"Attenuated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prisoners seated on benches round the walls had become attenuated; only about a score of them now remained. Women had been dealt with first, the residuum were men; the general charge ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... not a very wise youth, but he did know well enough, that, though big arms and legs are very good things, there is something besides size that goes to make a man; and he had heard stories of a fighting-man, called "The Spider," from his attenuated proportions, who was yet a terrible hitter in the ring, and had whipped many a big-limbed fellow, in and out of the ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Democracy are so abundant, deductions from its influence so confident and universal, that it is worth while to point out what a very hollow thing the word in most cases really is, a large empty object in thought, of the most vague and faded associations and the most attenuated content, and to inquire just exactly what the original implications and present realities of "Democracy" may be. The inquiry will leave us with a very different conception of the nature and future of this sort ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... odd hopping step that no human limb could manage, turned their paper-white, long, expressionless faces toward me for an instant, then were gone, on the trail of the mole-man. Beneath those robes must have been a body as attenuated as a skeleton, as different as an insect's from man's. Within those odd egg-shaped heads must have been a mind as alien to mine as an ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... moments when the long, low, and black hull was seen distinctly resting on the summit of a sea, and glittering in the sun-beams, as the water washed from her sides; and then, as boat and vessel sunk together, all was lost to the eye, even to the attenuated lines of her tallest and most ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... resting to draw from the sole of his foot the cruel thorn, driven into it as he ran. In any case, there he still sits for a moment, for ever, amid the smiling admiration of centuries, in the agility, in the perfect navet also as thus occupied, of his sixteenth year, to which the somewhat lengthy or attenuated structure of the limbs is conformable. And then, in this attenuation, in the almost Egyptian proportions, in the shallowness of the chest and shoulders especially, in the Phoenician or old Greek sharpness and length of profile, and the long, conventional, wire-drawn hair of the boy, arching ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... exists of Rossetti at twenty-seven conveys the idea of a nature rather austere and taciturn than genial and outspoken. The face is long and the cheeks sunken, the whole figure being attenuated and slightly stooping; the eyes have the inward look which belonged to them in later life, but the mouth, which is free from the concealment of moustache or beard, is severe. The impression conveyed is of a powerful intellect and ambitious nature at war ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... 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 ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... weeks later that a slender-bodied young Nicaraguan known as Doctor Alfonso Sedeno (his right to that title resulting from four years of medical study in Paris) escorted into Bluefields the flaccid and attenuated shadow of Never-Fail Blake. Doctor Sedeno explained to the English shipping firm to whom he handed over his patient that the Senor Americano had been found in a dying condition, ten miles from the camp of the rubber company for ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... 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. She used in vain to attempt to ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... 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, so that it can ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... Monk made no reply; and Lanyard remarked a curious quivering of that excessively tall, excessively attenuated body, a real trembling, and suddenly understood that the absurd creature was being shaken by jealousy, by an enormous passion of jealousy, quite beyond his control, that shook him very much as a ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Mr. Jorrocks and his friend, relative to an indignity that had been offered him by the rejection by the editor of a sporting periodical of a long treatise on eels, which, independently of the singularity of diction, had become so attenuated in the handling, as to have every appearance of filling three whole numbers of the work; and Mr. Jorrocks had determined to avenge the insult by turning author on his own account. The Yorkshireman, ever ready for amusement, cordially supported Mr. Jorrocks in his views, and a bargain ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... of the remaining negroes came very faintly back. We read what Napoleon said of his own conduct in the matter; but with the abolitionist Miss Martineau on one side, and the doubtful Man of Destiny on the other, the pure fact grew very attenuated, and I am not now sure that I have seen it. The moment your curiosity is really aroused about an historical circumstance, the glasses through which you have been viewing so varied and wide a landscape become suddenly very opaque. History is a gallery of pictures so individually ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... difficulties in constructing its suitable gearing arose from the fact that the speed of the rove passing on to the various diameters must be maintained throughout, and must coincide with the delivery of yarn from the rollers, so that the attenuated but slightly twisted sliver can be wound on to the bobbin without strain or stretch. The varying motion is regulated and obtained by a drive, either from friction plates or from cones, and the whole gear is interesting, ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour
... judged from his appearance, a mechanic; but the mark of the destroyer was on his bloated countenance and in his heavy, stupid eyes. Intemperance had marked him for his own. The pawn-broker was yet examining the offered pledge, when a woman, whose pale face and attenuated form bespoke long and intimate acquaintance with sorrow, came hastily into the shop, and with the single exclamation, "O Robert!" darted, rather than ran, to that part of the counter where the man was standing. Words were not ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... influenza 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.
