Dryden's poetry does not make the tears start to our eye or the blood come to our cheek, but it flatters our ear with its
smoothness and elegance; it tickles our fancy with its wit.
With the exception of these trifling frictions, work in Miss Stacy's little kingdom went on with regularity and
smoothness.
If he had looked at the picture when he turned away from his window, he might have remarked that a river which is running with its utmost
smoothness at one moment may be a river which plunges into its most violent agitation at another; and he might have remembered, with certain misgivings, that the progress of a stream of water has been long since likened, with the universal consent of humanity, to the progress of the stream of life.
At first I was inclined to believe that this superficial bed, from its wide extent and
smoothness, must have been deposited beneath the sea; but I afterwards found in one spot, that it lay on an artificial floor of round stones.
He improved on the versification of Wyatt's sonnets, securing fluency and
smoothness.
His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the
smoothness of the water were all against him.
I was rather in want of amusement, and so rare an opportunity was not to be neglected; so, leaving both meadow and hedge, I quickly repaired to the spot, but not before Sancho, who, immediately upon perceiving his young friend, scoured at full gallop the intervening space, and pounced upon him with an impetuous mirth that precipitated the child almost into the middle of the beck; but, happily, the stones preserved him from any serious wetting, while their
smoothness prevented his being too much hurt to laugh at the untoward event.
Each waiter was trained in terrible silence and
smoothness, as if he were a gentleman's servant.
He dived out of the galley door, or glided rather, with a swiftness and
smoothness of gait that struck me as being not so much cat-like as oily.
It was only from feeling himself nearer the ground and from the peculiar
smoothness of his motion that Vronsky knew how greatly the mare had quickened her pace.
She stole glances at the
smoothness of his face, and the essential boyishness of him, so much desired, shocked her.
He had fallen with a pleasant ease and
smoothness into the rather curious life lived at Elizabeth Boyd's bee-farm.
