"Compactness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a huge pine-tree, overthrown so as to fill the vacuity, completed what nature had left undone; and, bating the one or two rude cavities left here and there in the sides—themselves so covered as to lie hidden from all without—there was all the compactness of a regularly-constructed dwelling. A single and small lamp, pendent from a beam that hung over the room, gave a feeble light, which, taken in connection with that borrowed from without, served only to make visible the dark indistinct of the place. With something dramatic in their ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... and built with a shiplike compactness, there was but one room on the ground floor besides the kitchen and its offices. It was a plain, comfortable place, wainscoted about, with shelves and lockers in the whimsical copy of a vessel's cabin. And it ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the charm of the tree lies in the low reach of the branches and the compactness of the crown. The pruning should, therefore, be limited to the removal of dead ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... vigilance, self-control, arrogance, love of power, firmness, and hardihood. These faculties express concentration of purpose and their functional equivalents are power of elaboration, constructiveness, condensation, firmness of fiber, compactness of frame, and endurance of organization. The pulse is full, firm, and regular, the muscles are strong and well marked, the hair and skin dark, the temporal region is not broadly developed, the face is angular, its lines denoting both power of purpose and strength of constitution, with ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... subterranean passage from the bottom of Halemaumau. There was no material change in the sunken portion of the crater except a continual falling in of rocks and debris from its banks as the contraction from its former intense heat loosened their compactness and sent them hurling some 200 or 300 feet below, giving forth at times a boom as of distant thunder, followed by clouds of cinders and ashes shooting up into the air 100 to 300 feet, proportionate, doubtless, to the size of the ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... action, at a single place, in a single time. More than any other modern form of literature, the short story requires the observance of the old Greek unities of time, place and action: its brevity and compactness do not admit of the proper treatment of the changes wrought by the passage of time, the influences of different scenes, or the complications resulting from the interrelation of many characters of varied importance. If the plot chosen requires the passage ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... could be presented; and men never grew weary (especially if the argument involved Constitutional construction, in which department he stood primus inter illustres) of admiring the amplitude of his legal attainments, the accuracy of his learning, the compactness of his logic, and the majestic flow of his eloquence, and more than all, that firmness and breadth of mind which lifted him above the ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... footstep which she might have recognised ringing rapidly down the frosty road. She was too busy rustling about with perpetual motion, folding and refolding, and smoothing into miraculous compactness all the heterogeneous elements of that mass. When a sudden knock came to the door she started, struck with alarm, then paused a moment, looking round her, and perceiving at one hasty glance that nobody could possibly ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... not deny that it was with a secret glee I watched her. Had I been a gentleman I believe Madame would have found favour in my eyes, she was so handy, neat, thorough in all she did: some people's movements provoke the soul by their loose awkwardness, hers—satisfied by their trim compactness. I stood, in short, fascinated; but it was necessary to make an effort to break this spell a retreat must be beaten. The searcher might have turned and caught me; there would have been nothing for it then but a scene, and she and I would have had ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... he writes in the same letter: "I miss him dreadfully. The sense I used to have of compactness and comfort about me while I was reading, is quite gone; and on my coming out for the ten minutes, when I used to find him always ready for me with something cheerful to say, it is forlorn. . . . Besides which, H. and all the rest of them ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... on producing practical results. There are no false motions. Every swaying of the preacher's weapon is a blow, and every blow is a hit. There is hardly another example in homiletic literature of such compactness, such solidity, such logical consecutiveness, such cogency, such freedom from surplusage. Tare and tret are excluded. Every thing counts. You meet with two or three adjectives, and you at first naturally assume, that, after the usual manner of ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... published, in the old Democratic Review for 1846, an article on the "Natural Proof of the Existence of a Deity," that for beauty of language, depth of reasoning, versatility of illustration, and compactness of logic, has never been equaled. The only other publication which at that period he had made, was a book that astonished all of his friends, both in title and execution. It was called "The Desperadoes of the West," and purported to give minute details of the lives of some of the most ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... physique, but as they sat facing each other an observer would have remarked that Elton's visage possessed a clean-cut compactness of expression despite its rotund contour. His closely trimmed whiskers, his small, clear, penetrating eyes, and the effect of neatness conveyed by his personal appearance were so many external indications of his mental ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... became a great leader, and which would have elected him President had he not shortened his life by intemperance. He was a solid, square-built man, with an impassive, ruddy face. He claimed to be a good farmer, but no orator, yet he was noted for the compactness of his logic, which was unenlivened by a figure of speech or a ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... wireless messages in mid-air. But Tom had seen the advantage of this while making a trip in the ill-fated Red Cloud to the cave of the diamond makers, and he determined to have his new craft thus provided against emergencies. The wireless outfit of the Humming-Bird was a marvel of compactness. ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... monstrous jaw betrayed more of the quickness and sudden ferocity of the tiger than those suggested by the heavy, lion-like jowl of the English mastiff. His ears, too, were close cropped, in accordance with the Russian fashion, and somehow the compactness this gave to his head seemed to throw forward and bring into prominence his great fiery eyes, that reflected red lights as he moved, and did not tend to inspire ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... help from the indication of the correct use of prepositions, the misuse of which is one of the most common of errors, and one of the most difficult to avoid, while their right use gives to style cohesion, firmness, and compactness, and is an important aid to perspicuity. To the text of the synonyms is appended a set of Questions and Examples to adapt the work for use as a text-book. Aside from the purposes of the class-room, this portion ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... both of them Clovis exercises, needlessly, his titular right of entry, but he can be removed without damage, leaving Saki at his best and most characteristic, save that he shows here, in addition to his own shining qualities, a compactness and a finish which he did not always achieve. With these I introduce you to him, confident that ten minutes of his conversation, more surely than any words of mine, will have given him the freedom ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... rows of bunks, mess-tables, sizzling sauce-pans over kitchen-fires. Everywhere were endless ingenuities in the way of camp-furniture and household decoration. Farther down the road a path between fir-boughs led to a hidden hospital, a marvel of underground compactness. While we chatted with the surgeon a soldier came in from the trenches: an elderly, bearded man, with a good average civilian face—the kind that one runs against by hundreds in any French crowd. He had a scalp-wound which had just been dressed, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... It is said to be of Asiatic invention, and was composed of four rings within a fifth, each of which was rivetted. Single-chain mail was worn by the Crusaders, in Henry III's time; and when the number of rings was doubled, it became double-chain mail. Its great advantages were compactness and pliability. Horses were now ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... Herndon felt warranted in saying that he was at the same time a very great and a very insignificant lawyer. His mind was logical and direct. Generalities and platitudes had no charm for him. He had the ability to seize the strong points of a case and present them with clearness and compactness. His power of comparison was great. He rarely failed in a legal discussion to use this mode of reasoning. Yet he knew practically nothing of the rules of evidence, of pleading, of practice, as laid ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... late army hovering about us, and, aided by an exasperated population, he may again unite in treble our numbers and fall upon us to advantage if we rest inactive in the security of past victories. Compactness, vigilance, and discipline are therefore our only securities. Let every good officer and man look to these cautions and ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... which the lateral movement of the piston is communicated by connecting-rods to the rotatory movement of the crank-shaft. Mr. Nasmyth says of it, that "on account of its great simplicity and GET-AT-ABILITY of parts, its compactness and self-contained steadiness, this engine has been the parent of a vast progeny, all more or less marked by the distinguishing features of the original design, which is still in as high favour as ever." Mr. Maudslay also directed his attention in like ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... held by a pulverized and open soil, than by a compact and close one. Water is held in the soil between the minute particles of earth. If these particles be pressed together compactly, there is no space left between them for water. The same is true of soil naturally compact. This compactness exists more or less in most subsoils, certainly in all through which water does not readily pass. Hence, all these subsoils are rendered more permeable to water by being broken up and divided; and more ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... clavier sonatas particularly well." This habit of working out ideas with the assistance of the piano has been condemned by most theorists as being likely to lead to fragmentariness. With Haydn at any rate the result was entirely satisfactory, for, as Sir Hubert Parry points out, the neatness and compactness of his works is perfect. It is very likely, as Sir Hubert says, that most modern composers have used the pianoforte a good deal—not so much to help them to find out their ideas, as to test the details and intensify ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... infinite, and of grasping all that is revealed to us amid the boundless and inexhaustible fullness of creation, development, and being." The fidelity to this sentiment which is every where apparent in "Cosmos," is no less remarkable than the compactness of its reasoning and the wealth of its details, and to the mind imbued with the genuine spirit of science, invests this extraordinary work ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... which had in itself so much the air of a gentleman's residence, so much the look of a something above a mere parsonage-house—above the expenditure of a few hundreds a year. It is not a scrambling collection of low single rooms, with as many roofs as windows; it is not cramped into the vulgar compactness of a square farmhouse: it is a solid, roomy, mansion-like looking house, such as one might suppose a respectable old country family had lived in from generation to generation, through two centuries at ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... for the same amount; that there are large tracts which even the improvements of the adjacent lands will never raise to that price, and that the present uniform price, combined with their irregular value, operates to prevent a desirable compactness of settlements in the new States and to retard the full development of that wise policy on which our land system is founded, to the injury not only of the several States where the lands lie, but of the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... in size, shape and construction, there was nothing to prevent the occupant from subsequently enlarging and improving his house. For the present, however, the interests of all were best served by speed and compactness. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... The bow-rope and tail-rope were then manipulated alternately until the bow of the sledge was manoeuvred slowly through the gaping hole in the snow-lid and was finally hauled up on to level ground. No more remarkable test of the efficiency of the sledge straps and the compactness of the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... his fame has known no diminution; therefore these affectionate recollections of him have always been treasured there for the gratification of his pilgrims, and with a becoming reverence themselves, the people naturally set apart as sacred all that belonged to him. I have noticed the compactness of his few rooms, and their separation from the larger apartments—they have also a separate communication by a small elegant flight of steps into the garden, as you may see in Prout's drawing. If the rooms were not an addition, and it did not suggest itself at the moment to look ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... compactness for shedding water. The oil spread over them during the preening is useful as a ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... sides to the summit of her short, powerful masts there was scant beauty in her. She was broad, blunt, evidently slow in her movements, and in the smooth waters of the bay seemed out of her element. But, for all that, she imparted an impression of compactness, the compactness of things dwarfed and stunted. Vast, indeed, would be the force that would crush those bulging flanks, so cunningly built, moreover, that the ship must slip and rise to any too great lateral pressure. Far above her waist rose her smokestack. Overhead ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... twenty-two, and twenty feet high, for $20. The building can be done at any season, and can be finished with great speed, and there are said to be numerous other advantages connected with the use of the paper. It differs from ordinary paper in consistency, compactness and solidity. In the manufacture it is subjected to a pressure of hundreds of tuns, which squeezes out the liquid matter, leaving a substance of the right thickness. It is said to be proof against damp and gnawing of vermin, and it being an excellent non-conductor of heat, ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... vices, tames at length the selfish host, into the laborious slaves and mechanic implements of the self-interested. Thus, without public spirit, nay, by the predominance of the opposite quality, the latter are the public benefactors: and, giving steadfastness and compactness to the whole, lay in the ground of the canvass, on which minds of finer texture ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... that Brussels is almost certain to make upon the visitor is its compactness. Its population, including the outskirts, is nowadays rather over 600,000; but it is almost impossible to realize that nearly one-eleventh of the whole population of Belgium is concentrated in this one city, or, as might be said, in Greater Brussels. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... masses of plutonic rocks that had been upheaved and entirely occupied the surface. Although vast blocks lay heaped in the wildest confusion, they exhibited the peculiar characteristics of all Cyprian rocks (excepting the calcareous limestone) in their utter want of compactness. I have never seen in Cyprus any hard rock (except jurassic limestone), whether gneiss, syenite, or others, that would yield an unblemished stone to the mason's chisel of ten feet in length by a square of two feet. This peculiarity is not the result of decay, but the entire mass has been fractured ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... century; and it is strongly held by contemporary Liberals like M. Faguet, who frankly abrogate its speculative foundations and rest their case on social utility. Its strength is, in effect, not in its logical principles, but in the compactness and consistency which it gives to a view of the functions of the State which responds to certain needs of modern society. As long as those needs were uppermost, the theory was of living value. In proportion as they have been ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... classical poets are turned to great and frequent account throughout the poem; and yet the work has a strong air of originality, partly owing to the subject, partly to the abundance of love-scenes, and to a certain compactness in the treatment of the main story, notwithstanding the luxuriance of the episodes. The Jerusalem Delivered is stately, well-ordered, full of action and character, sometimes sublime, always elegant, and very interesting-more ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... to the cheeks, very mobile, and when at attention carried with the back of the ear upward and outward. NECK—Moderately long, with slightly arched nape, muscular and clean, showing no dewlap, and carried well up and forward. FORE-QUARTERS—His work underground demands strength and compactness, and, therefore, the chest and shoulder regions should be deep, long, and wide. The shoulder blade should be long, and set on very sloping, the upper arm of equal length with, and at right angles to, the shoulder blade, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... influence over the affairs of all the Provinces. In his tune, moreover, the English interest, under the auspices of an undisturbed dynasty, and a cautious, politic Prince (Henry VII.), began by slow and almost imperceptible degrees to recover the unity and compactness it had lost ever ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... effective intercourse has involved personal presence at the point where intercourse occurs. The possibility, therefore, of going and coming and doing that day's work has hitherto fixed the extreme limits to which a city could grow, and has exacted a compactness which has always been very undesirable and which is now for the first time in the world's ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... more credit and honour than old sedate Bannerman; for his lads were lighter in the heel, glegger in the eye, and brisker in the manoeuvres of war: moreover, they were all far more similar in their garb and appearance, which gave them a seeming compactness that the countrymen had nothing like. But when the sham contest began, it was not long till Bannerman's disciples showed the proofs of their master's better skill to such a mark, that Hepburn grew hot, and so kindled his men by reproaches, that there was like to have been ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... to melancholia may expect his brain, sooner or later, to degenerate from its original strength, and relax the toughness and compactness of its fibre. Absolute dementia may not be the result for some years, but there will be occasional and painful indications of the end for a long space before it arrives. The indications, as a rule, will assume the form of visions and dreams and wild imaginings of ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton |
