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More "Attenuated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strength of his religious impressions, the boldness and 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 first part of these Remains. Unpleasant ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... miscellaneous collections of human beings; and now and then a shred of humanity like this little adust specialist, with just the resources needed to keep the "radical moisture" from entirely exhaling from his attenuated organism, and busying himself over a point of science, or compiling a hymn-book, or editing a grammar or a dictionary;—such are the tenants of boarding-houses whom we cannot think of without feeling how sad it is when the wind is not tempered to the shorn lamb; when the solitary, ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... years pass. 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 ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... of Baird, or the olive-backed thrush, but its song is totally different. The moment I heard it I said, "There is a new bird, a new thrush," for the quality of all thrush songs is the same. A moment more, and I knew it was Bicknell's thrush. The song is in a minor key, finer, more attenuated, and more under the breath than that of any other thrush. It seemed as if the bird was blowing in a delicate, slender, golden tube, so fine and yet so flute-like and resonant the song appeared. At times ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... cold almost to chilliness after the warmth of the preceding days, so there was no haste, no hurry, in the dispersion of the cloud blankets that covered the rocky walls and plateaus below. Slowly they began to rise, then to stretch out and become attenuated. Tiny gusts of wind played with them, and tossed them hither and thither. Banks of smoky gray lay over certain portions, but there was no regularity, no evenness, either in the clouds themselves, or in their disposition. East and west thick masses hid all vision; immediately at our feet the ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... tall, so far as I could judge, but oh, how attenuated! Her lower limbs absolutely made no impression on the mattrass, to which her frame appeared to cling, giving a ghastly conspicuousness to the oedematoust swelling of her feet, and to her person, for, alas! She was in a way to have become ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... blame is not in all cases the same, nor the breeding of the offenders. Pinney learned that there were defaulters who were in society, and not merely because they were defaulters for large sums and were of good social standing at home, but because there were circumstances that attenuated their offence in the eyes of the people of their city of refuge; they judged them by their known intentions and their exigencies, as the justice they had fled from could not judge them. There were other defaulters of a different type and condition, ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... round. It was Lord Selsey with his wife. He looked suave and debonair as ever, with his touch of attenuated Georgian dandyism. She had not changed, nor had her long brown eyes lost their sly and fascinating twinkle. Evidently Lord Selsey had not been able—if indeed he had tried—to persuade her to take much trouble about her appearance, but he had ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... especially in the case of inanimate objects. This is where Hans Christian Andersen reigns supreme. Horace Scudder says of him: "By some transmigration, souls have passed into tin soldiers, balls, tops, money-pigs, coins, shoes and even such attenuated things as darning-needles, and when, informing these apparent dead and stupid bodies, they begin to make manifestations, it is always in perfect consistency with the ordinary conditions of the bodies they occupy, though the several objects ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... millions of bulls, at length far away there appeared something terrible. I can only describe its appearance as that of an attenuated mountain on fire. When it drew nearer I perceived that it was more like a ballet-dancer whirling round and round upon her toes, or rather all the ballet-dancers in the world rolled into one and then multiplied a million ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... from which I sprang. Now, some authors would weary their indulgent readers with a flatulent chapter upon the moral beauty of this virtue; but as my first wish is to win favor by my candor, I must honestly confess, that necessity was the parent of this lean attenuated offspring!—For, alas! ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... plan for intercepting the French in their occupation of the interior, by inducing Virginia settlement to proceed along one side of James River only, until this column of advancing pioneers should strike the attenuated line of French posts in the center. In the same year he sent a body of horsemen to the top of the Blue Ridge, where they could overlook the Valley of Virginia.[90:1] By 1714 he became active as a colonizer himself. Thirty miles above the falls of the Rappahannock, ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... beginning the descent. At that instant Iphicrates set his ambuscade in motion, and dashed against the Spartan at full speed. The latter quickly discerned that there was no hope of escape as he scanned the long straggling line of his attenuated column. The troops in advance, he was persuaded, would never be able to come back to his aid up the face of that acclivity; besides which, he observed the utter bewilderment of the whole body at sight of the ambuscade. He therefore turned to those ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... ordinary 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 John ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... a reality that drives into the region of the ideal, or of the merely possible, the object which is incompatible with it. Suppose the stronger and more substantial existence annihilated: it is the attenuated and weaker existence of the merely possible that becomes the reality itself, and you will no longer be representing the object, then, as non-existent. In other words, and however strange our assertion may seem, there is more, and ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... forced by the paternal pride of Chatham. At Cambridge, at Lincoln's Inn, and in Parliament the intellectual pressure was maintained, with the result that his weakly frame was constantly overwrought and attenuated by a too active mind. Further, the pressure at Westminster was so continuous as to preclude all chance of widening his nature by foreign travel. He caught but a glimpse of the life of France in 1783; and his ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... arising from the touch was contracted even by inanimate objects; for whatever was touched in any way by an unclean man, became itself unclean. Wherein the Law attenuated the superstition of the Gentiles, who held that uncleanness was contracted not only by touch, but also by speech or looks, as Rabbi Moses states (Doct. Perplex. iii) of a woman in her periods. The mystical sense of this was ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... sound hardly came across the room; and I came in with a soft bass note from time to time. No instrument, you know; just an unaccompanied murmur no louder than an Aeolian harp; and it sounded infinitely sweet and plaintive and—what shall I say?—weak—attenuated—faint—'pale' you might almost say—in that formal, rather old-fashioned salon, with that great clear oval mirror throwing back the still flames of the candles in the sconces on the walls. Outside the wind had now fallen completely; all was very quiet; and suddenly in a voice ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... and some few weeks passed, ere Emmeline was sufficiently convalescent to leave her room, and then her pallid features and attenuated form were such constant and evident proofs of that mental as well as bodily fever, that Mrs. Hamilton could not look on her without pain. She was still inwardly restless and uneasy, though evidently struggling for cheerfulness, and Mr. Maitland, to whom some necessary ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... alone can keep literature alive is shown by literary history after Shakespeare. Just after him you have the "mellifluous poets" of the next period on the one hand, with style enough, but with such attenuated ideas that their work has died. Who knows Drayton or Brown or Wither? On the other hand, there came the metaphysicians with ideas in abundance, but not style, and their ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... up. At first I was as incapable as a swathed infant—stepping with limbs I could not see. I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist. I had to hang on to the table and press my ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... the business of Reason seems to be to chasten and direct our instincts, never to destroy them. We require individuality in our attachments: the sympathy which is expanded over all men will commonly be found so much attenuated by the process, that it cannot be effective on any. And as it is in nature, so it is in art, which ought to be the image of it. Universal philanthropy forms but a precarious and very powerless rule of conduct; and the 'progress of the species' will turn out equally unfitted for deeply ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... nights her life was despaired of. Her husband, the shadow of his former self, never left her bedside. He had loved her well, with all his worldliness and pride. But now the crisis of the disease came on. Her life hung upon the most attenuated thread. The doctor gave them no ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... swift messenger of death when it came to hand-to-hand fighting, and the horse I rode had its rich trappings of gold and silver. It may all seem strange, to hear me tell those things of the long ago and to look upon me now"—and the speaker stretched forth his skinny, twisted fingers and attenuated arms, and for ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... with a vast head, by way of prospectus, which protruded itself for three weeks successively at the top of the leading article, with a fine and subtle body of paragraphs, and the smallest legs, in the way of advertisements, that any poor newspaper ever stood upon! And yet this attenuated journal had a plump and plethoric title,—a title that smacked of turtle and venison; an aldermanic, portly, grandiose, Falstaflian title: it was called The Capitalist. And all those fine, subtle paragraphs were larded out with recipes how to make money. There was ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, and that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally thin and flexible was Elfride at this moment, that she appeared to bend under the light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into her sides and bosom, and splintered into spray on her face. There is nothing like a thorough drenching for reducing the protuberances of clothes, ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... but also on moral and philosophical grounds. For instance, Mr. Keir Hardie tells us: "As for thrift, much which passes for such at present is little different from soul-destroying parsimony. Men and women starve their years of healthy activity that they may have enough to keep alive an attenuated old age scarcely worth preserving."[854] In other words, he advises the workers to spend all they earn and to become paupers in their old age. A very influential Socialist writer says: "A man by starving his mind and his body is able to save money. He borrows ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... intention of finding out whether this 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, ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... half of which scratched its head meditatively. Then a tall, thin man, with an attenuated face like a starved fowl, ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... of this I would say: that the fire there is that which heats the globe, inside of it is the water, and it happens that this humid element, being rarefied and attenuated by virtue of the heat, and thus resolved into vapour, it requires much greater space to contain it, therefore if it does not find easy exit, it goes on with extreme force, noise, and destruction to break the vessel; ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... 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
