Compose

I have listened to you for twenty minutes while you detailed wearisome nonsense to me which must have cost you sleepless nights to compose.

She wanted to ascertain the feelings of each of her visitors, she wanted to compose her own, and to make herself agreeable to all; and in the latter object, where she feared most to fail, she was most sure of success, for those to whom she endeavoured to give pleasure were prepossessed in her favour.

“You are flurried—compose yourself!” Napoleon seemed to say, as with a scarcely perceptible smile he looked at Balashëv’s uniform and sword.

Lucie, my child, if ever you were brave and serviceable in your life—and you were always both—you will compose yourself now, to do exactly as I bid you; for more depends upon it than you can think, or I can say.

She’ll compose herself in bindu suspension to reduce her oxygen needs.

It takes a long time for the Master to compose his painting.

Sad cypress, vervain, yew, compose the wreath, And ev’ry baleful green denoting death.

“Or would you like a few moments to compose an epitaph?”“Oh, not quite yet,” said Dumbledore, smiling.

The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:—upper, middle, and lower.

The invariable principles and unchangeable order which regulate the movements of all the parts that compose the universe, demonstrate, both to our senses and our reason, that its Creator is a God of unerring truth.

But as this dream cannot be realized, since Mademoiselle Danglars must become my lawful wife, live perpetually with me, sing to me, compose verses and music within ten paces of me, and that for my whole life, it frightens me.

He had only been waiting till the aforesaid blighted affections were decently interred; that being done, he felt that he was ready to “hide his stricken heart, and still toil on.” As Goethe, when he had a joy or a grief, put it into a song, so Laurie resolved to embalm his love-sorrow in music, and compose a Requiem which should harrow up Jo’s soul and melt the heart of every hearer.

Outside of five or six immense exceptions, which compose the splendor of a century, contemporary admiration is nothing but shortsightedness.

The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them:— Boards $8.03½ Mostly shanty boards.

He selected a book and a comfortable chair, and tried, as far as the disturbed state of his mind would permit him, to compose himself for an evening’s reading.

Not the Pilot Not the pilot has charged himself to bring his ship into port, though beaten back and many times baffled; Not the pathfinder penetrating inland weary and long, By deserts parch’d, snows chill’d, rivers wet, perseveres till he reaches his destination, More than I have charged myself, heeded or unheeded, to compose a march for these States, For a battle-call, rousing to arms if need be, years, centuries hence.

With every camera gleefully trained on him, I have just enough time to release the small, choked sound in my throat and compose myself.

I taught them all my poetisation and aspiration: to compose and collect into unity what is fragment in man, and riddle and fearful chance;— —As composer, riddle-reader, and redeemer of chance, did I teach them to create the future, and all that hath been—to redeem by creating.

Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.

He believed there was hardly a man alive who would not choose a gradual death of weakness in the desert, rather than a sudden cutting off; indeed, in his judgement, the slowest death was the most merciful of all, since absence of hope would prevent the bitterness of a losing fight, and leave the man’s nature untrammelled to compose itself and him into the mercy of God.

He settled back and tried to compose himself.

I share it all with you, even the greatest mystery of all time, the mystery by which I compose my life.

“Compose yourself,” said I.

Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships And proud as Priam murdered with his peers; Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man’s image and his cry.

“Trouble with a lot of folks is: they’re so blame material; they don’t see the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy; they think that inventions like the telephone and the areoplane and wireless—no, that was a Wop invention, but anyway: they think these mechanical improvements are all that we stand for; whereas to a real thinker, he sees that spiritual and, uh, dominating movements like Efficiency, and Rotarianism, and Prohibition, and Democracy are what compose our deepest and truest wealth.

The avicularia are believed by Mr. Busk, Dr. Smitt and Dr. Nitsche—naturalists who have carefully studied this group—to be homologous with the zooids and their cells which compose the zoophyte, the movable lip or lid of the cell corresponding with the lower and movable mandible of the avicularium.

Emerging from its last gorge, it glides in wide lace-like rapids down a smooth incline into a pool where it seems to rest and compose its gray, agitated waters before taking the grand plunge, then slowly slipping over the lip of the pool basin, it descends another glossy slope with rapidly accelerated speed to the brink of the tremendous cliff, and with sublime, fateful confidence springs out free in the air.

Arina Petrovna, compose your countenance.

It is a base thing for the countenance to be obedient and to regulate and compose itself as the mind commands, and for the mind not to be regulated and composed by itself.

no father shall thy corpse compose; Thy dying eyes no tender mother close; But hungry birds shall tear those balls away, And hovering vultures scream around their prey.

He had attempted, not perhaps with complete artistic success, but with acknowledged imagination and invention, to compose epics and love stories reflecting the riot of violent and even cruel colour; tales of tropical heavens of burning gold or blood-red copper; of eastern heroes who rode with twelve-turbaned mitres upon elephants painted purple or peacock green; of gigantic jewels that a hundred negroes could not carry, but which burned with ancient and strange-hued fires.

“Be calm; compose yourself.

All things invite To peaceful counsels, and the settled state Of order, how in safety best we may Compose our present evils, with regard Of what we are and where, dismissing quite All thoughts of war: ye have what I advise.” He scarce had finished, when such murmur filled The assembly, as when hollow rocks retain The sound of blustering winds, which all night long Had roused the sea, now with hoarse cadence lull Sea-faring men o’erwatched, whose bark by chance, Or pinnace anchors in a craggy bay After the tempest: such applause was heard As Mammon ended, and his sentence pleased, Advising peace: for such another field They dreaded worse then Hell: so much the fear Of thunder and the sword of Michael Wrought still within them; and no less desire To found this nether empire, which might rise, By policy, and long process of time, In emulation opposite to Heaven.

Be content, Anselmo, and refrain from making further proof; and as thou hast passed dry-shod through the sea of those doubts and suspicions that are and may be entertained of women, seek not to plunge again into the deep ocean of new embarrassments, or with another pilot make trial of the goodness and strength of the bark that Heaven has granted thee for thy passage across the sea of this world; but reckon thyself now safe in port, moor thyself with the anchor of sound reflection, and rest in peace until thou art called upon to pay that debt which no nobility on earth can escape paying.” Anselmo was completely satisfied by the words of Lothario, and believed them as fully as if they had been spoken by an oracle; nevertheless he begged of him not to relinquish the undertaking, were it but for the sake of curiosity and amusement; though thenceforward he need not make use of the same earnest endeavours as before; all he wished him to do was to write some verses to her, praising her under the name of Chloris, for he himself would give her to understand that he was in love with a lady to whom he had given that name to enable him to sing her praises with the decorum due to her modesty; and if Lothario were unwilling to take the trouble of writing the verses he would compose them himself.

If, he said, he had been writing to be understood by the meanest capacities, he would have explained that every want was an evil:— “That on the multiplicity of those wants depended all those mutual services which the individual members of a society pay to each other: and that consequently, the greater variety there was of wants, the larger number of individuals might find their private interest in labouring for the good of others, and united together, compose one body.”93 If we bear in mind Smith’s criticism of Hutcheson and Mandeville in adjoining chapters of the Moral Sentiments, and remember further that he must almost certainly have become acquainted with the Fable of the Bees when attending Hutcheson’s lectures or soon afterwards, we can scarcely fail to suspect that it was Mandeville who first made him realise that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Treating the word “vice” as a mistake for self-love, Adam Smith could have repeated with cordiality Mandeville’s lines already quoted:— “Thus vice nursed ingenuity, Which join’d with time and industry, Had carry’d life’s conveniencies, It’s real pleasures, comforts, ease, To such a height, the very poor Lived better than the rich before.” Smith put the doggerel into prose, and added something from the Hutchesonian love of liberty when he propounded what is really the text of the polemical portion of the Wealth of Nations:— “The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.”94 Experience shows that a general belief in the beneficence of the economic working of self-interest is not always sufficient to make even a person of more than average intelligence a free-trader.