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More "Flatness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of cases from the employment of some animal as a model. Thus, if an alligator or almost any quadruped is embodied in the vessel, the form tends to become elongated; if a crab or a fish is imitated, there is a tendency to flatness &c. The base is almost universally more or less conical, is rarely flat, and never concave, excepting as the result of the addition of an annular foot or stand. The radical shapes do not undergo any considerable change when rims, necks, handles, legs, and other appendages ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... 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 ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... to us are muddy, foul, or dirty: now, of the channels the waters receive a disadvantage, and so come to us as savouring of what came not with them from the fountain, but from the channels. This is the cause of the coolness, and of the weakness, of the flatness, and of the many extravagancies that attend some of our desires. They come warm from the Spirit and grace of God in us; but as hot water running through cold pipes, or as clear water running through dirty conveyances, so our desires [cool ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to secure its own fulfilment? With a "This won't do!" What? if after such acknowledgments extorted from his own judgment he should proceed from charge to charge of tameness and raving; flights and flatness; and at length, consigning the author to the house of incurables, should conclude with a strain of rudest contempt evidently grounded in the distempered state of his own moral associations? Suppose too all this done without a single ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... The unbroken 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 we were weary of looking at them. We occasionally ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... our adventures thus far, I find it impossible. How, then, make it real to others? To tell of aerial adventure one needs a new language, or, at least, a parcel of new adjectives, sparkling with bright and vivid meaning, as crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and delightful to it. For there is something new under the sun: aerial adventure; and the most lively and unjaded ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... 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 ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... symmetry, observe, but extreme flatness. Feathers are smoothed down, as a field of corn by wind with rain; only the swathes laid in beautiful order. They are fur, so structurally placed as to imply, and submit to, the perpetually swift forward motion. In fact, I have no doubt the Darwinian theory ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... the small streams that trickled from above as to be almost impassable. In the course of the day we passed the scene of a very melancholy accident. Some years ago two families of Indians, induced by the flatness of a small beach which lay betwixt the cliff and the river, chose it as the site of their encampment. They retired quietly to rest, not aware that the precipice, detached from the bank and urged by an accumulation of water in the crevice behind, was tottering to its base. It fell during ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... as a city of shams, is certainly not surpassed in the way of show by any capital in Europe. As to natural situation she may be said to be at once fortunate and infelicitous: the flatness of the land is not redeemed by fertility, the monotony of the panorama is not broken by mountains; the city rides as a raft upon the waters, so heavily freighted as to run the risk of sinking. And yet I know of no capital more imposing when taken from the strong points of view. Almost beyond ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... very ordinary request a sudden flatness overspread Ning's manner and he began to describe the many much more profitable rewards that Hia might fittingly demand. As none of these appeared to entice her imagination, he went on to rebuke her want of foresight, and, still later, having unsuccessfully pointed out to her the inevitable penury ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... of the coolness, and of the weakness, and of the flatness, and of the many extravagances that attend some of our desires: they come warm from the Spirit and grace of God in us; hut as hot water running through cold pipes, or as clear water running through dirty convey ances, so our desires ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... joyful things to enjoy. What was best of all about this later delight, was that it left no bitter taste behind it; in youth, a day of abandonment to elation, a day of breezy talk, hearty laughter, active pleasure, would often leave a sense of flatness and dissatisfaction behind it; but the later joy had no sort of weariness as its shadow; it ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... think, but one fault in her appearance and one peculiarity. With a white-painted hull, her bridge and the whole of her upper structure, except the masts and funnel, were also white, giving to her general features a certain flatness which masked her fine proportions. Her bridge, instead of being well forward, was placed so far aft that it was only a few feet from the funnel. The object of this departure from custom was to prevent ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... psychic forces which the Institute invariably produces must be tempered, along about midway of the week, by some sharp contrast in the communal life. Otherwise, the group, like over-trained athletes, will grow emotionally stale before the week is done, and at the end of that is let-down and flatness. Hence "stunt night." ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... very easily overdone, and I am far from asserting that this may not be in some degree my own case; but there is scarcely so nice a line to distinguish, as that which divides true simplicity from flatness and Sternholdianism (if I may be allowed to coin the word), and therefore it is not surprising, that in endeavouring to avoid the latter, so young and inexperienced a rhymer as myself should sometimes have deviated also from the former."[71] This ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... 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
... reverts to its former flatness, the hills vanish, the shores are level, but the southern influence is felt, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... save the usual accidents and delays incidental to travelling in an unexplored region. Oxley's opinion of the value of the new district had, as is evident from his journal, been steadily decreasing since leaving the depot. The flatness of the country, the numerous branches of the river and the want of height visible in its banks, seemingly depressed him very much. On the 6th ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... must be fairly fronted, and the fronting of it brings us to the very core of the business of actually forming the taste. If your taste were classical you would discover in Lamb a continual fascination; whereas what you in fact do discover in Lamb is a not unpleasant flatness, enlivened by a vague humour and an occasional pathos. You ought, according to theory, to be enthusiastic; but you are apathetic, or, at best, half-hearted. There is a gulf. How ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... about Margaret; in a sense my conception of Margaret was entirely poetic illusion. I don't think I was ever blind to certain defects of hers, and quite as certainly they didn't seem to matter in the slightest degree. Her mind had a curious want of vigour, "flatness" is the only word; she never seemed to escape from her phrase; her way of thinking, her way of doing was indecisive; she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out to ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... like the lens of a camera, as Dr. Wood tried it, so that one-half of it catches the light, all the light caught will be refracted through it. Fishes, too, have a wide range of vision. Some have eyes that see over half a circle. So the lens gets its name. Ordinary cameras, because of the flatness of their lenses, have a range of only a few degrees, the widest in use, I believe, taking in only ninety-six, or a little more than a quarter of a circle. So, you see, my detectascope has a range almost twice as wide as that ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... road. The modern pattern has a convex angle in the roof, and dormer-windows; it is a rustic adaptation of the Mansard. The antique pattern, which is far more picturesque, has a concave curve in the roof, and the eaves project like eyebrows, shading the flatness of the face. Paint is a rarity. The prevailing colour is the soft gray of weather-beaten wood. Sometimes, in the better class of houses, a gallery is built across the front and around one side, and a square of garden is fenced in, with dahlias and hollyhocks and marigolds, and perhaps ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... indentings in the middle of the chin save in men of cool understanding, unless when something evidently contradictory appeared in the countenance. The soft, fat, double chin generally points out the epicure; and the angular chin is seldom found save in discreet, well-disposed, firm men. Flatness of chin speaks the cold and dry; smallness, fear; and roundness, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... noon at the town of Cheyenne, in Wyoming Territory. Cheyenne, once boasting the title (I was told) "The Magic City of the Plains," was located upon a dreary flatness, although from it one might see, far southwest, the actual Rocky Mountains in Colorado Territory, looking, at this distance of one hundred miles, like low dark clouds. The up grade in the west promised that we should soon cross over their ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... surnamed, from the flatness of his feet, Plautus, was the greatest among the comic poets of Rome. Of humble origin, he was driven to literature by his necessities, and it was while turning the crank of a baker's hand-mill that he began the work by which ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... we did find ourselves on the prairie, amid the waving grass, with the land rolling on before us in a succession of gentle sweeps, never rising so as to impede the view, or apparently changing in its general level, but yet without the monotony of flatness. We were on the prairie, but still I felt no satisfaction. It was private property, divided among holders and pastured over by private cattle. Salisbury Plain is as wild, and Dartmoor almost wilder. Deer, they told me, were to be had within reach of Dixon, but for the buffalo one has to ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... young girl wished to attempt this last effort asked by her companion. She found her way by the light from the flashes. They were then crossing a boundless desert, in the midst of which was lost the little river. Not a tree nor a hillock broke the flatness. Not a breath disturbed the atmosphere, whose calmness would allow the slightest sound to travel an ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... it. In some few months less than another year, you know, I shall carry Pussy off from school as Mrs. Edwin Drood. I shall then go engineering into the East, and Pussy with me. And although we have our little tiffs now, arising out of a certain unavoidable flatness that attends our love-making, owing to its end being all settled beforehand, still I have no doubt of our getting on capitally then, when it's done and can't be helped. In short, Jack, to go back to the old song I was freely quoting at dinner (and who ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... remarkable face—a most impressive face. If you could fancy some mighty serpent transformed into man, preserving in the human lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea of that countenance than long descriptions can convey: the width and flatness of frontal—the tapering elegance of contour disguising the strength of the deadly jaw—the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as the emerald—and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the consciousness ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... 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 ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... his cerebrum bears to the subjacent ganglia, as well as in the wider 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, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... with the ordinary interests of the day before them. There was a latent unwillingness in Mrs. Egremont's mind to discuss the subject with either aunt or daughter; and when the post brought no letter, Ursula, after a moment's sense of flatness, was relieved, and returned to her eager desire to hurry after the water-soldier. It was feasible that very afternoon. Mary Nugent ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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, in the engineer's opinion, was, that by forming the ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... of her direction, Tess stood still upon the hemmed expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly. The sole effect of her presence upon the placid valley so far had been to excite the mind of a solitary ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... left, life in the village settled down to its normal level, or more accurately, to its normal flatness as regarded general contours, and its petty inequalities in respect to local detail. It reminded Hadria of the landscape which stretched in quiet long lines to the low horizon, while close at hand, the ground fussed and fretted itself into minor ups and downs ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... in many a sky, all gave to this man the appearance of some god of the forest who had just come forth from its primeval depths bringing with him the laurels of wood and mountain crag and sky, some king standing on the edge of the wood amazed at the flatness and tameness of the valley and plains. Umapine stood there the embodiment and glorification of Indian manners, costume, and tradition, a vivid picture of Indian life and story. The waymarks of such a life are, always tense with interest: they are more so as he points them out himself. We will ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... relief. But somehow, in a subtle way, he was more feverishly wretched than when Margot was near, and while planning to hurry on the marriage. He had been buoyed up with a rather youthful sense of defiance of the world, a hot desire to "get everything over." The flatness of the reaction which he felt on finding himself free, at least of Margot's society, was a surprise; and yet Stephen vaguely understood its real meaning. To be free, yet not free, was an aggravation. And besides, he did not know what to do or where to go, now that ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and replaced by roofs designed in that style prevalent during the fifteenth century. The slope or pitch of the roof is much lower than before, and the form altogether more obtuse, and sometimes approaching nearly to flatness. The exterior is on this account often entirely concealed from view by the parapet. Many roofs of this style are divided into bays or compartments by horizontal tie-beams faced with mouldings, and apparently ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... 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 ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... old and worn, Persis thought, more like the man who must settle for the spring finery of a family of grown daughters, than a complacent young husband paying for his wife's first new gown since the wedding. There was a flatness in his voice that matched the weariness in his eyes, and forthwith a dozen questions raced through ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... and precision of range. All modern guns are capable of being made to shoot straight; but their precision of range depends partly on the successful designing of the gun and ammunition, so as to give uniform velocities, and partly on the flatness of the trajectory. The greater the velocity, the lower the trajectory, and the greater the chance of striking the target. Supposing a heavy gun to be mounted as in the fortresses round our coasts, and aimed with due care, the distance of the object being approximately ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... remember? He was killed in that auto crash coming home from the city last year." There was an odd questing flatness in her voice. ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... them to a somewhat calmer and rather happy state of mind. Charley's sorrow was blunted by sympathy with Kate's joy, and Kate's joy was subdued by sympathy with Charley's sorrow; so that, after the first effervescing burst, they settled down into a calm and comfortable state of flatness, with very red eyes and exceedingly pensive minds. We must, however, do Charley the justice to say that the red eyes applied only to Kate; for although a tear or two could without much coaxing be induced to hop over his sun-burned ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the level flatness of her tones almost broke the Sculptor Girl's heart. She reached out her hand and caught Felicia's and gripped it hard. She did not say much but what she said ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... his solid white profile as he stood with hands clasped, near her music, on the chiffonier. She noticed again that strange flatness of the lower ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... imitation to make them; but the difference to which I refer is an indescribable something, which can only be compared to peculiarities of accent. They both speak the same language; perhaps in classical purity of phraseology the fashionable Scotchman is even superior to the Englishman; but there is a flatness of tone in his accent—a lack of what the musicians call expression, which gives a local and provincial effect to his conversation, however, in other respects, learned and intelligent. It is so with his manners; he conducts himself with equal ease, self-possession, and discernment, ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... (1948:46) and Langebartel and Shannon (1956:165). Lumbar glands are longer than broad, at least one third the distance from axilla to groin, lateral and usually high, and often conspicuous and protuberant. The elevation or flatness of the lumbar glands seems to be due to individual variation; living specimens in the field had conspicuous and protuberant, or non-elevated, indistinct lumbar glands. Lumbar glands are not to be confused with ...
— A New Species of Frog (Genus Tomodactylus) from Western Mexico • Robert G. Webb
... well as we can. For examples of Heads nothing can be better than photographs from Botticelli and other early Tuscan, and from the early Siennese painters. Also from Holbein, and chiefly from his drawings. There is a flatness and firmness of treatment in all these which is eminently suited to stained-glass work. Hands also may be studied from the same sources, for though Botticelli does not always draw hands with perfect mastery, yet he very often does, and the expression ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... 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 enough ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... including even Mr. Perry, experienced a sensation of sudden vacancy and flatness when his Highness left them. It was as though they had been sheltering a royal eagle that was used to dwelling in sunlit heights unknown to them, and now they were left on flat ground to consort with ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... was no 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 raged ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... sullen gray-black spate, and out on the levels the water lies six inches deep, in stretch upon stretch, as far as the eye can reach. Every culvert is full, and the broken ice clicks against the wooden pier-guards of the bridges. Somewhere in this flatness there is a refreshing jingle of spurs along the cars, and a man of the Canadian Mounted Police swaggers through with his black fur cap and the yellow tab aside, his well-fitting overalls and his better set-up back. One ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... breadth together without depth give flatness. Life and love without feeling produce shallow, superficial natures. Feeling is the need of men to ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... her. 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 least they were shot through ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... 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 ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... 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. ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... be formed from the fibres of the cirrus sinking into a horizontal position, at the same time that they approach each other sideways. This cloud is to be distinguished by its flatness and great horizontal extension, in proportion to its height; a character which it always retains, under all its various forms. As this cloud is generally changing its figure, and slowly sinking, it has been called the wane-cloud. A collection of these clouds, when seen in the distance, ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... administrations of 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, as prosperous rather than memorable, as wanting in greatness, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... but the flatness of the country offered no opportunity for anything larger than a gopher to hide. Trees and bushes, alike too small for shelter, and little rises of land, hard enough to climb but easily visible to anyone on horseback, were all that offered themselves. In the distance an arroyo looked ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... the war wore out of its own violence. 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 ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... the days seemed to drag heavily at Lisconnel, where a dulness and flatness had come over society. Dr. Hamilton had carried off Denis O'Meara to Ballybrosna, and there was nothing to fill up the blank he left except speculations about his chances of recovery, and censures upon Hugh McInerney, monotonously unanimous. In his favour, indeed, no one seemingly had a word to say. ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... the body and becoming shorter towards it's extremity where it ends in an accute point. the hairs of the body are much longer on the side and rump than any other part, which gives the body and apparent flatness, particularly when the animal rests on it's belley. this hair is upwards of 3 inches in length particularly on the rump where it extends so far towards the point of the tail that it almost conceals the shape of that ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... Kinsella understood them. He felt a warm affection for Miss Rutherford rise in his heart when she told Jimmy, who sat humped up over his oar, to keep his back flat. Jimmy merely smiled in reply. He had known since he was two years old that the flatness or roundness of the rower's back has nothing whatever to do with the progress of a boat in Rosnacree Bay. A few minutes later she accused Priscilla of "bucketing," and Frank loved her for the word. Priscilla replied indignantly ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... down in some convenient spot, with 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 weary days until ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... up and denied the first word of the charge with unpleasant flatness. To be caught means to be in love, to be in love implies a wish and hope to marry, and these were just what Claude could not allow. May not a man, nevertheless, have an ideal of truth and beauty and look worshipfully ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... And the family devote themselves to the cake-walks and comic medleys, the 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 "Fashion Plate March" in its appeal. ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... 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 honour of a representative attitude—perceiving ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... 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,' ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... 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
... which to view bears is, as a general thing, a dangerous experiment, as bears themselves are such capital climbers. But there are times when it is the only possible course available for those who would observe their action, on account of the flatness of the country thereabout. So, speedily as possible, the trees were selected that were considered most suitable. These were situated a little north and south of the spot where the bears had thrown their fish on the shore. They were a little distant from the trail along which ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... 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 ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... sense of flatness. He embodied the life of the village in a way one could not believe unless one had lived there. I've seen a lot of him in the last few months; we were fairly driven ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... up at the well-known door at quite an early hour. Daisy and the baby were already out, but Harold, still something of an invalid, stood by the dining-room window. Harold, a little weary from his journey, a little spoiled by his happy month at Torquay was experiencing some of that flatness, which must now and then visit even a little child when he finds he must descend from a pedestal. For a very long time he had been first in every one's thoughts. He had now to retire from the privileges of an invalid to the everyday position, the everyday life of a healthy child. While ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... "Non, miladi, positivement rien." Strange to say, I too felt desoeuvre by the want of having something to be alarmed or to hope about,—I, who meddle not with politics, and wish all the world to be as quiet and as calm as myself. Every one I see appears to experience this same flatness, just like the reaction produced on the spirits the first day or two after the Italian Carnival, when the cessation of gaiety, though felt to be a relief to the frame, leaves ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... 2,500 to 3,000 feet) is very different from that required for great depths. To reach great depths, the size of shafts must greatly expand, to provide for extended ventilation, pumping, and winding necessities. Moreover inclined shafts of a degree of flatness possible for moderate depths become too long to be used economically from the surface. The vast majority of metal-mining shafts fall into the first class, those of moderate depths. Yet, as time goes ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... extraordinary commonplaces, as in the comparison of popular favor to a weathercock, and of woman's love to a flower worn, then thrown aside; and a constant lapsing from the energy and spirit of the dialogue into flatness, familiarity and triviality. There is an occasional not unwholesome coarseness which recalls Mr. Story's Elizabethan masters, as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... at that time 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 place with as little ceremony as ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... our 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
... gloomy, even in early summer. Its architect seems to have feared this gloominess, for he planned great bay windows for three rooms, one above the other. He built the bay. It juts out for the whole height of the house, breaking the flatness of the northern wall. But his heart failed him in the end. He dared not put such a window in the house. He walled up the whole flat front of the bay. Only in its sides did he place windows. Through these there is a side view of the sea and a side view of the main wall of the ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... employed on the premises, they fare better, being paid by the piece. The minutest divisions of labor prevail, even more than with us—a shirt passing through many hands, the weekly wage differing for each. The "fitter," for instance, must be a skilled workwoman, the flatness and proper set of the shirt front depending upon correct fitting at the neck. For this fitting in West End houses, the fitter receives a penny a shirt, and can in a week fit twenty dozen—this meaning a pound a week. But slack seasons reduce the amount, so that often she earns ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... A deadly flatness, although Olga's absence made no difference, descended on the three. Lucia did not resume her arm-work, for after all these years her acting might be supposed to be good enough for Riseholme without further ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... supply of those who are to come after them. Thus, not only a great portion of the country about Rouen—(especially in the direction of the road leading to Caen—) is gradually left desolate and barren, but even here, as you approach the town, there is a dreary flatness of country, unrefreshed by the verdure of foliage: whereas the soil, kind and productive by nature, requires only the slightest attention of man to repay him a hundred fold. What they will do some fifty years hence for fuel, is quite inconceivable. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... next few days after leaving the third encampment was fatiguing and monotonous. The unvarying routine of our daily life in smoky Korak tents, and the uniform flatness and barrenness of the country over which we journeyed, became inexpressibly tiresome, and we looked forward in longing anticipation to the Russian settlement of Gizhiga, at the head of Gizhiginsk Gulf, which was the Mecca of our long pilgrimage. To spend ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Your pedigree would no doubt bear me out: there is as much of the Magyar as of the Pole in your anatomy. Athlete, and yet a tangle of nerves; a ferocious brute at bottom, I dare say, for your broad forehead inclines to flatness; under your bristling beard your jaw must protrude, and the base of your skull is ominously thick. And, with all that, capable of ideal transports: when that girl played and sang to-night I saw the swelling of your eyelid veins, and how that small, tenacious, ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... garden, and every inch of the country in which he lived, rescued as it had been from invasions by armies and the sea. Many painters never left Holland, and found beauty enough there to fill well-spent lives in painting its flatness beneath over-arching clear or clouded skies. Although the earlier Flemings had had a great love of landscape, they had not conceived it as a subject suitable for a whole picture, but only for a background. In the sixteenth century the figures gradually ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... lacking out of it to Lambert as he looked across the verdant flatness with pensive eyes, that great, gray something that took hold of a man and drew him into its larger life, smoothed the wrinkles out of him, and stood him upright on his feet with the breath deeper in ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... mind upon this latter little man. Picture her disappointment when she found Albert quite unattractive. He was tall and thin and brittle, with a pale, rather dry, flattish face, and with curious pale eyes. His impression was one of uncanny flatness, something like a lemon sole. Curiously flat and fish-like he was, one might have imagined his backbone to be spread like the backbone of a sole or a plaice. His teeth were sound, but rather large and yellowish and flat. A ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... confounding figures were much less to be met than during the months of winter, and indeed they were never frequent at Mrs. Bonnycastle's. At present the social vistas of Washington, like the vast fresh flatness of the lettered and numbered streets, which at this season seemed to Vogelstein more spacious and vague than ever, suggested but a paucity of political phenomena. Count Otto that evening knew every one or almost every ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... 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 ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... process of unloading with perplexed and even agitated interest, was a whimsical figure—large of girth, short of limb, convex where the accredited lines of beauty demand, if not concavity, at least a refined flatness of surface. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... admitting), that fault may doubtless be found in the fact that their scenery as a rule tends to be just a trifle monotonous. Though fine in themselves, they lack variety. To be sure, very few of the deserts of real life possess that absolute flatness, sandiness and sameness, which characterises the familiar desert of the poet and of the annual exhibitions—a desert all level yellow expanse, most bilious in its colouring, and relieved by but four allowable academy properties, a palm-tree, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 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 ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sometimes—great banks of bloom rising up out of crystal rivers, in deep gorges, full of sunshine and scent. How nice it is to be idle! I'm sure I've earned it, after that deplorable chapter. It really is a miracle of flatness! You go back to your work, my boy, and thank God you can say what you mean! And then you can bring it to me, and I'll tell you to an inch ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... every movement, rapid and almost convulsive in his gestures when excited. Still he could be at any time graceful in attitude, and elegant in manner. Even then he stooped a little, so that his shoulders inclined forward, which gave something of flatness to his chest. His face was thin and elongated; but what a forehead! What eyes! What beauty in the contour of his intellectual visage! In repose, its habitual expression was reflective and concentrated, with a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... fair land! I never before grasped the charm of French colouring; the pinkish-yellow of the pan-tiled roofs, the lavender-grey or dim green of the shutters, the self-respecting shapes and flatness of the houses, unworried by wriggling ornamentation or lines coming up in order that they may go down again; the universal plane trees with their variegated trunks and dancing lightness—nothing more charming than plane trees in winter, their delicate twigs and little ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... The time still demands some explanation why the leading juvenile wears no gold chevrons on his left sleeve. As a matter of fact, our young servant of the Grey-Matter Agency had been declined by a recruiting station and a draft board on account of flat feet; although I must protest that their flatness detracts not at all from his outward bearing nor from his physical capacity in the ordinary concerns of amiable youth. When the army "turned him down flat," as he put it, he had entered the service of the Committee on Public Information, and had carried on mysterious ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... I knew from many pictures must be the Rialto, but there was no disappointment, no flatness in the impression of having seen this all before, for not the greatest genius who ever lived could paint Venice at her every day best. Palace after palace; and by-and-by a church with a front carved in ivory by the growing moonlight, thrown up ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... those spectacles as clearly as if they had been plain window-glass; and they had certainly given an inverted reflection of the candle-flame like that thrown from the surface of a concave lens. Now they obviously could not be both flat and concave; but yet they had the properties peculiar to both flatness and concavity. And there was a further difficulty. If I could see objects unaltered through them, so could Mr. Weiss. But the function of spectacles is to alter the appearances of objects, by magnification, reduction or compensating distortion. If they leave the ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... his vellum, he fettered himself unnecessarily, and instead of a picture he has only succeeded in producing a surface enamel, or a mere reticulation of surface-patterns. This very defect has by some writers been held up to admiration as the true perfection of all illumination. Its flatness was applauded because it had to be shut up in a book, and was therefore the only appropriate way of making a picture for such a purpose. But whoever would dream that because a picture, painted in due perspective and proper light ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... 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 ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... below. The actual roof of oak and lead was so flattened as to be invisible in accordance with the ideas of the architect. "No Roofs almost but Spherick raised to be visible." "The Ancients affected Flatness." "No Roofs can have Dignity enough to appear above a ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... Oland on the left, and on the right by Schmoland. In front rose the mountain-island the Jungfrau, to which every Swede points with self-satisfied pride. Its height is only remarkable compared with the flatness around; beside the proud giant-mountain of the same name in Switzerland it would seem ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... judging from present 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 honour of a representative ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... amuse them was a failure, just as a 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 ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... house and his garden, and every inch of the country in which he lived, rescued as it had been from invasions by armies and the sea. Many painters never left Holland, and found beauty enough there to fill well-spent lives in painting its flatness beneath over-arching clear or clouded skies. Although the earlier Flemings had had a great love of landscape, they had not conceived it as a subject suitable for a whole picture, but only for a background. In the sixteenth century ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... 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 ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... think that to the 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 there is no true abstract ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... unseasonable ornament, and the painful attempt to elevate themselves, to astonish the reader, and to involve a trivial meaning in the smoke of obscurity and exaggeration. Their prose is soaring to the vicious affectation of poetry: their poetry is sinking below the flatness and insipidity of prose. The tragic, epic, and lyric muses, were silent and inglorious: the bards of Constantinople seldom rose above a riddle or epigram, a panegyric or tale; they forgot even the rules of prosody; and with the melody of Homer yet sounding ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... rather happy state of mind. Charley's sorrow was blunted by sympathy with Kate's joy, and Kate's joy was subdued by sympathy with Charley's sorrow; so that, after the first effervescing burst, they settled down into a calm and comfortable state of flatness, with very red eyes and exceedingly pensive minds. We must, however, do Charley the justice to say that the red eyes applied only to Kate; for although a tear or two could without much coaxing be induced to hop over his sun-burned cheek, he had got beyond ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... 