"Rigidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... education and improvement—that suttee, for example, was ever an honoured institution in the province now most advanced. But to the observant student of the Indian people, the evolution of India is almost as noteworthy as the more apparent rigidity. There is a flowering plant common in Northern India, and chiefly notable for the marvel of bearing flowers of different colours upon the same root. The Hindus call it "the sport of Krishna"; Mahomedans, "the flower ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... With all his rigidity he was too truly pious a man for his ministrations to contain anything in which, Churchwoman as she was, she could not join with all her heart, and feel comforting; but ere he was about to rise from his knees she said, "One ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lighted dining-room. Monona was in bed. Di was not there. Mrs. Bett was in Dwight Herbert's leather chair and she lolled at her ease. It was strange to see this woman, usually so erect and tense, now actually lolling, as if lolling were the positive, the vital, and her ordinary rigidity a negation of her. In some corresponding orgy of leisure and liberation, Lulu ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... of restoring life. This she sprinkled over her brother, whereupon the chill and rigidity of death disappeared, the colour came to his face, and warm red blood flowed from his wound. Upon the wound she poured water from the second bottle, and it was immediately healed. When she had made use of the third kind of water he opened his eyes, looked at her with astonishment, and ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... have had effect, for Stella's rigidity had turned to a violent shivering and it was evident that her strength was beginning to fail. But in that moment Bernard broke into an exclamation of most unwonted anger, and ruthlessly seized the ragged wisp of black beard that hung down ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... avoid, knowing that it opened on a part of the court which, from its commanding a view of the scaffold, he justly feared would be crowded. He had paused but to speak one word of encouragement to Agnes, who, with a calmness appalling from the rigidity of feature which accompanied it, now stood at his side; he bade her only hold by his cloak, and he hoped speedily to lead her to a place of safety. She heard him and made a sign of obedience. They passed the gate unquestioned, traversed ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... which often occurs with great rapidity, and during which the vocal bands increase to double their previous length in males, that, though the pitch of the voice, owing to increased length of the bands, suddenly lowers, yet not until full maturity is reached, do the laryngeal cartilages attain that rigidity, or the vocal bands that ready elasticity essential to the production of pure, resonant voice. Yet, during these years, while the voice is developing, the vocal bands remain unchanged in length. Even ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... She was sure he understood her by the sudden rigidity of his pose, while his eyes stopped twinkling, and his fingers ceased to travel along the line of his mustache. Her eyes fell before the scrutiny in his, but she lifted them again for one of ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... stiffness and rigidity of English methods which hinders their acceptability amongst Indian people. On the other hand, the Indian priest is more patient in dealing with the people's difficulties. Rustics in England relate the history of a quarrel, or sickness, ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... succumbed less to his gentleness than to the knowledge that it was she alone who evoked that gentleness out of a nature almost adamantine, wholly masculine. His faults she knew to be the faults of one who had hewn his own road in life—a rugged surface—a strain of rigidity beneath—at worst a tendency to dogmatise—and knowing as she did her own control over them, they attracted rather ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... grew almost intolerable. The game certainly ceased to be amusing after an uneventful fifteen minutes had passed. He was just about to give up, to step forth into the trail and resume his journey to the cabin, when he caught a strange sound, which made him stiffen back at once into watchful rigidity. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... a spring or buffer to the body, nor could it adapt its sole to the various kinds of surfaces on which we have to tread or stand. Nature, with her usual ingenuity, has succeeded in combining those opposing qualities—rigidity, suppleness, and elasticity or springiness—by resorting to her favorite device, the use of muscular engines. The arch is necessarily constructed of a number of bones which can move on each other to a certain extent, so that the foot may adapt itself to all kinds of roads and paths. It is true ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... You, who are a florist, you know whether it is ever possible to restore the broken stem, to revive the faded colors, to make the sap flow again in the tender vessels of which the whole vegetative function lies in their perfect rigidity. If some botanist should attempt the operation, could his genius smooth out the folds of the bruised corolla? If he could remake a flower, he would be God! God alone can remake me! I am drinking the bitter cup of expiation; but as I drink it I painfully spell out this sentence: Expiation ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... the