"Attenuated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attenuated for computation, is here able to effect such a change in a pinch of dust that it becomes a free avenue instead of a barricade. Through that avenue a powerful blow from a local store of energy makes itself heard and felt. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... Allusions to Democracy are so abundant, deductions from its influence so confident and universal, that it is worth while to point out what a very hollow thing the word in most cases really is, a large empty object in thought, of the most vague and faded associations and the most attenuated content, and to inquire just exactly what the original implications and present realities of "Democracy" may be. The inquiry will leave us with a very different conception of the nature and future of this sort of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... affected. The Impossibility of quickly meeting them, made him very impatient; the Account of their Forces added to this Uneasiness; in fine, Joy, Grief, Hope and Fear, distracted his Heart, and the Shock of such opposite Motions was too strong for his attenuated Body. A violent Disorder seiz'd upon his whole Constitution, which was succeeded by such a Fever, whose first Symptoms seem'd to ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... Thomas W. Barber, one of the victims of the Kansas war. The attenuated hand supporting the aching head, and half shielding the tear-dimmed eyes, the silent drops trickling down the wasted cheeks, told but too well ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... written in Coleridge's person by the tender-hearted Elia, gives the best view possible of Coleridge's scanty and suffering commencement of life. At that time, it may be premised, the dietary of Christ's Hospital was of the lowest: breakfast consisting of a "quarter of penny loaf, moistened with attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from," and the weekly rule giving "three banyan-days to four ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... has any atmosphere it must be so very attenuated indeed that human beings could not possibly live in it at all; but nothing has yet been detected which would enable us to say positively that any atmosphere does exist there, although there have been some indications observed ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... problem should be in Edison's hands rather than in his own. To say that the solution of the problem lay merely in reducing the size of the carbon burner to a mere hair, is to state a half-truth only; but who, we ask, would have had the temerity even to suggest that such an attenuated body could be maintained at a white heat, without disintegration, for a thousand hours? The solution consisted not only in that, but in the enormous mass of patiently worked-out details—the manufacture of the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... life and perform their duty in "splendid isolation." It was only gradually that limb after limb was added, and subsequently constructed railways were incorporated or absorbed, until the consolidated system obtained the rather attenuated proportions with which we are familiar to-day, stretching from Whitchurch, on the Cheshire border, to Aberystwyth, on the shores of Cardigan Bay, with its two chief subsidiary "sections," one (including some half dozen miles of the original track) from Moat Lane Junction to ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... indulged in anticipation of again mixing with the fashionable world, and talked of chaperoning Isabel to private parties and public amusements, when she was standing at the brink of eternity. Isabel sighed as she listened to her mother, and observed her attenuated frame; occasionally she would refer to her mother's state of health, and attempt to bring her to that serious state of mind which her awful situation demanded; but in vain: Mrs Revel would evade the subject. Before a week had passed she had set up an ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... calculated upon nineteen pounds only of twenty-five pounds per barrel of fermentable matter being attenuated, and have even in that quantity included five pounds eight ounces of lees and yest, (the least quantity produced,) such calculation must not be admitted to preclude the practicability of attenuating almost every particle of fermentable matter, and replacing ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... streets like a silent rebellion; like a still and statuesque riot. In modern constitutional countries there are practically no political institutions thus given by the people; all are received by the people. There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... said tenderly in French, raising in her arms as she spoke the attenuated form of the suffering woman before her and rearranging her pillows, "you feel very bad to-day: I knew you did just now when you were asleep and I heard you groaning. I wish—bon Dieu!—I wish I could do something ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... did come, came attenuated. 'We heard there had been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,' Barnet relates; 'but it didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still somewhere elaborating their plans and issuing orders. When the enemy began to emerge from the woods in front of us, we cheered and blazed away, and didn't ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... evening at seven o'clock, just as I was going out to dine, I saw, a few yards away, a tall, broad-brimmed hat surmounting a head of lank white hair, a long neck throttled in a white neckcloth, a frock-coat flapping about a pair of attenuated legs. ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... already attired in her trousseau. She had travelled down from London in a shady straw hat trimmed with pink roses. A white veil swept loosely round her face; she carried in her hand an attenuated mottled cane, with an elaborate silver top. A black fan hung from her waist by a thin silver chain, and, as usual, she was peering through her eyeglasses at her surroundings. Mr. Amarinth and Lord Reggie were dressed very much alike in loosely fitting very light suits, with high turn-down ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of another "Divine Spouse," though mutilated and unfinished, is pleasing from its greater breadth of style, although such breadth is rarely found in the works of this school, which toned down, elongated, and attenuated the figure till it often lost in vigour what it gained in distinction. The one point in which the Saite artists made a real advance, was in the treatment of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... informed the world that they hailed respectively from Goteborg and Helsingborg. They also sported large rectangles, painted in vertical stripes of yellow and blue, while close behind them, a Dane, with an absurdly attenuated funnel and long ventilators sticking at all angles out of her hull like pins from a pincushion, ambled stolidly along like a weary cart-horse. She, scorning other decoration, merely showed the scarlet white-crossed emblem of her country. Some of the neutrals ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... clearness of his views, his long habits of self-denial, and his unconquerable energy of mind, triumphed over weakness and decay, till men with all their health and strength about them might gaze upon his attenuated form, struck with a certain awe of wonderment at the brightness of his wit, the intenseness of his mental vision, and the iron strength of his argument.... We will venture a remark as to that ironical turn, which certainly does appear in various shapes in ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... room 1. A very small percentage of them will strike the doorway or opening into room 2. In their turn these sound waves will be diffused all through room 2, and again but a small percentage of them will find access into room 3. The sound waves will by this time be so much attenuated that the voice of the man standing in room 1 will be lost. Any little tone, however, that may remain will become dissipated in room 3, and it will not be possible for a person standing in room 4 ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... for me, I would look on, as it seemed my part to do, understandingly, if my intellect could fathom the meaning and the moral, and, at all events, reverently and sadly. The curtain fallen, I would pass onward with my poor individual life, which was now attenuated of much of its proper substance, and diffused among ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from the vastness of what they deny. And not these alone, but many other words, less indebted to logic for the magnificence of reach that it can lend, bring before the mind no picture, but a dim emotional framework. Such words as "ominous," "fantastic," "attenuated," "bewildered," "justification," are atmospheric rather than pictorial; they infect the soul with the passion-laden air that rises from humanity. It is precisely in his dealings with words like these, "heated originally by the breath ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... two of these churches all the churchyard left is a square yard or two at the back of the church. In one of these tiny enclosures—I forget which now—I found that of all the headstones and tombs which had once adorned this now sadly diminished and attenuated acre, there was left but one. It was a tombstone in memory of an infant, aged eight months. Out of all the people buried here, who had lived long and been held in honour, and thought that their memory would last for many generations—perhaps as long as that of ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... a corky substance, as described by Rumphins, we can offer no conjecture.' Most curious things (remarks Dr. Templeton) they are; they all spring very narrow from the root, expand as they rise, and then become gradually attenuated, occasionally forking, but never throwing out shoots or leaves, or in any respect resembling the parent root or wood. They are firm and close in their texture, nearly devoid of fibrous structure, and take a moderate polish when cut with a sharp instrument; but for lining insect boxes ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... her unfortunate habits, Philip himself cooked the meal, serving it without apology or explanation upon a cloth of fine yellowed damask, with his mother's egg-shell china, and certain spoons and forks that bore upon their attenuated tips the worn outlines of a crest. The table was drawn into a window, through which the scent of Philip's little garden floated in. There were flowers upon the table, too; garden roses in a low pewter bowl, and wax tapers in very beautiful ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... fierce features she ranged up her attenuated class, distributed the well-thumbed books—with a horn-book for little Luke Toy—and for two hours taught them with the same joyless severity under which their fathers and mothers had suffered. For spelling 'lamb' without the final b, Ivy Nancarrow underwent the punishment invariably ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... generally sought to temporize. I was as intent upon saving him from leaving his skin in this business as I was, on the other hand, intent upon doing my duty without pause or scruple to my King. But the fool forced my hand. A Court is a foul place always, even so attenuated a Court as that which Philip of Spain encouraged. Rumour thrives in it, scandal blossoms luxuriantly in its fetid atmosphere. And rumour and scandal had been busy with the Princess of Eboli and me, though I did not ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... late: for a great scarcity of furniture, and total absence of comfort, together with the disappearance of all such small moveables as spare clothes and linen, bespoke a state of extreme poverty; while the meagre and attenuated condition of Mr. Sikes himself would have fully confirmed these symptoms, if they had stood ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... that the attitude required of the observer was one which is not commonly taken. And it may be objected that the results of an attitude so unusual towards objects so ghostly and attenuated must be too delicate, or too complex, or influenced by too many alien suggestions, to be plumply set down in arabic numerals. The subjects, in fact, did at first find the attitude not easy to assume. A visual object may ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... expedient to draw custom. He had been lying down, it seemed to him, but a few moments, when a tap at the door, to which he responded with a loud "come in," was followed by the entrance of a thin, pale, haggard-looking creature, her clothes soiled, and hanging loosely, and in tatters about her attenuated body. By the hand she held a little girl, from whose young face had faded every trace of childhood's happy expression. She, too, was thin and pale, and had a fixed, stony look, of hopeless suffering. They came up to where he still lay upon the sofa, ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... and peeped into a cupboard in which an overcoat surmounted by a felt hat hung from a peg like an attenuated suicide; he looked in all the corners and into the sitting-room, but no ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... kindness. He spent his evenings sometimes in the great dreary desert of a salon, and listened respectfully while Mademoiselle Servin, the young music-teacher, played dismal sonatas of Gluck or Gretry on a cracked old piano that had been one of the earliest made of those instruments, and was now attenuated and feeble as the very ghost of music. He listened to Madame Magnotte's stories of departed splendour. To him she opened her heart as she never had opened it to ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... strained intellect seek to overtake an ever-receding commencement, and toil to gain some adequate grasp of an apparently endless succession. A beginning there must have been, though we can never hope to fix its point. Even speculation droops her wings in the attenuated atmosphere of a past so remote, and the light of imagination is quenched in the darkness of a history so ancient. In time, as in space, the confines of the universe must ever remain concealed from us, and of the end we know no more than ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... degenerating almost into stupefaction; and more than once, when he received an order from his superior, hesitated as one who either heard not, or, in attempting to perform it, mistook the purport of his instructions, and executed some entirely different duty. The countenance of this officer, whose attenuated person otherwise bore traces of languor and debility, but too plainly marked the abstractedness and terror of his mind, while the set stiff features and contracted muscles of the face contributed to give an expression of vacuity, that one who knew him not might have interpreted unfavourably. ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... must be constantly and abundantly fertilized, all the more as conditions of excessive subaerial denudation found in the steep slope and usual heavy rainfall of mountains, as well as possible glacial scouring of the land in the past, have greatly attenuated the layer of soil called upon to support plant life. The Swiss or Tyrolese farmer cherishes his manure pile as at once source and badge of his wealth. After harvest it is carted or carried in baskets not only to the terraces, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... whether they adopted it in their migration across Slavonic lands. German geist and English ghost, too, may possibly have the same original sense of breath." How marvellously significant this ascent from the perceptions of wind and breath to what we now understand by soul and spirit! The most attenuated concepts have their basis in the physical world. Even to this present day, as Max Mueller remarks, "the soul or the spirit remains a breath, an airy breath, for this is the least material image of the soul ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... larger than the basidia, varying in size and form in different species. They present the appearance of large sterile cells, attenuated upwards, sometimes into a slender neck. Corda was of opinion that these were male organs, and gave them the name of pollinaires. Hoffmann has also described[F] both these organs under the names of pollinaria and spermatia, but does not appear to recognize ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... to the edge of the water, and the nodding plumes showed for some distance out in the stream. Several miles in advance, on the same shore, the dark green mass of a forest buffeted against the soft sky, the species of trees being innumerable and so closely wedged in many places, that not even the attenuated Captain Guzman could have forced his way through except by scrambling from limb ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... rise high in the air; here on the other hand (probably owing to the rarity of the atmosphere and the low tension of its vapours), the drought is accompanied by perfect transparency, and the atmosphere is too attenuated to support the dust raised ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... you went to the big Hotel Metropole, opposite. If you were a person of fastidious tastes and an attenuated income, you felt the superior charm of the Cliff Hotel. The little house, the joy of its proprietor, was hidden in the privacy of its own beautiful grounds, having its back to the high road and its face to the open sea. They had taken stock of it that morning, with its clean walls, white as ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... die to-morrow,' he said, on the eve of his unanticipated death, 'I have lived to be older than my father.' The weight of thought and feeling burdened him heavily; you read his sufferings in his attenuated frame, while you perceived the mastery he held over them in his animated countenance ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... long flannel night-dress, by the side of Miss Thusa, watching the rapid turning of her wheel, and the formation of the flaxen thread, as it glided out, a more and more attenuated filament, betwixt the dexterous ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... blue nankeen come out of the starboard passage below the bridge and cautiously look up at the bridge. He did not see Long Jim, so intent was he on looking up; but when the cockney drew a pistol he screamed shrilly and fled into the passage, his long queue sticking out behind like an attenuated pennant, so ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... frightful thing was or was not a ghastly dream. Then my memory would go back over the long years, and every little instance of unselfishness and devotion would rise