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 ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... Heydon Hey is a 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 washes the edge of a garden which ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... 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 the town. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... feel that he can walk along his passages and courtyards. Note that he frequently puts the point of sight quite at the side of his canvas, as at S, which gives almost the effect of angular perspective whilst it preserves the flatness and simplicity of parallel ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... intellectual stimulus of some kind, and thus they were carried out of the region of the merely prosaic. Their foible,—the bad excess of their characterising quality of strenuousness,—was not a prosaic flatness, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... that time 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 place with ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... ashamed of her. What did he think of her—that she was base, vulgar, ignoble? He at least knew now that she had no traditions! It had not been in his prevision of things that she should reveal such flatness; her sentiments were worthy of a radical newspaper or a Unitarian preacher. The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his—attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... were to be seen as 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; breadth or surface displaying ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... and plenteousness mocked the posie in the girl's hands. They walked now silent, expectant every moment of the exit that somehow baffled, and at last they came upon the noble lawn. It stretched from their feet into a remote encroaching eve, no trees beyond visible, no break in all its grey-green flatness edged on either hand by wood. And now the sky ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... 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 ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... exceedingly fond of wild and lonely scenery, and believe that I have the faculty of being as much impressed by it as any man living. But the prairie fell, by far, short of my preconceived idea. I felt no such emotions as I do in crossing Salisbury Plain. The excessive flatness of the scene makes it dreary, but tame. Grandeur is certainly not its characteristic. I retired from the rest of the party, to understand my own feelings the better; and looked all round, again and again. It was fine. It was worth the ride. The sun was going down, very ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... 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 ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... 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 to penetrate ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... 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 ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... were well for you to know them. That knowledge would be a topography, and a history, and romance, walking by your side, and helping your discourse. Meath tells it flatness, Clonmel the abundant riches of its valley, Fermanagh is the land of the Lakes, Tyrone the country of Owen, Kilkenny the Church of St. Canice, Dunmore the great fort, Athenry the Ford of the Kings, Dunleary the ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... from not being attached to the mount all over, is apt, especially when in a large size, to be somewhat wavy and wanting in flatness. Another plan recommended, as giving a surface resembling albumen paper, is to paste the back of the print without moistening the surface, and so mount. Some prints that have been shown thus treated had so strongly curled the cards upon which they were mounted ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... was more than two miles from the ranch did she show herself upon one of the numberless small ridges which, blended together in the distance, give that deceptive look of flatness to the mesa. Even two miles away, in that clear air that dwarfs distance so amazingly, Wagalexa Conka might recognize her if he looked at her with sufficient attention. But Wagalexa Conka, she told herself with a flash of her black eyes, would not look. Wagalexa ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... it much, Miss Mortimer," answered Mary, turning quickly with a bright face. "Flatness has its own beauty. I sometimes feel as if room was all I wanted; and of that there is so much there! You see over the tree-tops, too, and that ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... perhaps, the extreme fascination of the job will obliterate a certain feeling of flatness, of disappointment, of ... of ... of shirking. Yes, that's it: I feel as if I were shirking all the horrors. You see, I shall enjoy this job immensely. All the hateful "arrangering things" for large numbers of men, all the tiresome ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... the town of Cheyenne, in Wyoming Territory. Cheyenne, once boasting the title (I was told) "The Magic City of the Plains," was located upon a dreary flatness, although from it one might see, far southwest, the actual Rocky Mountains in Colorado Territory, looking, at this distance of one hundred miles, like low dark clouds. The up grade in the west promised that we should soon cross ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... letters ML instead of K—barges, launches, 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 river ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... 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
... desoeuvre by the want of having something to be alarmed or to hope about,—I, who meddle not with politics, and wish all the world to be as quiet and as calm as myself. Every one I see appears to experience this same flatness, just like the reaction produced on the spirits the first day or two after the Italian Carnival, when the cessation of gaiety, though felt to be a relief to the frame, leaves the mind unfitted ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... invaluable as a means of flattening zinc plate or shaping it in any way. During the work it may be held by means of an old cloth. Zinc sheet which has been heated between iron plates and flattened by pressure retains its flatness very ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... 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 ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... different age, some of 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
... the "Faust" of Goethe into prose; but let any one compare the Hymn of the Archangels and other of the more highly-wrought passages, as rendered by him, with any of the better translations in verse,—with that of Mr. Brooks for example,—to perceive at once the insufficiency, the flatness and meagreness of even so verbally faithful a prose version. The effect on "Faust," or on any high passionate poem, of attempting to put it into prose, is akin to what would be the effect on an exquisite bas-relief of reducing its projection one half by a persevering ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... was a large one, sufficed for both breakfast and dinner for the three of them. The boy, a bright little fellow, with the ruddy brown cheeks of an Italian peasant boy, but with the slight squint of eyes and flatness of nose peculiar to these natives of the North, watched every move they made with ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... 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 ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... your bumps to see if you have improved—Ju-ju, your head isn't so flat as it used to be on top. It seems a different shape somehow, nicer. Blunders is as flat as a pancake on top of his head. Flatness runs in families I suppose. Look at Venetia's feet! Ju-ju, have you ever seen her in felt ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... was my father; O that he were alive, and here beholding His daughter's trial! that he did but see The flatness of my misery; yet with eyes ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... apply to his vellum, he fettered himself unnecessarily, and instead of a picture he has only succeeded in producing a surface enamel, or a mere reticulation of surface-patterns. This very defect has by some writers been held up to admiration as the true perfection of all illumination. Its flatness was applauded because it had to be shut up in a book, and was therefore the only appropriate way of making a picture for such a purpose. But whoever would dream that because a picture, painted in due perspective and proper light and shade, ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... will soon be coming now and, if you like, I will send you some of them. I know one gets them early in London; but don't you like best to open yourself a box from the country and see them lying in bunches with their leaves. I like even the slight flatness they have; but mine are very little flattened; I am good at packing flowers! My guardian always tells me so! You are probably right in not caring to see the papers; they are always much alike in what they say. It was only the glimpse of the great enthusiasm they gave ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... had to listen to many a cross and cryptic remark flung across the table from the dear boy who had always been so gentle; and more than that, he put his foot down once and for all and refused with a flatness that silenced her to eat any more patent foods. "Absurd," cried Tussie. "No wonder I'm such an idiot. Who could be anything else with his stomach full of starch? Why, I believe the stuff has filled my veins with milk instead of ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... 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 ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... 