spectrum they rose and fell; blazing orange, silken, wonderful, translucent blues, and shimmering reds. Below, a broad band of paler hue, like sheet lightning fixed to rigidity, wavered and rippled. All the auroras of the northland blended in one could but have paled away before the splendour ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... intolerable, showed by their death-darkened tracery of inflamed veins how much the lone wanderer had suffered. The hands, with their strong bronze now paled to tarnished ochre, were heavily callused by manual labour, and sharply attenuated by recent hardship. The skin was cold, but the rigidity of death was yet scarcely apparent. Evidently he had not died of thirst alone, but of mere physical exhaustion, sealed by the final collapse of hope. And it seemed so strange to hear the low voices of Rory and Mary close by; to see through occasional spaces in the scrub ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... of my principal conclusions first, i. e., that the only types of infection that are associated with pain are those in which the infection may be spread by muscular action or those in which the fixation of parts by continued muscular rigidity is an advantage; and, further, as a striking corollary, that the type of infection that may cause muscular action when it attacks one region of the body may cause no such action ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... where doubt exists, the foot should be lifted to the knee, and the cartilage carefully examined with the foot in that position. If, then, at any spot above the normal contour of the os pedis we meet with hardness or rigidity, we are to look upon that foot with suspicion. Nevertheless, providing our conscience is sufficiently elastic, the animal may be passed sound so far as the existence of a side-bone is concerned. We know, however, that with ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... no more to them for ever than a sight of the eyes, a hearing of the ears, a far-away interest of the inflexible heart, not pausing, not pitying, but austere with a holy austerity, rigid with a calm and passionless rigidity; and I find them none the less ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... themselves from an affection under any compulsion. The old father, enriched by his extortions in the army, recognized in this charming girl a woman who could restrain his son by the power of virtue, and by the ascendancy of a nature that was firm without rigidity. ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... end of the barrel the ringlets which had fallen over one of her ears. She was still breathing.... A shot in the temple. Her body contracted with a final shudder, then remained immovable with the rigidity of a corpse. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... fine contempt for Mesopotamia and all its works. "And the mistress is tired of 'ousekeeping, so they're going to live in one of them there family 'otels, as they call them." The butler sighed, and then, as if conscious of having lapsed from correct behaviour, stiffened to rigidity and became merely butler once more. "Will you see the 'ouse ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... will from his body and devitalised it before the public eye. I have observed that the powdered personage has much greater control over his muscles than the ordinary footman with human hair, and is infinitely his superior in rigidity. Dawson tells me confidentially that if a footman smiles there is little chance of his rising in the world. He says a sense of humour is absolutely fatal in that calling, and that he has discharged many a good footman because of an ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... that arrested my attention. It was the body of a very large man lying flat upon his face, his head buried among the roots of a good-sized tree. The arms were stiffly pressed against his side, and his legs projected at full stretch, exhibiting an appearance of motionless rigidity, as though a well-dressed corpse had been rolled over on its face. I at once recognised it as the body of the major, whom I supposed to have ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... early masters, the great motive struggling still with the minute and rigid hand. So the critics of the last century ignored, or underrated, the works of the earlier Tuscan sculptors. In what Cicero calls "rigidity" of Canachus, combined with what we seem to see of his poetry of conception, his freshness, his solemnity, we may understand no really repellent hardness, but only that earnest patience of labour, the expression of which is constant in all the best work of an early time, in the David of Verrocchio, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... afternoon he was told that his father would like to see him. He had finished the Scotsman and begun a conversation with his betrothed in a gently facetious vein, but it took him not a moment to adjust his features to the rigidity of an urn, and save for the faint squeaking of his boots, he ascended the stairs with noiseless solemnity. He found Mr. Walkingshaw propped up on pillows and breathing heavily. The demeanor of both was exactly becoming to ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... by a formal announcement of our arrival, the caravan made ready for reception by copious, but needed, ablutions of flesh and raiment. The women, especially, were careful in adorning and heightening their charms. Wool was combed to its utmost rigidity; skins were greased till they shone like polished ebony; ankles and arms were restrung with beads; and loins were girded with snowy waist-cloths. Ali-Ninpha knew the pride of his old Mandingo companions, and was satisfied that Mohamedoo would have been mortified had we surprised ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... Serapis. He extolled the merits of the deified Antinous in inscriptions couched in the ancient language of the Pharaohs, and set the fashion of statues hewn out of black basalt in the Egyptian style.