... communion for the loss of which the world holds no recompense. For several years, before and after his sister Elizabeth's death, Whittier wore the look of one who was very ill. His large dark eyes burned with peculiar fire, and contrasted with his pale brow and attenuated figure. He had a sorrowful, stricken look, and found it hard enough to reconstruct his life, missing the companionship and care of his sister, and her great sympathy with his own literary work. There was a likeness ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... Rousseau have the double title to hatred of being Frenchmen and freethinkers. But even orthodox Frenchmen fare little better. 'The French Bossuets, Bourdaloues, Fenelons, &c., whatever may be thought of their meagre and attenuated rhetoric, are one and all the most commonplace of thinkers.' In fact, the mere mention of France acts upon him like a red rag on a bull. The French, 'in whom the lower forms of passion are constantly bubbling up, from the shallow and superficial character of their feelings,' ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... amusement. If you say your wife or relations are dead, they replay coldly, "Il faut se consoler:" or if they visit you in an illness, "Il faut prendre patience." Or tell them you are ruined, and their features then become something more attenuated, the shoulders something more elevated, and a more commiserating tone confesses, "C'est bien mal beureux—Mai enfin que voulez vous?" ["It's unlucky, but what can be said in such cases?"] and in the same instant they ill recount some good fortune ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... 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
... copper-riveted overalls of shy and silent prospectors from the hills who stood 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 ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... gap between Sherman and Wallace, but the conflict now raged about Shiloh Church with a fury surpassing any portion of the battle of Sunday. McCook, with his well closed division, McClernand and Sherman with their attenuated but persistent commands, Wallace with his fresh and compact division, with the batteries of Bouton, McAllister, Wood, Thompson, and Thurber, formed a curved line concentrating upon the convex line comprised of part of Clark's division, Wood's brigade, Trabue's brigade, Cheatham's division, and ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... 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 the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the 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 ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... two thousand years wave had never reached it: the last general elevation of the land had raised it beyond the reach of the highest stream-tides; and when my gang and I took possession of its twilight recesses, its stony sides were crusted with mosses and liverworts; and a crop of pale, attenuated, sickly-looking weeds, on which the sun had never looked in his strength, sprang thickly up over its floor. In the remote past it had been used as a sort of garner and thrashing-place by a farmer of the parish, named Marcus, who had ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... old Jarvis appeared an altered man. His sinewy frame became bent and attenuated, his step fell feebler, his hair was bleached to snowy whiteness, and his homely, tanned features assumed an expression of stern and patient endurance. It was evident to Flora that his heart was breaking for the ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... well suited to the style of her lineaments; majestically tall and stately, and though attenuated something by the near approach of old age, preserving still the soft and flowing outlines of a form, which had in youth been noted for roundness ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... 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 ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... by this time had left the garden, and the coachman had turned his horses' heads northwards, away from the lake, towards the Alps, where their snowy summits, attenuated by the sun and the distance and the blue air, looked like vapours ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... the eve of the Revolution, an objectionable term denounced by Madame de Luxembourg still consigns a man to the rank of "especes," because correct expression is ever an element of good manners.—Language, through this constant scratching, is attenuated and becomes colorless: Vaugelas estimates that one-half of the phrases and terms employed by Amyot are set aside.[3213] With the exception of La Fontaine, an isolated and spontaneous genius, who reopens the old sources, and La Bruyere, a bold seeker, who opens a fresh source, and Voltaire ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... 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, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... 