... 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
... of the creek, while the front was level with the street. This was the office of Mr. Matthew Wright, the sole representative of the colored race at the bar of Chinquapin County. Mr. Wright came of an "old issue" free colored family, in which, though the negro blood was present in an attenuated strain, a line of free ancestry could be traced beyond the Revolutionary War. He had enjoyed exceptional opportunities, and enjoyed the distinction of being the first, and for a long time the only colored ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... Brazil-wood with which the vessel was laden, devoured every scrap of leather, singed and ate the horn of lanterns, hunted rats through the hold, and sold them to each other at enormous prices. At length, stretched on the deck, sick, listless, attenuated, and scarcely able to move a limb, they descried across the waste of sea the faint, cloud-like line that marked the coast of Brittany. Their perils were not past; for, if we may believe one of them, Jean de Lery, they bore a sealed letter from Villegagnon to the magistrates of the first French ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... reached the landing. Many were stove among the 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 ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... prose is attenuated almost to the vanishing point, where it may seem to be lost, it may nevertheless borrow from its content a beauty of rhythm, imagery, and form that will seem to be its very own. For in language, as we observed ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... about it—grew as attenuated and brown as an eel—and garnished his conversation with several significant hints about suicide. He was, however, saved from that ghastly alternative by being drafted into a Rowing Club, who plied their gondolas daily on the Union Canal. Hard ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... obtaining the attenuated virus used in the treatment is as follows: A rabbit is inoculated by the brain method before described, each day, with suspension of the fresh, fixed virus. These rabbits die in six days after the inoculation. In this way a rabbit dies each day; the spinal cord is removed, divided into sections, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... us very probable, that the density of the atmosphere was changed at the deluge, having been considerably attenuated, nor can this inference be regarded in the light of mere speculation: there seems sufficient evidence that it really must have been so. The rainbow appearing for the first time—the abbreviation of human life, and the diminished size of animal and vegetable forms, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... eclipse her eyes. It is difficult to resist the tendency to depend upon those portraits, and to enjoy vicariously through them a high consideration. But, after all, what girl is complimented when you curiously regard her because her mother was beautiful? What attenuated consumptive, in whom self-respect is yet unconsumed, delights in your respect for him, founded in honor for his ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... last summer. Harry returned, to protest that he would not join the walk, if she chose to be seen in the spectacles, while she undauntedly continued her petition, though answered that she would attract the attacks of the quarrymen, who would take her for an attenuated owl. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... brought up in Europe, these facts should exempt me from a supposition of bias in exonerating England. It is with real grief that I must record my convictions against the Boer nation as solely and entirely guilty, but with this qualification, that its responsibility is much attenuated by the fact, as I will endeavour to show, that the bulk of that people has been unconsciously decoyed as tools of a gigantic intrigue, a conspiracy which was originated some thirty years ago by an infamous Hollander coterie, and operated since by ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... elevation in our atmosphere at which these delicate clouds are formed the temperature is too low, even in midsummer, for water to exist in the liquid state; and accordingly, the attenuated vapor from which they were condensed passed at once into a solid form. They consist, in fact, of tiny crystals of ice, not of little drops of water. If the precipitation has been hasty, the crystals will, though all small, be of many sizes jumbled together, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... machine-shop. In that delectable world religion is superfluous; the true high priest is the mechanical engineer; the minor clergy are the village blacksmiths. It is rather a pity that so fine and fair a sphere should prosper only in the attenuated ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... the other, "and observe what is yet more worth your study;" and he pointed to the third bystander, whose face, sharp and attenuated, was bent with an absorbed, and, as it were, with a hungering attention over ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... suspend our hammocks, which, by the by, when slung, left, I noticed, but a very small space on either side of the table; and depending from a beam overhead there hung a common horn lantern containing the most attenuated candle I ever saw—a veritable "purser's dip." This lantern, which was suspended over the centre of the table, afforded, except at meal-times or other special occasions, the sole illumination of the place. Although ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... way over a bed of decayed vegetation often meandering through a dense growth of wiry reeds in a channel set well below the general level. Banks of attenuated grass and rank foliage lined its course, and the welcome sunlight poured down upon its water in sharp contrast with ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... mourning-pins holding a lock of hair. They had big black bonnets, some of them with stiff capes, such as Kate and I had not seen before since our childhood. They treasured large rusty lace veils of scraggly pattern, and wore sometimes, on pleasant Sundays, white China-crape shawls with attenuated fringes; and there were two or three of these shawls in the congregation which had been dyed black, and gave an aspect of meekness and general unworthiness to the aged wearer, they clung and drooped about the figure in such a hopeless ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... have 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.
... in a blanket. Don Quixote always expresses himself in a stilted and oratorical manner; Sancho's language is of the coarsest kind, and is interlarded with the vulgarest illustrations and proverbs. His master is tall, attenuated, in fact, merely skin and bone; his face is long, his nose prominent, his eyes hollow and very bright; Sancho, on the contrary, is short, fat, his face is round, eyes small and pig-like, mouth large and coarse, nose nothing ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... on the sickness of the patient. 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... a puffy-faced little man, with an overgrown body, and midriff sustained upon an attenuated pair of legs; his visage is buried in an immense shirt collar, stiff and starched as a Norman cap. Dr. Veron believes himself the key-stone of the Elysean arch, and that the weight of the government is on his shoulders. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... typical subfamily Pteropodinae, while the remainder represent a second group, Carponycterinae (or Macroglossinae), characterized by having the facial part of the skull produced, the molar teeth narrow, and scarcely raised above the gum, and the tongue exceedingly long, attenuated in the anterior third, and armed with long recurved papillae near the tip. The single representative of the first genus, Notopteris macdonaldi, inhabiting Fiji, New Guinea and the New Hebrides, is distinguished from other bats of this family by the length of its tail, which is nearly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... intruders with a look of passive wonder. It was a poor, ill-conditioned-looking object, suffering from a cutaneous disorder. On giving it a piece of damper, it quickly began to devour it, tearing it to fragments with its sharp and attenuated fingers, with all the keenness of a hawk. We left it standing with a lump of bread in each hand, where its mother would no doubt find it when she came to see what had been left of it by the large dogs, as the aborigines of this part of Australia ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... first time in his life Sylvestre hears that music. The bullets coming towards a man have a different sound from those fired by himself: the far-off report is attenuated, or not heard at all, so it is easier to distinguish the sharp rush of metal as it swiftly passes by, almost grazing ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... but what a startling change a few months had wrought! Who could have recognized in this pale, attenuated-looking young person, whose old-fashioned clothes, and out-of-style hat, suggested poverty's grim clutch, the famous beauty, whose jewelry and gowns used to be the envy of every woman in New York? Where the pace is so swift, those who do not keep up ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... which I would illustrate is skimpy. It signifies something mean and defective; and in the following history, told to me by a clerical friend, it refers to an attenuated and bony female. When a curate in a remote country parish, he took a raw village lad into his service, to train him for some better place; and, when his education was sufficiently advanced, and he had made some ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... curiously enough, lacked this garment of the dark. But it was only after the Feudal Period that the call, as we now know and practise it, became a social custom; and even to this day feudalism, in an attenuated form, rules society, and the call is often enough an act of homage to the superior social chief. One might argue (except for the fact that Sheba gave as well as exhibited her treasurer to Solomon) that ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... the continuance of D.O.R.A., a remanet from last Session, the ATTORNEY-GENERAL was almost apologetic. He laid much stress upon the "modest and attenuated form" which the measure now presented, and the short time it was to remain in force. Serious objection was taken by the Irish Members to the provision that in districts where a proclamation is in force the D.O.R.A. regulations, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... without, the fire burned low on the rude hearth, and the little apartment, but illy protected from the searching blasts, grew chilly. Still the hermit sat silent, his bowed head resting between his small, attenuated hands. Edgar rose, brought the long overcoat and spread it over his shoulders, as a protection from the increasing cold. Then wrapping a blanket around his own light form, he stole softly to the window, and turned his gaze upward to the star-lighted heaven. He dearly loved to sit thus through ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... eyes upon a woman; but he confessed to me that at the age he had reached it was indifferent to him whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was very old when I first came to know him, and his body so attenuated that it seemed formed of nothing so much as of so many roots of trees. With all this sanctity he was very affable. He never spoke unless he was questioned, but his intellectual right-mindedness and grace gave to all ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... than 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. ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... issuing from the horizon in the north, east, and west 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 ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... than many whose existence is protracted. 'If I 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 ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... depth is apparently massive; this is an inherited ancestral trait due to the fact that it developed out of the earlier coffers that really were massive; in reality it is rather light. The later modified Jacobean chest shows only an attenuated appearance of massiveness, and the loss is real, for there are no fresh compensating qualities. But the developed eighteenth-century walnut chest is the unmistakable expression of a new feeling in civilisation, a new feeling ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... bargain and corruption slid from his tongue with the concentration of venom of the rattlesnake. The very thought of Clay seemed to inspire his genius for vituperation; his eye would gleam, his meagre and attenuated form would writhe and contort as if under the enchantment of a demon; his long, bony fingers would be extended, as if pointing at an imaginary Clay, air-drawn as the dagger of Macbeth, as he would writhe the ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... thought. There was none worse, those days, in the eyes of the people. He craved and got the little man's release on parole. A fortnight later, as Dr. Sevier was sitting at the breakfast table, with the little rector at its opposite end, he all at once rose to his full attenuated height, with a frown and then a smile, and, tumbling the chair backward ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... of External Perception has a psychological place, where its difficulties are very much attenuated, to say the least of it; and, however convenient it may be to treat it as a detached problem, we should carry with us into the discussion all the lights that we obtain while regarding it as it stands among the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... spots and a band, one small spot somewhat transverse, near the middle, beneath this a broadish band extends from the anal margin nearly to the outer side of wing, which is divided by a brown line, leaving an irregular squareish spot, attenuated towards the outer margin; on the margin are three differently-shaped dots beginning from the internal margin, and in one of the specimens are four slight lunules, growing fainter as they approach the outer margin. Beneath, upper wings with two transverse fulvescent orange bands, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... Quebec. His forehead and chin receded; his nose, tip-tilted heavenwards, formed with his other features the point of an obtuse triangle. His hair was fiery red, his shoulders narrow, his legs a pair of attenuated spindle-shanks; he was a chronic invalid. But between his fiery poll and his plebeian and upturned nose flashed a pair of eyes—keen, piercing, and steady—worthy of Caesar or of Napoleon. In warlike genius ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... 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 ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... suggested as possibly the best course, can have brought him but little increase of expectation. If, in its best estate, after its first restoration, the Rump had disappointed him, what could he hope from it now in its attenuated and crippled condition, with Vane expelled from it because of his actings during the Wallingford-House Interruption, with Salway out of it, who had worked so earnestly with Vane on the Church-question, and with others of the ablest also out of it, leaving a House ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... called forth." Dr 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 ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... to—but by this time Lily's eager foot was on the 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 of Beltshire and ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... news, when it 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 ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... had always been, and yet with such strange and sudden starts of generosity that he had been known to seek out distant obscure maiden relatives and redeem the mortgaged roof over their heads. His strongest instinct, which was merely an attenuated shoot from his supreme feeling for possessions, was that of race, though he had estranged both his son and his daughter by his stubborn conviction that he was not doing his duty by them except when he was making their lives a burden. For, as with most ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... considerations 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. The reason is that the pressure varies ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... author of the play suddenly entered, and Lucien beheld M. du Bruel, a short, attenuated young man in an overcoat, a composite human blend of the jack-in-office, the owner of house-property, and ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... on which the Morgan home stood. Three persons were in sight, and hurrying along toward the house. One of these he recognized as his chum, Thad, who must have returned from Hobson's mill-pond earlier than he had expected. Another was the tall, attenuated Chief Wambold; and the party whom he was gripping by the arm—yes, it was none other than Hugh's late ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... thousand three hundred when I became aware that I could go no farther. Physically, the strain was not as yet greater than I could bear, but my machine had reached its limit. The attenuated air gave no firm support to the wings, and the least tilt developed into side-slip, while she seemed sluggish on her controls. Possibly, had the engine been at its best, another thousand feet might have been within our capacity, but it was still missfiring, and two out of the ten ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... described to you. Mont Benon, a beautiful promenade, was close at hand, and, in the near view, the eye ranged over fields, verdant and smooth lawns, irregular in their surfaces, and broken by woods and country-houses. A long attenuated reach of the lake stretched away towards Geneva, while the upper end terminated in its noble mountains, and the mysterious, glen-like gorge of Valais. We returned from this excursion in the evening, delighted with the exterior of Lausanne, and more and more convinced that, all things ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the Act been passed than the battle was renewed again over the interpretation of the clause. Many of the Church controversialists held that the liberal or more advanced party intended to exclude all reference to the Bible or to religion, on the plea that some sect could be found to which the most attenuated expression of religion would appear to be against the plain meaning of the clause, and Huxley, who had been in the forefront of the controversy, and who was a candidate for the first London School Board, was decried as an enemy of the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... 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, chopped sphagnum, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... 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 which they ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... position of the earth with reference to the sun which would cast a shadow having such a tenuous form as the Milky Way presents. Such a body obviously would not be a globe, but a long-drawn-out, attenuated figure. There is, to be sure, no direct evidence preserved to show that Anaxagoras conceived the world to present such a figure as this, but what we know of that philosopher's close-reasoning, logical mind gives ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... exist even now, in most country parishes of New England, a few most excellent and notable women, who delight in an overworked parson, for the pleasure they take in recommending their teas, and plasters, and nostrums. The more frail and attenuated the teacher, the more he takes hold upon their pity; and in losing the vigor of the flesh, he seems to their compassionate eyes to grow into the spiritualities they pine for. But he must not give over his visitings; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... above the turmoil of emotion a little tremulous, attenuated ideal was trying to raise its head. Her duty. She dimly discerned a possibility of deliverance, of purification from her sin. Therefore she clung more desperately than ever to her post. Seeing that she had served ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... Lisbon alone) working hard and well at occupations which the Portuguese will not do at all, or, if they attempt them, will do indifferently; herding together some ten or twelve in a small room, living on maize bread and a clove of garlic washed down with water; accepting thankfully a very attenuated hire, and yet contriving to send substantial savings back to Galicia,—must considerably affect the labour market and tend to keep wages low. They also close certain forms of labour to the native worker, and cause these industries to be ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... five lines: the first and third consisting of 5 syllables, the second, fourth and fifth of 7, making a total of 31 in all. The number of lines is not compulsory: sometimes they may reach to thirty, forty or even more, but the alternation of 5 and 7 syllables is compulsory. The most attenuated form of all is the hokku (or haikai) which consists of only three lines, namely, 17 syllables. Necessarily the ideas embodied in such a narrow vehicle must be fragmentary. Thus it results that Japanese poems are, for ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of head, narrow and rounded at tip; face abruptly narrowed in front of eyes; muzzle long, narrow, cylindrical; lower jaw slightly projecting; eyes large; tongue very long, last third attenuated, covered with brush-like papillae; interfemoral membrane very narrow, especially at root of tail; fur reddish brown, and ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... fortitude. Every morning, when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me. I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength, threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die, if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall. She had only been three months at school; and it was some years before the experiment of sending ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Mountains, live the Djangals or Bandra-Lokhs, the latter name signifying man-monkey, and thus associating itself with the tale of Rama, above alluded to. Like most of the Dravidian tribes, they live in great misery, and show every sign of their condition in their attenuated figures. One of this tribe measured by Rousselet was five feet in height. It may here be remarked that the stature of the Dravidian races exceeds that of the purer Negritos, a fact due, no doubt, to the influence of crossing. Farther south, in the Nilgherry Hills, and ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... 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