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. As a rule, however, the surface wears off somewhat, but it is possible ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... Runiroi was a comfortable, old, rambling structure, in a green yard and flower garden, not ugly, but quite innocent of any pretensions at comeliness. Neither was there, to many, a bit of picturesque beauty in the flat surroundings; and yet this very flatness did lend a charm peculiar to itself. My eyes ever found a delight in its purple distances and in the great, broad-armed trees marking the graceful curves of the river. The approach from the public road, which followed the bank of the river, was ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... I do manage to git a little jolly. Ah! sir, music ain't wot it used to be. There's a general flatness about it now, sir, an' people don't seem to admire it 'alf so much as w'en I first began. But if you don't like the pathetic, p'raps you like ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... severe now. Sabine and Anton grew daily more silent and reserved; he became more cheerful, far less silent than of yore, was never weary of drawing Anton into conversation, and listened with intense attention to each word he spoke. There was still a great flatness in trade, but he did not appear to heed it. When Mr. Braun, the agent, poured out his oppressed heart, he only laughed and returned ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... nation's fate were at stake, was enough to ruffle a calmer temper than mine. My impetuosity impressed him, however, and he began to lay about him vigorously with hoe and rake and lines, and, in an incredibly short space of time, had a bit of square flatness laid out with wonderful precision. Meanwhile I had ransacked my vegetable-bag, and though lettuce and asparagus were not there, plenty of beets and parsnips and squashes, etc., were. I let him take his choice. He took ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... tributes to men who have deserved well of the country. On the other hand, it not unfrequently publishes jokes the birth of which considerably antedates that of the United States itself; and it sometimes descends to a level of trifling flatness and vapidity which no English paper of the kind can hope to equal. It is hard—for a British critic at any rate—to see any perennial interest in the long series of highly exaggerated drawings and jests referring to the gutter children of New York, a series in which the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... 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 ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... have never seen a vessel of more beautiful lines. Sailors would find, I think, but one fault in her appearance and one peculiarity. With a white-painted hull, her bridge and the whole of her upper structure, except the masts and funnel, were also white, giving to her general features a certain flatness which masked her fine proportions. Her bridge, instead of being well forward, was placed so far aft that it was only a few feet from the funnel. The object of this departure from custom was to prevent any walking over Mr. Pulitzer's head when he sat in his library, which ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... of Oxley's journal from the start; the exceeding flatness of the country, the many ana-branches of the river, the low altitude of its banks, and the absence of any large tributary streams, above all, the dismal impression made by the monotony of the surroundings, seem to have depressed Oxley's spirit. He appears to have formed the idea that ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... 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 ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... passages in which the flatness and tediousness of the narrative is relieved by no sort of beauty, nor elegance of diction, and which form an extraordinary contrast with the more animated and finished portions of the poem. We shall not afflict our readers with more than one specimen of this ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... affection for Miss Rutherford rise in his heart when she told Jimmy, who sat humped up over his oar, to keep his back flat. Jimmy merely smiled in reply. He had known since he was two years old that the flatness or roundness of the rower's back has nothing whatever to do with the progress of a boat in Rosnacree Bay. A few minutes later she accused Priscilla of "bucketing," and Frank loved her for the word. Priscilla replied indignantly with an obvious misapprehension of Miss Rutherford's meaning. Frank, ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... merely the continuation of the clerestory, 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 ...
— 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
... which hill was barely visible. The only striking feature I could perceive east of the Darling was Greenough's group, which rose upon the horizon, level on that side, save where one or two summits of the higher ground to the eastward just appeared to break the sharpness of the bounding line. But the flatness of the north-western line of vision was still more remarkable, and it was difficult to understand how the basin of the Darling, which appeared so narrow below, could find limits there. The country to the northward, if not a dead level, was varied by only some slight undulations, and ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... obstruction to their progress for twelve days, save the usual accidents and delays incidental to travelling in an unexplored region. Oxley's opinion of the value of the new district had, as is evident from his journal, been steadily decreasing since leaving the depot. The flatness of the country, the numerous branches of the river and the want of height visible in its banks, seemingly depressed him very much. On the 6th of May ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... leagues north and south of San Nicolas and Rozario, the country is really level. Scarcely anything which travellers have written about its extreme flatness can be considered as exaggeration. Yet I could never find a spot where, by slowly turning round, objects were not seen at greater distances in some directions than in others; and this manifestly proves inequality in the plain. At sea, ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the back begins to appear, and the outline of its right edge. Standing exactly at the back, there is a remarkable flatness at the lower end of the mesial groove. This flatness is somewhat in the shape of an elongated diamond; it is rather below the loins, and is, I think, caused by the commencement or upper part of the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... me most," said Oxenden, "in all that has been read thus far, is the flatness of the South Pole, and the peculiar effect which ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... with great speed and enthusiasm the few miles to the sea. She reached it at a point where the cliff dwindled into flatness, where the gentle tide rattled on pebbles instead of on sand, where the tall breakwaters contradicted the line of the shore. The furthest breakwater had seaweed like hair waving on the water. At intervals it would seem to be thrust up between two glassy ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... 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 ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... marsh, which appeared to extend in every direction, but more particularly to the north, for many miles. We were, however, at fault, and I really felt at a loss what step to take. I should have been led to believe from the extreme flatness of the country, that the Macquarie would never assume its natural shape, but from the direction of the marshes I could not but indulge a hope that it would meet the Castlereagh, and that their united waters might form a stream of some importance. Under this impression ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... get drunk Monday night and Hatch should happen to arrest him, he would give the drunkard five dollars if the drunkard would mash Frank's new hat. The fellow said he would flatten it flatter than flatness itself. Just after dark Mr. Hatch was walking down Third street, "Whoop, hurrah for Tilden, (hic) 'endrix." The remark seemed so out of place that Frank went down there. The man was lying on the sidewalk, and telling the barrel to roll over and not take ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... such as "For God's sake;" vulgarisms like "Leave me alone" for "Let me alone;" extraordinary commonplaces, as in the comparison of popular favor to a weathercock, and of woman's love to a flower worn, then thrown aside; and a constant lapsing from the energy and spirit of the dialogue into flatness, familiarity and triviality. There is an occasional not unwholesome coarseness which recalls Mr. Story's Elizabethan masters, as in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... had wasted so much learning and fine parts—was neither this nor that—but that the length and goodness of the nose was owing simply to the softness and flaccidity in the nurse's breast—as the flatness and shortness of puisne noses was to the firmness and elastic repulsion of the same organ of nutrition in the hale and lively—which, tho' happy for the woman, was the undoing of the child, inasmuch as his nose was so snubb'd, so rebuff'd, so rebated, and so ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... daylight, and the early sun lighted the newly painted, slanting deck of the Charming Lass as she snored through the gentle sea. On every side the dark gray expanse stretched unbroken to the horizon, except on the starboard bow. There a long, gray flatness separated itself from the horizon—the coast ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... demanded for moderate depths (say vertically 2,500 to 3,000 feet) is very different from that required for great depths. To reach great depths, the size of shafts must greatly expand, to provide for extended ventilation, pumping, and winding necessities. Moreover inclined shafts of a degree of flatness possible for moderate depths become too long to be used economically from the surface. The vast majority of metal-mining shafts fall into the first class, those of moderate depths. Yet, as time goes on and ore-deposits are exhausted to lower ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... catches the light, all the light caught will be refracted through it. Fishes, too, have a wide range of vision. Some have eyes that see over half a circle. So the lens gets its name. Ordinary cameras, because of the flatness of their lenses, have a range of only a few degrees, the widest in use, I believe, taking in only ninety-six, or a little more than a quarter of a circle. So, you see, my detectascope has a range almost twice as wide ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... indescribable something, which can only be compared to peculiarities of accent. They both speak the same language; perhaps in classical purity of phraseology the fashionable Scotchman is even superior to the Englishman; but there is a flatness of tone in his accent—a lack of what the musicians call expression, which gives a local and provincial effect to his conversation, however, in other respects, learned and intelligent. It is so with his manners; he conducts ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... 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 ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... 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
... understand that the correctness of your temperament depends entirely upon your ability to judge the degree of flatness of your fifths; provided, of course, that the strings stand as tuned. We have told you something about this, but you may not be able at once to judge with sufficient accuracy to insure a good temperament. Now, we have said, let the fifths beat a little more slowly than once a second; ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... those marauders, oxen not so easily; the people, therefore, principally breed this species of cattle, and instead of idle shepherd boys amusing themselves with little flutes, and guiding the sheep by throwing stones at them, the herds here are driven by mounted horsemen with long poles. The flatness of the country and the frequency of oxen will serve to illustrate the exactness of Bible narratives, particularly in the matter of the wheeled carriage and the kine used for conveying the ark of God from this place, Ekron, ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... wears no gold chevrons on his left sleeve. As a matter of fact, our young servant of the Grey-Matter Agency had been declined by a recruiting station and a draft board on account of flat feet; although I must protest that their flatness detracts not at all from his outward bearing nor from his physical capacity in the ordinary concerns of amiable youth. When the army "turned him down flat," as he put it, he had entered the service of the Committee on Public Information, and had carried on mysterious activities in their ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... 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 Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... 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, in the engineer's opinion, was, that by forming the railway ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... 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
... 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 river. It looked like a small barn. A row of piles driven into the soft bank in front ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... lever of its apex. The cross-hatchings of rain cut the Tower obliquely, Scratching lines of black wire across it, Mutilating its perpendicular grey surface With the sharp precision of tools. The city is rigid with straight lines and angles, A chequered table of blacks and greys. Oblong blocks of flatness Crawl by with low-geared engines, And pass to short upright squares Shrinking with distance. A steamer in the basin blows its whistle, And the sound shoots across the rain hatchings, A narrow, level bar of steel. Hard cubes of lemon Superimpose ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... landlocked; glacial scouring accounts for the flatness of Belarusian terrain and for ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... observe. The flatness of surface is essential to the problem of bas-relief. The lateral limit of the panel may, or may not, be required; but the vertical limit of surface must be expressed; and the art of bas-relief is to give the effect of true form on that condition. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... for the heart, what the supporting air from within is for the 35 hollow globe with its suspended car. Deprive it of this, and all without, that would have buoyed it aloft even to the seat of the gods, becomes a burthen and crushes it into flatness. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... I never before grasped the charm of French colouring; the pinkish-yellow of the pan-tiled roofs, the lavender-grey or dim green of the shutters, the self-respecting shapes and flatness of the houses, unworried by wriggling ornamentation or lines coming up in order that they may go down again; the universal plane trees with their variegated trunks and dancing lightness—nothing more charming than plane trees in winter, their delicate twigs and little brown balls shaking ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... undo the evil of his sketches. A spirit once well strung up to the concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will hardly dare to finish a study and magniloquently ticket it a picture. The incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuning-fork by which we test the flatness of our art. Here it is that Nature teaches and condemns, and still spurs up to further effort and new failure. Thus it is that she sets us blushing at our ignorant and tepid works; and the more we find of these inspiring shocks the less shall we be apt to ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... announced some time before we reached it by its remarkable church, which is very visible in the flatness of the surrounding country. The small town numbers some three thousand inhabitants, but has almost the primitive look of a village. Many of the people still wear the costumes of the place, especially on a Sunday, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... mounted Amazon attacked by a leopard or whatever, a work judged at that day sublime and the glory of the place; so that I felt the journey back in the autumn dusk and the Sixth Avenue cars (established just in time) a relapse into soothing flatness, a return to the Fourteenth Street horizon from a far journey and a hundred looming questions that would still, tremendous thought, come up for all the personal answers of ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... us to give any very detailed study to Chesterton's critical work. Bacon said "distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things." A second distillation, perhaps even a third, suggests a Euclidean flatness. The sheer management of a point of view, however, is always instructive. We have seen an author use his exceptional powers of criticism upon society in general, and ideas at large. How is he able to deal with ideas and inventions stated ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... in men of cool understanding, unless when something evidently contradictory appeared in the countenance. The soft, fat, double chin generally points out the epicure; and the angular chin is seldom found save in discreet, well-disposed, firm men. Flatness of chin speaks the cold and dry; smallness, fear; and ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... and more joyful things to enjoy. What was best of all about this later delight, was that it left no bitter taste behind it; in youth, a day of abandonment to elation, a day of breezy talk, hearty laughter, active pleasure, would often leave a sense of flatness and dissatisfaction behind it; but the later joy had no sort of weariness as its shadow; it ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of Bruges the wide plain of Flanders extends to the French frontier. Church spires and windmills are the most prominent objects in the landscape; but though the flatness of the scenery is monotonous, there is something pleasing to the eye in the endless succession of well-cultivated fields, interrupted at intervals by patches of rough bushland, canals, or slow-moving streams winding between rows of pollards, country houses embowered in woods and pleasure-grounds, ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... south of San Nicolas and Rozario, the country is really level. Scarcely anything which travellers have written about its extreme flatness, can be considered as exaggeration. Yet I could never find a spot where, by slowly turning round, objects were not seen at greater distances in some directions than in others; and this manifestly proves inequality in the plain. At sea, a person's eye being six feet ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... with the figure of some animal. They have no seats, nor any other supporters, on the inside, than several round sticks, little thicker than a cane, placed across, at mid depth. They are very light, and their breadth and flatness enable them to swim firmly, without an out-rigger, which none of them have; a remarkable distinction between the navigation of all the American nations and that of the southern parts of the East Indies, and the islands in the Pacific Ocean. Their paddles are small and light; ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... Harry was at Blent; no word and no sign came from him. Bob Broadley never made advances. The field was clear for the Major. Janie, grateful for his attentions, yet felt vaguely that he was more amusing as one of two attentive cavaliers than when he was her only resource. A sense of flatness came over her sometimes. In fact the centre of interest had shifted from her; she no longer held the stage; it was occupied now, for the few days she had still to live, by Lady Tristram. Moreover, Duplay was puzzling. Although not a girl who erected every attention or every ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... said, 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