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 looked on ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... 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 ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... was affected. In other words, Pasteur had made the greatest discovery in physiology of this century. He had found it is possible to attenuate the virus of a virulent disease, and to use that virus so attenuated as a vaccine matter which will guard the animal vaccinated against the disease. He had taken Jenner's discovery, and proved it applied to other diseases ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... her arms is generally supposed to be the infant Christ. I have fancied, as I look on the picture, that it may be the poor sick child recommended to her mercy, for the face is very pathetic, the limbs not merely delicate but attenuated, while, on comparing it with the robust child who stands below, the resemblance and the contrast are both striking. To the right of the Virgin kneels the burgomaster Meyer with two of his sons, one of whom holds the little brother who is restored ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... clasped warmly the chill attenuated fingers of the student of theology, gave the reign to his horse, that needed no spur, and disappeared the moment after amidst a ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... a fine bird, of large size, close feathered, generally dark- coloured, with an elongated neck. The beak is attenuated and of wonderful length: in one specimen it was 1.4 inch in length from the feathered base to the tip; therefore nearly twice as long as that of the rock-pigeon, which measured only .77. Whenever I compare proportionally any part in the carrier and rock-pigeon, I take the length of the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... situation. Wan and wasted as a spectre, she indulged in anticipation of again mixing with the fashionable world, and talked of chaperoning Isabel to private parties and public amusements, when she was standing at the brink of eternity. Isabel sighed as she listened to her mother, and observed her attenuated frame; occasionally she would refer to her mother's state of health, and attempt to bring her to that serious state of mind which her awful situation demanded; but in vain: Mrs Revel would evade the subject. Before a week had passed she had set up an equipage, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... cases had been squabbles over property, conflicts of property-rights, lawsuits, contests of wills, breaches of contract, bankruptcies, etc. With the passing of private property, this ninety-five per cent. of the cases that cluttered the courts also passed. The courts became shadows, attenuated ghosts, rudimentary vestiges of the anarchistic times that had preceded the coming ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... argosy. Masts to the right, masts to the left, masts in front, masts yonder above the warehouses; masts in among the streets as steeples appear amid roofs; masts across the river hung with drooping half-furled sails; masts afar down thin and attenuated, mere dark straight lines in the distance. They await in stillness ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... he referred, mounted on an attenuated mule, and escorted by a Sergeant and six men of the B.S.A., under the superintendence of a large pink officer of the Staff, was at that moment being conducted at a sharp trot out of the lines, to meet a smallish waggon ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... drove the scalpel of epigram and the sharp points of much good wit into that innocent girlhood and happy marriage. Blondet congratulated Raoul on encountering a woman guilty of nothing worse so far than horrible drawings in red chalk, attenuated water-colors, slippers embroidered for a husband, sonatas executed with the best intentions,—a girl tied to her mother's apron-strings till she was eighteen, trussed for religious practices, seasoned by Vandenesse, and cooked to a point ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... the credit of emotional expression, also, it may be, a number of linguistic elements expressing certain modalities, such as dubitative or potential forms, which may be interpreted as reflecting the emotional states of hesitation or doubt—attenuated fear. On the whole, it must be admitted that ideation reigns supreme in language, that volition and emotion come in as distinctly secondary factors. This, after all, is perfectly intelligible. The world of image and concept, the endless ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... lain quiet for a little while, I felt his somewhat attenuated weapon slip out of me. He then turned himself round, presenting his buttocks to me and, still keeping his hold on my member which he had maintained during all his raptures, he gently drew me round also, nothing ...