... tall and thin, and looming up lanky against a dusky sky, reminded me equally of an attenuated M.P., a phantom telegraph-pole, and PETER ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the deserts when the persecution was first raised by Dioclesian. The desire of shedding his blood for Christ made him quit his solitude, while the people of that city were assembled to the Circus[1] to solemnize public games in honor of Mars. His attenuated body, long beard and hair and ragged clothes, drew on him the eyes of the whole assembly; yet, with this strange garb and mien, the graceful air of majesty that appeared in his {082} countenance commanded veneration. Being examined by the governor, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the secretary made a sign. From behind a stone pillar there stepped forth a man at whose appearance Francis could not forbear a scream. He was tall and very attenuated, clothed wholly in black. His face thin and sinister was of a pale sickly color while his eyes, black and glittering, held the gaze with a basilisk glare. He was the sworn tormentor ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... snow hindered them from acting successfully against the flying cavalry of the enemy. The artillery vainly thundered from the ramparts, and in the field it could not advance, because of the weakness of our attenuated horses. This was our way of making war; this is what the civil service employes of Orenbourg ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... moments in this affair were hidden from me, but in the end my aunt triumphed. He did not so much throw as jerk over Mrs. Scrymgeour, and she did not so much make a novel of it as upset a huge pailful of attenuated and adulterated female soul upon this occasion. My aunt did not appear in that, even remotely. So that it is doubtful if the lady knew the real causes of her abandonment. The Napoleonic hero was practically unmarried, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the written language of a country where it is unknown), for 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 ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... having stripped Mr. Chesterton so that he is no longer even an attenuated ghost of himself, let us re-clothe him and present him decent and as he is. We must imagine this abstracted personage, ignorant and therefore unbiassed, suddenly introduced to all the learned jargon of the day. He still retains his simple views ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... possessed a long, attenuated, but powerful figure, and a face chiefly remarkable for its cadaverous hollows and a pair of hungry eyes and ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... animals] emaciated, lean, meager, gaunt, macilent^; lank, lanky; weedy, skinny; scrawny slinky [U.S.]; starved, starveling; herring gutted; worn to a shadow, lean as a rake [Chaucer]; thin as a lath, thin as a whipping post, thin as a wafer; hatchet-faced; lantern-jawed. attenuated, shriveled, extenuated, tabid^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... . For aught 'Bias knew then—as indeed 'Bias had reason to suspect—this husk of a man, helpless on the bed, had robbed him of his all, ruined him, left him no prospect but to begin life over again when late middle-age had sapped his vigour, attenuated the springs of action, left sad experience in the room of hope. And 'Bias's thought, ignoring it all, had been to sit beside this man's calamity, on the merest chance of piercing it with ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... to 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 voices of Rory and Mary close by; to see ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... country infested with lawless soldiery. The stranger came steadily on, and as he drew near, Helmar noticed that, although dressed in flowing Eastern garb, he was a white man, and of patriarchal age. He had a snow-white beard, that reached to his waist, and his figure was tall, lean, attenuated, and tottering. Altogether his appearance was so fascinating that George drew his ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... be played, and multitudes huzza and banners wave. Perhaps some such feelings as these Mr. Ruskin himself at one time experienced, until, shocked by what he deemed the excessive mundaneness, the intense unspirituality of the great Fleming,—he revolted to the thoughtful, attenuated poetry of Angelico and the early Italian painters, to be in time again driven by the too intense asceticism and archaic debility of this school, to the robust excellence and the more real and material, though pure and refined, beauty of ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated as I could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then, faltering in the act and folding it up once more, I put it back in my pocket. "Is ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... the gravel, dipped her hands in the water, feeling full of life in the burning heat of the sun, attenuated by the fresh puffs of breeze in the shade. While she tore and soiled her frock on the stones and clammy ground, Camille neatly spread out his pocket-handkerchief and sank down beside her with endless precautions. Latterly the young couple ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... which renders most speeches of this class diluted and commonplace was exactly what he needed. He required abundant intellectual room for a proper display of his powers, and he had the rare quality of being able to range over vast spaces of time and thought without becoming attenuated in what he said. Soaring easily, with a powerful sweep he returned again to earth without jar or shock. He had dignity and grandeur of thought, expression, and manner, and a great subject never became small by his treatment of it. He had, too, a fine historical imagination, and could breathe ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... enemy, and when he started I moved to the front with the balance of the reserve, to put everything I had into the fight. This meant an inestimable advantage to the enemy in case of our defeat, but our own safety demanded the hazard. All along our attenuated line the fighting was now sharp, and the enemy's firing indicated such numerical strength that fear of disaster to Alger increased my anxiety terribly as the time set for his cheering arrived and no sound ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... at a distance making the motions of stooping to bathe, on which Yuranigh immediately said "He has found plenty of water;" and there, in fact, our guide had found two large ponds. They were still in the attenuated channel of the Macquarie, here called by them Wammerawa, the course of which river is continuous throughout the marshes; and marked by some high reeds greener than the rest, even when the reeds may have been generally burnt. These reeds are distinctly different from ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... is the connection between the soul and body. A system of slender wires—more slender by far than the most attenuated thread of human construction—connects the more than ethereal spirit with the wonderful mechanism of the human body. And so long as this intimate connection is maintained intact we have the living, breathing, reasoning ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... The first sign I read, on entering its long street, might perhaps be considered as confirming my remote impression. It bore these words: "Miss Ogle, Past, Present, and Future." On arriving, I visited Lieutenant Abbott, and the attenuated unhappy gentleman, his neighbor, sharing between them as my parting gift what I had left of the balsam known to the Pharmacopoeia as Spiritus Vini Gallici. I took advantage of General Shriver's always open door to write a letter home, but ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Kelvin thought, in the form of vortices), that the different atoms of which matter is composed are, as suggested in View Three, apertures of different complexity of outline—namely, those points at which Ether is absent or its density attenuated. Have we not apparently here another example of Positive and Negative, the Invisible the Ether, as the Real, and the Visible, the Material Universe, as its Negative the Unreal, similar to our list of Positives and Negatives in View One? Ether itself cannot be explained by ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... 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 upon them in this direction, and, the tutor soon had a practical ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... thicker than the bark of the good old English oak,—and if this noble sovereign, notwithstanding 'the heart' and interior substance of which it boasts, is, even in the well-protected park in which it has been born and bred, often prostrated by the storm, how difficult is it to conceive that an attenuated aerial hollow beam, no thicker than its mere rind, should, by human science, be constructed strong enough to withstand, besides the weights rushing through it, the natural gales and artificial squalls of wind to which, throughout its entire ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... WEBSTER was a little restless in a part for which he was not constitutionally suited, but played with the greatest courage and sincerity. Mr. DION BOUCICAULT'S study of Mr. Pim was extraordinarily effective; and the way in which he made the attenuated pipings of this futile old gentleman carry like the notes of a bell was in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... of the Equidae, while it is more slender than in most of the true Palaeotheria; it is fixedly united, but not ankylosed, with the radius. There are three toes in the fore limb, the outer ones being slender, but less attenuated than in the Equidae. The femur is more like that of the Palaeotheria than that of the horse, and has only a small depression above its outer condyle in the place of the great fossa which is so obvious in the Equidae. The fibula is distinct, but very slender, and its ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of the attenuated person was unusual; not from any peculiarity of feature, but from its invincible cheerfulness. This cheerfulness was constitutional, and contagious. His face seemed nearly ten years younger than it was; for the unquenchable good-humor having settled there in infancy had thwarted the hand of time. ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... with innumerable wrinkles, occasioned as much by thought and care as by age; his pointed beard and moustaches were almost white, contrasting strikingly with his dark, jaundiced complexion, the result of an atrabilarious temperament; his person was extremely attenuated, and his hands thin and bony. He had once been tall, but latterly had lost much of his height, in consequence of a curvature of the spine, which bowed down his head almost upon his breast, and fixed it immoveably in that position. His features were good, ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... in honor of some distinguished personage. To produce startling and telling stage effects, machinery of the most ingenious contrivance was devised; scenery, as yet unknown in ordinary exhibitions of the stage, was painted with elaborate finish; goddesses in the most attenuated Cyprus lawn, bespangled with jewels, had to slide down upon invisible wires from a visible Olympus; Tritons had to rise from the halls of Neptune through waters whose undulations the nicer resources of recent art could not render more genuinely marine; fountains ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... mischief, watching my intellectual entanglement. The mere sight of his excellent appetite was an assurance of success; for I had very clear recollections of days and nights without a thought of food, when his baffled mind had chafed before some problem while his thin, eager features became more attenuated with the asceticism of complete mental concentration. Finally he lit his pipe, and sitting in the inglenook of the old village inn he talked slowly and at random about his case, rather as one who thinks aloud than as one who makes ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... holds the date like a vice), we saw grass. It was grass. It was undoubtedly grass—the kind of grass that gave one the feeling that this particular veld, like a man prematurely bald through worry or riotous living, had been trying some hair restorer with ludicrous results—grass whitish, feeble, attenuated, that to be seen at all wanted an ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... carefully stood up in a vessel of water, placed upon the table on a linen cloth, diffusing its sweet odor around, and expanding its purple calix in the very closet, whose plastered walls, gray and damp, were feebly lighted by the rays of an attenuated candle. The sempstress, who had taken off no part of her dress, was seated upon her bed—her looks were downcast, and her eyes full of tears. She supported herself with one hand resting on the bolster; and, inclining ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... night's engagement, and the deaths from cold and exposure that had occurred during the passage from Pine Island, had so thinned the already attenuated ranks of the 1st West India Regiment, that on the morning of the 24th, only 16 sergeants and 240 rank and file were available for duty. The officers serving with them were Major Weston, Captains Isles and Collins, Lieutenants McDonald, ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... thoroughly. She would chuck him under the chin mornings, or shake his solid head between her hands, telling him he was a brute, but a nice kind of a brute. "Yes, yes," he would growl. "I know. I'm an animal, I suppose. You're a seraphic suggestion of attenuated thought." ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... improvements in the navigation of the lakes of Italy and Switzerland, it is true; but time, even at this hour, has done little towards changing the habits and opinions of those who ply on these inland waters for a subsistence. The Winkelried had the two low, diverging masts; the attenuated and picturesquely-poised latine yards; the light, triangular sails; the sweeping and projecting gangways; the receding and falling stern; the high and peaked prow, with, in general, the classical and quaint air of those vessels that are seen in the older paintings and engravings. A gilded ball ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... Henceforth, our system allows him only the regime to which we see him subject, namely the rush, the puffing and blowing, the gallop without stopping on a race-course, the perilous jumps at regular distances over previously arranged and numbered obstacles. Instead of being restricted and attenuated, the disadvantages of the Napoleonic institution spread and grow worse, and this is due to the way in which our rulers comprehend it, the original, hereditary way ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and Baeddicker. He found the surface of Mars one of extreme complexity, a multitude of bright spots in places, but with a general fixity of character which led him to believe that the appearances were not atmospheric. He indeed attributed to Mars an attenuated atmosphere and thought that some of the vagaries in its surface characters were due to variations in our own atmosphere He did not find the Schiaparelli canals as distinct in outline as given by that ingenious observer. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... countenance. Such a face would, with advancing age, become too bony, as fleshless as that of a knight errant. But at this stage of youth, with chin and cheek lightly covered with soft down, its latent harshness was attenuated by the charming softness of certain contours which had remained vague and childlike. His soft black eyes, still full of youth, also lent delicacy to his otherwise vigorous countenance. The young fellow would probably not have fascinated all women, as he was not what one calls a handsome man; but ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... 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 filaments, their uniform carbonization, making ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... arrogance of youth and my intellectual calm. I had seen a ghost. There, in the dim light, where we had flung the dead man overboard, I had seen a faint and wavering form. Six-feet in length it was, slender, and of substance so attenuated that I had distinctly seen through it the ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... 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 ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... genius in its more alarming shapes, his fair chin whisker seemed an absurdity. The more discriminating, however, welcomed it. Anything might be expected of a man with a chin whisker which some one, with more imagination than restraint, had described as an "attenuated shredded wheat biscuit seen through a glass darkly." Leofwin's work had of late years suffered on account of a rheumatism which defied medicine. He had sacrificed his tonsils and nine teeth upon ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... extraordinary group. It consisted of numerous horses in the last stage of decrepitude, the animals being such mere skeletons that at first Ethelberta hardly recognized them to be horses at all; they seemed rather to be specimens of some attenuated heraldic animal, scarcely thick enough through the body to throw a shadow: or enlarged castings of the fire-dog of past times. These poor creatures were endeavouring to make a meal from herbage so trodden and thin that scarcely a wholesome blade ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... them (as sponges), they 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 vapours—some ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... changing, being ruled by the change of flower to seed, the development causing the sharp bend to rise day by day. The leaves of the root are spoon-shaped, and those of the stems broadly lance-shaped, varying in length from 3in. to 5in., entire, veined, of good substance, and having attenuated stalks; the younger leaves have a changeable satiny hue; all the leaves at their junction with the stems are marked with a bright redness; the main stems are furnished with many side branches, which assist in maintaining floriferousness until late autumn. The habit of the plant is ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... of Overbeck is well known. I myself had the privilege of first seeing the painter when in the Cenci Palace, as far back as the year 1848. My journal describes a man impressive in presence, tall and attenuated in body, worn by ill-health and suffering, the face emaciated and tied round by a piece of black silk. The mind had eaten into the flesh; the features were sorrow-laden. The voice sank into whispers, the words were plaintive and sparse; noiselessly the artist glided among easels ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... that daily," said the cardinal; and he invited his companion to seat himself on the trunk of an oak that had been lying there since the autumn fall. A slight hectic flame played over the pale and attenuated countenance of the cardinal; he seemed for a moment in deep thought; and then, in a voice distinct yet somewhat hushed, and at first rather faltering, he said: "I know not a grander, or a nobler career, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 political arrangement ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... in length and of 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 ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the Highlanders, 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 ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... was tall and thin, and looming up lanky against a dusky sky, reminded me equally of an attenuated M.P., a phantom telegraph-pole, and PETER SCHLEMIL, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... corruption of the Equites (as Judices) was flagrant, and Drusus proposed to transfer the judicial functions to a mixed body of 300 Senators and 300 Knights, the selected Knights to be included in the now attenuated ranks of the Senate. 14. ad dandam civitatem Italiae. The claims of the Italians to the franchise were just and pressing, but the overbearing pride and self-sufficiency of the ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... collected from the last rainstorm, wherein a lean-backed hog wallows, and we learn that this is the villagers' water supply! Naked children of both sexes run about under our horses' legs, and supplicate me for a centavito. A horse, or at least the framework of a horse—for the animal is attenuated beyond description—stands tethered under the shade of a rude roof of boughs and whinnies feebly to our ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... lot of many who tried to live for sanity, justice and truth when mad riot raged. Dante, Victor Hugo, Prince Kropotkin and Wagner are types to which we turn. Then there is an attenuated form of persecution known as ostracism, which consists in being exiled at home, but of this it is not worth while ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... cowpox and proved that a slight attack of one disease protected the body from a disease of an allied nature. An occasion equally famous in the history of medicine was a day in 1881, when Pasteur determined that a flock of sheep vaccinated with the attenuated virus of anthrax remained well, when every one of the unvaccinated infected from the same material had died. Meanwhile, from Pasteur's researches on fermentation and spontaneous generation, a transformation had been initiated in ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... 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
... usually embittered by disappointment or by hope deferred,—angular, envious, busybodies in other women's matters; or they are comically odd, self-ridiculing, and unrestful; or, worst of all, they have become morally attenuated by a thwarted love or a long course of dismal and absurd self-sacrifice and are so resigned, colorless, and impassive, that, like Naaman, we are tempted to go away in a rage. But where shall we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... An attenuated disciple of the ill-paid art which has been described as one embracing the "delightful task which teaches the young idea how to shoot," in a fit of despair, being but little skilled in the above sporting accomplishment, endeavoured to cheat nature of its right of killing by trying the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... darkened by the cloud of a new sorrow. Langhetti was dying. His frail form became more and more attenuated every day, his eyes more lustrous, his face more spiritual. Down every step of that way which led to the grave Edith went with him, seeming in her own face and form to promise a speedier advent in that spirit-world where ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... roared solemnly without, the fire burned low on the rude hearth, and the little apartment, but illy protected from the searching blasts, grew chilly. Still the hermit sat silent, his bowed head resting between his small, attenuated hands. Edgar rose, brought the long overcoat and spread it over his shoulders, as a protection from the increasing cold. Then wrapping a blanket around his own light form, he stole softly to the window, and turned his gaze upward to the star-lighted heaven. He dearly loved to sit thus through the ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... to her daughter, showing that in this art, as in all else, order cannot be dispensed with. There were things a tall person might wear, but which a short person might not, and the draperies which adorned a portly lady were but pitiable weeds when trailed by her attenuated sister. The effect of long thin lines in a fabric will make a short woman appear tall, while round, thick lines can reduce the altitude of people whose height is a trouble to be combated. She illustrated the usage of large and small checks ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... at her death. Lady Elizabeth, as we shall still by way of distinction call her, was then so emaciated as to resemble a living spectre; but the lines of a rare and commanding beauty still remained. Her features were regular and noble, her eyes magnificent, and her attenuated figure was upright and dignified, with the step of an empress. Her complexion of marble paleness completed this portrait. Her beautiful arms and hands were still as white as ivory, though almost like a skeleton's from their thinness. ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... what they call 'seconds,' but so low that the sound hardly came across the room; and I came in with a soft bass note from time to time. No instrument, you know; just an unaccompanied murmur no louder than an Aeolian harp; and it sounded infinitely sweet and plaintive and—what shall I say?—weak—attenuated—faint—'pale' you might almost say—in that formal, rather old-fashioned salon, with that great clear oval mirror throwing back the still flames of the candles in the sconces on the walls. Outside the wind had now fallen completely; all was very quiet; and suddenly in a voice not much ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... trickled its way over a bed of decayed vegetation often meandering through a dense growth of wiry reeds in a channel set well below the general level. Banks of attenuated grass and rank foliage lined its course, and the welcome sunlight poured down upon its water in sharp contrast with the ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... small glimmer of moonlight entering by one of the holes to carry objects to eyes that would have pierced the deepest gloom. There is said to be no darkness in the world sufficient to conceal objects entirely; but here there was, in addition to the attenuated beam, the white dress of Ady, and the bed where Kalee lay. Janet had described it, and the table and the chair: what more than the bare walls was there to describe? Nothing. On that bed, covered by a thin white cloth, lay this Indian princess dead, with Ady hanging over her, and pulling ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... writers in the possession of a genius, which in the most exact sense of that admirable word, can only be described as the genius of a gentleman. It is a style singularly sensitive, a little vibrant perhaps sometimes, and so tense as to become attenuated, but of a most rare and wistful beauty. His humor which is his weakest point is a thing of almost feminine perceptions but quaintly pliable, as the sense of humor in women often is, to an odd strain of ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... in that company of futility and openly avowed inadequacy. The child was a keen-eyed, slender little girl, resembling neither father nor mother, but looking rather like her paternal grandmother, who was a fair, attenuated woman, with an intelligence which had sharpened on herself for want of anything more legitimate, and worn her out by the unnatural friction. The little Amabel, for Eva had been romantic in the naming of her child, was an old-fashioned-looking ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... conspiracy to save his life. Having thus tried every avenue to destruction, and failed in all, he felt like a man doomed to live forever. Henceforward he shrank and shrivelled by slow degrees, until in the course of time he became so attenuated that the grossness of human vision could no longer ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... long spells of immunity from foreign interference. Her people, defended by the Himalayan wall and the ocean, were free to develop their own scheme of national life; and world-forces which pierce the thickest crust of custom, reached them in attenuated volume. Their isolation ended when the sea was no longer a barrier; and for maritime nations it is but an extension of their territory. A third invasion began in the sixteenth century, and has continued till our own day. The underlying motive ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... lungs; and as the absorption of oxygen is a cause of solidity in many bodies, this tenuity of the blood may proceed from a deficient absorption of oxygen. However this may be, it is certain that the blood is very much attenuated, though with considerable variations in degree, as it is sometimes found thin on opening a vein, and at a subsequent period is thicker; varying perhaps according to the continuance of ease or difficulty in respiration. It is certain, that ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... of the play suddenly entered, and Lucien beheld M. du Bruel, a short, attenuated young man in an overcoat, a composite human blend of the jack-in-office, the owner of house-property, and ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... would eventually swallow up altogether. In the efflagration, when everything went back to the primeval aether, the universe would be pure soul and alive equally through and through. In this subtle and attenuated state, it would require more room than before and so expand into the void, contracting again when another period of cosmic generation had set in. Hence the Stoic definition of the Void or Infinite as that into which the cosmos is resolved at ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... parts of mineral earth there is one of gold. Spite of this, however, by reason of their great ductility, the precious metals have been able to penetrate even into the meanest huts in one form or another. It has been estimated that a silver leaf may be attenuated by beating to a thickness of only 0.00001 of an inch, and a gold leaf to 0.0000035 of an inch. An ounce of gold spread on a silver thread may attain a length of 13,000 English ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... 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
... with a spear. Pund-jel threw another which took Kar-ween in the knee-joint, so that he could not walk, but soon pined away and became a mere skeleton. "Thereupon Pund-jel made Kar-ween a crane," and that is why the crane has such attenuated legs. The Kortume, Munkari and Waingilhe, now birds, were once men. The two latter behaved unkindly to their friend Kortume, who shot them out of his hut in a storm of rain, singing at the same time an incantation. The three then turned into birds, and when the Kortume sings it is a token ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... furnished with stout hooks to which to suspend our hammocks, which, by the by, when slung, left, I noticed, but a very small space on either side of the table; and depending from a beam overhead there hung a common horn lantern containing the most attenuated candle I ever saw—a veritable "purser's dip." This lantern, which was suspended over the centre of the table, afforded, except at meal-times or other special occasions, the sole illumination of the place. Although the ship was ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... elbows propped on the table, his eyes fixed on the swaying waters outside, from which the moon gradually faded, leaving them to make a denser blackness in the night. As Pellerin read, this density of blackness—which never for a moment seemed inert or unalive—was attenuated by imperceptible degrees, till a greyish pallour replaced it; then the pallour breathed and brightened, and suddenly dawn was ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... consoled by the Sacraments of the Church. For long weary days and nights her life was despaired of. Her husband, the shadow of his former self, never left her bedside. He had loved her well, with all his worldliness and pride. But now the crisis of the disease came on. Her life hung upon the most attenuated thread. The doctor gave them no hope ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... wholly normal. He liked work and rejoiced in good cheer, when he found it, however attenuated its form. He was a good companion, and even at ten years old a practical person. He took his loose coppers from the old bureau drawer, and remembering that he had several times helped Jake Hutchins to sell his newspapers, he went forth into the world ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... pretext for visiting the Temple the very attenuated colonial fact that some Mortons akin to him of Merrymount in Massachusetts, have their tombs and tablets in the triforium of the Temple Church. But when we had climbed to the triforium by the corkscrew stairs leading to it, did we find there ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... narrow prison quarters, it seemed like paradise, and Annie walked on air, so delighted was she to have him with her again. Yet there were still anxieties to cloud their happiness. The close confinement, with its attendant worry, had seriously undermined Howard's health. He was pale and attenuated, and so weak that he had several fainting spells. Much alarmed, Annie summoned Dr. Bernstein, who administered a tonic. There was nothing to cause anxiety, he said reassuringly. It was a natural reaction after what her husband ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... 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 only ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... 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 Borgia ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the young Countess had never moved her eyes from my face—perhaps I was flattered—perhaps for that reason I talked on and on, pouring out wisdom from a somewhat attenuated supply. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... services of M. Pasteur 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 ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... words came up through the clear blue air, infinitely diminished and attenuated, like some insect cry. The tall man seemed to guess just what the interruption would be. He turned with a ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... evening of intoxicating success, just for the sake of her old ambitions: they had been little less than entities at one time; for old friendship's sake she would like to give them their due. She did wish that she felt a thrill as she touched it,—a vibration of the attenuated thread which connected one of her soul's particles with that other soul which, perhaps, had contributed its quota to her making. But she felt nothing, and replaced the dagger with ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the most attenuated form, has been expressed by Salomon Reinach. "Instead of freedom of faith and thought the Reformation produced a kind of attenuated Catholicism. But the seeds of religious liberty were there, though it was only after two centuries that they blossomed and bore fruit, {736} ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... syllables, the second, fourth and fifth of 7, making a total of 31 in all. The number of lines is not compulsory: sometimes they may reach to thirty, forty or even more, but the alternation of 5 and 7 syllables is compulsory. The most attenuated form of all is the hokku (or haikai) which consists of only three lines, namely, 17 syllables. Necessarily the ideas embodied in such a narrow vehicle must be fragmentary. Thus it results that Japanese poems are, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... gravel, dipped her hands in the water, feeling full of life in the burning heat of the sun, attenuated by the fresh puffs of breeze in the shade. While she tore and soiled her frock on the stones and clammy ground, Camille neatly spread out his pocket-handkerchief and sank down beside her with endless precautions. Latterly the young couple almost ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... It was not more than twelve feet square, and in the corner was an apology for a bed. On this was stretched an old man whose face was sunken, whose eyes were lusterless, whose hand was long and thin and bony, and whose voice was attenuated and pitched in a falsetto key. The guide said that this old Chinaman was sixty-eight years of age, and that he had had a life of varied experience. He was a miner by profession, but had spent all his earnings long ago, and was now an object of charity as well as of pity. Indeed ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... almost too 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 ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... secretary of all the governors Lower Canada had yet had, corresponded, most confidentially, with his home masters, somewhat, perhaps, to the prejudice of his honor the administrator. As general Simcoe loathed the nasal twang, attenuated appearance, and the vulgar republicanism of a downeast American, so Mr. Witsius Ryland abominated Romanism. Speaking of the Roman Catholic clergy of Canada, he says:—"I call them Popish to distinguish them ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... combined with extremely latitudinarian opinions. There is, indeed, a type of mind which finds in such services a happy anodyne for half-suppressed doubt. Petitions which in their poignant humiliation and profound emotion no longer correspond to the genuine feelings of the worshipper, seem attenuated and transformed when they are intoned, and creeds which when plainly read shock the understanding and the conscience are readily accepted as parts of a musical performance. Scepticism as well as belief ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... For aught 'Bias knew then—as indeed 'Bias had reason to suspect—this husk of a man, helpless on the bed, had robbed him of his all, ruined him, left him no prospect but to begin life over again when late middle-age had sapped his vigour, attenuated the springs of action, left sad experience in the room of hope. And 'Bias's thought, ignoring it all, had been to sit beside this man's calamity, on the merest chance of piercing it with one ray ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... which he had to go was broad enough to begin with, although very rough and wild here and there. But after he had gone a little way, it got so narrow that he found it difficult to secure a foot-hold. At this point the ridge became so attenuated that the youth saw at the first glance that it was impossible to proceed in an upright position; he therefore crept along on all fours, or sat astride the ridge and urged himself on with his hands ...
— Harper's Young People, November 11, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... which might, perhaps, fill a distich, is expanded and attenuated, till it grows weak and ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... 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, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... 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 ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... 'far-flung battle line' the ordinary 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 John French ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... arm closer about her, he pressed her to his side, and they sat in silence while the wind whistled in the tree-tops above them. From their shelter they could see the empty chimneys of Jordan's Journey, and a blurred and attenuated figure on the lawn, which was that of the old negro, who passed back and forth spreading manure. Some swallows with slate grey wings were flying over the roof, and they appeared from a distance to whirl as helplessly ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... the seclusion of the mulberry-tree I found that the paper had become ungummed, so I placed the tobacco in it and succeeded after a while in rolling it up. The result, though somewhat attenuated, was recognisably a cigarette. I lit it, and when I had finished coughing I came to the conclusion that if only I could induce Joan to present her gift to the German troops instead of to our Tommies it would precipitate our ultimate triumph. I had to eat several ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... against the walls envying their dapper ease. A remittance man from Devonshire whose ancestral halls had sheltered an hundred knights danced with Faro Nell, who gambled for a living, while the station agent's attenuated daughter palpitated in the arms of a husky stage-driver. Mr. Percy Parrott, the sprightly cashier of the new bank, swung the new milliner from South Dakota. Sylvanus Starr, the gifted editor of the Crowheart Courier, schottisched with Mrs. "Hank" Terriberry, while his no less ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... I have 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
... warped humanity the breaker has become! It saps even the attenuated manhood of the aliens it attracts, and when they are rendered useless for its ends, emits them to be a ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... 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 ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Pteropodinae, while the remainder represent a second group, Carponycterinae (or Macroglossinae), characterized by having the facial part of the skull produced, the molar teeth narrow, and scarcely raised above the gum, and the tongue exceedingly long, attenuated in the anterior third, and armed with long recurved papillae near the tip. The single representative of the first genus, Notopteris macdonaldi, inhabiting Fiji, New Guinea and the New Hebrides, is distinguished from other bats of this ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... undiluted brag on the part of this sturdy fellow—mere boasting of what he would do under particular conditions which were never likely to arise. A glance at him, indeed, rather helped to support his statements, for Stuart, though somewhat attenuated after those months of internment at Ruhleben, after months of short commons and indifferent accommodation, was still a big bony fellow of some twenty-five years of age, with broad shoulders, long arms and legs, ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... of the example. Tho both display the same unflinching fortitude in encountering death; still the glory of your exit will be superior to mine." After this, both had the veins of their arms opened with the same stroke. As the blood flowed slowly from the aged body of Seneca, attenuated as it was too by scanty sustenance, he had the veins of his legs and hams also cut; and unable to bear up under the excessive torture, lest by his own sufferings he should overpower the resolution of his wife, and by witnessing her anguish be betrayed into impatience himself, he advised her ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... presence of the spectre became more and more constant; and wherever the poor lawyer went, there was the aged man at his side. From being one of the finest men in the county, he became a miserably attenuated and bowed old man. Misery was stamped on every feature—terror was indicated in every movement. At length he appears to have besought his ghostly attendant to free him of his presence. It was long before the ghost would listen to any terms; but when Ezekiel at length ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... the ideas of gold and offal lie very near each other is shown in numerous forms and variations in myth, fairy tale and popular superstition. I mention above all the figure of the ducat or gold-dropper which has probably been attenuated from a superstition to a joke, and around it are gathered such expressions as "he has gold like muck," "he must have a gold dropper at his house"; then the description of bloody hemorrhoids as golden veins; the fabulous animals that produce as excrement ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... bottle is, 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, though it will ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... to gaze. 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
... nearly conical: differs from pyriform in being shorter and more suddenly attenuated at base: applied to an eye ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... satins, shoe buckles and powdered hair usually mark the high tide of imaginative originality among this sort of people. So it was to be the inevitable Louis XVI fete—or as near to it as attenuated, artistic intelligence could manage, and they altered Duane's very clever and correct sketches to suit themselves, careless of anachronism, and sent the dainty water-colour drawings to town in order that those who sweat and sew in the perfumed ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the next street, I could, without difficulty, look into the third floor of the houses we were passing, and on reaching the market place, I found myself elevated to the altitude of the church-clock; my bearers having become as attenuated as the conductor. Here all consciousness left me, and what farther became of me, I know not. On recovering myself, I lay in the chair which stood in its old place. It was already near mid-day; I therefore crept softly out of my fearful tenement, and luckily escaped unobserved. My friends to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... chiefly of the face, and dwells on its delicacy, and on the delicacy of the hands and feet, the slender figure, and especially the slender waist. In the pictured representations of the women of that time, and in modern romantic imitators of the chivalric thought and feeling, the waist is attenuated to a degree that implies extreme debility. The same ideal is still extant among a considerable portion of the population of modern industrial communities; but it is to be said that it has retained its hold most tenaciously in those modern communities ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... 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 Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... thrown at us Americans that we love a title, and that we are not averse to the ornamentation of our names with pseudo and attenuated "Honorables" and "Colonels" and "Judge" and so on; and I am bound to admit the impeachment, for I blush at some of my be-colonelled and becaptained friends, and wonder at their rejoicing over such effeminate honorifics, especially those colonelcies born of clattering ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... which covered scarcely more than a hundred acres, a rim of yellowish, green grass followed the water's edge and struggled against the inevitable, and here and there among the grasses flowers of faded colors and attenuated foliage reared their heads bravely in the burning sunshine. And this lone lake, nestled in the lowest spot among the mountains and valleys which once floored the Pacific, now held the last of earth's waters. Barren and lifeless the rest of the world ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... 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 ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... down the following 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 ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... characteristics of the family from which I sprang. Now, some authors would weary their indulgent readers with a flatulent chapter upon the moral beauty of this virtue; but as my first wish is to win favor by my candor, I must honestly confess, that necessity was the parent of this lean attenuated offspring!—For, alas! ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... Coffee has been recommended for this purpose, but delicate and pleasing washes or glazings may be produced from burnt sienna, yellow ochre, burnt umbre, and lake, in various combinations, and laid on extremely attenuated by water.] ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... "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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... was completed, and the plantations were deserted. It was dusk; there were no leaves as yet; the nightingales would not begin to sing for a fortnight; and "the Mother of the Months" was in her most attenuated phase—starved and bent to a mere bowed skeleton, which glided along behind the bare twigs in ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... wanting other indications of the good gentleman's having gone down in the world of 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 in any ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... was a little restless in a part for which he was not constitutionally suited, but played with the greatest courage and sincerity. Mr. DION BOUCICAULT'S study of Mr. Pim was extraordinarily effective; and the way in which he made the attenuated pipings of this futile old gentleman carry like the notes of a bell was in itself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... 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. The reason is that the pressure varies in proportion to the surface ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... all such cases when suitable vapours are employed in a sufficiently attenuated state, no matter what the vapour may be, the visible action commences with the formation of a blue cloud. Let me guard myself at the outset against all misconception as to the use of this term. The blue cloud here referred to is totally invisible in ordinary daylight. To be seen, ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... all possible doubt that without the intervention of the United States of America the War could not have been won by the Entente. Although the admission may prove humiliating to the European point of view, it is a fact which cannot be attenuated or disguised. The United States threw into the balance the weight of its enormous economic and technical resources, besides its enormous resources in men. Although its dead only amount to fifty thousand, the United States built up such a formidable human reserve as to deprive Germany of all ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... of speech, he was singularly like David in person and deportment. They resembled twins rather than first cousins. They were both remarkably fine-looking men, tall, wiry, and in splendid condition. It was only the slightly more attenuated features of Robert that made it possible, even for Brett, to distinguish one from the other at a ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... took the offering with broken thanks; But day succeeded day, and still revealed Those sombre and attenuated shanks Intensely unconcealed; ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... spectre issuing from her bright pavilion. She rose, red and angry, from her dark couch. Afterwards a thin haze partially obscured her brightness; her pale, wan beam seemed struggling through a wide and attenuated veil. The wind, too, began to impart that peculiar chill so well understood as the forerunner of a change. A loud sough came shuddering through the frozen bushes, moaning in the grass that rustled by her path. Muffled and alone, she took her adventurous ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... 