... surroundings possessed no picturesque charms. The land stretched in uniform flatness from the sluggish Suderelbe to the equally sleepy Seeve, and the Fuchsberg at Ronneburg, with its height of two hundred feet, was a giant of the Alps or Cordilleras, compared to the floor-like ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... very far away there were mountains, but he suddenly realized the remarkable flatness of the ground over which they were flying. From the edge of the world, behind, to the very edge of these far-distant hills, the ground was flat. There were gullies and depressions here and there, but no hills. It was flat, ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... upon 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 rent asunder in some ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... they entered Woodston, a large and populous village, in a situation not unpleasant. Catherine was ashamed to say how pretty she thought it, as the general seemed to think an apology necessary for the flatness of the country, and the size of the village; but in her heart she preferred it to any place she had ever been at, and looked with great admiration at every neat house above the rank of a cottage, and at all the little chandler's shops which they passed. At ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... simply a condition in which an effusion takes place in the chest cavity, and is the result or effect of some disease, mostly pleurisy. It can be easily diagnosed by physical signs. A loss of the respiratory murmur will be noticed on auscultation, and on percussion dullness or flatness on a line as high as the effusion has taken place. When a large amount of effusion is present, tapping with the trocar and cannula is generally resorted to. The proper method of performing this operation will be found under the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... universally white, that there was no 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 ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... a decision, with a sense of certainty, raising them above all doubt. In the rendering of distant mountains, Mr. Dillon evinces new knowledge of what such forms necessarily imply,—their tendency to monotone and to flatness, yet preserving all their essential surface markings, and their inevitable cutting outline against the sky,—which sharpness Mr. Tilton as yet has only hinted at, not represented. Positive edges are the true.—But we have no further ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... commenced his critique in vulgar exultation with a prophecy meant to secure its own fulfilment? With a "This won't do!" What? if after such acknowledgments extorted from his own judgment he should proceed from charge to charge of tameness and raving; flights and flatness; and at length, consigning the author to the house of incurables, should conclude with a strain of rudest contempt evidently grounded in the distempered state of his own moral associations? Suppose too all ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... lost two minutes, twenty-eight seconds at Cayenne, which proved that the momentum was less at this place than at Paris. From this fact, Newton and Huyghens deduced the flatness of the Globe at the Poles. Shortly afterwards, however, the computation of a terrestrial degree given by Abbe Picard, and the determination of the Meridional arc, arrived at by the Cassinis, father and son, led scientific men to an entirety different result, and induced them to ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... brought frankly into intimate association with the room that is lived in, so that these people of other days seem really to enter into our very presence, to thrust vitally their quaint selves into our company. This feature of simple flatness is in so great contrast to later methods of drawing that one becomes keenly conscious of it, and deeply satisfied with its beauty. The purpose of decoration and of furnishing seems to be most adequately met when the attention is retained within the chamber ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... passed away. David, on the other side of the brook, revelling in the joys of battle, and all the more alive to them perhaps because of the watch kept on Louie by one section of his brain, was conscious of no length in the minutes. But Louie's mood gradually became one of extreme flatness. All her resources were for the moment at an end. She could think of no fresh torment for David; besides, she knew that she was observed. She had destroyed all the scanty store of primroses along the brook; gathered rushes, begun to plait them, and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... engage in muscular toils in the open air. The German peasant-woman has labored out-of-doors for many generations. The result has been the gradual approach to each other of her hips and shoulders, the extinguishment of that portion of her person known as the waist, and some noticeable flatness over the cerebral organs; but the German peasant-woman has her right, and that is worth any sacrifice, you know. If she prefers hoeing cabbages to spinning flax, who shall hinder her? If all women should ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... at his solid white profile as he stood with hands clasped, near her music, on the chiffonier. She noticed again that strange flatness of the lower part ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... it is Matty," returned Hetty, with a flatness of contradiction that seemed impossible ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... after diphtheria. Web removed 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 ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... 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 feeling ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... considerable degree of decoration. Still, however, I do most sincerely agree with you, that this may be very easily overdone, and I am far from asserting that this may not be in some degree my own case; but there is scarcely so nice a line to distinguish, as that which divides true simplicity from flatness and Sternholdianism (if I may be allowed to coin the word), and therefore it is not surprising, that in endeavouring to avoid the latter, so young and inexperienced a rhymer as myself should sometimes have deviated also from the former."[71] This was Scott's earliest stage as a ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... 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, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... temperature ranging from 85 deg. to 90 deg. F. (inclusive), and during such exposure the cylinder shall not diminish in height by more than one-fourth of its original height, and the upper cut surface shall retain its flatness and the sharpness of ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... the fish: it presents such fine lines—is so clean, so true, and so rapid in its movements. The ship, however, must float; and to hit upon the happy medium of velocity and stability seems to me the art and mystery of shipbuilding. In order to give large carrying capacity, we gave flatness of bottom and squareness of bilge. This became known in Liverpool as the "Belfast bottom;" and it has been generally adopted. This form not only serves to give stability, but also increases the carrying power ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... occasional visitors had left, life in the village settled down to its normal level, or more accurately, to its normal flatness as regarded general contours, and its petty inequalities in respect to local detail. It reminded Hadria of the landscape which stretched in quiet long lines to the low horizon, while close at hand, the ground fussed and fretted itself into minor ups and ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... a long word, and a malady from which the English do not suffer, for they carry their country on their backs, walk the wide world in a cloud of their own atmosphere, making that world England. The French have eyes to see, and, when not surrounded by houses that have flatness, shutters, and subtle colouring—yellowish, French-grey, French-green—by cafe's, by plane-trees, by Frenchwomen, by scents of wood-smoke and coffee roasted in the streets; by the wines, and infusions of the herbs of France; by the churches of France and the beautiful silly chiming of their ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... The morning was unpropitious, it being very rainy, and this, no doubt, helped to give them a dismal appearance. They are of all forms and sizes, some three miles long, and some hardly appearing above the water. The disappointment to us was their flatness, and their all being alike in their general aspect, being covered with light wood. When this is lit up by the sun, they are probably very pretty, as we experienced later in the day, which turned out to be a most brilliant one. The ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... with 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
... remains a fourth and last wide level of rice- fields to traverse. The absolute flatness of the great plains between the ranges, and the singular way in which these latter 'fence off' the country into sections, are matters for surprise even in a land of surprises like Japan. Beyond the fourth rice-valley there is a fourth hill-chain, lower and richly wooded, on reaching the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... close to the spot, and all the cordage and tackle of every description being stored in the capstan-house. But this did not at all chime in with Lance's plans, so he merely remarked that it would do well enough if no better place could be found, but that the flatness of the ground and the consequent shoal water at that spot would prove serious difficulties in the way of launching; and that it would be advisable before deciding to give the entire shore of the bay a very ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... only thinning where the buildings began: the objects in the foreground were sharp; but, as the distance increased, they were blurred as though seen through a swimming of the vision. The great bulk of the sugar mill, at the left, like—on the flatness of the land—a rectangular mountain shaken by a constant rumbling, was indistinct below, but the mirador lifted against the sky, the man there on look-out, were discernible. The mill, netted in ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the stimulus of her enlivening spirit, without the element of surprise constantly contributed by my wife's love of variety, the daily life, and therefore the daily paper, of their favorite editor would partake of that flatness which is the predominant characteristic of this western part of the State ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... Trajectory.—The comparative flatness of this depends on the construction of the rifle and the propulsive force employed, and varies as does velocity with the nature, excellence, and amount of the explosive, the correctness of the principles upon ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
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