"Compactness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... manager he writes in the same letter: "I miss him dreadfully. The sense I used to have of compactness and comfort about me while I was reading, is quite gone; and on my coming out for the ten minutes, when I used to find him always ready for me with something cheerful to say, it is forlorn. . . . Besides which, H. and all the rest of them are always somewhere, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... essential idea is to divide the opposing force by penetrating through an interval found, or made, in it, and then to concentrate upon that one of the fractions which can be least easily helped by the other. In a column of ships this will usually be the rear. The compactness of the order attacked, the number of the ships cut off, the length of time during which they can be isolated and outnumbered, will all affect the results. A very great factor in the issue will be the moral effect, the confusion introduced into a line thus broken. Ships coming up toward the break ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... whale-line for the close coiling to which it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength, however much it may give it compactness and gloss. Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... about the book was its maturity and compactness. It has none of the ear-marks of those entertaining "young writers" whom every season produces as inevitably as its debutantes, young men who surprise for an hour and then settle down to producing industriously for the class with which their peculiar trick of phrase has found favor. It was ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... foreshortened thing, where representation is arrived at, as I have already elsewhere had occasion to urge, not by the addition of items (a light that has for its attendant shadow a possible dryness) but by the art of figuring synthetically, a compactness into which the imagination may cut thick, as into the rich density of wedding-cake. The moral of all which indeed, I fear, is, perhaps too trivially, but that the "thick," the false, the dissembling second half of ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... and driest spots, which still retain the compactness imparted by the steam-roller, are the favourite veins; and the work of making the pellet is slow and painful. It is scraped up atom by atom; and, by means of saliva, turned into mortar then and there. When it is all well kneaded and there is enough to make a load, the Mason ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... his seat, and announced his intention of supporting Government at any rate. All the Irish members do the same, and this great body, that everyone expected would display hostility to the Bill, have formed themselves into a phalanx, and will carry it through any difficulties by their compactness and the regularity of ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... height of the page, or broad bands of floriated tracery that occupied its entire width, were the only indications of changes of chapter or subject. In printer's phrase the composition was "close-up and solid" to the extreme degree of compactness. The uncommonly free use of red ink for the smaller initials was not altogether a matter of taste; if the page had been written entirely in black ink it would have been unreadable through its blackness. This nicety in writing ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... by minorities—where money and influence could be employed, particularly where a line in a tariff spelt a fortune to a section of the people, in the manipulation of the floating vote. Parties may boast of their voting strength and their compactness, but their voting strength under the present system of voting is only as strong as its weakest link, discordant or discontented minorities, will permit it to be. The stronger a party is in the Legislature the more is expected from it by ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... ingenious form invented by mediaeval poets, we have the Triolet, which may be said to be a rondeau in miniature. I choose one of Mr. H.C. Bunner's dainty creations to illustrate the musical refrain characteristic of the rondo form because of its compactness. Here it is: ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... discourse can be found treated with equal freedom, unless it is the two doubtful cases in c. viii and c. xxix. (3) It will not fail to be noticed that the passage as it stands in Clement has a roundness, a compactness, a balance of style, which give it an individual and independent appearance. Fusions effected by an unconscious process of thought are, it is true, sometimes marked by this completeness; still there is a difficulty in supposing the terse antitheses of the Clementine version to ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... her infantine bones, they were such as needed not to fail of straightness in the limbs, compactness in the body, smallness in hands and feet, and exceeding symmetry and comeliness throughout. Possibly between the two sides of the occipital profile there may have been an Incaean tendency to inequality; but if by any good fortune ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... GRIFFITHS, a serial which has reached its seventh number, and has elicited the warmest encomiums from distinguished constructors and engineers. The style is a fine model of scientific discussion, presenting the first principles of naval architecture with precision, compactness, and simplicity, abounding with graphic descriptive details, and preserving a spirited freedom and boldness in the most intricate and difficult expositions. The superior character of its contents, with the low price at which it is ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... the fatal fault of our own, I have questioned whether it can claim a greater longevity than ours. There is a hint of a typical difference in the American and the Englishman which I have long recognized in the two elms as compared to each other. It may be fanciful, but I have thought that the compactness and robustness about the English elm, which are replaced by the long, tapering limbs and willowy grace and far-spreading reach of our own, might find a certain parallelism in the people, especially the females of ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... one has a senator for a guide; and I never knew a more efficient one than our statesman. His own curiosity was the best possible aid in satisfying our own. Having seen the compactness and simplicity of an army column at the front, we were to find that the same thing applied to high command. A sentry and a small flag at the doorway of a village hotel: this was the headquarters of the Sixth Army, which General Manoury had ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... ten room constituted the entire home. A shed roof slanted from eight feet high on the door and window side to a bit more than five on the other. A bed in one corner took up most of the space, and the remaining necessities were bestowed with the compactness of a ship's cabin. The rough boards of the roof and walls had been hidden by a covering of newspapers, with a row of illustrations pasted picture height. Cushions and curtains of turkey-red ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of past times! It is well known that many of our novelties were in use by our ancestors! In the history of the human mind there is, indeed, a sort of antique furniture which I collect, not merely for their antiquity, but for the sound condition in which I still find them, and the compactness which they still show. Centuries have not worm-eaten their solidity! and the utility and delightfulness which they still afford make them look as fresh and as ingenious as any of our ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... to be found under the very sands of the sea-shore, whither it has oozed underground from the upper country, and where it overlies the denser salt water; or else abuts against it, if the compactness of the sand resists free percolation. In very many places along the skirt of the great African desert, fresh water is to be found by digging ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... was with a secret glee I watched her. Had I been a gentleman I believe Madame would have found favour in my eyes, she was so handy, neat, thorough in all she did: some people's movements provoke the soul by their loose awkwardness, hers—satisfied by their trim compactness. I stood, in short, fascinated; but it was necessary to make an effort to break this spell a retreat must be beaten. The searcher might have turned and caught me; there would have been nothing for it then but a scene, and she and I would have had to come all ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... flesh; and she had achieved her end at a garden party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise deserved. Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not withered him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible. ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... do not mellow a heavy soil. The effect of the potash is to overcome the granular structure and increase compactness. Coal ashes, because they are coarser in particles and devoid of potash, do promote mellowness, and are valuable mechanically on a heavy soil although they do not contain appreciable amounts of plant food. You are overfeeding your tomato plants, probably. The chances are that ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... the schooner was packed began to show signs of disintegration. The surface rotted by day and froze again by night and this destroyed its compactness. If the sun's arc above the horizon had been longer, its rays more vertical, the ice must infallibly have melted and freed the Karluk, for it was salt-water ice, and there were times when the thermometer ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... of idleness and its accompanying vices, tames at length the selfish host, into the laborious slaves and mechanic implements of the self-interested. Thus, without public spirit, nay, by the predominance of the opposite quality, the latter are the public benefactors: and, giving steadfastness and compactness to the whole, lay in the ground of the canvass, on which minds of finer texture may ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... more credit and honour than old sedate Bannerman; for his lads were lighter in the heel, glegger in the eye, and brisker in the manoeuvres of war: moreover, they were all far more similar in their garb and appearance, which gave them a seeming compactness that the countrymen had nothing like. But when the sham contest began, it was not long till Bannerman's disciples showed the proofs of their master's better skill to such a mark, that Hepburn grew ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... then, must possess, first, precision, and next (the subject of the present chapter), completeness. Some have argued that, in addition, names are fitted for the purposes of thought in proportion as they approximate to mere symbols in compactness, through meaninglessness, and capability of use as counters without reference to the various objects which, though utterly different, they may thus at different times equally well represent. Such are, indeed, the qualities ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... air, and fire, lasts for an unlimited period when buried in underground structures. It follows that when exposed to moisture, as its texture is not loose and porous, it cannot take in liquid on account of its compactness, but, withdrawing from the moisture, it resists it and warps, thus making cracks in the structures in which it ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... these ascending streams of warm air would be almost wholly obstructed by the compactness of a trodden path, and they would naturally divide at some distance below it, and pass up through the loose earth on each side, leaving the ground along the line of the path, to a great depth beneath it, a cold, dead mass, through which the frost would continue ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... genesis of the social union, as Plato and Aristotle had in different ways been able to do many centuries before; and they could prescribe some of the conditions of its being maintained in vigour and compactness. Some of them could even see in a vague way the interdependence of peoples and the community of the real interests of different nations, each nation, as De la Riviere expressed it, being only a province of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... all through the geological ages the continents had been increasing in size and compactness, and that just at the close of the Tertiary Age they received a considerable addition of land to the north. The astronomer also informs us that at a comparatively recent epoch the eccentricity of the earth's orbit became ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... Rev. SAMUEL SEABURY as the first Bishop of Connecticut and of the Episcopal Church in the United States. We owe to this consecration some of the best features of our Book of Common Prayer. We owe to it the compactness and unity of our great American Communion, and surely it was well to have what we used on Sunday last—a form of thanksgiving for this our hundredth anniversary of the election of Bishop Seabury that ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... out at the base of the precipice; and there are natural clefts about that part where the rock closes, by which the external light is admitted, and in the daytime the spot is fully illuminated. The air within is free from all moisture caused by dropping, and is quite pure, owing to the compactness of the rock, which diverts all the wet and ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... 'Epistle to a Friend', in 1798; 'Columbus', in 1812; 'Jacqueline', in 1813; 'Human Life', in 1819; 'Italy', in 1822-34. His later years were occupied in revising, correcting, or amplifying his published poems, and in preparing the notes to 'Italy', which are admirable studies in compactness and precision of language. A disciple of Pope, an imitator of Goldsmith, Rogers was rather a skilful adapter than an original poet. His chief talent was his taste; if he could not originate, he could appreciate. The fastidious care which he lavished on his work has preserved ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... second great virtue of Turgenef's art is the skill with which he contrives to tell the most with the least number of words, the skill with which he contrives to produce the greatest effect with the least expenditure of force. There is a compactness in his stories which I can only describe as Emersonian. Of his six great novels, only one has as many as three hundred pages; of the other five, not one has over two hundred. Turgenef's art is thus in striking contrast with that required by the English ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... shall we say of bone itself as a mere material or tissue, with its admirable lightness, compactness, and flawlessness. And every bone in our body is a triumph of engineering architecture. No engineer could better recognize the direction of strain and stress, and arrange his rods and columns, arches and buttresses, to suitably meet them, than ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... purple robe, and to sleep on the bare ground is the softest bed; and he gives as a proof of each thing that he affirms his own courage, his tranquillity, his freedom, and the healthy appearance and compactness of his body. There is no enemy near, he says; all is peace. How so, Diogenes? "See," he replies, "if I am struck, if I have been wounded, if I have fled from any man." This is what a scout ought to be. But you come to us and tell us one thing after another. ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus |
