"Elasticity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the necessity which lay upon you of bearing a bold front during those long and terrible weeks of course consumed your strength. The wonder is that the fibres of your mind should have retained any of their elasticity after such an ordeal. But as you are so strong, it would be a pity that you should not be strong altogether. This thing that is now to be offered to you is what you have ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... on which time had wrought no change. Years had passed lightly over his head. His eye was as vivid, and his mind as active as ever. He perhaps stooped a little more, and his frame had lost something of that elasticity of step which had so often tried my young nerves in our ramblings over the hills. But he was the same cordial, animated, and high-toned being, in all his feelings, that I had seen him from the first hour. I found him in his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... goes on digging. Should anything alarm or distress her, she does not merely inspect her Spider: she also brings her a little closer to her work-yard, but never fails to lay her on the top of a tuft of verdure. These are the manoeuvres of which I can avail myself to gauge the elasticity of ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... were up and on their way. It was the second morning since Paul's departure. Already a sense of freedom gave his spirits unwonted elasticity, and encouraged him to hope for the best. Had his knowledge of the future been greater, his confidence might have been less. But would he ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... order of things. The older men were stunned and seemed unable to throw off the gloom that had settled upon them. They bowed to the inevitable fall of the old and its replacement by the new. They were not buoyed up by the elasticity and confidence of youth; they seemed to realize that their race was run and that it were better that they step aside and give to younger men the task of solving a new problem in a new way. They sat perfectly still with dejected faces that ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... fanciful resemblance between Civilis and William the Silent, two heroes of ancient German stock, who had learned the arts of war and peace in the service of a foreign and haughty world-empire. Determination, concentration of purpose, constancy in calamity, elasticity almost preternatural, self-denial, consummate craft in political combinations, personal fortitude, and passionate patriotism, were the heroic elements in both. The ambition of each was subordinate to the cause which he served. Both refused the crown, although each, perhaps, contemplated, in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... seemed to be three to four feet long, and rose five to six feet above the surface of the sea. Their leaping looked like an attempt at flying, but their gills did not do them good service in the trial, and they fell back immediately. The old fish did not seem to have the same elasticity; they only described a small arch like the dolphins, and only rose so far above the water that we could see the middle part ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... because it is so awfully true. Thousands of women, well born, well reared, know it to be true—burned into them by the cruel conflict of their youth; happy they if it ended in their youth, while mind and body had still enough vitality and elasticity to endure! I paint it, because it accounts for the accusation sometimes made—especially by men—that women are naturally stingy. Possibly so: but in many instances may it not have been this petty struggle with petty wants this pitiful ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... Coleridge's literary power that it should be otherwise. But "vigorous" is certainly not the adjective which seems to me to suggest itself to an impartial critic of these too copious disquisitions. Making every allowance for their necessary elasticity of scope as being designed to "prepare and discipline the student's moral and intellectual being, not to propound dogmas and theories for his adoption," it must, I think, be allowed that they are wanting in that continuity of movement and co-ordination of ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Leech's face, and saw that she thought she was to stay too, she felt that for no sister-in-law in the world would she wipe it out with that month's notice. She decided to say nothing, but simply to keep her as well as Letty. Her two thousand a year was in her eyes of infinite elasticity. Never having had any money, she had no notion of how far it would go; and she did not hesitate to come to a decision which would probably ultimately oblige her to reduce the number of those persons ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... surprised and taken aback at the beauty of Cesarine. Just out of her dressing-room and wearing a pretty morning-gown, fresh and rosy as a young girl is fresh and rosy at eighteen, blond and slender, with blue eyes, Cesarine seemed to the young artist a picture of the elasticity, so rare in Paris, that fills and rounds the delicate cheek, and tints with the color adored of painters, the tracery of blue veins throbbing beneath the whiteness of her clear skin. Though she lived in the lymphatic atmosphere of a Parisian ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... already conquered. The civil authorities spread banquets for them, compliments rained from the honeyed lips of chosen orators, poets sang sweet strains on the theme of their glories. This appeared a spontaneous outburst to the troops, and they marched with the elasticity of enthusiasm to their task. The curious may read to-day what the army could not know—that by Napoleon's personal decree the ministry of war had prepared every detail of that triumph, that the prefects acted under stringent orders, that three sets of warlike ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the corridors toward the royal apartments she went. Her copper eyes had taken on a luminousness that was visible in the dark. There was an elasticity in her ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... apt to infringe on the rights of her child (of course with the best intentions) is the "firm" person, afflicted with the "lust of dominion." There is no elasticity in her firmness to prevent it from degenerating into obstinacy. It is not the firmness of the tree that bends without breaking, but the firmness of a certain long-eared animal whose force of character has impressed itself on the common mind and ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... illustrate Haeckel's "love of truth" let it suffice to observe that in the second chapter he asserts that man is not only a true vertebrate, a true mammal, etc.—which indeed is passable—but even a true ape (having "all the anatomical characteristics of true apes"). With a wonderful elasticity he passes over the differences. What, indeed, is to be said, when he states as a "fact" that "physiologically compared (!), the sound-speech of apes is the preparatory stage to articulate human speech." It is so simply ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... virgin soil had been well-nigh exhausted. But with you, gentlemen, it is far otherwise. Canada springs at once from the cradle into the full possession of the privileges of manhood. Canada, with the bloom of youth yet upon her cheek, and with youth's elasticity in her tread, has the advantage of all the experience of age. She may avail herself, not only of the capital accumulated in older countries, but also of those treasures of knowledge which have been gathered up by the labour and research of earnest and thoughtful men throughout ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... often necessary to know the modulus of elasticity and other mechanical constants of a rock, as in cases where it is to be combined with metal or other masonry or to be ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... can recognize the ordinary modes of operation of the common forces of nature,—gravity, cohesion, elasticity, transudation, chemical action, and the rest,—we see the so-called vital acts in the light of a larger range of known facts and familiar analogies. Matteuecci's well-remembered lectures contain many and striking examples of the working of physical forces ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... circumstances in which they are placed in regard to each other; and may not the active power be fixed and always the same? Does not this conclusion best accord with the simplicity of nature? Is it probable that two active powers could be co-existent? May not the elasticity of a universal medium account for most of the intricate phenomena of bodies? May not motion grow out of the vacuum between the atoms of that universal medium? May there not be set within set, each necessary to the motion of the other, till we approximate ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... bright, sunny, cloudless, as was usual in beautiful Spain—a joyous elasticity was in the atmosphere, a brilliance in the heavens, which thence reflected on the earth, so painfully contrasted with misery and death, that the bright sky seemed to strike a double chill on the hearts of those ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... or of knowledge, in the pursuit of science, and in search of the Northwest Passage. But suppose some more fortunate adventurer should discover there, even at the very pole itself, a veritable 'fountain of youth and beauty,' whose rejuvenating waters could restore the elasticity of youth to the frame of age, smoothing away its wrinkles, and imprinting the bloom of childhood upon its cheeks, bringing back the long-lost freshness and buoyancy to the soul; would not the navigators of those dangerous seas be multiplied ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the cutter again, upon such a course as would take us up through the thickest cluster of islands; and, such is the elasticity of the human mind, before night closed down upon us we appeared to have almost forgotten everything connected with the treasure-island, and thought and spoke of nothing but the chances in favour of and against the finding ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... for experiment then, for members of this audience, is that of finding some substance that may be added to give elasticity, but which will not change the melting point. In the South we may require in addition something to whiten our paraffin. Some men in Southern California wrote me that they had fastened white paper about each graft and put a rubber ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... smoke, hanging like a cloudlet, guided his eyes. Not far in front of it he saw the fawn-like form of a chamois stretched in death upon the ground, while two others were seen bounding with amazing precision and elasticity ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... moist and soft. It was the mark of a woman's boot, only to be distinguished from that of a walking-stick by its semicircular form. A little higher, I found the outline of a foot, not so small as to awake an ecstasy, but with a suggestion of lightness, elasticity, and grace. If hands were thrust through holes in a board-fence, and nothing of the attached bodies seen, I can easily imagine that some would attract and others repel us: with footprints the impression is weaker, of course, but ...
— Who Was She? - From "The Atlantic Monthly" for September, 1874 • Bayard Taylor
... myself, was too young to live without love!—therefore the only correct thing to do was to take a husband—a good one, if you could get him—a husband, anyway. As spring came round, and my mind regained something of its natural elasticity, and my personal appearance probably improved with returned health, the air seemed full of husbands. Everybody that had any business with me, if he happened not to have a wife, immediately proposed to take me in that relation. All ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... to be carried out during the incoming administration is a change of our monetary and banking laws, so as to secure greater elasticity in the forms of currency available for trade and to prevent the limitations of law from operating to increase the embarrassment of a financial panic. The monetary commission, lately appointed, is giving full consideration to existing conditions and to all proposed remedies, and will doubtless ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... who immediately drew all of our attention to himself. It was an aged man, with hair already as white as snow. Still there was that in his gait, attitudes, and all his movements which indicated physical vigor, not to say the remains, at least, of great elasticity and sinewy activity. Aged as he was, and he must have long since passed his fourscore years, his form was erect as that of a youth. In stature he was of rather more than middle height, and in movements deliberate and dignified. His dress was quite ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... it down in death. Under his mild administration the prosperity of France revived; the passing traveller could note the change in the face of the country and of the people; yet it may be doubted whether this change was due to the government of the quiet old man, or merely to the natural elasticity of the people, no longer drained by war nor isolated from the rest of the world. French authorities say that agriculture did not revive throughout the country. It is certain, however, that the maritime prosperity ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... cut-off, F, acts like a four way cock. The spindle of the cut-off, F, is connected with the lever, I, and is moved by the rudder, as already described. By enlarging or gradually narrowing the ends of the steam ports great rigidity or elasticity may be given to the hold of this engine, according to the ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... overcome by heat as well as that of solids, only to a much greater degree, for under it they assume a new form, acquire new properties, and expand immensely in volume. They pass into the form of vapour, occupy a thousand times larger area, and possess an elasticity of compressibility and expansibility they were destitute ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... also shift it from one part of the field to the other, and even turn it upside down. I use the diagram as a resting-place for the memory, placing a number on it and finding it again when wanted. A remarkable property of the diagram is a sort of elasticity which enables me to join the two ends of the horse-shoe together when I want to connect 100 with 0. The same elasticity causes me to see that part of the diagram on which I fix my ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... very fine-looking old lady, with keen, though also kind grey eyes, looking out from rather shaggy eyebrows, and an open frank smile on her mouth. The colour of health still bloomed on a cheek that had seen sixty summers and winters, and the elasticity of youth had only been transformed into the dignity and repose of a green old age. It is better to be at the head of the commonalty than dragging in the rear of the gentry, and for substantial comfort, liberal housekeeping, generous almsgiving, ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... time after time, God's government is an immutable thing; it changes not. The perfect idea of a human government is this—I do not say it is realised—to have certain fixed principles that are to abide, and then in the application of those principles to find an elasticity which shall meet every conceivable alteration of circumstances about us. That is the idea of a perfect human government; but human governments do not attain to it. The government of God, however, is perfect. The great principle is love—"God is love;" its great end, the welfare ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... young lady of her rank in society could not disappear suddenly from the world, without inquiries being made on the subject—and the pretence of a sudden attack of madness would lead to a serious investigation. Whether true or false, this conviction had restored Adrienne to her accustomed elasticity and energy of character. And yet she sometimes in vain asked herself the cause of this attempt on her liberty. She knew too well the Princess de Saint-Dizier, to believe her capable of acting in this way, without a certain end in view, and merely for the purpose ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... drill, and the minute attention to technical detail, bequeathed as a legacy by the school of Wellington, Lumsden upheld the principle that the greatest and best school for war is war itself. He believed in the elasticity which begets individual self-confidence, and preferred a body of men taught to act and fight with personal intelligence to the highly-trained impersonality which requires a sergeant's order before performing the smallest duty, and an officer's ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... force. The identification, for instance, of the dead after a big battle. Others are subject to doubt, unless you insert "lorsque les circonstances le permettent, s'il se peut, si possible, s'il-y-a necessite," or the like. This will give them that elasticity without which the bitter severity of actual warfare will ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... object which I had in view, what were my prospects of widening and defining their meaning? The prospect was encouraging; there was no doubt at all of the elasticity of the Articles: to take a palmary instance, the seventeenth was assumed by one party to be Lutheran, by another Calvinistic, though the two interpretations were contradictory to each other; why then should not other Articles be drawn up with a vagueness of an equally ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... fine emery, and a saw extends the aperture along the pen itself. The inside edges of the slit are smoothed and polished by the emery wheel; burnishing and hammering produce the proper degree of elasticity." ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... by the arms, feels his muscle with great care and caution, tries the elasticity of his body by lifting him from the floor by his two ears. This is too much, which the child announces with loud screams. "Stuff! out and out," says Mr. Grabguy, patting him on the back, in a kind sort of way. At the same time he gives a look ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... one that expands or contracts with each respiration of its wearer, and that is why I am such an enthusiastic devotee of the corset waist with the elastic bands on either side. It matters not one bit how tight the clothing may be, so long as it is given elasticity and is yielding. This is absolutely necessary to perfect health and the proper development ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... penetrated behind the scenes, they would have been obliged to acknowledge that beneath this attractive exterior there was hopeless decay. As with all creatures when they have passed their prime, Egypt had begun to grow old, and was daily losing her elasticity and energy. Her spirit had sunk into a torpor, she had become unresponsive to her environment, and could no longer adapt herself to the form she had so easily acquired in her youth: it was as much as she could do to occupy fully the narrower limits to which she had been reduced, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... fund for the older employes, into the funds of some great Public Library at the end of thirty or forty years. Several such Associations have played, or are still playing a useful part in British affairs, but most of them have lost the elasticity of youth. Lord Brougham's Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was one of the earliest, and we have today, for example, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, the Catholic ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... small blow is given to a large mass of matter, as to a pile, the imperfect elasticity of the material causes a small loss of momentum in the transmission of the motion from each particle to the succeeding one; and, therefore, it may happen that the whole force communicated shall be destroyed before it ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... change of air and scene had seemingly broken a malign influence, and sleep—that for weeks had almost forsaken me—had yielded its deep refreshment for fifteen hours. Besides, I had not sinned against my life so many years as to have destroyed the elasticity of early manhood. When I had lain down to rest I had felt myself to be a weary, broken, aged man. Had I, in my dreams, discovered the Fountain of Youth, and unconsciously bathed in it? In my rebound toward health of mind and body I seemed ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... spiritual infection. The hero was a French priest, an octogenarian, pious, pure, and learned. French? Why French? Simply because the character must be possessed of a certain tinge of poetic fancy, a certain elasticity of sentiment, and according to Carlino, not one Italian priest in a thousand was likely to possess these exalted attributes. It happened one day that this priest received the confession of a man of great intellect whose faith was assailed by terrible doubts. His confession over, the penitent went ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... The Constitution's unfortunate elasticity of interpretation also for the time worked well. People who had fought it saw how their cherished views could after all be based upon it. All parties soon began, therefore, to swear by the Constitution as their political Bible. The fathers of the immortal ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... in thought,—God be thanked! Nor yet in tears,—for He is merciful! But they shall die, as the leaves die,—die, as Spring dies into the heat and ripeness of Summer, and as boyhood dies into the elasticity and ambition of youth. Death, Distance, and Time shall each one of them dig graves for your affections; but this you do not know, nor can know, until the story of ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... after some weeks at home, he seemed to have recovered from his loss with the blessed elasticity of childhood, and so he had in a measure; but he did not forget, for his was a nature into which things sank deeply, to be pondered over, and absorbed into the soil where the small virtues were growing fast. He played and studied, worked and sang, just as before, ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... that would do violence to the structural part of his compositions, Chopin was a very martinet with his pupils if too much license of tempo was taken. His music needs the greatest lucidity in presentation, and naturally a certain elasticity of phrasing. Rhythms need not be distorted, nor need there be absurd and vulgar haltings, silly and explosive dynamics. Chopin sentimentalized is Chopin butchered. He loathed false sentiment, and a man whose taste was formed by Bach and Mozart, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... sportsmen were amazed to see her spring up into an apple-tree and cling to a bough lightly as a bird. She snatched at the fruit, ate it, and dropped to the ground with the same supple grace that charms us in a squirrel. The elasticity of her limbs took all appearance of awkwardness or effort from her movements. She played about upon the grass, rolling in it as a young child might have done; then, on a sudden, she lay still and stretched out her feet and hands, with the languid natural grace of a kitten ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... some of our problems, but not under our conditions, and not in presence of the same difficulties. Still the effect of colonial prosperity—a prosperity alike of admirable achievement and boundless promise—is irresistible. It imparts a freedom, an elasticity, an expansiveness, to English political notions, and gives our people a confidence in free institutions and popular government, which they would never have drawn from the most eloquent assumptions of speculative system-mongers, nor from any other source whatever, save practical experience carefully ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... feature in his deportment. There was another circumstance, less rare in his country, the advantage of an admirable constitution. It was this, coupled with his original want of feeling, which sustained him in the imprisonment in the Tower, and enabled him to display, at eighty, the elasticity of youth. Lord Lovat was never known to have had the headache, and to the hour of his death he read without spectacles. A very short time after the death of Hugh Lord Lovat elapsed, before those relatives to whom he had bequeathed his estates were involved in ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... position secured by Germany as a result of her persistent application of these methods was not to be seriously challenged, nor would she be deprived of her hold upon it by anything other than the use by Englishmen of the same skill, the same elasticity, the same persistence, and the same efficiency in ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... gentleman watched her attentively. He saw there was no elasticity in her steps, no hope in her movements, and pity for her began to steal into his heart. When her husband entered, her features relaxed into a smile, and she forced a cheerfulness into her manner. The traveler noted it all, and he was forced to admire this woman who could assume a cheerfulness ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... nervous, frequently erratic and aimless activity, bear witness to the fact that the mind of man has had revealed to it its own limitations, and is well on the way towards despair of ever arriving at truth. The Greek mind no longer exhibits that elasticity and spontaneity and enthusiasm in the search for truth, or that confidence in its results, which characterized the representatives of the best period of the thought of the race. The political fortunes of Greece do but typify the process which was going ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... to see Bunter on board, and sympathized with him on his prospects for the voyage. He was subdued. I suppose a man with a secret locked up in his breast loses his buoyancy. And there was another reason why I could not expect Bunter to show a great elasticity of spirits. For one thing he had been very seedy lately, and besides—but ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... and confidence in me; and I had wished all the other friends I had formed good-bye, except Lieutenant Jeekel, who told me he intended to come and see the last of me on board. I felt that I had at length commenced my enterprise; my hopes rose with the occasion. There was an elasticity in my spirits, a buoyancy in my step, which I had never before experienced, as I walked the deck of the Fraulein, as she lay in the roads just ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... cotyledons, now .55 inch in diameter, moved vertically downwards at night. This fact made us suspect that their sinking might be due merely to their weight; but they were not in the least flaccid, and when lifted up sprang back through elasticity into their former dependent position. A pot with some old seedlings was turned upside down in the afternoon, before the nocturnal fall had commenced, and at night they assumed in opposition to their own weight (and to any ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... subdue the force of those deeply painful sensations to which few men can refuse to yield, in the immediate prospect of a long and distant separation from the land of their fondest and earliest recollections. With my gallant shipmates, indeed, whose elasticity of spirits is remarkably characteristic of the professions to which they belonged, hope appeared greatly to predominate over sadness. Surrounded as they were by every circumstance that could render their voyage propitious, and in the ample enjoyment of every ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... little, and her hands were soft and white; nor had toil and sorrow, and the weariness, and indifference to self, that come of them, as yet impaired the symmetry of her well-turned shape, or the elasticity of her free and graceful carriage. Her deportment was frank and self-reliant, and her manners, though reserved, far from awkward; her complete presence, indeed, compelled consideration and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... must return to our narrative. Let the American reader imagine one of our mildest October mornings, when the sun seems a ball of silvery fire, and the elasticity of the air is felt while it is inhaled, imparting vigor and life to the whole system ; the weather, neither too warm nor too cold, but of that happy temperature which stirs the blood, without bringing the lassitude of spring. It was on such ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... and hazardous. I bounded forward, and they turned shuddering away, that their eyes might not witness the destruction that awaited me. Meanwhile, balancing my long gun in my upraised hands, I trod the dangerous path with a buoyancy and elasticity of limb, a lightness of heart, and a fearlessness of consequences, that surprised even myself. Perhaps it was to the latter circumstance I owed my safety, for a single doubt of my security might have impelled a movement that would not have failed to have precipitated me ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... preserve one's self pure for life and to be a free man in it, one must have vast powers! I had them. I had elasticity, cleverness. I have spent all these in order to learn something which is absolutely unnecessary to me now. I have wasted the whole of myself in order to preserve something within myself. Oh devil! I myself and many others with me, we have all robbed ourselves for the sake ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... not be one ten-thousandth of an inch. The condensation is only momentary; it may last the hundredth or the thousandth of a second, according to the suddenness and violence of the explosion; then elasticity restores the air to its original condition and everything is just as it was before the explosion. A thousand detonations can produce no more effect upon the air, or upon the watery vapor in it, than a thousand rebounds of ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... the pantomime—turn and twist, bend and spring— afford at once a gratifying spectacle to the beholder and a wholesome training to the performer; I maintain that no gymnastic exercise is its equal for beauty and for the uniform development of the physical powers, —of agility, suppleness, and elasticity, as ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... according to Constance Elliot, a complete fraud. Except for her hair, which had temporarily lost some of its elasticity, she had never looked so radiant. She was out of bed on the ninth day, and walking in the garden on the twelfth. The behavior of the baby—who was a stranger to artificial food—was exemplary; he never fretted, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... favorable climate; but as he had already engaged the services of an able and experienced tutor, who on two or three previous occasions had been over the Continent, he expected, reasonably enough, that novelty, his tutor's good sense, and the natural elasticity of youth would soon efface a sorrow in general so transient, and in due time restore him to his usual spirits. He consequently adhered to his resolution—the day of departure was fixed, and arrangements made for the lovers to separate, as we ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... entirely into a new element; for, as he was forced to show the fishes out of water, he was deprived of his favourite excellence, motion; yet such motion as a fish new-landed has, he has given with elasticity and life: brilliance to the scaly, and lubricity to the smooth; so as to remind the naturalist of excellent old Chaucer's touches ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... she showed the elasticity which had made it so hard for her friends to realize the true state of her health, and for a few weeks seemed to improve. As life returned she began to hope that she might again be able to take up her work, and for a time the eagerness to work was so strong that she dreaded the thought ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... height; but it is by an infinite number of little things, by incessant labour and calls upon the attention, by a repetition of blows that have no rebound in them. The sympathy excited is not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. Nothing is unforced and spontaneous. There is a want of elasticity and motion. The story does not "give an echo to the seat where love is throned." The heart does not answer of itself like a chord in music. The fancy does not run on before the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged along ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... is surely too short to solve the uses of the fascia in animal forms. It penetrates even its own finest fibers to supply and assist its gliding elasticity. Just a thought of the completeness and universality in all parts, even though you turn the visions of your mind to follow the infinitely fine nerves. There you see the fascia, and in your wonder and surprise, you exclaim, "Omnipresent in man and all other living beings of the ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... "points" unerringly made and verses exquisitely spoken, helping to explain the purity of the sound that issued from them. Her whole countenance had the look of long service—of a thing infinitely worn and used, drawn and stretched to excess, with its elasticity overdone and its springs relaxed, yet religiously preserved and kept in repair, even as some valuable old timepiece which might have quivered and rumbled but could be trusted to strike the hour. At the first words she spoke Gabriel ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... nice for Mrs. Megilp, who was a widow, and whose income did not stretch with the elasticity of the times, to have friends who lived like the Ledwiths, and who always made her welcome; it was a good thing for Glossy to be so fond of Agatha and Florence, and to have them so fond of her. ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... heard him speak. Baird was his mental nourishment and solace. When they were apart he found his mind dwelling on him as a sort of habit. But for this one man he would have lived a squalid life among his people at Janney's Mills—squalid because he had not the elasticity to rise above its narrow, uneducated dullness. The squalor so far as he himself was concerned was not physical. His own small, plain home was as neat as it was simple, but he had not the temperament which ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Marshall, as Chief Justice of that Court, raised it to a lofty height in the judicial world, and by his various decisions established the Constitution in its unique position as applicable to all manner of political and commercial questions—the world's marvel of combined firmness and elasticity. To quote Winthrop, as cited by Dr. Lord, it is "like one of those rocking-stones reared by the Druids, which the finger of a child may vibrate to its centre, yet which the might of an army cannot move ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... pool than usual, for amusement. Their dunghill, indeed, was the finest of it size and kind to be seen; quite a tasteful thing, and so convenient, that he could lay himself down at the hearth, and roll out to its foot, after which he ascended it on his legs, with all the elasticity of a young poet triumphantly ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... to mend rapidly, with all the elasticity of youth's happy time. Blanche—the enchanting Blanche—ministered henceforth to me, for I would take no medicine but from her lily hand. And what were the effects? 'Faith, ere a month was past, the patient was over head and ears in love ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... followed the battle of the Douro was one of the most beautiful I ever remember. There was that kind of freshness and elasticity in the air which certain days possess, and communicate by some magic their properties to ourselves. The thrush was singing gayly out from every grove and wooded dell; the very river had a sound of gladness as it rippled on against its sedgy banks; ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... an elasticity and purpose about the young composer, the secret of which no one knew, not even himself. Like one caught in the whorls of some happy dream, who will not pause to ask, "Whither?" he poured out before ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... remarkable as for names and faces. He had taken off his cap on deck, and the breeze had ruffled his thick fair hair, brought the blood to his thin cheeks. The lines of his face, cut by privation and anxiety and illness, had almost disappeared with the renewed elasticity of the flesh, and his blue eyes were wide open, and sparkling in sympathy with the pleasure of his guests and the success of his own strategy. These few insignificant Spaniards dislodged, a half-dozen forts in this harbor, and the combined navies of the world might be defied; ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... grow, without let or hindrance, along the lines that expediency and convenience have shown to be most practical and useful. It has been too busy to be logical or theoretical, and consequently it is full of absurdities and anomalies, but it works with marvellous ease and elasticity. ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... winter of 1887-8 his friends first perceived that a change had come over him. They did not realize that his life was drawing to a close; it was difficult to do so when so much of the former elasticity remained; when he still proclaimed himself 'quite well' so long as he was not definitely suffering. But he was often suffering; one terrible cold followed another. There was general evidence that he had at last grown old. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... had been given her, and, with all its rawness of appeal, had somehow touched her religious sentiment in a way it had never been touched before. He had put so much of his youthful enthusiasm into his language, it showed such an elasticity of hope and joy, as impressed her very strangely. It made the formal homilies of Miss Eliza seem more harsh than ever. She had listened, in those fatiguing and terrible days of illness, to psalms long drawn out, and wearily; but here was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... of unconscious placid gravity—of absorption in thoughts that had no connection with the present moment or with her own personality—an expression that is most of all discouraging to a lover. Her very walk was discouraging: it had that quiet elasticity that asks for no support. Seth felt this dimly; he said to himself, "She's too good and holy for any man, let alone me," and the words he had been summoning rushed back again before they had reached his lips. But another thought ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... frivolous pretext of the police or another, and did not reach Genoa till the 20th of October. At Genoa there was a delightful society, and Irving seems to have been more attracted by that than by the historical curiosities. His health was restored, and his spirits recovered elasticity in the genial hospitality; he was surrounded by friends to whom he became so much attached that it was with pain he parted from them. The gayety of city life, the levees of the Doge, and the balls were not unattractive to the handsome young man; but what made Genoa ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... his tread a heaviness that contrasted forcibly with the elasticity that had formerly been characteristic. As he passed close by the window where Miss Craven was standing she saw that he was splashed from head to foot. She thought with sudden compassion of the horse that he had ridden. She had been in the ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... care and grief, but he held his white head high and stepped with an elasticity that he had not known in years. Defeat, disaster, sorrow, could not weaken him; he was of the old stock, the real beau-sabreur, a relic of the old regime, that grew young in the face of defeat, that died of a broken heart at the breath of dishonour. There had been no dishonour, as ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... The usages incidentally photographed in such a parable as this are indeed true sections of the place and the time, but others, agreeing in general character though differing in detail, might have been substituted in perfect consistency with the circumstances. There is some elasticity even in Oriental manners. It is not probable that all marriages were conducted on precisely the same plan. There might, for aught I know, be a difference between a wedding among the rich and a wedding among the poor, and another difference between ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... favourite one for drinking cups and a variety of ornamental work. Old snuff boxes were frequently made of horn impressed or stamped with beautiful designs, such as hunting scenes and mythological figures. Horn can either be cut, moulded, or turned, its natural elasticity making it very durable and difficult to break. Its source of supply is chiefly from the horned cattle, the buffalo and the bison, the horns of these beasts in their natural state frequently being mounted on shields just as in later years the horns of smaller animals, such as the South African varieties ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... call health. The man whom we look upon as well, and who has never known physical illness, is not well in the larger sense until he knows why he is working, why he is living, why he is filling his life with activity. In spite of the elasticity and spring of the world's interests, there must come often, and with a kind of fatal insistence, the deep demand for a cause, for a justification. If there is not an adequate significance behind it, life, with all its courage and accomplishment, ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... three art essays that happened to find much more favor than his abstruse philosophies. After all, he was young, and the whole world lay before him. Surely he could carve out some kind of fortune. The light of earnest endeavor shone in his eyes, the languid step quickened into one of courageous elasticity. He had dawdled away years enough: he would put a purpose into his manhood, that some distant eyes, seeing, might not relegate him entirely to ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... as much at home in the Fleet as in Pall Mall, and quite as happy in the one place as in the other. "That's the way I take things," would this philosopher say. "If I've money, I spend; if I've credit, I borrow; if I'm dunned, I whitewash; and so you can't beat me down." Happy elasticity of temperament! I do believe that, in spite of his misfortunes and precarious position, there was no man in England whose conscience was more calm, and whose slumbers were more tranquil, than those of Captain ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he was a ruined man, and could only serve in the ranks. These were the thoughts he revolved while he dressed for dinner, and dressed, let it be owned, with peculiar care; but when the task had been accomplished, and he descended to the drawing-room, such was the elasticity of his young temperament, every thought of coming evil was merged in the sense of present enjoyment, and the merry laughter which he overheard as he opened the door, obliterated all notion that life had anything before him except what was ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Remembrance, and Longing are to be almost my sole companions all day through—that at night I shall go to bed with them, that they will long keep me sleepless—that next morning I shall wake to them again,—sometimes, Nell, I have a heavy heart of it. But crushed I am not, yet; nor robbed of elasticity, nor of hope, nor quite of endeavour. I have some strength to fight the battle of life. I am aware, and can acknowledge, I have many comforts, many mercies. Still I can GET ON. But I do hope and pray, that never may you, or any one I love, be placed as I am. To sit in a lonely ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... evening! now it was impossible to tell within half an hour the time of the luminary's going down. Knight led her about, and being by this time accustomed to her sudden changes of mood, overlooked the necessity of a cause in regarding the conditions—impressionableness and elasticity. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... that at this other end the log was solid and whole, just as it always had been. So Rollo perceived that the two halves being joined and held together firmly here, they could only be separated at the other end by the wedge springing them open, and, of course, by their elasticity they tended to spring together again. Then besides, he saw, by looking into the crack, a great number of splinters, large and small, which extended obliquely from one side to the other, and bound the two sides strongly ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... Duchy of Baden, and in the territories of Wuertemberg, have also horns; but I never could get any thing, in the character of a tune, performed by either of them. The moment you enter BAVARIA, you observe a greater elasticity of character. [The ARMS of Bavaria head the first page of this third volume of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... in their affection which, in the last days of November, was unexpectedly put on trial. Mr. Langhope, since his return from his annual visit to Europe, showed signs of diminishing strength and elasticity. He had had to give up his nightly dinner parties, to desert his stall at the Opera: to take, in short, as he plaintively put it, his social pleasures homoeopathically. Certain of his friends explained the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... velocity of sound enunciated by Newton on purely mechanical considerations, was found wrong by one-sixth. The error remained unaccounted for until the time of Laplace, who, suspecting that the heat disengaged by the compression of the undulating strata of the air, gave additional elasticity, and so produced the difference, made the needful calculations and found he was right. Thus acoustics was arrested until thermology overtook and aided it. When Boyle and Marriot had discovered the relation between ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... planters themselves, and adjudged by the magistrates, in case of apprentices buying their own time. Hundreds of planters had declared upon oath what the time of the apprentice was worth to them. Possibly as sellers, in the elasticity of their consciences, they may have set a higher price than they would be willing to give as buyers. In strict honesty, however, it is difficult to see why labor should not be worth to them as much in the one case as the other. The rate of wages fixed upon in Antigua may be seen ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... shadows," is an immortal quotation from some unknown Greek author. Providence, too, by no miracle, came to our relief. The wife died, as it was foreseen she must, and that weight being removed, some elasticity and recoil developed itself. John's one thought now was for his child, and by means of the child the father passed out of himself, and connected himself with the future. The child did in fact teach the father exactly what we tried to teach, and taught it with ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... operating upon wheels of any diameter, having no limit to it capacity in that respect. It was, at the same time, possessed in respect of the principle on which it was arranged, of the power of taking a much deeper cut, there being an entire absence of any source of springing or elasticity in its structure. This not only enabled the machine to perform its work with more rapidity, but also with more precision. Besides, it occupied much less space in the workshop, and did not cost above one-third of the machines formerly in use. It gave the highest satisfaction to those ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... almost lying on the chairs; they were sun-browned and their thin cotton jerseys, with short sleeves, showed their bare arms, which were as strong as a blacksmith's. They were two strong, athletic fellows, who showed in all their movements that elasticity and grace of limb which can only be acquired by exercise and which is so different to the deformity with which monotonous heavy work stamps ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... showed me his sword. I took the weapon in my hands, examined it, and found that it was made entirely of hardened gold, and that it had been treated in such a manner as not only to possess a certain elasticity but also to be capable of receiving a fairly sharp edge. The scales of their armour, I was told, were also treated in the same way, and were so hard that it was impossible to pierce them either with sword or spear. ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... and never saw there. And their Horse Guards, weedy to a man! fit for a doll-shop they are, by my faith! And their Foot Guards: Have ye met the fellows marching? with their feet turned out, flat as my laundress's irons, and the muscles of their calves depending on the joints to get 'm along, for elasticity never gave those bones of theirs a springing touch; and their bearskins heeling behind on their polls; like pot-house churls daring the dursn't to come on. Of course they can fight. Who said no? But they 're not the only ones: and they 'll miss their ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of their solid substance, though it more frequently acts upon them with a repulsive force, from which, or from its accumulation in bodies to a greater or lesser degree, the transformation of solids into fluids, and of fluids to aeriform elasticity, is entirely owing. We have employed the generic name gas to indicate this aeriform state of bodies produced by a sufficient accumulation of caloric; so that, when we wish to express the aeriform state of muriatic acid, carbonic acid, ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... as if struck by lightning. Aristomachus silently loosened his sword in its scabbard; Phanes extended his arms as if to discern whether the old athletic elasticity still ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Fearful key, which locks behind me the prisonhouse of life, and opens before me the habitations of eternal night—tell me—oh, tell me—whither—whither wilt thou lead me? Strange, unexplored land! Humanity is unnerved at the fearful thought, the elasticity of our finite nature is paralyzed, and fancy, that wanton ape of the senses, juggles our credulity with appalling phantoms. No! no! a man must be firm. Be what thou wilt, thou undefined futurity, so I remain but true to myself. Be what thou wilt, so I but ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... above his drooping convoy. Her physical distress was not accompanied by any failing of her spirits; and hearing her strike so soon into a playful and charming vein of talk, Challoner could not sufficiently admire the elasticity of his companion's nature. "Let me forget," she had said, "for one half-hour, let me forget"; and sure enough, with the very word, her sorrows appeared to be forgotten. Before every house she paused, invented a name for the proprietor, and sketched his character: ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... most aromatic vegetables the earth affords, it is no wonder its effects, like honey, should approach so near a general specific. The invaluable oils, uniting with the sulphurs of the sanative tea, recruit, soften, and lubricate the juices, diminish the too great elasticity, dryness, and crispness of the nervous fibres, and afford the exhausted liquids fresh supplies. Their effects are consequently exceedingly restorative in all cases, where the force of the fibres and the vessels are too strong, the circulation too rapid, and the blood too attenuated or diminished; ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... shall find honey in the carcass. Let us only cheerfully make the best of everything, and uphold the administration and the war with a right good will, and we shall learn as we never did before the extent of the incredible elasticity and recuperative power of ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... artist is to substitute man for nature and to protest against her.") The beginners and the smatterers are always "students of nature," and suppose that to be so will suffice; but when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity, life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from other animals and inanimate nature. Religion should be the drill and exercise ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... operations are conducted by a series of civil departments which have undergone many changes before reaching their present constitution and relation to the Board. The salient characteristic of the admiralty is a certain flexibility and elasticity with which it works. Its members are not, in a rigid sense, heads of departments. Subject to the necessary and constitutional supremacy of tho cabinet minister at their head, they are jointly and co-equally ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... be borne in mind that a certain elasticity of the formal side of marriage while, on the one side, it permits variations from the general monogamic order, where such are healthful or needed to restore a balance in natural conditions, on the other ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... drop into a walk, and finally, to put elasticity back into their own stiffened limbs, they dismounted and ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... not gone from her features—smiles were still on her lips, brightness in her clear hazel eyes, buoyancy in her tread, and alertness and dignity in her tall, slender, unbent figure. There was nothing so remarkable about her as the elasticity as well as sweetness of her whole look and bearing, as if, while she had something to love, nothing could ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... about him. He noticed the excitement his advent had created, and walked quickly up the street to the statehouse. Though his hair and beard were white as snow, his frame was vigorous and strong, and his step had about it the elasticity of youth. His brow was furrowed with care rather than time, and his eye seemed still to flash with the fires of young manhood. Nevertheless he was an old man. Every one who saw him on that memorable morning pronounced ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... radiant heat will be sent off from it; but when it is SMOTHERED UP, very little will be generated; and indeed very little combined heat, that can be employed to any useful purpose: most of the heat produced will be immediately EXPENDED in giving elasticity to a thick dense vapour or smoke which will be seen rising from the fire; — and the combustion being very incomplete, a great part of the inflammable matter of the fuel being merely rarefied and driven up the ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... feldspar and pyroxene, exclusively occupy the region next to the Peak. This peculiar distribution seems to confirm the observations made long ago at Vesuvius, that the white ashes are thrown out last, and indicate the end of the eruption. In proportion as the elasticity of the vapours diminishes, the matter is thrown to a less distance; and the black rapilli, which issue first, when the lava has ceased running, must necessarily reach farther than the white rapilli. The latter appear ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... his brooding mind, his body stooped, his step lost its elasticity, his eyes were seldom lifted from the ground. He knew he could not help the deplorable mistake that had been made, but he knew he could not mend it; for the days and weeks went by, and no one claimed his name or ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... persons who tell me they experience nought of this elasticity of spirits at the approach of spring! How are such mortals to be pitied! Yet, perhaps, they are less so than we imagine, for the same insensibility that prevents their being exhilarated, may preclude them from the depression so peculiar to all who ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... whose business will measure the amount under such a law? To me the answer comes back in reverberating tones repeated with emphasis, measured in volume according to the bankers' business, of course. Our philosophers tell us there are two kinds of elasticity—elasticity by compression and elasticity by expansion. Thus an elastic substance after being either compressed or expanded when released, returns to its original shape and size, so when the bankers want money expanded in volume according to the need of their business, ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... not give at full length his thrice unhappy name—had been from infancy a ball for fortune to spurn at; but nature had given him that elasticity of mind which rises higher from the rebound. His form was tall, manly, and active, and his features corresponded with his person; for, although far from regular, they had an expression of intelligence and good humour, and when he spoke, or was particularly animated, might ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... reason that Mr. Dagonet's ignorance of business was as fathomless as his own, this was not his sole motive. Finally it occurred to him to put the case hypothetically to Mr. Spragg. As far as Ralph knew, his father-in-law's business record was unblemished; yet one felt in him an elasticity of adjustment not allowed for in the ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... triumph at his approaching fall existed there. But, as in observing everything, he wished to remain himself impenetrable, he composed his features, smiled with that charmingly sympathetic smile which was peculiarly his own, and saluted the king with the most dignified and graceful ease and elasticity of manner. "Sire," he said, "I perceive by your majesty's joyous air that you have been ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... travel in troops over the flat roofs, and are very bold and mischievous, and great thieves. But monkeys must be studied in their wild freedom in the woods to appreciate them. When seen leaping from tree to tree with refreshing elasticity, or from rock to rock in the open country, their spirit of fun and mischief having full scope, the sight is a delightful one. They stick very closely to their own districts, although now and then a solitary monkey will detach himself from the rest ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... with the air of one who defended himself, without much thought of attack. He did not bend so low as Del Ferice, his arm doubled a little before his lunge, and his foil occasionally made a wide circle in the air. He seemed careless, but in strength and elasticity he was far superior to his enemy, and could perhaps afford to trust to these advantages, when a man like Del Ferice was obliged to employ his ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... of it. The heavy atmosphere of that Boeotia might be good for vegetation, but it was associated in popular belief with the dulness of the Boeotian intellect: on the contrary, the special purity, elasticity, clearness, and salubrity of the air of Attica, fit concomitant and emblem of its genius, did that for it which earth did not;—it brought out every bright hue and tender shade of the landscape over which it was ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... at present not less than five thousand sheep, of which the wool from continual crosses with Spanish tups, the progeny of the few sheep purchased by him at the sale of the king's flocks, has become as fine as the best imported from Saxony, and has been found to surpass it in elasticity, a quality highly conducive to the firmness and durability of the cloth. Many gentlemen also of the colony who have large flocks, sensible of the folly of breeding sheep for the mere sake of the carcases, which in consequence ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... turn, and her philosophy tended to seeing the brighter side. Where she was singularly fortunate was that though she felt pleasure deeply—a temperament that feels pain in proportion—her suffering, though acute, seldom lasted long. There was an elasticity in her disposition that made her rebound quickly ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... lipothamia, which is a total faintness of body and defect of strength; paralysis, which is a loosing and relaxation of the membranes and ligaments which serve for motion; certain chronic diseases, arising from a loss of the sensibility and elasticity of the nerves, or from too great a thickness; tenacity, and acrimony of the humors; epilepsy; fixed weakness arising from apoplexy; certain phthisical complaints, whereby the body is wasted; the cholic, caeliac affection, rupture, and other ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... few more steps till they were outside the building and she had returned the key. "Can this be the girl," said Jude when she came back, feeling a slight renewal of elasticity now that he was in the open street; "can this be the girl who brought the pagan deities into this most Christian city?—who mimicked Miss Fontover when she crushed them with her heel?—quoted Gibbon, and Shelley, and Mill? Where are dear Apollo, ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... with perfume, which blends with that of roses and jessamines; and the fields are so starred and enamelled with flowers that they might have served as the type for those Elysian realms sung by ancient poets. The fervid air is fanned by continual sea-breezes, which give a delightful elasticity to the otherwise languid climate. Under all these cherishing influences, the human being develops a wealth and luxuriance of physical beauty unknown in less favored regions. In the region about Sorrento one may be said to have found the land ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... people in our frontier town who would have graced any society, and with the elasticity of true culture adapted themselves to all circumstances. At my residence, which adjoined the Democrat office, I held fortnightly receptions, at which dancing was the amusement, and coffee and sandwiches the refreshments. At one of these, I had the honor ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... But it would be just as foolish to underrate the progressive forces which show now as ever in the history of Hinduism, that it is also capable of combining with a singular rigidity of structure and with many forms repugnant to all our own beliefs a breadth and elasticity of thought by no means inferior to ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... of its heating surface to enable steam enough to be raised rapidly and continuously for the purpose of maintaining high rates of speed—the effect of high pressure engines being ascertained to depend mainly upon the quantity of steam which the boiler can generate, and upon its degree of elasticity when produced. The quantity of steam so generated, it will be obvious, must chiefly depend upon the quantity of fuel consumed in the furnace, and, by necessary consequence, upon the high rate ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various |