before my mind. As I looked at the prostrate and attenuated form that lay silent on the couch of eucalyptus leaves, I felt that life was merely the acutest agony, and that I must immediately seek oblivion in some form or the other, or lose my reason. It seemed, I say, impossible that Yamba ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... shattered liquid; here the most powerful eddies recoil against the shale. From this portion of the fall, indeed, the spray sometimes rises without solution of continuity to the region of clouds, becoming gradually more attenuated, and passing finally through the condition of true cloud into invisible vapour, which is sometimes reprecipitated higher up. All the phenomena point distinctly to the centre of the river as the place of greatest mechanical energy, and from the centre the vigour of the fall gradually dies away towards ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... a fire burning certain nights in the vicinity of the grave. They hold and believe, at least the 'Big Indians' do, that the spirits of the departed are compelled to cross an extremely attenuated greasy pole, which bridges over the chasm of the debatable land, and that they require the fire to light them on their darksome journey. A righteous soul traverses the pole quicker than a wicked one, hence they regulate the number of nights for burning a light according to the character ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... was over, and Ascension drew near, but the sweet month of May had done little to restore health to poor Elfric. He had scarcely ever had a day free from pain. His eye was brighter than ever, but his attenuated face told a sad tale of the decay of the ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... They have, with Falstaff, "turned diseases to commodity;" their only concern being to keep out the undertaker. Whilst there's life, there's profit,—is the philosophy of the Tory College; hence, poor Mr. Bull, though shrunk, attenuated,—with a blister on his head, and cataplasms at his soles,—has been kept just alive enough to pay. And then his patience under Tory treatment—the obedience of his swallow! "Admirable, excellent!" cried a certain doctor (we will not swear that his name was not PEEL), ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... Kemble and Lord Falmouth—June 23 and July 7. They were very recherche, so it appears. Viardot-Garcia sang. The composer's face and frame were wasted by illness and Mr. Solomon spoke of his "long attenuated fingers." He made money and that was useful to him, for doctors' bills and living had taken up his savings. There was talk of his settling in London, but the climate, not to speak of the unmusical atmosphere, would have been fatal to him. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the trick Mrs Gowler had played in order to secure a further shilling from her already attenuated store, an emotion which increased her distress of mind. When Mrs Gowler brought in the midday meal, which to-day consisted of fried fish and potatoes from the neighbouring fried fish ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... of the first period. This regressive metamorphosis—for I cannot style it otherwise—is rare but not without examples. Ordinarily the creative imagination, when it has passed its adult stage, becomes attenuated by slow atrophy without undergoing serious change of form. Nevertheless, I am able to cite the case of a well-known scholar who began with a taste for art, especially plastic art, went over rapidly to literature, devoted his life to biologic studies, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... recollection of details which he had not especially remarked at the time came to him in the midst of his work at the bank. Sometimes when he turned off the gas at night, or just as he was falling asleep, the sharp, attenuated figure of the ship-builder limned itself against the blackness of the chamber, or the old gentleman's vacuous countenance in its frame of silver hair peered in through the hangings of the bed. But more frequently it ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... say that furniture has no expression; the small couch, the faded work-table, the straight chairs, with their twisted attenuated legs, had an unspeakable air of sadness. One day she cautiously touched the notes of the instrument. How weak and thin and hollow they were! And yet they blended perfectly with something in her own heart. She played till the tears were on ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... to express and objectify himself completely, and achieve vital form. In performance, most of his works shrink and dwindle. The central and sustaining structure, the cathedral which is behind every living composition and manifests itself through it, is in these pieces so vague and attenuated that it fades into the background of the concert-hall, is like gray upon gray. The gems and gold thread and filigree with which this work is sewn tarnish in the gloom. Something is there, we perceive, something that ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... grasped his wrist tightly with one hand—and both feeble and attenuated was that poor wrist—the baronet, we say, grasped it, and in an instant had regained possession of the mask, which he deliberately replaced on his face, after which he seized the unfortunate young man by the neck, and pressed it with such ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the speaker, whose attenuated frame, venerable face, and long locks, aided by the hectic of enthusiasm that played beneath a glazed and deep-set eye, imparted a character that seemed to rise superior to human weakness. Bending his head in superstitious reverence, he turned gravely to those who, appearing ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... staggered the deputation, half of which scratched its head meditatively. Then a tall, thin man, with an attenuated face like a starved fowl, said sneeringly ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... organic nature on this planet—to examine in more detail, we find that it appears to be instinct with contrivance. So to speak, wherever we tap organic nature, it seems to flow with purpose; and, as we shall presently see, upon the monistic theory the evidence of purpose is here in no way attenuated by a full acceptance of any of the 'mechanical' explanations furnished by science. Now, these large and important facts of observation unquestionably point, as just observed, to some one integrating principle as pervading the Cosmos; and, if so, we can scarcely be wrong in supposing that among ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... away up the ravine to picket him on a little patch of grass he had discovered the day before, and as he passed the colonel's fire a keen-eyed old veteran of the cavalry service, who had stopped to have a chat with our chief, dropped the stick on which he was whittling and stared hard at our attenuated racer. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... in no supplies, and the march was resumed on the morning of the both by a force attenuated by starvation, cold, and despair, diminished further by extensive desertion. After much exertion the advance, consisting of all that remained of the 44th, the solitary gun, and a detachment of cavalry, forced a passage to the front through the rabble ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... exposed themselves beneath the short, narrow sleeves, while the skirts only "shadowed not concealed," that part of the body they had been originally intended to cover. A pair of blue pantaloons, perfectly in keeping, on the score of scantiness and age, with the coat, covered the attenuated lower limbs of the wearer, on whose head, moreover, was stuck a conical cap that had all the appearance of having been once a portion of the same uniform, and had only undergone change in the loss of ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... was nearly wide open, and we then had a full view of everything within. The picture was solemn. Seated in a very high-backed, elaborately-carved, and Gothic chair, supported on all sides by pillows, sat the attenuated figure of my father. I gazed upon him with an eager curiosity, mingled with awe. His countenance was long and ghastly—there was no beauty in it. Its principal expression was terror. It was evident that his days were numbered. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the reception of this shoe that, with the shoe in position, there will still be maintained a tread that is normal. To our minds harm is far more likely to arise from a shoe of this class through the thinned iron heels of the shoe becoming attenuated under wear to the point of bending, and so inflicting an injury ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... account of the rapid succession of the electric impulses, there was not sufficient time between them for the electric action to cease entirely. Consequently the line could not clear itself, and became surcharged, as it were; the effect being an attenuated prolongation of each impulse as manifested in a weaker continuation of the mark on the tape, thus making the whole message indistinct. These ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... out his attenuated frame in the barber's chair, and dropped his head back upon the rest. Andre looked as grave and serious as though he had been called to operate upon the face of one of the venerable and dignified bank presidents ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... of this is acquired by those who are regarded as persons of knowledge. Uniting all these together, viz., the senses, the objects of the senses, and the five great entities, one should hold them in the mind.[116] When everything is attenuated (by absorption) in the mind, one no longer esteems the pleasures of life. Learned men, whose understandings are furnished with knowledge, regard that as true happiness.[117] I shall after this, tell thee of renunciation with respect to all entities by means, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and bloodless as a landscape of polar ice, building was going on in the dark with incessant activity. The archways and ceilings were everywhere hung with down-growing crystals, like inverted groves of leafless saplings, some of them large, others delicately attenuated, each tipped with a single drop of water, like the terminal bud of a pine-tree. The only appreciable sounds were the dripping and tinkling of water failing into pools or faintly plashing ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... knee, which from acquiring chlorophyll becomes green, and increases in size. In rarely or never becoming perfectly straight, these cotyledons differ remarkably from the ultimate condition of the arched hypocotyls or epicotyls of dicotyledons. It is, also, a singular circumstance that the attenuated extremity of the upper bent portion invariably withers ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... so well the voice she had expected at the other end of the wire that the husky, boyish note which reached her, attenuated by distance, struck her ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... resolute features, a commanding figure garbed in aristocratic black, and not yet verging into the proportions of obesity,—take him for all in all, a very fine and favorable specimen of the solid men of Boston. And seen in contrast (oh! could he but have known it!) with the attenuated figure of the poor, ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... everybody was convinced who observed how it filled the ear, and how distinctly every inflection was heard through the fullest harmony of the orchestra. The same clearness was observable in her pianissimo. When, in lier beautiful closes, she prolonged a tone, attenuated it by degrees, and falling gently upon the final note, the sound, though as ethereal as the sighing of a breeze, reached, like Mrs. Siddons's whisper in Lady Macbeth, every part of the immense theatre. Much of the effect of this ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... female the average height is about five feet, or perhaps a little under. The anterior part of the brain is more limited than in the male; the apex of the head is carried further back; the facial angle is more acute; and the extremities are more attenuated. The latter circumstance may probably be accounted for from the fact, that the females have to endure, from a very early age, a great degree of hardship, privation, and ill-treatment. Like most other savages the ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... individuality. Instead of the usual sword or baton, the man was holding, stretched out in his hand, his own plumed hat; and the horse, instead of the usual waterfall for a tail, possessed a somewhat attenuated appendage that somehow appeared out of keeping with his ostentatious behaviour. One felt that a horse with a tail like that would not have pranced ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... had previously pointed out as probable, that the waves of light exert a pressure or driving force, which becomes evident in its effects if the body acted upon is sufficiently small. In that case the light pressure will prevail over the attraction of gravitation, and propel the attenuated matter away from the sun in the teeth of its attraction. The earth itself would be driven away if, instead of consisting of a solid globe of immense aggregate mass, it were a cloud of microscopic particles. ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... the leader in securing the adoption of the Christian basis for the National Conference, and the insertion into the preamble of its constitution of the expression of faith in the Lordship of Jesus Christ, he was strongly opposed to any attempt to impose a creed upon the denomination, however attenuated it might be. He has been often charged with inconsistency, and it is difficult to reconcile his position in 1870 with that held in 1865. What he attempted to secure, however, was the utmost of liberty possible within the limits of Christianity; and, when he had committed the Unitarian body ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... several years, before and after his sister Elizabeth's death, Whittier wore the look of one who was very ill. His large dark eyes burned with peculiar fire, and contrasted with his pale brow and attenuated figure. He had a sorrowful, stricken look, and found it hard enough to reconstruct his life, missing the companionship and care of his sister, and her great sympathy with his own literary work. There was a likeness between the two; the same speaking eyes marked the line from ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank! How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. no. only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out. But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... individual could only see very little of the main operations. Yet the little I saw revealed to me the splendid heroism of our men, and the carefully thought out disposition of our troops; a heroism so perfect that one attenuated line of khaki, consisting of under 30,000 men, held 240,000 Germans at bay. For a week this small force clung to their positions by dint of magnificent fighting and dauntless pluck, until the main army from the Aisne under General Sir ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... Long Lauchie was aptly described by his name. He was a tall, thin, attenuated man. Everything about him seemed to run to a point and vanish; his long, thin hands, his flimsy pointed beard, even his long nose and ears helped out his character. He rarely indulged in conversation, coming out of an habitual reverie only occasionally to make a remark. Nevertheless he was ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... retirement. The others demurred, though meekly. If their sun set so early, how could they be expected to pass the night with any degree of pleasure? The composer saw all this; but he was sensibly selfish, and buttoning the long frock-coat which hung loosely on his attenuated frame shook hands with his disciples, called a carriage and drove away. Lenyard and Scheff stared after him and then faced the situation. There were many tell-tale porcelain tallies on the table to be settled, and neither had much money; so the manoeuvring was an agreeable ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... the glass and reconnoitred. There was my friend, sure enough; moreover, he was playing a very respectable trout. But he was fishing on the near side of the loch, and though I had quite a distinct view of his back, and indeed of all his attenuated form, I was as far as ever from recognising him, or guessing where, if anywhere, I had seen him before. I now determined to stalk him; but this was not too easy, as there is literally no cover on the ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... generally, much larger than the neck into which it has been forced. It is seldom that one hears a buyer ask to see the cork. The average buyer of champagne would not understand the cork's story. He is accustomed to large and bulging corks and if he were to see an attenuated specimen, of dark complexion and as hard as a piece of vulcanized rubber he would look at it with great suspicion and, doubtless, refuse the wine. But an experienced waiter will know his man and will bring him the sort of "large bottle" to which he has been accustomed, ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... white tents. We had reached our journey's end. The church-bells were ringing as I rode into Quetta, for it was Sunday, and, unfortunately, a bright, fine morning. Had it been otherwise, I might have been spared the ordeal of riding, on a very dirty and attenuated camel, past a crowd of well-dressed women and frock-coated men on their way to church. As we passed a neat victoria, glistening with varnish, and drawn by a pair of good-looking, high-stepping ponies, containing a general in full uniform and a pretty, smartly dressed ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... an enlargement, or stretching, of the cavities of the heart, and may be confined to one or extend to all. Two forms of dilatation may be mentioned—simple dilatation, where there is normal thickness of the walls, and passive, or attenuated, dilatation, where the walls are simply distended or stretched out without ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... were again in demand. Again he discovered that the devastator was a microscopic destroyer. It was anthrax. The result of his experimenting was the discovery of an antidote, a method of prevention by inoculation with attenuated microbes. Similar studies and experiments and discoveries enabled him to furnish relief to the hog, at a time when the hog-cholera was making devastations. As he had discovered a preventive remedy for anthrax, he also found a remedy for chicken-cholera, to the saving of poultry ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... a power within her for which she had found no adequate task. She speaks vaguely, too, of a Being platonically loved, and loving in like manner, absent for most of the year, and seen only for a few days at long intervals, whose correspondence had added a new influence to her life. This attenuated relation was, however, broken before she made her essay of a new life. Her half-brother, Hippolyte, brought to Nohant a habit of joviality which soon degenerated into chronic intemperance; and though she does ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... able to say to himself from time to time "She knows it NOW—even while I worry." It was a great comfort to him in general not to have left past things to be dragged to light and explained; not to have to produce at so late a stage anything not produced, or anything even veiled and attenuated, at the moment. She knew it now: that was what he said to himself to-night in relation to the fresh fact of Chad's acquaintance with the two ladies—not to speak of the fresher one of his own. Mrs. Newsome knew ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... certainly rather attenuated, but the subject is an ungrateful one. Mme. de Sevigne finds Voiture "libre, badin, charmant," and disposes of his critics by saying, "So much the worse for those who do not understand him." One is often ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... the endless airy deluge of the Trade, are doubtless answerable for the climate. A strong draught of wind blew day and night over the anchorage. Day and night the same fantastic and attenuated clouds fled across the heavens, the same dusky cap of rain and vapour fell and rose on the mountain. The land-breezes came very strong and chill, and the sea, like the air, was in perpetual bustle. The swell crowded into the narrow anchorage ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said, gently, as they entered the room aglow with the soft light produced by guttered jets, "here is a Luini bought last winter." It was "The Mystic Marriage of St. Catharine." He paused while she surveyed the rapt expression of the attenuated saint. "And here," he went on, "is my greatest find so far." They were before the crafty countenance of Caesar ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... for the growth of leaves and blossoms, of grass and flowers and fruit, have lingered down to our own time in the shape of pastoral plays and popular merry-makings, is it not reasonable to suppose that they survived in less attenuated forms some two thousand years ago among the civilised peoples of antiquity? Or, to put it otherwise, is it not likely that in certain festivals of the ancients we may be able to detect the equivalents of our May Day, Whitsuntide, and Midsummer ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the matter of individual rights; they turned each his own horse and cow into his own door-yard. Animated, doubtless, by something of the same principle, those attenuated animals, having made an impartial detour of the premises, congregated, as of one accord, along the highway, especially in that part of the lane between the ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... first he had tramped round, like a pedler, delivering the dividends himself and soliciting more, but soon he hired a boy. This was in February, 1899. Business increased. The golden flood began to appear in an attenuated but constant rivulet. He hired four more employees and the whole top floor of the house. The golden rivulet became a steady stream. From a "panhandler" he rolled in ready thousands. The future opened into magnificent auriferous distances. He began to call himself "The ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... whose serum resembles most the white of an egg. It has therefore been most rationally concluded, that the origin of the animal spirits is from aliments capable of being changed into a similar substance, but so attenuated by incalation as to concrete by fire. For this reason the greatest support of the spirits is afforded by light and nourishing meats and drinks, which in taste and smell are even agreeable to infants. All cordials and aromatics are consequently the most proper for such purposes, ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... occurred in the United States. The most serious epidemic occurred in the latter part of the '70's, and the last one in 1900-'01. Influenza is present in the principal horse centers in a somewhat attenuated form. ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... of the last observations, as of the {302} first, the brightness of its single kernel, though the environing more dilute matter were then almost all lost; it being, according to the Author, more and more attenuated, and grown narrow, the nearer the Star approached ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... at very nearly the same period mentioned in a previous chapter—the latter part of June, 1862—lay on the sofa a young man, of perhaps twenty-five, with a countenance that would have been strikingly handsome if it had not been drawn and attenuated by suffering. He had a well-chiselled face, clear blue eyes, and light-brown, curling hair, closely shaven of beard or moustache; still showing, spite of sickness, the manly nature that lay within, and which always makes, when ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... among the azaleas, her large deer-like eyes were suddenly dilated with terror. From around the curve of the road came the quick beat of hastening footsteps, the sobbing sound of panting breath, and between her and the sinking moon there passed an attenuated one-armed figure, with a pallid sharpened face, outlined for a moment on its brilliant disk, and dreadful starting eyes, and quivering open mouth. It disappeared in an instant among the shadows of the laurel, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... case, there he still sits for a moment, for ever, amid the smiling admiration of centuries, in the agility, in the perfect navet also as thus occupied, of his sixteenth year, to which the somewhat lengthy or attenuated structure of the limbs is conformable. And then, in this attenuation, in the almost Egyptian proportions, in the shallowness of the chest and shoulders especially, in the Phoenician or old Greek sharpness and length of profile, and the long, conventional, wire-drawn ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... any instance in which mercury is administered to a living being. This difficulty, however, though insuperable in most cases, may not be so in all; there are sometimes concurrences of many causes, in which we yet know accurately what the causes are. Moreover, the difficulty may be attenuated by sufficient multiplication of experiments, in circumstances rendering it improbable that any of the unknown causes should exist in them all. But when we have got clear of this obstacle, we encounter another still more ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... afterwards the thought of the remaining negroes came very faintly back. We read what Napoleon said of his own conduct in the matter; but with the abolitionist Miss Martineau on one side, and the doubtful Man of Destiny on the other, the pure fact grew very attenuated, and I am not now sure that I have seen it. The moment your curiosity is really aroused about an historical circumstance, the glasses through which you have been viewing so varied and wide a landscape become suddenly very opaque. History is a gallery of pictures so individually ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... placed upon her chest of drawers. Had poor Minty been content with the full, free, and goddess-like outlines that it reflected, she would have been spared her impending disappointment. For, alas! the dress of her model had been framed upon a symmetrically attenuated French corset, and the unfortunate Minty's fuller and ampler curves had under her simple country stays known no more restraining cincture than knew the Venus of Milo. The alteration was a hideous failure, it was neither Minty's statuesque outline nor Louise Macy's graceful contour. ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... snatched up my hat, and joined the attenuated chase. It was making in one direction—a point, apparently, to the east of the town. As I sped excited through the narrow and tortuous streets, a great bulge of acrid dust bellied upon me suddenly at a corner; and, turning the latter, I plunged into a perfect fog of the same gritty smoke. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... immersed in water, and particularly on the lengthy cable between England and the Hague. Faraday showed that it was caused by induction between the electricity in the wire and the earth or water surrounding it. A core, in fact, is an attenuated Leyden jar; the wire of the core, its insulating jacket, and the soil or water around it stand respectively for the inner tinfoil, the glass, and the outer tinfoil of the jar. When the wire is charged from a battery, the electricity induces ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... pass along its green channel, between rising thickets where rabbits come out to gape, you feel as though walking into a poem by Walter de la Mare. This road, if pursued, passes by a pleasing spot where four ways cross in an attenuated X. Off to one side is a field that is very theatrical in effect: it always reminds us of a stage set for "As You Like It," the Forest of Arden. There are some gigantic oak trees and even some very papier-mache-looking ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... ladder from an adjacent building, threw it against the threatened lumber, skipped up its rungs like a squirrel and stood in silhouette against the flaring blaze, his dove-gray flannels flapping about his thin legs, his attenuated arms gyrating orders to the relief party, who had spread the rugs and blankets on the fire-endangered side of the pile of lumber and who were now soaking them with water under Muggles's direction. Now and then, as some part of the burning mass would collapse, a shower of sparks and smoke would obscure ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... storm, crashed and flooded the feelings with a sense of shipwreck and chaos, through which a voice seemed to cry- the quiver and delicate shrillness of one isolated string—and then fell a sudden silence, as though the end of all things had come; and on the silence the trembling and attenuated note which had quivered on the lonely string, rising, rising, piercing the infinite distance and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... party divisions in this tragic way. He was provided with religious explanations for the living and the dead; and his maxims in regard to contemporaries governed and attenuated his view of every historical problem. For the writers of his acquaintance who were unfaltering advocates of the Holy Office, for Philips and Gams, and for Theiner, who expiated devious passages of early youth, amongst other penitential works, with large volumes in honour of Gregory XIII., he had ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... argument which informed his movements—something stronger than common sense. It was a stirring of the insatiable curiosity of the human being who has begun to be sexually interested in another. Though not exactly coarse-fibred, he was so far removed from anything attenuated as almost to be so. He ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... the petty tyranny of Mataji; antagonistic as ever; sharpened and narrowed with age, even as her grandfather had mellowed and grown beautiful, with the unearthly beauty of the old, whose spirit shines visibly through the attenuated veil of flesh. Aruna, watching him, with clearer understanding, marvelled how he had preserved his serenity of soul through a ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... of these dark, shining, little evergreen leaves, spread at the foot of forest trees, whether sprinkled over in June with pairs of waxy, cream-white, pink-tipped, velvety, lilac-scented flowers that suggest attenuated arbutus blossoms, or with coral-red "berries" in autumn and winter, is surely one of the loveliest sights in the woods. Transplanted to the home garden in closely packed, generous clumps, with plenty of leaf mould, or, better still, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... by fierce party strife. Twice he endeavoured to free himself from the intolerable tutelage of the estates. The first occasion was in 1755 when, stimulated by his imperious consort Louisa Ulrica, sister of Frederick the Great, he tried to regain a portion of the attenuated prerogative, and nearly lost his throne in consequence. On the second occasion, under the guidance of his eldest son, the crown prince Gustavus, afterwards Gustavus III., he succeeded in overthrowing the tyrannous "Cap'' senate, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... imbibing everywhere those vapours. For which cause they who are wise will in this life also take care of using a thinner and dryer diet, that so that spirituous body (which we have also at this present time within our proper body) may not be clogged and incrassed, but attenuated. Over and above which, those Ancients made use of catharms, or purgations to the same end and purpose also. For as this earthy body is washed by water so is that spirituous body cleansed by cathartic ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... rocks, and others were overset; some of the men were dragged back by the surf and drowned; some lost their muskets, and were drenched to the skin: but the greater part got safe ashore. Among the foremost was seen the tall, attenuated form of Brigadier Wolfe, armed with nothing but a cane, as he leaped into the surf and climbed the crags with his soldiers. As they reached the top they formed in compact order, and attacked and carried with the bayonet the nearest French battery, a few rods distant. The division ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... embarrassing and painful. If, on the other hand, the task be imposed upon a 'Committee,' there ensues almost the certainty that its execution will depend at least as much on chance as on plan: that responsibility will be so attenuated as to pass off in vapour; and that the collection so brought together will consist of parts bearing but a chaotic sort of relation to ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... a light no longer intolerable, showed by their death-darkened tracery of inflamed veins how much the lone wanderer had suffered. The hands, with their strong bronze now paled to tarnished ochre, were heavily callused by manual labour, and sharply attenuated by recent hardship. The skin was cold, but the rigidity of death was yet scarcely apparent. Evidently he had not died of thirst alone, but of mere physical exhaustion, sealed by the final collapse of hope. And it seemed so strange to hear the low ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... great many pretty things, and the young gentleman a great many smart ones, before she discovered that the captain was wounded in the arm, though she had already remarked upon his pale face and rather attenuated form. ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... known at that time were those belonging to a decadent period—neither the Elgin marbles nor the Venus of Milo were accessible before 1816—so that the works from which they drew their inspiration were without character in themselves, or merely the feeble and attenuated copies of ancient Rome. In the pictures of this school, accordingly, we find only the monotonous perfection of rounded and well-modelled limbs, classical features and straight noses. Colour, to the sincere Davidian, was a vain and frivolous accessory, serving only to distract ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... go on. He was choking. The sole relief to his indignation was in once more tearing round the room, while Miss Walbrook moved to the fluted white mantelpiece, where, with her foot resting on the attenuated Hunt Diedrich andirons she bowed her head against an attenuated Hunt Diedrich ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they gave rise. Their quickly-attenuated force soon becomes inaudible to human ears. But the waves of air thus raised perambulate the surface of earth and ocean, and in less than twenty hours, every atom of the atmosphere takes up the altered movement due to that infinitesimal portion of primitive motion ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... although a descendant, and proud that he is so, of the Spanish settlers, has much intermixture of Indian and negro blood in his veins. Few of the Llaneros, indeed, could show a pedigree in which the Castilian blood was not sorely attenuated and diluted with that of half-a-dozen Indian or negro progenitors. He is born on the Llanos, as were his ancestors for many generations; and he has no conception of a land in which cattle-plains are unknown, and where the carcass of an animal is of more value ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... words she had spoken were a lie. It was the lie, the lie to her and which she had dragged out of her that seemed to the girl the ugliest thing. If she had admitted her folly, if she had explained, attenuated, sophisticated, there would have been a difference in her favour; but now she was bad because she was hard. She had a surface of polished metal. And she could make plans and calculate, she could act and do things for a particular effect. She could go straight to old Mrs. ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... martyrdom of forsaking father and mother and even his wife in the spirit appealed to his spiritual aspirations. Many a woman has been deserted in this subtle manner by her minister husband. But I kept the fear of it to myself, never encouraging this attenuated form of piety in him by even opposing it. Meanwhile, I began to observe with very genuine admiration his heroism in ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... D'Arcy, the great Dublin barrister, and of Doctor Driscoll. I was removed to the house of the latter, with poor Larry, who threatened to do all sorts of dreadful deeds, if he were not allowed to accompany me. My patrimony, which had become somewhat attenuated, was in the meantime put out to nurse. I was rather surprised at not being sent back to school, when one day the Doctor, as he sat cross-legged before the fire after dinner, rubbing his shins, called me ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... shadder there, and keep a-fannin' it smart for about three hours. When you come to the end of the shadder, take the right fork of the river, and in another hour you'll strike the Concho. That's the quickest way." And this bit of attenuated humor never failed to ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... was before. Through the disguise of rags, the sun-browned features, the heavy beard, and the generous and almost stalwart figure, his old and most intimate friends would have failed to recognize the delicate and attenuated man they had once known. Jim regarded him with great pride, and almost with awe. He delighted to hear him talk, for he was full of ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... ruffled and inflated throat, serrated back, and writhing tail; but in a very short time the dogs had obtained the mastery, and the creature was examined, proving to be a kind of iguana, nearly six feet in length, a great deal of which, however, was the attenuated tail. ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... were arguing anew as they paused upon the bluff, their gestures wonderfully distinct, drawn upon the sea of mist that filled the valley below and the air above. It revealed naught of the earth, save here and there a headland, as it were, thrusting out its dark, narrow, attenuated demesne into the impalpable main. Further and further one might mark this semblance of a coast-line as the vapor grew more tenuous, till far away the series of shadowy gray promontories alternating with the colorless inlets ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... troops, several of whom were sick, and lay along the deck helpless. Being an old campaigner, he had his medicine-chest with him, and he was thus enabled to administer to these men the medicines which he supposed their cases required. One huge fellow, attenuated to a skeleton by dysentery, who appears to have been aware of his benefactor's connection with the ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... the attenuated creature, with a morose reflection of his loss, the latter, with a rebellion which she could not control, selected with trembling fortitude a thick slice of bread, which she buttered liberally and began to devour ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... case of a third medium, the substance of which puzzled the philosophers of ancient time and still continues to puzzle the scientists of the present. This is the ether, that attenuated fluid which fills all inter-stellar space and all space in masses and between molecules and atoms not otherwise occupied by gross matter. When a lamp is lit the light radiates from it in all directions in a wave motion. That which transmits the light, the medium, is ether. By this means energy ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... wrote many comic songs there is ever in them something of the melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces and arabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad form was extremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so completely that it seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated and repeated to furnish full gratification to the ear. His form when compared with the modern ballad's amplitude seems like a Tanagra figurine beside a Michelangelo ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... consciously—during the lapse of years. "Thus," he says, "brothers and sisters, in the time of their infancy or childhood, have nothing in common except a certain family resemblance—and this not always. But, as they advance in age, the features that individualized them become attenuated, they return to the type of their progenitors, and one perceives that they are children of the same father and mother. Balzac's novels," he concludes, "have a connection of this kind. In his head, they were, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... place at one of the pianos, the top of the instrument was lowered, and Miss Fane, a little fair girl with a round face and frizzy auburn hair, came simpering forward to sing 'Una voce,' in a reedy soprano, which had been attenuated by half-guinea lessons from an Italian master, and which ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... his face is like the sun setting in the time of harvest, his waist garment excessive, and the undoubted symmetry of his middle portions honourable in the extreme. So welcome in my eyes, after witnessing an unending stream of concave and attenuated barbarian ghosts, was the sight of these perfections of Jones Bob-Jones, that instead of the formal greeting of this Island—the unmeaning "How do you do it?"—I shook hands cordially with myself, and exclaimed affectionately ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... morning a sad and thoughtful man. He was attenuated in appearance; one might almost say emaciated. I doubt whether his now grizzled looks had not palpably become more grey than on the preceding evening. At any rate he had aged materially. Years do not make a man old gradually and at an even pace. Look through the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... We turned to each other, the same thought, the same question in our eyes. For these plants to grow, there must be some air, however attenuated, air that we also should ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... strictly mechanical theory of the universe. Even the soul or life-principle in living creatures was simply a structure of the finest and roundest (and therefore most nimble) atoms, with which he compared the extremely attenuated dust particles visible in their never-ending {79} dance in a beam of light passed into a darkened room. This structure of exceeding tenuity and nimbleness was the source of the motion characteristic of living ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... side-ladder, and her first step on the Sabrina showed the worst of her apprehensions to be unfounded; for there, in the luxurious shade of the after-deck, the wretched Bertha, in full command of her usual attenuated elegance, sat dispensing tea to the Duchess ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... of two or three of these young matrons now on board the packet excited my more than commiseration; attenuated in form, sallow-visaged, and fragile as the aspen, they appeared to shrink from the very breeze, to seek whose freshness they had journeyed so far. Two of them possessed the remains of positive beauty; their dark hair was of gossamer fineness, and their handsome eyes sparkled with that unnatural ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... fear, and a species of fascination, to the spot. The appearance and actions of the parties indeed seemed to justify, not only the delusion, but the alarm of the worthy citizen. Both Gerald and Sambo were disguised in large dark cloaks, and as the light fell upon the thin person and pale, attenuated, sunken countenance of the former, he could scarcely persuade himself this was the living man, who a few months before, rich in beauty and in health, had questioned him of the very spot in which he now, under such strange circumstances, beheld him. ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... almost as much as upon Goldsmith, but I dare say that this fact had insensibly a great deal to do with my liking. Afterwards I came to see it, and at the same time to see what was Irving's own in Irving; to feel his native, if somewhat attenuated humor, and his original, if somewhat too studied grace. But as yet there was no critical question with me. I gave my heart simply and passionately to the author who made the scenes of that most pathetic history live in my sympathy, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... which exists of Rossetti at twenty-seven conveys the idea of a nature rather austere and taciturn than genial and outspoken. The face is long and the cheeks sunken, the whole figure being attenuated and slightly stooping; the eyes have the inward look which belonged to them in later life, but the mouth, which is free from the concealment of moustache or beard, is severe. The impression conveyed is of a powerful intellect and ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... points, and directed towards the zenith; in a few seconds these disappeared and a complete circle was displayed, bounding the horizon at an elevation of fifteen degrees. There was a quick lateral motion in the attenuated beams of which this zone was composed. Its colour was a pale yellow with an occasional ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... battered down, he undermined. [Sidenote: Methods of argument] Even when he argued against an opinion he called his polemic a "Conversation"—for that is the true meaning of the word Diatribe. With choice of soft vocabulary, of attenuated forms, of double negatives, he tempered exquisitely his Latin. Did he doubt anything? Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt" (subdubito). Did he think he wrote well? Not at all, but he confessed that he produced ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Siemens read a paper before the Royal Society in March 1882, on "A New Theory of the Sun". His views in many respects coincided with mine.* [footnote... Interstellar space, according to Dr. Siemens, is filled with attenuated matter, consisting of highly rarefied gaseous bodies— including hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and aqueous vapour; that these gaseous compounds are capable of being dissociated by radiant solar energy while in a state of extreme attenuation; and that the vapours so ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... caballeros, and looked in. On the bed, which was drawn to the middle of the chamber to get the air through the narrow loopholed windows, with the gauze curtains falling square on all sides, lay Lucia. Her attenuated frame scarcely presented an uneven surface beneath the snowy sheet which covered it. Her superb hair was spread in great black masses on the pillow, and her pale marble face reposed there like an ivory picture in an ebony setting. Her eyes were wide open, large and luminous, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... tentively, and found that I was not mistaken. Words cannot depict the anxiety with which I awaited the nearer approach of this mysterious object. Was it merely some inanimate substance, held in suspense in the attenuated atmosphere of the globule? or was it an animal endowed with vitality and motion? It approached, flitting behind the gauzy, colored veils of cloud-foliage, for seconds dimly revealed, then vanishing. At last the violet pennons that trailed nearest to me ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... firing was stopped by order of the artillery commander. Two guns and several prisoners were captured, together with horses and various boxes of shells for Maxim, Nordenfeldt, and Krupp quick-firing guns. Our wounded were many, and some companies looked woefully attenuated as the remnant, when all was over, whistled themselves back to camp. Their gallant leader, General Penn Symons, who had taken no precautions to keep under cover, but, on the contrary, had made himself conspicuous in being accompanied by ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... who outwatched the rest so long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards, that it almost seemed as if he meant to sit up until the morning of the resurrection; and bringing up the rear, attenuated but vivacious little Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated, reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in wickedness or wit. The good-humored junior member of our family always loved to make him happy by setting him chirruping about Miles Coverdale's ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... The attenuated neck of land between the Mersey and the Dee had an evil reputation for affairs of this description. Men pressed at Chester, and sent across the neck to the tenders or ships of war in the Mersey, seldom reached their destination unless attended ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... that one can only marvel at their popularity. They were not brilliant literature, by our standards to-day. Their humor is usually of a muscular kind, varied with grotesque exaggerations; the literary quality is pretty attenuated. Here and there are attempts at verse. He had a fashion in those days of combining two or more poems with distracting, sometimes amusing, effect. Examples of these dislocations occur in the Union letters; a single stanza will present the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... along the green-baize tables were deposited small parcels of stationery, consisting of a large sheet of sanguinary blotting-paper, a quire or so of foolscap, a piece of indiarubber, an attenuated lead-pencil, a dozen of quill pens, with others of Gillott's or Mitchell's manufacture, and an ink bottle—the whole putting one in mind of those penny packets of writing requisites that itinerant pedlars, mostly seedy-looking individuals who "have seen better days," ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... known only under the form of terrible but exceptional pulmonary consumption. Now it has at last been understood that there are slight tuberculoses, curable, but tremendously frequent. It will be the same with mental disorders; one day it will be recognized that under diverse forms, more or less attenuated they exist to-day on all sides, among a crowd of individuals that one does not feel inclined ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... singular contrast to the breadth and boldness of the Pharaonic ages. The broad-tipped reed-pen was thrown aside for the pen with a fine point, and the scribes vied with each other as to which should trace the most attenuated lines. The details with which they overloaded their figures, the elaboration of the beard and the hair, and the folds of the garments, are sometimes so minute that it is scarcely possible to distinguish them without a magnifying glass. Precious as these documents are, they ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... attenuated, so etherial, and penetrable in quality, and multiple in atoms; and a breath of air two quarts or more taken into the lungs fully charged with contagion, how many thousand air cells could be impregnated by one single breath? Say we take a case of measles into ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... The two bowls of wood given to the heroes at baptism are clearly a modification of that familiar incident in folk-tales, where one of a pair leaves with the other a "Lifetoken" {7} which will sympathetically indicate his state of health. As this has been considerably attenuated in our romance, we are led to the conclusion that it is itself an adaptation of a ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... Spurzheim, and Lavater, and remark his sallow face, attenuated by base excesses! Do you know any forehead so broad which means so little? the oyster could teach this man philosophy! His chin is sharp, his eyes are blank blue, his short black hair curls over his ears, and his beard is of a prickly black, with ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... not provokingly, as though to prolong his distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her, it was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It was the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything; and she had lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not wanted, that she seemed ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... known me at Dresden; a Baron de Wiedan, claiming Bohemia as his fatherland, who greeted me by saying that his friend the Comte St. Germain had arrived at the Etoile d'Orient, and had been enquiring after me; an attenuated-looking bravo who was introduced to me as the Chevalier de la Perine, whom I recognized at the first glance as the fellow called Talvis, who had robbed the Prince-Bishop of Presburg, who had lent me a hundred Louis the same day, and with whom I had ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... remains unchanged. The transparency of the compound is quite equal to that of the mixture prior to combination. No change is perceptible to the eye, but the keen vision of experiment soon detects the fact that the perfectly transparent and highly attenuated ammonia resembles pitch or lampblack in its behavior ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... beauty of Tenniel's classical purity of figure upon the children by teaching them to appreciate the contrast it presents to the bulging vulgarities made manifest by Keene; and showed them also that while Du Maurier depicted with admirable artistic interpretation the refined surroundings and attenuated forms of women as they are, Linley Sambourne, that master of lovely line, pointed the moral by drawing women as they should be. There was nothing conventional about the Heavenly Twins, and it was therefore easy to make a good impression ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... cracked as he tore his hands apart, flung out his arms, and leaned his forehead on them in a passion of fury. The other two looked at his shaking back—the attenuated Mr. Jones with mingled scorn and a sort of fear, Ricardo with the expression of a cat which sees a piece of fish in the pantry out of reach. Schomberg flung himself backwards. He was dry-eyed, but he gulped as if ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... liking for Mrs. Eliott. She seemed to him an apparition mainly pathetic. With her attenuated distinction, her hectic ardour, her brilliant and pursuing eye, she had the air of some doomed and dedicated votress of the pure intellect, haggard, disturbing and disturbed. His social self was ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... disposition to fall asunder into smaller pieces without any perceptible cause. It is full of cavities, containing compressed air, which, when the ice melts, bursts its attenuated envelope with a crackling sound like that of the electric spark. It thus behaves in this respect in the same way as some mineral salts which dissolve in water with slight explosions. Barents relates that on the 20/10th August 1596 he anchored his vessel to a block of ice which was aground ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... fortress—faith in God.'"[54] Butler's method, then, is allowed to be potent enough to crush all such half-believers as still clung to the idea of a Personal God and Intelligent Ruler; but it had no force or cogency against such as, following Arnold, attenuated the idea of God into a Stream of Tendency. This theme he elaborated with great ingenuity and characteristic dogmatism in his Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist; and, inasmuch as no task can be more distasteful than to attack the teaching of a man whose genius and character ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... in your bodies. Here lies your danger. I see nothing which distresses me so much as the physique of the children in our public schools. Great heads, beautiful faces, brilliant eyes; but with that attenuated neck, thin, flat chest, and languid gait. Look at these two boys, John and Thomas. John is a native Yankee. I found him, without long searching, in one of our public schools. Thomas is an imaginary boy, composed ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various |
