"Compactness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... paper upon an endless belt of moist felt, while the "wire" passes under and back to continue a fresh supply. The paper is as yet too fragile to travel alone, and the web felt carries it between two metal rolls called the first press-rolls. These squeeze out more water, give a greater degree of compactness to the fibers, smooth the upper surface, and finally deliver the web of paper to a second felt apron which carries it under and to the back of the second press-rolls. In this way the under surface ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... nights. Moreover, almost all effective intercourse has involved personal presence at the point where intercourse occurs. The possibility, therefore, of going and coming and doing that day's work has hitherto fixed the extreme limits to which a city could grow, and has exacted a compactness which has always been very undesirable and which is now for the first time in the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... up your Bible knowledge in this manner, bit by bit, is what you would not anticipate. The whole acquires a solidity and compactness not to be attained by any other method. You will find at the end of many days, not only that the structure has attained to symmetry and beauty,—but that the disposition of its several parts, in some respects, has become intelligible also: while, (what is not of least importance,) ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... of this novel lack the brisk movement, the sparkling compactness, the stinging surprises of Mr. Reade's usual style, but he kindles and condenses as he proceeds. As a whole, the work compares favorably with his most brilliant compositions. He is a writer difficult to criticize, because his defects are pleasing defects. Dogmatism is commonly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... cheapness, and compactness. The whole works— poems, and sonnets—are contained in one small volume: yet the page is perfectly clear and readable... For the busy man, above all for the working Student, the Globe Edition is the best of ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... line lost) through the thickets, we came suddenly upon the infantry regiment to which these skirmishers belonged. Fortunately for us, this regiment, in scrambling through the brush, had lost the compactness of its formation. We came close upon them before the Federals fired—they delivered one stunning volley, the blaze almost reaching our faces, and the roar rang in our ears like thunder. The next moment we ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... represent all that is evident and all that is conjectural—the works of Omnipotence, and the fabrications of man—we need to seek no further for the necessary materials of thought. The difficulty that has perplexed many persons respecting the compactness and unity of intelligence that a sentence contains, principally arises from their ignorance of the precise meaning of individual words. Etymologists would employ them in their original sense, and consider themselves justified by referring ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... says this edition is "a marvel of beauty, cheapness, and compactness. . . . For the busy man, above all for the working student, this is the best of ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... convey a large amount of useful information in a compact and intelligent form. They are evidently the productions of competent writers, well acquainted with the present state of geographical science. The Maps are beautifully distinct. Fulness, compactness, and clearness—the great requisites of a Cyclopaedia—are here combined in a high degree."—The Athenaeum, ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 28. Saturday, May 11, 1850 • Various
... and strange as some of it is, the beautiful rich yellow of the stone under the blue sky and the dark shadows thrown by the brilliant sun make the whole a building of real beauty. Even the wild west window is helped by the compactness of its outline and by the plainness of the wall in which it is set, and only the great coral branches of the round buttresses are actually unpleasing. The size too of the windows and the great thickness of the wall give the Coro a strength and a solidity which agree well with the old church, despite ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... the story of the submarine. Its history is another matter; its radius of action and results achieved one of the marvels of the ages. A long-sheathed body, the shape of a cigar with the butt end to the fore, the inside filled with machinery and compactness the order of the day, might be regarded as a fair description from a physical standpoint. It has spread terror to all corners of the earth, and, taken in proportion to its size and steaming radius, may well be said to be the ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... operated, though in diminishing force, throughout the nineteenth century; and it is strongly held by contemporary Liberals like M. Faguet, who frankly abrogate its speculative foundations and rest their case on social utility. Its strength is, in effect, not in its logical principles, but in the compactness and consistency which it gives to a view of the functions of the State which responds to certain needs of modern society. As long as those needs were uppermost, the theory was of living value. In proportion as they have been ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... yet, not only would the ordinary quantity too much stiffen the 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; and I will add (since there is an aesthetics ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... family use; an automobile which will attain to a sufficient speed to satisfy the average person without acquiring any of those breakneck velocities which are so universally condemned; a machine which will be admired by man, woman, and child alike for its compactness, its simplicity, its safety, its all-around convenience, and—last but not least—its exceedingly reasonable price, which places it within the reach of many thousands who could not think of paying the comparatively fabulous ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... of a gentleman's residence, so much the look of a something above a mere parsonage-house—above the expenditure of a few hundreds a year. It is not a scrambling collection of low single rooms, with as many roofs as windows; it is not cramped into the vulgar compactness of a square farmhouse: it is a solid, roomy, mansion-like looking house, such as one might suppose a respectable old country family had lived in from generation to generation, through two centuries at least, and were now spending from two to three thousand a year in." Miss Crawford listened, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... intellectual. To return to our author, they never, in their statues, subordinated symmetry to expression, the body to the head. They were interested not only in the prominence of the brows, the width of the forehead, and the curvature of the lips, but quite as much in the massiveness of the chest, the compactness of the thighs, and the solidity of the arms and legs. Not only the face, but the whole body, had for them its physiognomy. They left picturesqueness to the painter, and dramatic fervour to the poet; and keeping strictly before their eyes the narrow but ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... without having undergone other transformation than being cut to a certain length, and notched at either end, so as to sink into each other, when crossed at right angles, until their bodies met, thereby forming a structure of compactness, strength and solidity. Some ten or twelve feet from the ground, the two upper end logs of the cabin projected a foot or eighteen inches beyond the lower, and supported what were called butting poles—poles which crossed these projections at right angles, and, extending along the ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... were uniform in size, shape and construction, there was nothing to prevent the occupant from subsequently enlarging and improving his house. For the present, however, the interests of all were best served by speed and compactness. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... authority of the pope, This Roman influence was, in the nature of things, superior to the local; it expressed the sovereign will of one man over all the nations of the continent conjointly, and gathered overwhelming power from its compactness and unity. The local influence was necessarily of a feeble nature, since it was commonly weakened by the rivalries of conterminous states, and the dissensions dexterously provoked by its competitor. On ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... confidential slate an imaginary description of how, upon a balmy evening at dusk, two figures might have been observed in the market-garden ground round the corner, of whom one, being a manly form, bent over the other, being a womanly form of short stature and some compactness, and breathed in a low voice the words, 'Emma Peecher, wilt thou be my own?' after which the womanly form's head reposed upon the manly form's shoulder, and the nightingales tuned up. Though all unseen, and unsuspected ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... we can judge how great a change had come over the drama. Nowhere is there any incident approaching the nature of 'The Sacrifice of Isaac', nowhere is there any character worthy to stand beside the Mary of the Miracle Play. Those are the losses. On the other hand, we perceive a new compactness—still loose, but much in advance of what existed before—whereby the central figure is always before us, urged along from one act and one set of surroundings to another, towards a goal which is never lost sight of. Also there is the invention which provides ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... visions were clear, and he was emphatically the master of statement. His pursuit of the truth was indefatigable, terrible. He reasoned from his well-chosen principles with such clearness, force, and compactness, that the tallest intellects in the land bowed to him with respect. He was the strongest man I ever saw, looking at him from the stand-point of his reason—the throne of his logic. He came down from that height with an irresistible and crushing force. His printed speeches will prove this; but ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... page 120 illustrates the control wiring of the new steel motorcars. The method of assembling the apparatus differs materially from that adopted in wiring the outfit of cars first ordered, and, as the result of greater compactness which has been attained, the aggregate length of the wiring has been ...
— The New York Subway - Its Construction and Equipment • Anonymous
... Growing up by a natural process, educating the people to the proper exercise of their high trust, correcting mistakes, and adjusting difficulties as we progressed, the noble building would have settled into greater compactness as it arose in height, and all its various proportions been in harmony. We should have built slowly but surely. But when there was thrown upon us a mass of material wholly unfit for any political structure, ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... too compressed, it was said; there was not room enough to get away from your troubles. All the better. It was getting to a compactness that could be easily poked up and divinely appropriated. A new cable was landed at Rockport, Mass., that was to bring the world into closer reunion of messages. We were to have cheaper cable service under the management of the Commercial Cable Company. Simultaneously with this information, ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... edition is "a marvel of beauty, cheapness, and compactness.... For the busy man, above all for the working student, this is the best of all ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... from itself that the emancipation must come; that it is itself which must essentially think, act and strike; that its forces, long torn asunder and dispersed, must be marshalled in invulnerable compactness and iron discipline; and so that its hosts may not again be routed by strategy, no man or set of men should be entrusted with the irrevocable power of executing its decrees, for too often has the courage, boldness and strength of the many been shackled ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... 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
... particularly well." This habit of working out ideas with the assistance of the piano has been condemned by most theorists as being likely to lead to fragmentariness. With Haydn at any rate the result was entirely satisfactory, for, as Sir Hubert Parry points out, the neatness and compactness of his works is perfect. It is very likely, as Sir Hubert says, that most modern composers have used the pianoforte a good deal—not so much to help them to find out their ideas, as to test the details and intensify their musical sensibility by the excitant sounds, the actual ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... signs that everybody was fully astir to the business of the day. It was a scattering village; the houses and the churches stood and called to each other across great spaces of fields and fences between; but just where the crossing of two roads made a business point, there was a little more compactness. There was the baker's, and the post-office, and two stores and various other houses, and a blacksmith's shop. Up to the corner where the principal store stood, came the pony and his mistress, and forthwith ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the now half-finished picture will be blended and melted into one harmonious whole,—when all the now disjointed stones in the temple will be seen to fit into their appointed place, giving unity, and compactness, and symmetry, to all ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... of this set is its compactness, the equal division of the sections of the installation, and the celerity with which the station may be set up and dismantled in extremely mountainous country such as the Vosges, where it is even difficult for a pack-horse to climb to commanding ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... Legislatures by local majorities—sometimes 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 every little ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... In other cheery catacombs we found neat rows of bunks, mess-tables, sizzling sauce-pans over kitchen-fires. Everywhere were endless ingenuities in the way of camp-furniture and household decoration. Farther down the road a path between fir-boughs led to a hidden hospital, a marvel of underground compactness. While we chatted with the surgeon a soldier came in from the trenches: an elderly, bearded man, with a good average civilian face—the kind that one runs against by hundreds in any French crowd. He had a scalp-wound which had just been dressed, and was very pale. The ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... vigilance, self-control, arrogance, love of power, firmness, and hardihood. These faculties express concentration of purpose and their functional equivalents are power of elaboration, constructiveness, condensation, firmness of fiber, compactness of frame, and endurance of organization. The pulse is full, firm, and regular, the muscles are strong and well marked, the hair and skin dark, the temporal region is not broadly developed, the face is angular, its lines denoting both power of purpose ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... action, at a single place, in a single time. More than any other modern form of literature, the short story requires the observance of the old Greek unities of time, place and action: its brevity and compactness do not admit of the proper treatment of the changes wrought by the passage of time, the influences of different scenes, or the complications resulting from the interrelation of many characters of varied importance. If the plot ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... pet achievement of the market gardener. The great aim is not to produce size only, "but the fine, white, creamy color, compactness, and what is technically called curdy appearance, from its resemblance to the curd of milk in its preparation for cheese. When the flower begins to open, or when it is of a warty or frost-like appearance, it is less esteemed. It should not be cut in summer above ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... York. The present north boundary of civilized settlement is almost identical with the statutory limit of the city, or that of the island itself. There is no perceptible break, though there are gradations of compactness, in the settled district between the foot of the island and Central Park. Beyond the Park, Haarlem Lane, Manhattanville, and Carmansville take up the thread of civic population, and carry it, among metropolitan houses and lamp-posts, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... grass and large spaces about the houses, gardens, yards, shrubbery, coolness, fragrance,—seems unknown in England or Ireland. The towns and villages are all remnants of feudal times, and seem to have been built with an eye to safety and compactness, or else men were more social, and loved to get closer together, then than now. Perhaps the damp, chilly climate made them draw nearer together. At any rate, the country towns are little cities; or rather it is as if another London had been cut ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... the da capo, and in the treatment of the coda (last 17 measures), in which motives from both Songs are associated so closely as to vindicate their kinship. In a word, this movement possesses,—despite the apparent independence of its Songs,—some degree of that continuity, compactness and artistic finish which culminate in the ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... it must, more or less seriously, impair the solidity and vigor of the cavalry charge proper; in which a whole line, with "boot to boot" compactness, comes at once to the shock, like some terrific mechanical engine; and in which the riders in the front rank are compelled to dash on with full speed to the last; knowing that if they slacken rein, even for a moment, they would be ridden over by the rear-rank men one yard ...
— A Treatise on the Tactical Use of the Three Arms: Infantry, Artillery, and Cavalry • Francis J. Lippitt
... being designed and built with a shiplike compactness, there was but one room on the ground floor besides the kitchen and its offices. It was a plain, comfortable place, wainscoted about, with shelves and lockers in the whimsical copy of a vessel's cabin. And it contained the single work of art our establishment ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... raise with great talent a firmly constructed fabric, which was at once self-based and self-supported, and stood as by an innate necessity. I missed in it completely, however, what most of all I was desirous to find, and so it became for me merely a work of art, whose elegant compactness and completeness served to charm the eye only; nevertheless I listened willingly to the eloquent man who drew my attention from my grief to him; and I would have gladly yielded myself wholly up to him, had he captivated my heart ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... than in his own. The patient reading which he required for himself was justified by that which he always demanded for others; and he claimed it less in his own case for his possible intricacies of thought or style, than for that compactness of living structure in which every detail or group of details was essential to the whole, and in a certain sense contained it. He read few things with so much pleasure as an occasional chapter ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... embracing a syllable of debatable matter in the form of notes, it contains every needful explanation and illustration of the text that can be gathered from ancient art, literature and history, expressed with great distinctness and compactness, together with such well-executed wood engravings as unquestionable knowledge in this age could suggest—omitting altogether the absurd fancy embellishments which in most of the illustrated Bibles are so offensive ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... strong wind when blowing from behind, in order to incline the grain backwards, on to the platform, to make good bundles. A quick walk is required to make good work in very short and scattering grain. The machine performs well, up or down hill, provided the surface be not too broken. By its compactness and ease of management, rocks, and stumps too high to be cut over, can be easily avoided. Although a rough surface is very objectionable, yet I have cut over very rocky ground with no material difficulty. I can say one thing which to some may appear incredible, but it is not the less ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... space wasn't as easy as they made it sound. The bubbs, one of the basic inventions that made interplanetary travel possible, were, for all their almost vagabondish simplicity, still a concession in lightness and compactness for atmospheric transit, to that first and greatest problem—breaking the terrific initial grip of Earth's gravity from the ground upward, and gaining stable orbital speed. Only a tremendously costly rocket, with a thrust greater than its own weight when fully ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... and compactness for shedding water. The oil spread over them during the preening is useful as a ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... period. It must be owned, however, as before intimated, that the practical operation did not always correspond with the theory of their respective functions in these rude times; and that the powers of the executive, being susceptible of greater compactness and energy in their movements, than could possibly belong to those of more complex bodies, were sufficiently strong in the hands of a resolute prince, to break down the comparatively feeble barriers of the law. Neither were the relative privileges, assigned to the different ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... he lived so long. His weakness of body seems to have acted upon his strong mind, which must account for much that is satirical and splenetic in his writings. Very short, thin, and ill-shaped, his person wanted the compactness necessary to stand alone, until it was encased in stays. He needed a high chair at table, such as children use; but he was an epicure, and a fastidious one; and despite his infirmities, his bright, intellectual eye ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... In the best poetry there is vivid picture-making: reality is made more visible by being presented as a beautiful show. It is the power to present the beautiful show which constitutes the poet. To conceive a scene or person with such liveliness and compactness as to be able to transfer the conception to paper with a distinctness and palpitation that shall make the reader behold in it a fresh and buoyant type of the actual—this implies a subtle, creative life in the mind, this is the test ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... Amphictyones did not write extracts from the Iliad or Odyssey, or the Paeans of Pindar, in the temple of Pythian Apollo at Delphi, but "Know thyself," "Not too much of anything,"[595] and "Be a surety, trouble is near;"[596] so much did they admire compactness and simplicity of speech, combining brevity with shrewdness of mind. And is not the god himself short and concise in his oracles? Is he not called Loxias,[597] because he prefers ambiguity to longwindedness? And are not ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... packed down as a Buddha, the great sinews of his strength bulged in his short neck and in the backs of the calves of his legs, even rippled beneath his coat. It was as if a compress had reduced him from great height down to his tightest compactness, concentrating the strength of him. Even in repose, the undershot jaw was plunged forward, the jowls ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... movements implied an improved nervous system, for the brain was a movement-controlling organ for ages before it did much in the way of thinking. The transition to terra firma also involved a greater compactness of body, so that there should not be too great friction on the surface. An animal like the jellyfish is unthinkable on land, and the elongated bodies of some land animals like centipedes and snakes are specially adapted so that they do not "sprawl." ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... exercises, needlessly, his titular right of entry, but he can be removed without damage, leaving Saki at his best and most characteristic, save that he shows here, in addition to his own shining qualities, a compactness and a finish which he did not always achieve. With these I introduce you to him, confident that ten minutes of his conversation, more surely than any words of mine, will have given him ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... shows them to contain minute cells, sufficiently large to admit water, which, by the action of frost, subjects the rock to rapid disintegration. Portions of the rock may, nevertheless, be selected partially free from this difficulty, and which are possessed of sufficient compactness to render them of value as a coarse building stone; horn-stone, striped jasper (imperfect); hog-toothed spar, calcareous spar, and fluor spar, are imbedded in the rock, although the latter is of ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland |
