your dinner off any part of them without distaste. On them, to the note of the bugle, the mail did its sixty miles a day; innumerable chaises ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of training who saw in the human body the most sacred temple of the human soul, and paid tribute to physical perfection. The flow and ripple of these strong, justly modeled sinews were like the play of steel under satin and their smoothness was as rhythmic and full of power as some young gladiator's, who might have stirred the appreciation of Phidias or Praxiteles. When at last he had burned his mental restlessness into physical weariness, Burton halted and stood with ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... Curran now flung his brief upon the table, and hurried to his side. A few words passed between them, inaudible to the court; but they had the unexpected effect of apparently restoring the sufferer to complete tranquillity. He again stood erect; his brow, and it was a noble one, resumed its marble smoothness; his features grew calm, and his whole aspect returned to the stern and moveless melancholy of an ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... with her father to dine in accordance with Max's invitation. The evening passed with absolute smoothness. Sir Kersley and Dr. Jim were old friends, and had a good deal to say to one another. Max was present at the table, but withdrew early, alleging that he had a serious case to attend. Olga and ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... intervals of time, a tree in England, or under the widely-different climate of Virginia, produces a single bud, and this yields a branch which ever afterwards bears nectarines. Nectarines differ, as every one knows, from peaches in their smoothness, size, and flavour; and the difference is so great, that some botanists have maintained that they are specifically distinct. So permanent are the characters thus suddenly acquired, that a nectarine produced by bud-variation has propagated ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... the weather was a dead calm, and the water of glassy smoothness. Not a sound was to be heard save the distant thunder of bursting icebergs and the water swashing up against the field-ice that now and then passed with the current. It sounded for all the world like waves upon a rock-bound coast, or like the distant rumbling of a train of cars. About midnight ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... white and carved stone means the chaste and wise; the whiteness is modesty, the carving dogma. By the effigy of marble, smooth, shining, dark, the bride is figured, guileless, well conducted, working. The smoothness very rightly means guilelessness, the splendour good conduct, the blackness work. The noble cohort of the clergy lightening the world with light divine is expressed by the clear windows. The corresponding order can everywhere be observed. The Canonic is set forth by the higher order; the Vicarious ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... statesman. The smoothness of his manipulation was marvellous. No other man in politics, indeed no other man who had ever been in politics in this country, could—his admirers said—have brought together so many hostile interests ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... were highly important to Mr. Hepplewhite, for upon the absolute smoothness with which tea and dinner were served and the accuracy with which his valet selected socks to match his tie his entire happiness, to say nothing of his peace of mind, depended. His daily life consisted ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... again languidly, and turned them on a monk sitting beside him,—a monk whose face was neither old nor young, but which presented a singular combination of both qualities. His high forehead, white as marble, had no furrows to mar its smoothness, and from under deep brows a pair of wondering wistful brown eyes peered like the eyes of a lost and starving child. The cheeks were gaunt and livid, the flesh hanging in loose hollows from the high and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... nothing need be said in detail. Most people knew his pictures of the Four Elements, so neatly executed in a style adapting Flemish smoothness of surface to Italian suavity of line. This sort of art delighted the cardinals and Monsignori of the seventeenth century. But it has nothing whatsoever to say to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... grossness and barbarism, or insipidity and verbiage, in a writer that is the god of a nation's idolatry, it is we and not they who want true taste and feeling. The controversy about Pope and the opposite school in our own poetry comes to much the same thing. Pope's correctness, smoothness, etc., are very good things and much to be commended in him. But it is not to be expected or even desired that others should have these qualities in the same paramount degree, to the exclusion of everything else. If you like correctness and smoothness of all things ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... feeling is to make him talk and act like a veritable madman. He had yet to learn the profound wisdom, for poets as well as actors, of Hamlet's rule to "acquire and beget, in the whirlwind of passion, a temperance that may give it smoothness." ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... and questions shall be answered in their proper places; here I will but say that I scorn and detest lying, and quibbling, and double-tongued practice, and slyness, and cunning, and smoothness, and cant, and pretence, quite as much as any Protestants hate them; and I pray to be kept from the snare of them. But all this is just now by the bye; my present subject is my Accuser; what I insist upon here is this unmanly ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... and the situation did not change. The steersman returned on deck, and the captain, descending, watched the movement of the engines. Even when our speed increased, these engines continued working without noise, and with remarkable smoothness There was never one of those inevitable breaks, with which in most motors the pistons sometimes miss a stroke. I concluded that the "Terror," in each of its transformations must be worked by rotary engines. But I could not ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne
... consciousness of her body. She had relaxed completely and her mind soared, free. She moved one foot, cautiously, to see whether her body was still there, and smiled when she was reassured by the cool smoothness of the linen sheet, and the other warm little ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... never seen her more radiant. Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing. Was it really eleven years, Selden found himself wondering, and had she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... looked like the saloon of a Moorish day-boat; not that he knew of any such craft, but the decorations were so Saracenic and the architecture so Hudson Riverish. They found there on the grand central divan a large lady whose vast smoothness, placidity, and plumpness set at defiance all their preconceptions of Mrs. Grosvenor Green, so that Mrs. March distinctly paused with her card in her hand before venturing even tentatively to address her. Then she was astonished ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... he says, "a manly rough line with a deal of meaning in it, rather than a whole poem full of musical periods, that have nothing in them, only smoothness ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... a party of the officers endeavoured to get on one of the larger icebergs, but ineffectually, owing to the steepness and smoothness of its sides, and the swell produced by its undulating motion. This was one of the largest we saw, and Mr. Hood ascertained its height to be one hundred and forty-nine feet; but these masses of ice are frequently magnified to an immense size, through the illusive ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... well as military business was being transacted in Pretoria with perfect smoothness, in spite of the proximity of the enemy. The yeomanry were acting as police both there and in Johannesburg. The gaol, of which we had a glimpse, was crowded with 240 prisoners, but was under the competent direction of the usual English under-official, who had been in the service ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... independent John Adams sought and respected his views and his aid, perhaps more than they themselves appreciated. Surely here was labor enough, and even more responsibility than labor; but Franklin's great, well-trained mind worked with the ease and force of a perfectly regulated machine whose smoothness of action almost conceals its power, and all the higher parts of his labor were achieved with little perceptible effort. For the matters of account-keeping and letter-writing, he neglected these things; and one is almost provoked into respecting him for so doing ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... like to be with young folks; I like what they like. Yet deep lines are set in my forehead, the veins stand out upon my hands, and my shadow is the shadow of a stooping old man; and when, from frequent weariness, I rest my head on my hand, the fingers clasp only smoothness, or, at best, but a few scattered locks,—wisps, I might as well say. If ever I took pride in anything, it was in my fine head of hair. Well, what matters it? Since heart of youth is left me, I'll never mind ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... his inexpressible manner of raising his hat to you, and the heartfelt sincerity of his apology; where one man will run a mile to restore a lost franc, but if you ask him to change a gold piece he will steal five; where your eyes are ravished with the beauty, and the greenness, and the smoothness and apparent ease of living of all its inhabitants; where your mind is filled with the pictures, the music, the art, the general atmosphere of culture and wit; where the cooking is so good but so elusive, ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... pipe the smoke ascending Filled the sky with haze and vapor, Filled the air with dreamy softness, Gave a twinkle to the water, Touched the rugged hills with smoothness, Brought the tender Indian Summer To the melancholy north-land, In the ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... whilst in a gig, of rattling over the uneven stone blocks was as if the whole vehicle might at any moment be shattered into a hundred fragments. The improvement has come at last, and these streets are now almost of a billiard-table smoothness. The General Post Office has been removed from the congested thoroughfare of the Escolta to a more commodious site. Electric tramcars, in supersession of horse-traction, run through the city and suburbs since April 10, 1905. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... labours, or about the time when he had completed his second locomotive, he began to direct his particular attention to the state of the Road; as he perceived that the extended use of the locomotive must necessarily depend in a great measure upon the perfection, solidity, continuity, and smoothness of the way along which the engine travelled. Even at that early period, he was in the habit of regarding the road and the locomotive as one machine, speaking of the rail and the wheel as ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... add to the wonders in this under-world of glamour and mystery. Shells, pink and pearly, brown and lilac, scarlet and cobalt, strew the flower-decked floor with infinite variety, concave and spiral, ribbed and fluted, fretted and jagged—the satin smoothness of convoluted forms lying amid rugged shapes bristling with spines and needles. We gaze almost with awe at the lovely vision of a dainty Nautilus, sailing his fairy boat down a blue channel fringed with purple and salmon-coloured anemones, beneath a hedge of rosy coral. The shimmering sail and carven ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... hand and took his. He was terrifically conscious of the warm smoothness of her fingers playing a soft tattoo on the back of ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... with them, is capable of joining the effect of certain agreeable qualities of the mind to those of the body. So that to form a finished human beauty, and to give it its full influence, the face must be expressive of such gentle and amiable qualities, as correspond with the softness, smoothness, and delicacy of the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... supposing that the ancient audiences were delighted with the sound. The imitator ought, therefore, to have adopted what he found, and to have added what was wanting; to have preserved a constant return of the same numbers, and to have supplied smoothness of ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... every day, and to form the character into such habits as will fit or unfit it for great proofs of unselfishness, should such be ever called for. Besides, it is on trifles such as these that the smoothness of "the current of domestic joy" depends. It is a smoothness that is easily disturbed: do not let your hand be the one ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... is next covered with cedar bark; all the interstices are filled with it, and an upper or final layer is spread with some regularity and smoothness. Earth is then thrown on from base to apex to a thickness of about six inches, but enough is put on to make the hut perfectly wind and water proof. This operation finishes the house, and usually there are enough volunteers to complete ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... that of Mr. Grayson; it was a matter of course with both. To Harley, fresh from other lands, it seemed in the first breath singular, and yet in the second he liked it; the easy give-and-take promoted the smoothness of life, and men might assume false values, but they were not able to keep them. His thoughts returned for a moment to the least little attache whose manner was more important than that of a ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... with moonlight, a motionless white stag stood watching her. It was a hart of the sixth year, and stood already higher than any hart of the twelfth; full five foot high it stood, and its grand soft shining flanks seemed to be molded of marble for their grandeur, and silk for their smoothness, and moonlight for their sheen. Its new antlers were branching towards their yearly strength, and the triple-pointed crowns rose proudly from the beam that was their last perfection. The eyes of the girl and ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... Luxembourg Gallery, Mr. Lambert's "Family of Cats" is considered one of the finest cat pictures in the world. In this painting the mother sits upon a table watching the antics of her four frivolous kittens. There is a wonderful smoothness of touch and refinement of treatment that have never yet been excelled. "After the Banquet" is another excellent example of the same smoothness of execution, with fulness of action instead of repose. And yet there is an undeniable lack of the softer attributes ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... mariner will trust no winds, although Upon his sails they blow fair flattery; No tides which, with all fawning smoothness, flow Can charm his fears into security; He credits none but thee, who art his bay, To which, through calms and storms, he hunts ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan |