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, chopped sphagnum, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... endure. With grim humor he wrote to Thomas, "I suppose the enemy with his smaller force intends to surround us!" [Footnote: Id., p. 582.] The only alternative seemed to be to find the places where that smaller force was most attenuated and break through by main strength. He notified his subordinates that this must be done on the 27th. [Footnote: Ibid. and p. 588.] As a preliminary, he ordered demonstrations to be kept up on both flanks to draw ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... were set, is such a wearying task 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 ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... becomes of importance in long range high angle fire, where the shot reaches the higher attenuated strata of the atmosphere; on the other hand, we must take [tau] about 800 in a calculation ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... were four-posters and the things of four-poster days. Wing-cheek chairs of cozy depths told of old-time fireside dreams; a work-table with attenuated legs called to mind the wearisome needlework of our foremothers; and a brass warming-pan carried us back to the times when only such devices could make tolerable the frigid ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... trained in the exact form of confession. Father Letheby has drilled them well. But dear me! what white souls they are! Poverty and purity have worked hand in hand to make them angelic, and their faces are transfigured by the light that shines within. And their attenuated bodies show clearly the burning lamp of holiness and faith, as a light shines soft and clear through the opal shades of porcelain or Sevres. And the little maidens always say, "Tank you, Fader," when they receive their penance; and the boys say, "All right." I sometimes expect ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... the same as saying, I don't care whether I am dirty or clean? When others tell me this, I regard it as a pose, or a poor joke. This person was manifestly sincere in his profession of faith. He did not care what he ate. He looked it. Were I afflicted with this peculiar ailment, this attenuated form of coprophagia, I should try to keep the hideous secret to myself. It is nothing to boast of. A man owes something to those traditions of our race which has helped to raise us above the level of the brute. Good taste in viands has been painfully acquired; it is a sacred ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... for some unknown reason, are increasing in virulence and approaching the activity of the bovine bacillus, or are they really bovine bacilli which have multiplied in the human body until their virulence has become attenuated? In whatever manner these questions are decided it would seem that the findings of the German commission, instead of supporting Koch's views that we can decide with certainty by the inoculation of cattle as to the source of any given bacillus, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... of the offenders. Pinney learned that there were defaulters who were in society, and not merely because they were defaulters for large sums and were of good social standing at home, but because there were circumstances that attenuated their offence in the eyes of the people of their city of refuge; they judged them by their known intentions and their exigencies, as the justice they had fled from could not judge them. There were other ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... on it, and the thing's done. Well! not done, perhaps, but begun; for if the bank is high enough to get exposed at low water, this pioneer mangrove grows. He has a wretched existence though. You have only got to look at his dwarfed attenuated form to see this. He gets joined by a few more bold spirits and they struggle on together, their network of roots stopping abundance of mud, and by good chance now and then a consignment of miscellaneous debris of palm leaves, or a floating tree-trunk, but they always die ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Professor Roberts showed him to be a different sort of a man, though perhaps harder to read. Square shoulders and attenuated figure—a mixture of energy and nervous force without muscular strength; a tyrannous forehead overshadowing lambent hazel eyes; a cordial frankness of manner with a thinker's tricks of gesture, his nervous fingers emphasizing ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... white because red and white are such lovely colours; and because a red rose has so strange an air of complicity in human passion, and the first white rose was surely grown from some phosphorescent cutting that dropped through the starlight from the moon. And these were the furled, attenuated blooms of winter, born out of due season and nurtured in stoked warmth, like the delicate children of kings, and emanating a faint reluctant scent like the querulous sweet smile of ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... space. It is quite possible to conceive a body occupying the position of the earth with reference to the sun which would cast a shadow having such a tenuous form as the Milky Way presents. Such a body obviously would not be a globe, but a long-drawn-out, attenuated figure. There is, to be sure, no direct evidence preserved to show that Anaxagoras conceived the world to present such a figure as this, but what we know of that philosopher's close-reasoning, logical mind gives some warrant to the assumption—gratuitous though in a sense it be—that the author ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... regard varicella as a very attenuated form of smallpox, hence the name "chicken pox," by which it is popularly known. This opinion is based merely on the analogy between the two types of skin eruptions and the coincidence sometimes observed between two epidemics of smallpox and chicken pox. But the theory ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... ferruginous at their apex; the tarsi ferruginous, wings hyaline, nervures fuscous, stigma testaceous. Abdomen shining, delicately punctured; the basal margins of the second, third, and fourth segments with a band of cinereous pubescence, attenuated in the middle. ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... dress for dinner," I lied with some haughtiness. "And so does Poopendyke," I added as an afterthought. My blush deepened as I recalled the attenuated blazer in which my secretary breakfasted, lunched ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... amusement of the people who did not care for acrobatic feats and stood in no need of the primitive methods of the physician, there was a story-teller, who addressed a somewhat attenuated circle of phlegmatic listeners, and a snake-charmer who was surrounded by children. Sidi ben Aissa undoubtedly kept the snakes—spotted leffas from the Sus—from hurting his follower, but not even the saint could draw floos from poor youngsters whose total ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... 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
... not so voluminously as at first. It had evidently become attenuated, and was growing thinner. It appeared also to be ascending with rapidity, as up the funnel of a chimney having a good draught. For this reason it was carried past the mouth of the grotto without much of it drifting in, ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... substances, because it is among the rarest or thinnest of the elements. It is, however, said by some, who are disposed to transcendentalize his doctrine, that he did not mean the common atmospheric air, but something more attenuated and warm; and since, in its purest state, it constitutes the most perfect intellect, inferior degrees of reason must be owing to an increase of its density and moisture. Upon such a principle, the whole earth is animated by the breath of life; the souls of brutes, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... 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 to ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... French scientist, says epizootic hog-cholera, even of the most virulent type, can be prevented by inocculation with the attenuated virulent virus. He also says it is proven that the period of immunity is more than a year; that, consequently, this is long enough for the requirements of hog-raising, since the period of fattening does not generally exceed a year. Yet, in spite of these happy results, I repeat that the question ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... of vanilla is sufficient to perfume a pound and a half of cacao. It is with difficulty reduced to fine particles, but it may be sufficiently attenuated by cutting it into small bits, and grinding these along ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... 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 in ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... vignettes carefully executed in a dry and minute style which offers a 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 give a very insufficient ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... 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
... and old of both sexes, struggling forward with their rusty tin and iron vessels for soup, some of them upon all fours, like famished beasts. There was a cheap bread dispensary opened in one end of the building, and the principal pressure was at the door of this. Among the attenuated apparitions of humanity that thronged this gate of stinted charity, one poor man presented himself under circumstances that even distinguished his case from the rest. He lived several miles from the centre of the town, ...
— A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood • Elihu Burritt
... diminish in an inverse ratio, so he starved himself almost to death, and was constantly seen anxiously examining the buckle of his belt, to make sure that he had not increased in girth since his last meal. Voluntary Tantalus, he scarcely allowed himself enough to keep life in his attenuated frame, and if he had but fasted as carefully from motives of piety he would have been ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... the delirious fancy of some enriched shopkeeper. But still it was a display of fancy, a sign of grace; but at that moment these figures appeared to me weird and intrusive and strangely alive in their attenuated grace of unearthly beings concealing a power to see ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... curled, was much in the style of a London preacher of prophetic and anti-poetic notoriety. He was deeply browned with the sun, and had an air and gait expressive of his bold, enterprising, and desperate mind. Indeed, when I saw him in his cell and at his trial, although his frame was attenuated almost to a skeleton, the color of his face a pale yellow, his eyes sunken, and hair closely shorn; he still exhibited strong traces of what he had been, still retained his erect and fearless carriage, his quick, fiery, and malevolent eye, his hurried and concise speech, and his close and pertinent ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... 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 by ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... explanation of this I would say: that the fire there is that which heats the globe, inside of it is the water, and it happens that this humid element, being rarefied and attenuated by virtue of the heat, and thus resolved into vapour, it requires much greater space to contain it, therefore if it does not find easy exit, it goes on with extreme force, noise, and destruction to break the vessel; but if it finds space and easy exit, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... 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 filaments, their uniform carbonization, making the globes, producing a perfect ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... broad-shouldered and muscular as Gaston, who was in truth a very prince amongst men, he was in his own way quite as striking, being very tall, and as upright as a dart, slight and graceful, though no longer attenuated, and above all retaining that peculiar depth and purity of expression which had long seemed to mark him out somewhat from his fellow men, and which had only intensified during the year that had banished him from the stirring ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
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