— Laura Middleton; Her Brother and her Lover • Anonymous
... "dire deboshing" was that, having come to Europe with a soul literally attenuated and starved for want of the ordinary gaiety and amusement which all youth requires, my life in Princeton having been one continued strain of a sobriety which continually sank into subdued melancholy, and a body just ready to yield to consumption, I grew vigorous and healthy, or, as the saying ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 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 ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... 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 woods in front of us, we cheered and blazed ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... 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 of delicacy ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... 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 ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... heads, under a burning sun, they were mercilessly lashed with a heavy slave-whip, by a tall, athletic negro, who acted as overseer, and who, with refined cruelty, dispensed the punishment alike on stout men, slender youths, and thin attenuated females. Our arrival having attracted the notice of the gang, and induced a momentary halt in their work, the unfeeling wretch commenced a furious onslaught with the whip, each crack of which, followed, as it was, by the groans or cries of the sufferer, roused the indignant ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... transparency of the compound is quite equal to that of the mixture prior to combination. No change is perceptible to the eye, but the keen vision of experiment soon detects the fact that the perfectly transparent and highly attenuated ammonia resembles pitch or lampblack in its behavior to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... 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 ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... 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 ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... on our guard against this species of deceit in the highest matters, by observing how readily we glide into it, in things of smaller moment. Deceits of every shade, from the lie direct to the most attenuated equivocation, spring in the complicated intercourse of modern society, like weeds in a moist summer on a fallow field. Assuredly, unless our hand be diligent in digging out these bitter roots, we shall not grow rich in the graces of the Spirit. You are invited to a neighbour's house: ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... 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 ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... their mother loved to idolatry, although she had never passionately loved her husband; and she lavished upon them all her forethought and care. But the shop did not thrive, and the large dreams she had entertained of her sons' education and career became attenuated in the face of realities. Their schooling was of the plainest, but, being by the sea, they grew alert in all such nautical arts and enterprises as were attractive ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... movement from the heroes and goblins of the third. She heard the tune through once, and then her attention wandered, and she gazed at the audience, or the organ, or the architecture. Much did she censure the attenuated Cupids who encircle the ceiling of the Queen's Hall, inclining each to each with vapid gesture, and clad in sallow pantaloons, on which the October sunlight struck. "How awful to marry a man like those Cupids!" thought Helen. Here Beethoven started ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... man, in the strength and energy of his prime, ever loved with so fierce a love, or hated with so bitter a hate, as did this worn, attenuated being; in truth, it was the fire, undiminished still, of the strong, passionate heart that throbbed in so frail a tenement, which had sapped the very springs of life within him, and dried up the blood ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... life. Her laugh was as grateful to him as a summer wind. "See," he 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
... 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, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... root in any shadow of subserviency. Her father was a gouty general of infantry in the diplomatic service, disinclined to unnecessary disputes, out of consideration for his vehement irritability when roused. Her mother had been one of the beauties of her set, and was preserving an attenuated reign, through the conversational arts, to save herself from fading into the wall. Her brothers and sisters were not of an age to contest her lead. The temper of the period was revolutionary in society by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the winter night the victors hobbled along. Cockerell led the way, carrying the rifle of a man with a wounded arm. Occasionally he checked his bearings with map and electric torch. Sergeant M'Nab, who, under a hirsute and attenuated exterior, concealed a constitution of ferro-concrete and the heart of a lion, brought up the rear, uttering fallacious assurances to the faint-hearted as to the shortness of the distance now to be covered, and ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... and thin, and looming up lanky against a dusky sky, reminded me equally of an attenuated M.P., a phantom telegraph-pole, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... brackish lake remained. Along the shores of this lake, 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 ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... . 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
... the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched the rest so long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards, that it almost seemed as if he meant to sit up until the morning of the resurrection; and bringing up the rear, attenuated but vivacious little Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated, reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in wickedness or wit. The good-humored junior ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... occupied by the enemy in considerable force, but was not intrenched. My order was not executed with the promptness or energy which I had expected, yet probably with as much as I had reason to expect, considering the attenuated character of General Cox's line and the great distance and rough ground over which the attacking force had to move. The hill was, however, carried by General Wilson's cavalry (dismounted), whose gallantry and energy on that and ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... introductory wave of his hand in the direction of the attenuated and sallow-faced personage who had accompanied him, he graciously permitted Madame Patoux to humbly precede him by a few steps, and then followed her with a soft, even tread, and a sound as of rustling silk in his garments, from which ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... well the voice she had expected at the other end of the wire that the husky, boyish note which reached her, attenuated by distance, struck her with ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... needed judicious repression. Instead, they were unduly 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 knowledge of other peoples ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... shipwreck and chaos, through which a voice seemed to cry- the quiver and delicate shrillness of one isolated string—and then fell a sudden silence, as though the end of all things had come; and on the silence the trembling and attenuated note which had quivered on the lonely string, rising, rising, piercing the infinite distance and sinking into ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... withering than had ever been heard on the floor of Congress; his figure was outre; his voice, fine as the treble of a violin; his face, wan, wrinkled, and without beard; his limbs, long and unsightly, especially his arms and fingers; the skin seemed to grow to the attenuated bone; and the large, ill-formed joints were extremely ugly. But those fingers, and especially the right fore-finger, gave point and vim to his ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... 