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More "Rotundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... elegant finished appearance, nor is it so beautifully studded with lichens, as in a more rural district; and the wren is obliged to construct its house with straws and dry grasses, which do not give it that rotundity and compactness so remarkable in the edifices of that little architect. Again, the regular nest of the house- martin is hemispheric; but where a rafter, or a joist, or a cornice, may happen to stand in the way, the nest is so contrived as to conform to the obstruction, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... an opera-glass,—which would tie the ends of the earth together and toss it over shoulder like a peddler's bundle, to "swop" quaint curiosities, inspiring relics, and solemn symbols, for British prints or American pig-iron. Puck us no Pucks, De Sauty, nor constrict our planet's rotundity with any forty-minute girdle; for in these days of inflating crinoline and ever-increasing circumference of hooped skirts, it becomes us to leave our Mother Earth at least in the fashion, nor strive to reduce her to such unmodish dimensions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... the importance of it with two tight fists placed not overgently in the center of the guard's rotundity, and accompanied by a shove. In some miraculous fashion this accomplished it. The gate clanged at Patsy's back instead of in her face, as she had expected. A bell rang, a whistle tooted, and Patsy's feet clattered ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... a purple handkerchief, and put it back into his outside breast pocket with the corners sticking out like attentive ears. He crossed his legs and set on his knee an ankle clothed in a purple silk stocking. On account of his rotundity he was compelled to hold the ankle in place in the firm clutch of his hand. He settled his purple tie with ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... is at it again!" broke in Will Hendry, usually called Fatty by his chums because of his rotundity. Fatty was extremely good-natured, and as a consequence nearly every one ...
— The Rover Boys in the Land of Luck - Stirring Adventures in the Oil Fields • Edward Stratemeyer
... a round and red full moon sort of face, from the ample forehead above which the hair was all dragged back and stowed away under a small and close-fitting cap, which surrounding her face increased the effect of full-blown rotundity. But the grey eye and even the little snub nose were full of drollery and humour, and the lines about the generally somewhat closely shut mouth indicated unmistakable intellectual power. There is ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... not suspecting that S. Cohn's Saturday losses were more than counterbalanced by the general impression that a man who sacrificed business to religion would deal more fairly by you than his fellows. And his person, too, had the rotundity which the ratepayer demands. ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... down the road, was warming to its work. With cylinders heating, and her mixture therefore going snappily as a natural result, she too had taken on a slight accession of speed. Two meteors, flung from space across the earth's rotundity, could scarcely have been more exciting than these ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... fixing the attention upon the superiority, even artificial ornaments, of downright practical business and the realities of political strife, over the torpid atmosphere of a study or a school. Cicero, long after, had the same passion for numerositas, and the full, pompous rotundity of cadence. But in Cicero, all habits and all faculties were nursed by the daily practice of life and its impassioned realities, in the forum or in the senate. What is the consequence? Why this—that, whereas in the most ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... who advanced with his hat stuck on one side, with rubicund nose and sparkling eye, dressed in a loose coat, which displayed the rotundity of his abdomen. His hands, one of which held a huge cane shouldered like a musket, were plunged into the vast pockets of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... comparatively slow speed, yet the size of the moon's disc was very rapidly expanding as we approached nearer and nearer to it. In the course of a little over half-an-hour we were within ten miles of its surface, which now seemed to fill the whole space below us; and its rotundity was most impressive. The shadows of the mountains and other elevated portions near the terminator[4] were jet black, owing to the absence of an atmosphere; and, seen contrasted with the brilliant lighting of the parts exposed to the full glare of the sun, appeared almost like deep ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... a well-armed guard, and drawn by six strong horses with harness stout as cannon-leathers. The hostlers stood at the horses' heads, chewing at wisps of barley-straw as though their other fare was scant, which, from their sleek rotundity, was difficult to believe. The stable-boy, with a pot of slush, and a head of hair like a last year's haycock, was hastily greasing a forgotten wheel; while, out of the room where the servants ate, the drivers came stumbling ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... mysterious murders, but with the wiles of dealers in the spurious antique and the exploits of Lord Louis in defeating them. This Lord Louis is indeed a very pleasant as well as a very ingenious gentleman. From the rotundity of his conversational periods and a certain general suavity of demeanour I suspect him of having made a careful study of the methods of his distinguished predecessor in rogue-reducing, Prince Florizel of Bohemia. ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... costume off, thrashed his wife within an inch of her life for making a fool of him in public. And the Rector also brought the subject up while Dolores was prying him out of his uniform, and his flesh was gradually resuming its normal rotundity. He was sorry to say so, but that poor Rosario was crazy. Tonet might be all he might be—and it was true that brandy didn't do him any good! Just the same, it was a pity to see him tied to a woman about as easy to handle as a porcupine. But a brother was a brother in his eyes! ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... physical bulk alone will be found at all times inefficient in creating. If, however, Bon-Bon was barely three feet in height, and if his head was diminutively small, still it was impossible to behold the rotundity of his stomach without a sense of magnificence nearly bordering upon the sublime. In its size both dogs and men must have seen a type of his acquirements—in its immensity a fitting ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that they inherit from the Cotswold a carcass exceeding in weight that of the Downs from a fifth to a quarter; a fleece somewhat coarser but heavier than that of the Downs by one-third to one-half; and from the latter they inherit rotundity of form and fullness of muscle in the more valuable parts, together with the ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... we do, and were doubtless liars? Bailly proved over a hundred years ago that Hindu exact astronomical observations must date back at least 5000 years, and that they were in possession of minutely accurate tables[61-*] long before Europe was. And the rotundity of the earth was certainly known both to them and the other ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... merchandise from distant countries, and these [caravans] again say that they are brought to them from other remote regions. And he argues thus,—that if the Orientals affirmed to the Southerners that these things come from a distance from them, and so from hand to hand, presupposing the rotundity of the earth, it must be that the last ones get them at the North toward the West;[428-1] and he said it in such a way, that, having nothing to gain or lose by it, I too believe it: and what is more, the King here, who is wise and not lavish, likewise puts some ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... smell of powder. When the lamps are relighted, every one laughs, sniffs, and looks inquiringly at his neighbor—every one but a stout gentleman, who, with well-gloved hands folded upon his broad-cloth rotundity, sleeps on impressively. Had he been innocent, he would have waked up; for, to slumber in that babe-like manner, with a car full of giggling, staring, sniffing humanity, was simply preposterous. Public suspicion was down upon him at once. I doubt if the ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... gravel, consisting of rolled oval pebbles, on the average about six inches long by four wide—awkward building materials, yet used in ingenious alternation with the bricks in all the lowland Italian fortresses. Besides this universal rotundity, the qualities of stones which rendered them valuable to the lapidary were forced on the painter's attention by the familiar arts of inlaying and mosaic. Hence, in looking at a pebble, his mind was divided between its roundness and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... and the pencil and his heavy hand with a thud on the desk and laughed noiselessly down into the creases of his fat double chin and into the wrinkling rotundity of his white vest. ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... behind me on the roof of the vehicle sat a rosy-looking little gentleman, the rotundity of whose figure proclaimed him a man of some substance; he was habited in a suit of clerical mixture, with the true orthodox hat and rosette in front, the broadness of its brim serving to throw a fine mellow shadow over the upper part of a countenance, which would have formed ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... at the first thought of the thing, relish mounting without one a horse of which all I knew was that he and his master were on better terms than I had ever seen man and horse upon before. But even while the thought was passing through my head, Memnon was lying at my feet, flat as his equine rotundity would permit. Ashamed of my doubt, I lost not a moment in placing myself in the position suggested by Sir John Falstaff to Prince Hal for the defence of his own bulky carcase—astride the body of the animal, namely. At once he rose and ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... strength of the voice may be increased by practicing with different degrees of loudness, from a whisper to full rotundity, taking care to keep the voice on the same key. The same note in music may be sounded loud or soft. So also a sentence may be pronounced on the same pitch with different degrees of loudness. Having practiced ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... half an eye for art will tell you this—'tis an admitted axiom. Either, then, the shape of the covering should conform to that of the head, or it should not, and we take our ground in support of the latter position. The natural form of the head is determined by the rotundity of the cranium, beautifully modified by the waving curls of the hair—we speak of the abstract well-formed head; and nothing that approaches to the same shape will ever do more than give a bad substitute for the outline of the head as nature ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... appetite, his shoes will be lost below his waistcoat. Already their tops and hulls, like battered caravels, disappear beneath his fat horizon. With him I bear no fellowship. But although nature has not stuffed me with her sweets to this thick rotundity; alas, despite of tubes and bottles, no shadowy garden flourishes on my top—waving capillary grasses and a prim path between the bush. Rather, I bear a general parade and smooth pleasance open to ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... The peevish mouth and the fallen eye of the plaice, the helpless rotundity of the sunfish, the mournful gape and rolling glance of the goldfish, the furious and ineffective mien of the barndoor fowl, the wild grotesqueness of the babyroussa and the wart-hog, the crafty solemn eye of the parrot,—if such things as these do not testify to a sense ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cosmographers to hold a conference with Columbus. They assailed him with citations from the Bible. One objection advanced was, that should a ship ever succeed in reaching India, she could never come back, for the rotundity of the globe would present a mountain, up which it would be impossible to sail. Finally, after five years, the junta condemned the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... and immovable body inveigled along its course? I will explain it to you. It is by the power of friction; that is to say, the two wheels, or paddles turning diametrically, or at the same moment, on their axioms, and repressing by the rotundity of their motion the action of the menstruum in which the machine floats,—water being, in a philosophical sense, a powerful non-conductor,—it is clear, that in proportion as is the revulsion so is the progression; and as is the centrifugal force, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... rose from my bended posture, how I hated Carpet Slippers, and was happy in my hate! I hated the silkiness of his chestnut beard; I hated the sheen of his pink cranium; I hated his soft rotundity and his little curvilinear features; I hated, above all, his poisonous speeches. As I walked to my seat, my body stinging still, I resolved to go to war with Fillet. I declared with all a child's power of make-believe that a state of war existed ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... in the time of those latest triumphs, however, the same fault was committed in another way; and a boy of eight or ten was commonly represented—even by Raffaelle himself—as a dwarf Hercules, with all the gladiatorial muscles already visible in stunted rotundity. Giotto probably felt he had not power enough to give dignity to a child of three years old, and intended the womanly form to be rather typical of the Virgin's advanced mind, than an actual ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... Bummels, who had remained behind to digest the enormous dinner they had eaten. These now trudged manfully forward, smoking their pipes with outrageous vigor, so as to raise the awful cloud that has been mentioned, but marching exceedingly slow, being short of leg, and of great rotundity in the belt. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... as an illegal liberty, inasmuch as the Court of Chancery has decided that a man does not part with property in his own letters merely by sending them; but I ask permission to hint that your conduct will acquire a certain graceful rotundity, if you will remit to me in current funds the munificent sum of money which the whole-souled and gentlemanly proprietors—pardon the verbal habits of my humble calling!—have without doubt already remitted to you. Pecunia prima quaerenda, virtus post nummos. Mind you, I do not expect to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... constituted monism the philosophy of China than did the steam-driven machinery mentioned by Hero of Alexandria constitute the first century B.C. the 'age of steam.' Similarly, to take another example, the idea of the earth's rotundity, though conceived centuries before Ptolemy in the second century, did not become established before the sixteenth century. It was, in fact, from the I ching that the Chinese derived their dualistic (not their monistic) conception ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... wide hall was dark and grim. Wade was dark and grim, and Murray too, despite his rotundity. There were lank shadows at the bottom of the hall, grim projections of objects that stood for ornamentation: a suit of armour, a gloomy candlestick of prodigious stature, and a thin Italian cabinet surmounted by an urn whose unexposed contents might readily have suggested something ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... elderly man, inclined to rotundity, was introduced, and, taking his position before the fireplace, opened the proceedings with an expression of regret as to the circumstances ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... recall the fornyrdhalag of the Elder Edda. Soon after "Svea" followed, in 1812, "The Priestly Consecration," the occasion of which was the poet's own ordination. Here the oratorical note and a certain clerical rotundity of utterance come very near spoiling the melody. "At the Jubilee in Lund" (1817) is very much in the same strain, and begins with the statement ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Greeks whom we regard as the fathers of mathematics were simply pupils of Egypt. They were the first land-surveyors. They were the first astronomers, calculating eclipses, and watching the periods of planets and constellations. They knew the rotundity of the earth, which it was ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... no fault of Mr. Gosse's that with all his diligence he should fail to give a complete and striking portrait of his man, or to make more of what he describes as his 'smiling, faultless rotundity.' As he puts it: 'There were no salient points about Congreve's character,' so that 'no vagaries, no escapades place him in a ludicrous or in a human light,' and 'he passes through the literary life of his time as if ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... walrus was not less than eighteen feet long and eleven in circumference. It was more like an elephant in bulk and rotundity than any other creature. It partook very much of the form of a seal, having two large paw-like flippers, with which, when struggling for life, it had more than once nearly succeeded in getting upon the ice. Its upper face had a square, bluff aspect, ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the question. The material vision of the spoil absorbed all his faculties. A great vision! He seemed to see it. A few small canvas bags tied up with thin cord, their distended rotundity showing the inside pressure of the disk-like forms of coins—gold, solid, heavy, eminently portable. Perhaps steel cash-boxes with a chased design, on the covers; or perhaps a black and brass box with a handle on the top, and full of goodness knows what. Bank ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... his Chinese employers were paying him. Then it was that he put up his own sign: AH KIM COMPANY, GENERAL MERCHANDISE. Also, better fed, there was about his less meagre figure a foreshadowing of the melon-seed rotundity that was to attach ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... indifferent, was quite ready to demand satisfaction for the first sharp word; and when a man shows himself prepared for violence there is little more to be said. His imposing stature had taken on a certain rotundity, his face was bronzed from exposure in Texas, he was still succinct in speech, and had acquired the decisive tone of a man obliged to make himself feared among the populations of a new world. Thus developed, plainly dressed, his body trained to endurance by his recent ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... was living in Jamaica, and Mr. Ledbetter was a schoolmaster in England. He was in orders, and already recognisably the same man that he is to-day: the same rotundity of visage, the same or similar glasses, and the same faint shadow of surprise in his resting expression. He was, of course, dishevelled when I saw him, and his collar less of a collar than a wet bandage, and that may have helped to ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... our lord the Emperor. For according to these maps corrected recently in this way, the demarcation or line of demarcation falls near Gilolo, an island near the Malucos. This is so on the plane surface of their map. When this plane surface is reduced to a spherical one, because of the rotundity of the sea where these voyages are made—the latter being in addition along parallels other than that of the equinoctial and where the degrees are less than those of the equinoctial, (the same league being assigned to the different degrees)—so that ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... during twelve hours at the Ben Nevis observatory, while the velocity sometimes rises to 120 miles an hour. A twelve hours' gale might, therefore, carry light seeds a thousand miles as easily and certainly as it could carry quartz-grains of much greater specific gravity, rotundity, and smoothness, 500 or even 100 miles; and it is difficult even to imagine a sufficient reason why they should not be so carried—perhaps very rarely and under exceptionally favourable conditions,—but this is ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... looked at him with pity, and glanced for a moment at his neighbor's red face, his short, thick neck, his "corporation," as Chenet called it to himself, that hung down between two flaccid, fat legs, and his apoplectic rotundity of the old, flabby official, and, lifting the white Panama hat which he wore, from his head, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... my arm encircled as pretty a waist as ever was clasped by a lover. There was a pleasing rotundity about it, combined with a general symmetry of form and serpentine yieldiness of movement that rendered dancing with such a partner both easy and delightful. My observation at the moment was, that if the face of the modiste bore any sort of proportion to her figure, ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... to the edge, with a little of my second yellow, and finish off by a light tint of crimson (crimson lake in cake.) The petals are deep and few, and require a great deal of cupping; to assist in producing this rotundity of petal use the head of the ivory pin, commencing to roll from the bottom to about half-way up the petal. Make a foundation of white wax, rather large and cone-shaped; colour it the same as petals; place the latter on singly, and press them forward ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... three thousand one hundred and two years before Christ, which hardly yields in accuracy to that which modern science has built on the theory of universal gravitation. The Greeks divided the heavens into constellations fourteen centuries before Christ. Thales, born 640 B.C., taught the rotundity of the earth, and that the moon shines with reflected light. He also predicted eclipses. Anaximander, born 610 B.C., invented the gnomon, and ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... coracoid process by the muscles inserted into the inter-tubercular groove and the longitudinal muscles of the upper arm, and can be felt in the axilla. The elbow points laterally and backwards, and the upper arm is shortened. The shoulder retains its rotundity, but there is a slight hollow some distance below the acromion. On grasping the elbow and moving the shaft, it is found that the head and tuberosities do not move with it, and unnatural mobility and ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... said indignantly. "Him too muchee heavy fellow. S'pose him little fellow me chuck him all right," explaining a comical failure with even more comical explanations. Soon after the retirement of our crestfallen Cheon, hot cakes were served by a Cheon all rotundity and chuckles once more, but immediately afterwards, a snort of indignation riveted our attention on an exceedingly bristling, dignified Cheon, who was glaring across the enclosure at two of our neighbour's black-boys, one ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Titus brought from the temple of Jerusalem. The Flaminian way, which you are now to traverse, runs straight to the gate of Rome. In front is the long line of the city walls, within which you can descry the proud dome of St Peter's, the huge rotundity of St Angelo, or "Hadrian's Mole," and a host of inferior cupolas and towers, which in any other city would suffice to give a character to the place, but are here thrown into the shade by the two unrivalled structures I have named. You are not less than two miles from the gate; yet such are the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the exact purport of his words. Then, suspicion of covert sarcasm being clearly inadmissible, Sir Abel spoke again in his largest platform manner, although the tones of his voice, like his person, were shrunken, docked of the fulness of their former rotundity and unction. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... regretting, more than once, the absence of the lively humor and amusing sallies of the cheerful companion of former days. In fact, D'Artagnan was so absorbed, that, with his knife, he took advantage of the grease left at the bottom of his plate, to trace ciphers and make additions of surprising rotundity. ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... nobles are Liancourt, and La Rochefoucauld, and pious Lally, and Lafayette, whom Mirabeau calls Grandison Cromwell, and the Viscount Mirabeau, called Barrel Mirabeau, on account of his rotundity, and the quantity of strong liquor he contains. Among the clergy is the Abbe Maury, who does not want for audacity, and the Cure Gregoire who shall be a bishop, and Talleyrand-Pericord, his reverence of Autun, with sardonic grimness, a man living ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... he was born (ASQUITH, I mean) to close the breach And save a party all forlorn By mere rotundity of speech. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... indeed should rather have been named Split-ear, as we shall presently show, was afflicted with an aldermanic rotundity of person, by no means common among his race, and was one, who from his love of ease and naturally indolent disposition, seemed more fitted to take his seat in the council than to lead his warriors to battle. Yet was he not, in reality, ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... a closer look and judge of their condition, but keeping always at a respectful distance, for he was aware that almost without exception they were an ill-tempered crew. Contemplating the astonishing rotundity of their well-filled bodies, the spacious ease of their accommodation, the outward dignity of circumstances, and the absolute lack of freedom which conditioned their whole existence, he was struck with the ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... Wain[C] at the disposal of any one who is desirous of taking a drive in the Milky Way. The learned professor will likewise stand for an indefinite period on his head; and whilst in this position will clearly demonstrate the rotundity of the earth, and the tendency of heavy bodies to the centre of gravity. In order that the prices of admission may be in accordance with the intrinsic value of the lectures, nothing will be charged for the boxes, the entrance to the pit will be gratis, and the gallery will be thrown open ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... in keeping with this vivacity. Rather short, and inclining—but as yet only inclining—to rotundity of figure, with a peculiarly soft and clear complexion, Mrs. Damerel made a gallant battle against the hostile years. Her bright eye, her moist lips, the admirable smoothness of brow and cheek and throat, bore ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... with regard to the moon, it will be found to be the other way round; for her disc, when carefully measured, is actually the slightest degree greater when high in the sky, than when low down. The reason for this is that, on account of the rotundity of the earth's surface, she is a trifle nearer the observer when overhead ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... lay dead, were examined one by one, but they had fallen away so much previous to their decease, that not a symptom of fat was to be perceived. Without fat I could do nothing; and as I thought of it in despair, my eye was caught by the rotundity of paunch which still appertained to the English harpooner, the only living being besides myself out of so many. "I must have fat," cried I fiercely, as I surveyed his unwieldy carcase. He started when he observed ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the door of the Agricultural Exhibition thrown wide open to it, to enter the lists for prizes or "honorable mention," and for general admiration. A pig, whose legs and eyes have all been absorbed out of sight by an immense rotundity of fat, is often decked with a ribbon, of the Order of the Garter genus, as a reward of merit, or of grace of form and proportions! Turkeys, geese, ducks, and hens of different breeds, strut or waddle off with similar distinctions. As for blood-horses, bulls, cows, and sheep, one ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... Benjamin Tresco. But it was natural for him to think so, for he was the only man of his trade in a town of six thousand people. He was a portly person who took a broad view of life, and it was his habit to remark, when folk commented on his rotundity, "I am big. I don't deny it. But I can't help myself—God A'mighty made me big, big in body, big in brain, big in appetite, big in desire to break every established law and accepted custom; but I am prevented from giving rein to my impulses by the expansiveness ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... the vast tissue of discordant Mormon elements, in case he should survive Brigham, is the latter's equal in years, but in all things else his antipodes. His height is over six feet, his form of aldermanic rotundity, his face large, plethoric, and lustrous with the stable red of stewed cranberries, while his small, twinkling black beads of eyes and a Satyric sensualism about the mouth would indicate a temperament fatally in the way of any apostleship save that of polygamy, even without the aid ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... for twenty years; and when, soon after, the dame came and fetched me to partake of their early supper, the grasp of his great hand, and the harvest-moon of his benevolent face, which was needed to light up the rotundity of the globe beneath it, produced such a reaction in me, that, for a moment, I could hardly believe that there was a Fairy Land; and that all I had passed through since I left home, had not been the wandering dream of a diseased imagination, operating on a too mobile frame, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... beginning the earth was much nearer to a perfectly globular form. This points to a liquid or gaseous condition at one time, and the flattening of the sphere at the poles confirms the impression. We should hardly expect so perfect a rotundity in a body formed by the cool accretion of solid fragments and particles. It is just what we should expect in a fluid body, and the later irregularities of the surface are accounted for by the constant crumpling and wearing of its solid crust. Many would ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... in his gay rotundity A clumsy stuffed-out dress - They see in the cup he waves on high A ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... amplified and ripened, while purified, in the calm warmth of emotion. From being emotive, poetry draws in more of the man, and higher, finer powers, than prose. The poetical has, must have, rotundity. No poet ever had a square head. Prose, in its naked quality, is to poetry what a skeleton is to a moving, flesh-and-spirit-endowed body. From the skeleton you can learn osteology, but neither aesthetics nor human nature. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... from his lips—Mr Perch then ushered into the presence a strong-built lad of fifteen, with a round red face, a round sleek head, round black eyes, round limbs, and round body, who, to carry out the general rotundity of his appearance, had a round hat in his hand, without a ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... oddest feature of the doctrine is that Koresh professes to have proved it by a method which, so far as the geometry of it goes, is more rigorous than any other that science has ever applied. The usual argument by which we prove to our children the earth's rotundity is not purely geometric. When, standing on the seashore, we see the sails of a ship on the sea horizon, her hull being hidden because it is below, the inference that this is due to the convexity of the surface is based on the idea that light moves ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... thing, relish mounting without one a horse of which all I knew was that he and his master were on better terms than I had ever seen man and horse upon before. But even while the thought was passing through my head, Memnon was lying at my feet, flat as his equine rotundity would permit. Ashamed of my doubt, I lost not a moment in placing myself in the position suggested by Sir John Falstaff to Prince Hal for the defence of his own bulky carcase—astride the body of the animal, namely. At once he rose and lifted me into the natural ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... the incantations of Prince Alldane. Undoubtedly his name was an unfortunate one at the time, but, to judge by the old portraits I showed you, neither of these princes looked capable of such atrocities, and Prince Alldane was described as being the essence of rotundity. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... or even rumoured, lying in ponderous bulk upon the stage, much as it lay in a Guatemalan forest. It is engaged in the process of "plumping up." Orchids shrivel in their long journey, and it is the importer's first care to renew that smooth and wholesome rotundity which indicates a conscience untroubled, a good digestion, and an assurance of capacity to fulfil any reasonable demand. Beneath the staging you may see myriads of withered sticks, clumps of shrunken and furrowed bulbs by the thousand, hung above those leaf-beds ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... was so dejected that I felt a sinking at my heart, a scratchiness in my nose and a wateriness in my eyes. I suffered the pangs of suppressed sympathy. What could a boy of nineteen say or do in order to restore rotundity to a flattened hero? ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... bed- sacking, stuffed out into most plethoric dimensions, tottering on a pair of small, meagre legs, and peering out with his wild, hairy face from under his burden like a big-bodied spider. That "man with the pack" always inspired me with awe and reverence. Huge, almost sublime, in its tense rotundity, the father of all packs, never laid aside and never opened, what might there not be within it? With what flesh-creeping curiosity I used to walk round about it at a safe distance, half expecting to see its striped covering stirred by the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... rich acres, fat beeves, a substantial mansion, costly clothing, a chine and curkey, choice wines, and all other good things consonant to the wants and full-fed desires of their bodies. Such men charm fortune by the sleekness of their aspects and the goodly rotundity of their honest faces, as the others scare away poverty by their wan, meagre looks. The last starve themselves into riches by care and carking; the first eat, drink, and sleep their way into the good things of this life. The greatest number of warm men in the city are good, jolly ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... preceding by the much smaller size of the sporangia, different color and habit. The sporangia, while depressed, still maintain considerable rotundity; they are occasionally quite spherical, and then of very uneven size, hardly in contact. In some cases the plasmodium before maturing seems to assume the form of a plasmodiocarp, which, by transverse fission ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... days after Hilda's reappearance, she and the sculptor were straying together through the streets of Rome. Being deep in talk, it so happened that they found themselves near the majestic, pillared portico, and huge, black rotundity of the Pantheon. It stands almost at the central point of the labyrinthine intricacies of the modern city, and often presents itself before the bewildered stranger, when he is in search of other objects. Hilda, looking up, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... height, he was slightly inclined to rotundity, with hair almost white, a stubbly grey beard, and a pair of keen eyes rather prominently set in a bony but not unpleasant countenance. He had a peculiar habit of stroking his left ear when puzzled, ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... two modes of investigation open to us, the dogmatic and the inductive. We may take either. We may construct for ourselves, from the most flimsy suppositions, a metaphysical balloon, inflated with self-conceit into the rotundity of a cosmogony, according to which, in our opinion, the world should have been made, and we may paint it over with the figures of the various animals and noble savages which ought to have sprung up out of its fornea, and we may stripe its history to suit our notions of the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... cures, however, were very gradual. We are also told that when a humble hunchback bowed the knee in adoration at the tomb of St. Andreas, his irresistible faith instantly released him from his unnatural rotundity. In 1243 a Ferrara writer was at Padua, and while attending vespers at the tomb where the sainted body of the Minorite Anthony reposed, he affirms that he saw a person who had been mute from his birth recover his voice ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... contrary, it is easy to point out certain variations, the meaning of which he doubtless well understood. We find him guided throughout this period by his usual ideas as regards grandeur of outline and degrees of thickness; but the rotundity of the model, the shape that he gave to the sound-hole, the method of setting the sound-hole in the instrument, although, as before remarked, all executed with a breadth of purpose which his earlier efforts fail to show, may be cited as points in which he varied. ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... with a look of surprise which was greatly intensified by the rotundity of the blue spectacles. "Vell, I don't feel to ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... failed to lessen his rotundity, he had at least stopped its growth,—a fact of which he made sure once a month by weighing himself on the scales of the Custom House, where a friend of his held the post of weigher. His physician had also recommended sea- ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... not the victim of some trick—has no other fiddle been substituted for the broken Straduarius? No!—'tis his own well-known fiddle, outside and in—the same delicate proportions, the same elegant neck, and the same swelling rotundity of contour that might have made it a model for the Praxiteles of violins. He placed the instrument against his shoulder and seized the bow. But all of a sudden he paused—a cold perspiration bedewed his face—his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... court by being presided over by a judicial magistrate. This distinguished functionary, the judicial magistrate, who generally hears the appeals from Fetter's court, is a man of the name of Fairweather Fuddle, a clever wag, whose great good-nature is only equalled by the rotundity of his person, which is not a bad portraiture of our much-abused Sir John Falstaff, as represented by the heavy men of our country theatres. Now, to enter upon an analysis of the vast difference between Fetter's court in ordinary, and ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... had remained behind to digest the enormous dinner they had eaten. These now trudged manfully forward, smoking their pipes with outrageous vigor, so as to raise the awful cloud that has been mentioned, but marching exceedingly slow, being short of leg, and of great rotundity in the belt. ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... the most conspicuous of these buildings, an inn or alehouse, through the half-closed windows of which blazed out in ruddy comfort the beams of the hospitable hearth, he knocked hastily at the door. He was admitted by a lady of a certain age, and endowed with a comely rotundity of face ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... though her admiration was based upon wholly sentimental reasons. Old Mrs. Mitchell might have earned more money in a museum of freaks than her daughter in a district school. She was a mountain of rotundity, a conjunction of palpitating spheres, but the soul that dwelt in this painfully ponderous body was as mellow with affection and kindliness as a ripe pear, and the voice that proceeded from her ever-smiling lips was a hoarse and dove-like coo of love. Ellen ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
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