"Rarified" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dark when we left the Peacock. For a little while, pale, uncertain ghosts of houses and trees appeared and vanished, and then it was hard, black, frozen day. People were lighting their fires; smoke was mounting straight up high into the rarified air; and we were rattling for Highgate Archway over the hardest ground I have ever heard the ring of iron shoes on. As we got into the country, everything seemed to have grown old and gray. The roads, the trees, thatched roofs of cottages and homesteads, the ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... and drive out the Air as much as is possible, because in such seal'd Bubles the Air it self (as I have elsewhere shewn) has a weight; yet this advantage countervails not the inconvenience of being obliged to increase the weight of the Glass, which when it includes highly rarified Air, if it be not somewhat strong, will be broken by the pressure of the External Air, ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... second Objection, I anwer, that the Subtlety of the Air I look upon no Obstacle; for the Air near the Earth, especially in dry Places, where there are no impure Exhalations, by the intense Heat of the Sun, it is perhaps as thin, and as much rarified, as the AEtherial. This I suppose from the Tenuity of the Air on the top of the Mountain Tenera, where 'tis said none can inhabit on that account. But I have my self flown to the top of this Mountain, and carry'd with me a wet Spunge, ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... latter races ought to sit at Dante's feet, to learn the secret of the "Beatific Vision" that is as far beyond morality as it is outside science. There are, it is true, certain moments when the Italian poet leads us up into the cold rarified air of that "Intellectual Love of God" which leaves sex, as it leaves other human feelings, infinitely behind. But this Spinozistic mood is not the natural climate of his soul. He is always ready to revert, always anxious to "drag Beatrice in." ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... always the coldest and most violent which we experience, and the hypothesis which we have formed on that subject is, that the air coming in contact with the Snowy mountains immediately becomes chilled and condensed, and being thus rendered heavier than the air below it descends into the rarified air below or into the vacuum formed by the constant action of the sun on the open unsheltered plains. The clouds rise suddenly near these mountains and distribute their contents partially over the neighbouring plains. The same cloud will discharge ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark |