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 ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... of the materials would allow, both in order to render it more durable, and to make it serve the purposes of defence." This, I am afraid, is still very unsatisfactory. A fire lighted along the entire line of a wall inclosing nearly an acre of area could not be other than a very attenuated, wire-drawn line of fire indeed, and could never possess strength enough to melt the ponderous mass of rampart beneath, as if it had been formed of wax or resin. A thousand loads of wood piled in a ring ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... out of sheer excitement, to revert to her unfortunate habits, Philip himself cooked the meal, serving it without apology or explanation upon a cloth of fine yellowed damask, with his mother's egg-shell china, and certain spoons and forks that bore upon their attenuated tips the worn outlines of a crest. The table was drawn into a window, through which the scent of Philip's little garden floated in. There were flowers upon the table, too; garden roses in a low pewter bowl, and wax tapers in very beautiful bronze candelabra, ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... cosmopolitan style 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 ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... away up the ravine to picket him on a little patch of grass he had discovered the day before, and as he passed the colonel's fire a keen-eyed old veteran of the cavalry service, who had stopped to have a chat with our chief, dropped the stick on which he was whittling and stared hard at our attenuated racer. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... attenuated for computation, is here able to effect such a change in a pinch of dust that it becomes a free avenue instead of a barricade. Through that avenue a powerful blow from a local store of energy makes itself heard and felt. No device of the trigger class ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... 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 progress in the art of writing, he ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... capital cellar. And the couples slowly advanced, their chins raised, their eyes blinking, between the gigantic stone figures, the black marble gods, dumb in their hieratic rigidity, and the monstrous beasts, half cats and half women, with death-like faces, attenuated noses, and swollen lips. They thought all these things very ugly. The stone carvings of the present day were a great deal better. An inscription in Phoenician characters amazed them. No one could possibly have ever read that scrawl. But Monsieur Madinier, already up on the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... Pollock and Muncey of the Fortieth were the captains ordered to march forthwith. Before eight o'clock on Sunday morning the little column had swung sturdily away over the prairies, and Captain Devers, with his own attenuated troop and two companies of "doughboys," remained to guard the post and its supplies, and take care of the invalid colonel and the wives and children of the soldiers so ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... experienced a faint hope that, in the higher departments of the Philosophy of Evolution as conceived by Mr. Spencer and elaborated by his disciple, there might be found some rational justification for an attenuated form of Theism. But on examination I find that the bread which these fathers have offered us turns out to be a stone; and thinking that it is desirable to warn other of the children—whether of the family Philosophical or ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... from the vastness of what they deny. And not these alone, but many other words, less indebted to logic for the magnificence of reach that it can lend, bring before the mind no picture, but a dim emotional framework. Such words as "ominous," "fantastic," "attenuated," "bewildered," "justification," are atmospheric rather than pictorial; they infect the soul with the passion-laden air that rises from humanity. It is precisely in his dealings with words like these, "heated originally by the breath of others," that a poet's fine sense and knowledge most avail ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... man's wealth. A strangeness in his father's attitude caught his eye. With a sudden, quick return of boyish affection he laid his hand on the bowed shoulder, forgetting for the moment his evil purpose and all else. The attenuated figure swayed and would have fallen to the side, had Clement Symington not caught it and laid his father tenderly on the bed. Then he stood upright and cried aloud in agony with that most terrible of griefs—the repentance that comes too late. But none heard him. The deaf woman slept ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... 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
... another "Divine Spouse," though mutilated and unfinished, is pleasing from its greater breadth of style, although such breadth is rarely found in the works of this school, which toned down, elongated, and attenuated the figure till it often lost in vigour what it gained in distinction. The one point in which the Saite artists made a real advance, was in the treatment of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... explain no small part of the elevation referred to in the text. Observations during the eclipse of Dec. 22, 1870, led some astronomers to believe that the appearance of the corona was dependent upon or modified by cosmical dust or matter in a very attenuated form diffused through space. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... resolution working out what we may call a strictly mechanical theory of the universe. Even the soul or life-principle in living creatures was simply a structure of the finest and roundest (and therefore most nimble) atoms, with which he compared the extremely attenuated dust particles visible in their never-ending {79} dance in a beam of light passed into a darkened room. This structure of exceeding tenuity and nimbleness was the source of the motion characteristic of living ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... and small, and so attenuated that it was evident he had for some time been suffering from starvation. He wore no clothing, carried no arms of any kind, and was so utterly abject, and so evidently incapable of doing harm to any one, that none of the party thought it worth while to rise, or lay hands on a weapon. When ...
— Digging for Gold - Adventures in California • R.M. Ballantyne
... husband amid the joys of Paradise should turn his thoughts back to earth and wish for her there among his houris. But this poor sweet flower had not even this faint expectation, for she was no wife nor could be, slave of a Mohammedan harem. No rights in this world nor the next. Not even the attenuated rights which law and custom gave the free woman. No sustaining dream of a divine recompense for the unmerited unhappiness of this existence. A slave, a harem slave, wanted only when she smiled, was gay, and beautiful; who ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... young man a relative of yours?' No answer came. 'Can't I help you?' With a sudden start that electrified me, her dry eyes almost starting from the sockets and her voice husky with agony, she said, pointing her attenuated finger at the senseless boy, 'He is the last of seven sons—six have died in the army, and the doctor says he must die to-night.' The flash of life passed from her face as suddenly as it came, her arms folded over her breast, she sank ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... uttering the laborious ideas of his troubled mind with the somewhat painful pronunciation of the elocutionist (he makes chapell of Chapel); nor mark his languorous movements and the slow swaying action of the attenuated body; one cannot notice all this without feeling that in spite of his great courage and his iron tenacity of purpose, he is a little weary of the battle, and sometimes even perhaps conscious of a check for the cause which is far dearer to him than ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... starving. For myself alone I do not plead; I am but an amateur in polite literature. But Savarin, the illustrious Savarin,—in criticism the French Longinus—in poetry the Parisian Horace—in social life the genius of gaiety in pantaloons,—contemplate his attenuated frame! Shall he perish for want of food while thou hast such superfluity in thy larder? I appeal to thy heart, thy conscience, thy patriotism. What, in the eyes of France, are a thousand Foxes ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... spectrum of a star is a bright band of colour crossed by dark lines; that of a gaseous nebula consists of bright lines. This test has been made use of, and indicates that some of the nebulae are really immense masses of incandescent and very attenuated gas; very possibly, however, in a condition of which we have no experience, and arranged in discs, bands, rings, chains, wisps, knots, rays, curves, ovals, spirals, loops, wreaths, fans, brushes, sprays, lace, waves, and clouds. Huggins has ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... God, some sense of justice) most earnestly counsel these half-fed claimants to persevere in their just demands, till they are admitted to a more complete share of a dinner for which they pay as much as the others; and if they see a little attenuated lawyer squabbling at the head of their opponents, let them desire him to empty his pockets, and to pull out all the pieces of duck, fowl, and pudding which he has filched from the public feast, to carry home ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... Win's attenuated meals were eked out by Cupid's presentation chocolates and marshmallows. Of the latter—a novelty to her—she and Sadie were very fond. They seemed nourishing, too, or, at all events, "filling," and came in handy when you had allotted yourself ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... know whether this apology is necessary. For the merits of my adaptation and translation must decide how far I have well bestowed my time and imperfect powers, in giving form and substance to the frail and attenuated Leaves of the Sibyl. ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Throughout the whole of such gatherings, and in fact generally when prayer is being gone on with, the steam is kept well up, and the safety valve often lifts to let off the extra pressure. Sharp shouts, breezy "Amens," tenderly-attenuated groans, deep sighs, sudden "Hallelujahs," and vivacious cries of "Just now," "Aye," "Glory," "Yes," "Praise the Lord," &c.—all well meant— characterise them. But prayer meetings are not half so stormy as they used to be; twenty or thirty ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... has at last been understood that there are slight tuberculoses, curable, but tremendously frequent. It will be the same with mental disorders; one day it will be recognized that under diverse forms, more or less attenuated they exist to-day on all sides, among a crowd of individuals that one does not feel inclined ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... 