[36] The amateurs of that period affected to prefer the hieratic rigidity of the barbarian idols to the elegant freedom of Alexandrian art. Those esthetic manifestations probably corresponded to religious prejudices, and the Latin worship always endeavored to imitate the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... masters to blush with shame and envy. Mrs Gore and Nelly danced too, weeping the while with joy, and so did the White Swan, but her performances were peculiar. She danced with a slowness of manner and a rigidity of person that are utterly indescribable. She looked as if all her joints had become inflexible, except those of her knees, and her arms hung straight down at her sides, while she pendulated about the floor and gazed at the ...
— Silver Lake • R.M. Ballantyne
... its secrecy, caution, vigilance, and energy, it exhibited the best of the oligarchic features. Whatever was democratic by law was counteracted in its results by all that was aristocratic in custom. It was a state of political freedom, but of social despotism. This rigidity of ancient usages was binding long after its utility was past. For what was admirable at one time became pernicious at another; what protected the infant state from dissension, stinted all luxuriance of intellect in the more matured community. It is in vain that modern writers have ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not apparently felt by the poet as monotonous. Four or five persons, each representing a purpose or a passion, occupy the scene, and obviously contribute by every word and deed to the advancement of the tragic action; and this narrowness and rigidity of intent would be intolerable, if the tragedies were not so brief: I do not think any of them is much longer than a single act of one of Shakespeare's plays. They are in all other ways equally unlike Shakespeare's plays. When you read Macbeth or Hamlet, you find yourself ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... as soon as the stun of the blow passed away, and the rending pain began to make itself felt. For a few seconds he gazed before him stupid and helpless, then his face turned quite grey, the eyes and nostrils gaped wide, and a curious rigidity ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... turned, and looking back over the left shoulder. It seems to me that Her Majesty should own this picture, for it is an exquisite specimen of Mr. Sully's peculiar coloring, and a very lovely portrait. Here is no rigidity, no constraint, no irksome state. There is a springy, exultant vitality in the bearing of the graceful figure, and the light poise of the head, while in the complexion there is a tender softness and a freshness ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... been added between the clusters of leaves, and the leaves themselves curled over: and observe the well-directed thought of the sculptor in this curling;—the old incisions are retained below, and their excessive rigidity is one of the proofs of the earliness of the cornice; but those incisions now stand for the under surface of the leaf; and behold, when it turns over, on the top of it you see true ribs. Look at the upper and under surface ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... end of the apartment, and they saw Damiotti, standing at the head of two or three steps, sign to them to advance. His dress was so different from that which he had worn a few minutes before, that they could hardly recognize him; and the deadly paleness of his countenance, and a certain rigidity of muscles, like that of one whose mind is made up to some strange and daring action, had totally changed the somewhat sarcastic expression with which he had previously regarded them both, and particularly Lady Bothwell. He was barefooted, excepting a species of sandals in the antique fashion; ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Peter, and from the tenderness of his immaculate purity said to the adulteress, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." There are some sectarians in whom the arbitrary narrowness, fierceness, and rigidity of their received creeds have so demoralized and hardened conscience and sensibility in their native healthy directions, and artificially inflamed them in diseased channels, that we verily believe, if the decision of the eternal destiny of the human race were placed in their hands, they would with ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... duty," she said, with a decided rigidity of countenance, "to tell you what we know of that girl, and now we leave the matter with you"; which was a falsehood, if Miss Calthea was capable ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... there much under the influence of the priest, especially the women, and, indeed, among the upper classes the confessional and other priestly operations are attended with as much rigidity as in past centuries, although the male sex has very greatly emancipated itself therefrom, and receives any allusions to the priest with a shrug of the shoulders, or, at times, with coldness or open hostility towards that worthy. The Church has fallen into disrepute ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... by the knowing ones. On referring to the list, I found he was entered as "Recriminator," and that the rest of the deputation had refused to give him a warranty. He sprang up with angry activity; he placed his left hand on his breast, the right hand he extended with cataleptic rigidity, and with an expression of countenance which I can only compare to that of an injured female of spotless virtue, he began, "You, sir—yes, I say, you, sir—you presume to speak of the slave—you, sir, who come from a nation ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... frozen into rigidity and silence by a dreadful and indefinable sensation of horror, they heard a fluttering sigh coming from the opposite end of the room, apparently from somewhere near the ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... clearest and most logical intellect that the Reformation produced, though not the broadest; who reigned as a religious dictator at Geneva and in the Reformed churches of France, and who gave to John Knox the positivism and sternness and rigidity which he succeeded in impressing upon the churches of Scotland. And the peculiar doctrines which marked Calvin and his disciples were those deduced from the majesty of God and the comparative littleness of man, leading to and bound up with the impotence of the will, human dependence, the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... inward drama and argument, occasionally moving in his seat, resting one arm on the table, and rubbing his hand against his hair. There was a conflux of emotions and thoughts in him that would not let him either give thorough way to his anger or persevere with simple rigidity of resolve. Rosamond took ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... lean and high-featured matron, encased in the rigidity of her Sunday bombazine, gave a prim poke with her umbrella in the ribs of a sparrow-like little man, with a discoloured, scraggy beard, who nodded in one ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... was as bad as, if not worse than, the historically disastrous remark about super-tax, and a general rigidity, as of some partial cataleptic seizure, froze Mrs. Poppit's guests, rendering them, like incomplete Marconi installations, capable of receiving, but not of transmitting. They received these impressions, they also continued (mechanically) to receive more chocolates and sandwiches, ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... is often found between them in regard to the intellectual faculties. More or less of delicacy in these organs, of heat in the blood, of promptitude in the fluids, more or less of suppleness or of rigidity in the fibers and the nerves, must necessarily produce the infinite diversities which are noticeable in the minds of men. It is by exercise, by habitude, by education, that the human mind is developed and ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... killed is soft. After a while it goes into a state of rigidity known as rigor mortis. Then it begins to soften again. This third stage is really a form of decay, called ripening. It is believed that the lactic acid formed is one of the principal agents producing this softening. ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... think, to hope for Italy; and the Italy of his ideal was a Republic embracing every member of the race, purged of the priestcraft and the superstition which had degraded the man to the slave, indebted to itself alone for its independence, and consolidated by the reign of equal law. The rigidity with which Mazzini adhered to his own great project in its completeness, and his impatience with any bargaining away of national rights, excluded him from the work of those practical politicians and men of expedients who in 1859 effected ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... by Dr. Trenes. Aiguier, thanks to his peculiar system of muscles and nerves, can transform himself in most wondrous fashion. He has very properly dubbed himself "L'Homme-Protee." At one moment, assuming the rigidity of a statue, his body may be struck sharply, the blows falling as on a block of stone. At another he moves his intestines from above and below and right to left into the form of a large football, and projects it forward, which gives him the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... names and properties of many plants and herbs; and this knowledge had often been called into requisition for the benefit of many of the people as well as the animals of the neighborhood. Never had his skill been needed more than now, for poor Tiepoletta had not recovered consciousness, and her rigidity and the ghastly pallor which had overspread her features seemed to indicate that she had already ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... at four o'clock in the morning, a Napoleon who dictates half the night in his bath, and who works eighteen hours a day, would scarcely suffice for its needs. Such a regime cannot operate without constant strain, without indefatigable energy, without infallible discernment, without military rigidity, without superior genius; on these conditions alone can one convert twenty-five millions of men into automatons and substitute his own will, lucid throughout, coherent throughout and everywhere present, for the wills ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... knew the tones that spoke, the persuasive commanding tones hard to resist, apt to compel. Slowly I turned myself round; the speakers must be within eight or ten feet of me, but I could not see them. Still they came nearer. Then I heard the sound of a sob, and at it sprang to rigidity, poised on ready feet, with my hand on the hilt ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... A still rigidity and pale— An Indian aloofness lones his brow; He has lived a thousand years Compressed in battle's pains and ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... made. The frame is slit at the inner horizontal edges, and then folded in such a way as to make individual clamping-jaws for each end-flange. The clamping-in is done at great pressure, and the resultant plate has great rigidity and strength. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the subject. Why argue with him? The slant with which they got at things was different. Like her father, he had the mental rigidity that is ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... he kicked the wreckage about the room, his glance fell upon his rifle with the fixed bayonet. And then the swine-dog ran amok. Boudru stood with his back to the door: the blood froze in his veins, and his little body stiffened into absolute rigidity. ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... Matthew Arnold read it, is not between the two nations which Providence has so closely knit together, but between insolence, dulness, rigidity, on the one hand, and sensibility, quickness, flexibility, on the other. What Arnold lamented was that England has too often been represented in Ireland, and here also when Irish questions were discussed, by "the genuine, unmitigated ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... road, literally like some heavy statue hewn there in the age of the Druids. It seemed impossible that he should ever move. Turnbull grew restless with this rigidity, and at last, after calling his companion twice or thrice, went up and clapped him impatiently on one of his big shoulders. Evan winced and leapt away from him with a repulsion which was not the hate of an unclean thing nor the dread of a dangerous one, but was a spasm of awe and separation ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... ripe in years, in reputation, and in the wisdom of a vast experience. It was possible for him to treat Albert with something of the affectionate authority of a father; but, on the other hand, Albert was no Leopold. As the Baron was very well aware, he had none of his uncle's rigidity of ambition, none of his overweening impulse to be personally great. He was virtuous and well-intentioned; he was clever and well-informed; but he took no interest in politics, and there were no signs that he possessed any commanding force of character. Left to himself, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... up and down I took in mine the small hand which emerged from the great fur cuff of her boat cloak, and gradually its rigidity relaxed under my friendly pressure. I remembered, as I occasionally tightened my grasp upon it, that my dear little baby sister Lois, who was taken away from us before she outgrew her babyhood, used to squeeze my hand in this fashion, and when I asked her what it meant, she invariably ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... unfolds a dispatch, and looks for something to sit on. A cloak is thrown over a log, and he settles to reading by the firelight. The others stand round. The light, crossed by the snow-flakes, flickers on his unhealthy face and stoutening figure. He sinks into the rigidity of profound thought, till his ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... differ from every one that has preceded it. If it be true, as every physicist believes, that the earth is a cooling globe, then, whatever its present stage of refrigeration, the time must come when its surface contour will assume a rigidity of level not yet attained. Then, just as surely, the slow action of the elements will continue to wear away the land surfaces, particle by particle, and transport them to the ocean, as it does to-day, until, compensation ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... an example of civilization too notable in one sphere to call for eulogy, are often to be seen elbowing on the ragged edge of barbarism in the other. They must therefore be reduced to accept laws not of their own making, and of an extreme rigidity. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... abandonment to conjugal affection so much to be desired. We married to please our families, and we lived apart as much as possible to please ourselves. Though not without certain physical charms, Mrs. Stanhope was a woman of great moral rigidity and religious austerity, who saw life through the diminishing end of a sectarian telescope, and who cared far more for the distant heathen than for the local convivial pagans who composed my entourage. She had brought to me a considerable sum of money, ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... of trickling water from all directions like tiny voices whispering together. Now and then something moved with a small rustling. It might have been a lizard, a crab, or even a bat. But Chris thought of snakes and stiffened to rigidity, scarcely daring to breathe. The roar of the sea sounded remote and far, yet insistent also as though it held a threat. And, above all, thick and hard and agitatingly distinct, arose the throbbing of her ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... only did so, but did it with such a sudden breaking up of her rigidity into the pliancy of a naturally hospitable nature, that my heart was touched, and I followed her into the great bare apartment, which must have once answered the purposes of a drawing-room, with very different feelings from those with which I had ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... crowning piece of craft, Sally suddenly relaxed her rigidity and inclined langorously towards Vane who had no alternative save catching her. No sooner did she feel his arms than she sank gracefully into them, ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... that she had done her best, and then Miriam's face mocked her as it peeped furtively round the bedroom door. Thus she was brought back to her starting place, and finding the circle a giddy one, she determined to travel on it no more, and with her old rigidity, she kept this resolve. It was, however, less difficult than it would once have been, for her mind was weary and glad of an excuse to take the easiest path. She lay in bed according to Zebedee's bidding, hardly moving under the clothes, and listening to the noises in the house. She was astonished ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... it will be until morning," he said—"it is a question of the rigidity of certain muscles. But you need not be alarmed, she is ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... taken a handle of a rake and given her such a punch among her blue ribbons that her classic features would have frantically twined themselves around one resounding howl—but I didn't. I simply remarked to Jone, with a statuesque rigidity, that it was six o'clock and I was going home; to which he said he was going ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... much trouble that we succeeded in laying bare some portions of the temporal muscle which appeared of less stony rigidity than other parts of the frame, but which, as we had anticipated, of course, gave no indication of galvanic susceptibility when brought in contact with the wire. This, the first trial, indeed, seemed decisive, and, with a hearty laugh ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... as a matter of fact this ultramarine joke of yours is about east. It was blue on the Mercy G.—mighty blue, too. And it needed the inspiring hope of the gold I was soon to pick up in nuggets to stiffen my back-bone to a respectable degree of rigidity. I was about ready to wilt. But I discovered two Englishmen on board, and now I get along all right. We have formed a little temperance society—just we three, you know—to see if we cannot, by a course of sampling and severe study, discover which of the captain's liquors is most dangerous, so ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... the wrist made its play, or hearts of diamond not to be enchanted when such a bland smile enlivened the lips of the musketeer. Raoul, following his friend, cajoled the women who admired his beauty, pushed back the men who felt the rigidity of his muscles, and both opened, thanks to these maneuvers, the compact and muddy tide of the populace. They arrived in sight of the two gibbets, from which Raoul turned away his eyes in disgust. As for D'Artagnan, he did not even see them; his house with its gabled roof, its windows crowded ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... tells, and the man did not hesitate to hold the plow, as the example of Cincinnatus will show us. Time was precious, and thrift and economy were necessary to success. The father was the autocrat in the household, and exercised his power with stern rigidity. ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... her veil as she came near him—her long widow's veil, which to-day she had resumed. Beneath it, framed in it, the face appeared of an ivory rigidity and pallor. The eyes only were wild and living as she came up to him, clasping her hands, evidently ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... planes, 3 1/2 ft. wide, giving 70 ft. of sustaining surface, about 10 more in the tail. The making of this model required great consideration; various supports for the wings were tried, so as to combine lightness with firmness, strength and rigidity. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... on Irene's face, and even James became conscious of the rigidity that took possession of her whole figure beneath the softness of its silk and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... so full of laughing loveliness; then, with a sob which is almost human in the intensity of its pathos, the tired head falls downwards, the limbs contract with spasmodic pain, then stiffen into rigidity; and one wonders, if the Eternal mocked that silent appeal from those great sad eyes, eyes that had neither part nor lot in the sin and sorrow of war, how shall a man dare look upwards for help when the bitterness of death draws nigh ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... This rigidity of form and subordination to reason is as characteristic of Attic tragedies as of temples. It would indeed be possible to work out a close parallel between the two forms of art. But we must return to our immediate subject, sculpture. Temple sculpture exhibits the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... knowledge whatever of Shakespeare. Acquaintance with his works might, and I suppose certainly would, have impaired my relish for the great French dramatists, whose tragedies, noble and pathetic in spite of the stiff formality of their construction, the bald rigidity of their adherence to the classic unities, and the artificial monotony of the French heroic rhymed verse, would have failed to receive their due appreciation from a taste and imagination already familiar with the glorious freedom of Shakespeare's ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... articles of furniture. A chair is, probably, the most difficult piece of household furniture to make, because strength is required. In this type soft wood may be used, as the large legs and back pieces are easily provided with mortises and tenons, affording great rigidity when completed. In designing, therefore, you may see how the material ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... rather fond at political gatherings of making some allusion to Mr. Fox. His father had sat in the House of Commons when Fox was there, and had sternly opposed the French war. I don't suppose that anybody not actually IN IT—no Londoner certainly—can understand the rigidity of the bonds which restricted county society when I was young, and for aught I know may restrict it now. There was with us one huge and dark exception to the general uniformity. The earl had broken loose, had ruined his estate, had defied decorum and openly lived with strange ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... that the reproach was ill founded, for it proceeded from a wrong conception of the principle itself. But it seems to us that, far from condemning this doctrine in its serious application, the historical method may serve to explain and to justify it. Employing less of rigidity and dryness in form, it reaches consequences more in harmony with social life. But it is not to be imagined that we do not meet in this way with many ancient and glorious precedents. The great principles of industrial liberty, as well ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... a man came in every day to clean the knives and boots. Service with her was well requited, and much labour was never exacted. But it was not every young woman who could live with her. A rigidity as to hours, as to religious exercises, and as to dress, was exacted, under which many poor girls altogether broke down; but they who could stand this rigidity came to know that their places were very valuable. No one belonging to them need want for aught, when once the good opinion of Miss ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... myself—but how else shall I calm myself save by forgetting all that nightmare of religions and races, save by holding out my hands with prayer and music toward the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God! The Past I cannot mend—its evil outlines are stamped in immortal rigidity. Take away the hope that I can mend the Future, and you ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... drawn together to a point at one end and then inserted into a conical shoe; these longitudinal bars are wound spirally with a -in. rod wire tied to the bars at every intersection. This spiral rod has a pitch of only a few inches, but to bind it in place and give rigidity to the skeleton it is wound by a second spiral with a reverse twist and a pitch of 4 or 5 ft. As thus constructed, the reinforcing frame is sufficiently rigid to bear handling as a unit. The piles used at Bristol were 14 to 15 ins. in diameter and 52 ft. long, and weighed ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... growing out of those speeches, the ramblings through shades and rose-twined parterres, the raptures and romance, all tend prodigiously to take off the alarm, or instruct the inexperience, of the female heart. I know no more certain cure for the rigidity that is supposed to be a barrier. At all events, the Chevalier and his valet, probably both footmen, alike had profited of their opportunity. Our play had cost us two elopements; two shots between wind and water, which threatened to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... front of his automobile, with a pair of glasses, relatively as huge as himself, to his eyes. Occasionally he would purse his lips, and John knew that his favorite expression was coming forth. To the young American's imaginative mind his broad back expressed rigidity and strength. ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... twitch of the muscles of the face, an instant distortion, which in the next instant had passed and left no trace. These twitches gradually grew in frequency, but no muscle outside of the face lost any of its rigidity, or betrayed any interest in what was happening to Jim. I mean if something was happening to him, and I knew perfectly well that that was the case. At last a pair of tears began to swim slowly down his cheeks amongst the twitchings, but Jim sat still and let them run; then I saw his right ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... the first time, and Laverick thought that he had never seen anything so wonderful as the change in her features. The strained rigidity passed away. An altogether softer light gleamed in her wonderful eyes. She was certainly by far the prettiest child he had ever seen. As yet he could ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the bed and distinctly saw himself stretched on his back in the same clothes he had worn on going out. In his face were the lines of death, and a rigidity in the hands that would never ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... shoes. If someone touched him, he shrieked. The shriek was so piercingly frightening that one instinctively let him go, as though one had been shoved. Each time it happened one was as as helpless as the first time. Doctor Mondmilch was called. She stroked him a bit. His rigidity dissolved in sobs. He received drops, was put to bed, slept badly. Mechenmal called out, so that it echoed in the street, ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... considered their fittest ornament. There is something strangely original and attractive in the grotesque hideousness of these heads, agonised with pain, scowling in anger, or frightful with their upturned eyes in the rigidity of death, all bleached and shadowed as they are by the ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... world. How much more secure would this position be, if the front rank of the assailants were enticed within the fortress and given strong positions upon the walls! They would soon drink into their lungs the strong air of possession, they would soon be stiffened by that electric rigidity which falls on a man when he becomes possessed of a vested interest. There was little probability that the knights admitted to the senate would continue to be in any real sense members ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... a magistrate. Livy[1] and Cicero[2] call him praetor maximus; Seneca[3] calls him magister populi; what he decreed was looked upon as a fiat from above. Livy[4] says: pro numine observatum. In those times of incomplete civilisation, the rigidity of the ancient laws not having foreseen all cases, his function was to provide for the safety of the people; he was the product of this text: salus populi suprema lex esto. He caused to be carried before him the twenty-four axes, the emblems of his power of life and death. He was outside ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... glanced at the card which his butler had brought in to him, carelessly at first, afterwards with that curious rigidity of attention which usually denotes the setting free of a ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the loss of the rigidity of her pose. Hannah's head drooped and her fingers tapped faintly on the table. He moved closer, urging ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... consequences, from which doubtless he would not shrink, would be that a super-chemist (so to speak) could write him and his experiments and his book down in a series of chemical formulae—a consequence which takes a good deal of believing. But it also involves him in a belief in the rigidity of chemical reactions; and we are entitled to ask for an explanation of the identical behaviour of the chemical reaction in connection with epiblastic and mesoblastic cells—both pure chemical compounds ex hypothesi and, as far as we can tell from their normal behaviour, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... marble arch of the Place du Carrousel. Haughty, contemptuous, the marble arch of the Place du Carrousel. Like a woman raped by force, rising above her fate, Borne up by the cold rigidity of hate, Stands the marble arch of the Place du Carrousel. Tap! Clink-a-tink! Tap! Rap! Chink! What falls to the ground like a streak of flame? Hush! It is only a bit of bronze flashing in the sun. What are all those soldiers? Those are not the uniforms of France. Alas! No! The uniforms of ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... pontoons, and he was therefore rather anxious for the first ten minutes or quarter of an hour after he found himself fairly in the open sea. But the bracing was found amply sufficient to give the required rigidity, and this fact once demonstrated he kept away before the wind, and coasted along the northern shore of his island, keeping at a sufficient distance from the tremendously lofty cliffs to prevent his being becalmed. With the wind over her quarter the ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... sudden straightening of the arm. The blade slipped in between the Colonel's forearm and body, and was out again before the soldier fully comprehended what had happened. Maurice permitted a cold smile to soften the rigidity of his face. Beauvais saw the smile, and read it. The thrust had been rendered harmless intentionally. An inch nearer, and he had been a dead man. To accomplish such a delicate piece of sword play required nothing short of mastery. ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... incredible blindness, only her childish inability to face any painful fact until it struck her between the eyes, had kept her from discovering the truth before it was thrust on her by the idle chatter of strangers. A curious rigidity, as if she had been suddenly paralyzed, passed from her heart, which seemed to have ceased beating, and crept through her limbs to her motionless hands and feet. Though she longed to call out and ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... brightly lit," Thresk explained. "At the first glance I saw something moving. I was inclined to believe it a snake and to account in that way for Captain Ballantyne's fear and the sudden rigidity of his attitude. But I looked again and I was then quite sure that it was an ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... frames of all sorts. One retained a little of it on one's hands after moving a chair or opening a window; and even the hangings, having been dipped in that Pactolus, preserved upon their stiff folds the rigidity and sheen of metal. But there was nothing individual, homelike, dainty. It was the monotonous splendor of the furnished apartment. And this impression of a flying camp, of a temporary establishment, was heightened by the idea of travelling that hovered ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... silently held forth his right arm to the inspection of the other, who fingered the iron rigidity of muscle under the cloth with ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... gleam seemed to command Byrne to respect. But Byrne was too startled to make a sound. Amazed, he stepped back a little—and on the instant the seaman flung himself forward headlong as if to clasp his officer round the neck. Instinctively Byrne put out his faltering arms; he felt the horrible rigidity of the body and then the coldness of death as their heads knocked together and their faces came into contact. They reeled, Byrne hugging Tom close to his breast in order not to let him fall with a crash. He had just strength enough to lower the ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad |