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 ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... cores immersed in water, and particularly on the lengthy cable between England and the Hague. Faraday showed that it was caused by induction between the electricity in the wire and the earth or water surrounding it. A core, in fact, is an attenuated Leyden jar; the wire of the core, its insulating jacket, and the soil or water around it stand respectively for the inner tinfoil, the glass, and the outer tinfoil of the jar. When the wire is charged from a battery, the electricity induces an opposite charge ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... half of the contents of the rubber sack out on the sand and made a selection for dinner, and he chuckled in his big happiness as he saw how attenuated his list of supplies was becoming. There was still a quarter of a pound of tea, no sugar, no coffee, half a dozen pounds of flour, twenty-seven prunes jealously guarded in a piece of narwhal skin, a little salt and pepper mixed, and fresh ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... pancake," he nodded. "The ocean was like a vast plate of clam soup in which I simmered several times a day until I've become as leathery and attenuated as a punctured pod of kelp.... Where's the rig we depart in, Valerie?" he concluded, looking around the sun-scorched, wooden platform with ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... said also to devour certain species of wood-boring caterpillars, which it obtains by first cutting down with its teeth upon their burrows, and then picking them out of their retreat with the claw of its attenuated middle finger. It constructs large ball-like nests of dried leaves, lodged in a fork of the branches of a large tree, and with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... philosophizing. I suppose to a great many minds what we call "the universe" presents itself as a colossal circle, without any circumference, filled with an innumerable number of material objects floating in some thin attenuated ether. I suppose the centre of this circle with no circumference is generally assumed to be the "self" or "soul" of the person ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... regarding this fine lady personally, that she had the weakness of paying much attention to her dress. She was what might properly be called a leader of society, though society was at the time somewhat attenuated, families living, generally, some miles apart, and various obstacles, chiefly in the form of large, man-eating animals, complicating the matter of paying calls. As for the calls themselves, they were nearly as ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... the Kaiser's side and march hand in hand against the common enemy—Slavism. He made this urgent appeal for the last time, convinced that the King of Greece would respond to it. If not, all would be over between the two countries—this being a slightly attenuated version of another marginal note: "I will treat Greece as an enemy if she ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... made the sunshine of the shaded grass, as it did here, where else no spot of sun might enter, so dense was the night of shade. The life of another day and time lived, however, beneath that shade; Charm and the cure, as they drooped over the canvas, confronted a graceful, attenuated courtier, sickening in a languor of adoration, and a sprightly coquette, whose porcelain beauty was as finished as the feathery edges ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... 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
... held hopeful possibilities. A prompt answer would surely suggest a concurrence of feeling. An answer delayed would without doubt mean that she was pondering his words and reading between the lines. So he possessed his soul in patience, of a somewhat attenuated texture, ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... 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, whose status followed them: ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... recent knowledge of the true nature of matter, of the minuteness and complexity of the atom, we can now understand how the highly triturated and refined (attenuated) homeopathic remedy may still retain the dynamic force of the element, as Hahnemann has expressed it, and how a remedy so attenuated may still be capable of exerting an influence upon the minute cell. Since chemistry and physiology ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... still young, but attenuated by consumption and want, was seated on the edge of the bed, occupied in throwing crumbs to a whole host of swallows which were ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine |
