"Attenuated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bore the yellow tinge which colors the austere faces of abbesses who have been famous for their macerations. The attenuated temples were almost golden. The lips had paled, the red of an opened pomegranate was no longer on them, their color had changed to the pale pink of a Bengal rose. At the corners of the eyes, close to the nose, sorrows had made two shining tracks ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... only under the form of terrible but exceptional pulmonary consumption. Now it has at last been understood that there are slight tuberculoses, curable, but tremendously frequent. It will be the same with mental disorders; one day it will be recognized that under diverse forms, more or less attenuated they exist to-day on all sides, among a crowd of individuals that one does not feel inclined to ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... 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, about them, they ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... white man, judging by such parts as were not concealed by his clothes, was like that of one who had known hardships and exertion from his earliest youth. His person, though muscular, was rather attenuated than full; but every nerve and muscle appeared strung and indurated by unremitted exposure and toil. He wore a hunting shirt of forest-green, fringed with faded yellow*, and a summer cap of skins which had been shorn of their fur. He also bore a knife in a girdle of wampum, like that which ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... the gaunt attenuated figures of the penitents, Forese Donati, his intimate friend and kinsman of his wife Gemma. Our poet was surprised to find him so soon after his death on one of the terraces of Purgatory, the assumption being ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... remark an epigram, than which, if one is content with ostensible epigrams, there are many feats harder. 12 Univee was amused. Kerry read "Dorian Gray" and simulated Lord Henry, following Amory about, addressing him as "Dorian" and pretending to encourage in him wicked fancies and attenuated tendencies to ennui. When he carried it into Commons, to the amazement of the others at table, Amory became furiously embarrassed, and after that made epigrams only before D'Invilliers or ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... she, at all events, has done her best to court the violence she undergoes. In Middleton's Spanish Gypsy we find exactly the same episode, and the unhappy Portuguese nun wrote: "Love me for ever and make me suffer still more." To find in literature more attenuated examples of the same tendency is easy. Shakespeare, whose observation so little escaped, has seldom depicted the adult passion of a grown woman, but in the play which he has mainly devoted to this subject he makes Cleopatra refer to "amorous pinches," ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... The attenuated cable, which continually stretched itself out behind the little vessel, was of the most recent and improved pattern for deep-sea cables. The conducting wires in the centre of it were scarcely thicker than hairs, while ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... 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 ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... a fire burning certain nights in the vicinity of the grave. They hold and believe, at least the "Big Indians" do, that the spirits of the departed are compelled to cross an extremely attenuated greasy pole, which bridges over the chasm of the debatable land, and that they require the fire to light them on their darksome journey. A righteous soul traverses the pole quicker than a wicked one, hence they regulate the number of nights for burning a light ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... thoroughfare, lined by numerous shops, with great gas flares outside them. Many of these belonged to dealers in marine stores, and the numerous suits of oil-skin, hung up for exhibition, swung to and fro in the uncertain light, like rows of attenuated pirates. At every corner was a great public-house with glittering windows, and a crowd of slatternly women and jersey-clad men elbowing each other at the door. At the largest and most imposing of these gin-palaces the mate and Dimsdale ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... aspect 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 ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... 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
... Mazarin, raising his attenuated hand and striking his head, "I remember now!" Athos looked at him in astonishment. "Yes, that is it!" said the cardinal, continuing to look at his interlocutor; "yes, that is certainly it. I know you now, monsieur. Ah! diavolo! I am no ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... my arms to the street, and set him down in the cab. My wife has often told me, in talking over those old times, that she looked on me at that moment as a man possessed of Herculean strength; but, in truth, the poor fellow was so attenuated that his weight was scarcely greater than ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... me over and laced me as I had never been laced before. The head trusty certainly demonstrated his ability. I tried to steal what little space I could. Little it was, for I had long since shed my flesh, while my muscles were attenuated to mere strings. I had neither the strength nor bulk to steal more than a little, and the little I stole I swear I managed by sheer expansion at the joints of the bones of my frame. And of this little I was ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... striking proof of the dependence of the colors upon the thickness of the film was shown by the reflection of a beam of light from a piece of mica composed of twenty-four very attenuated plates overlapping each other. With each layer a marked gradation ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... 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 not ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... robes—that moved with an 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 ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... the azaleas, her large deer-like eyes were suddenly dilated with terror. From around the curve of the road came the quick beat of hastening footsteps, the sobbing sound of panting breath, and between her and the sinking moon there passed an attenuated one-armed figure, with a pallid sharpened face, outlined for a moment on its brilliant disk, and dreadful starting eyes, and quivering open mouth. It disappeared in an instant among the shadows of the laurel, and Clarsie, with a horrible fear clutching at her heart, sprang to her feet. . . ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... as his totem-creed led him to fix his mind upon. Hence we find that a familiarity and common consent existed between primitive man and many of his companion animals such as has been lost or much attenuated in modern times. Elisee Reclus in his very interesting paper La Grande Famille (1) gives support to the idea that the so-called domestication of animals did not originally arise from any forcible subjugation of them by man, but from a natural amity with ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... martyrdom of forsaking father and mother and even his wife in the spirit appealed to his spiritual aspirations. Many a woman has been deserted in this subtle manner by her minister husband. But I kept the fear of it to myself, never encouraging this attenuated form of piety in him by even opposing it. Meanwhile, I began to observe with very genuine admiration his ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... hypothesis were overjoyed; they now sang paeans to astronomy, because, as they said, it had proved the truth of Scripture. They had jumped to the conclusion that all nebula must be alike; that, if SOME are made up of systems of stars, ALL must be so made up; that none can be masses of attenuated gaseous matter, because ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... freedom of movement 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 ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... players had some freedom (albeit limited) to rebel from intolerable authority and to form their own company.[13] This freedom, this choice, as Lord Chesterfield pointed out in his speech against the act, was severely attenuated in 1737, and was to remain so in varying degrees until the monopoly the act allowed was legislated dead in 1843. But it was a cartel between the managers that the players most feared, and there is evidence in the pamphlets growing out of the ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive
... had graduated from an American college and had taken two years in a foreign institution of learning. She had carried away all the honours—but, alas, the higher education had carried away all her charms of person and of temperament. Attenuated, pallid, sharp-featured, she appeared much older than her years, and the lovely, confiding and tender qualities of mind, which made her so attractive to older people, had given place to cold ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... figures of birds thus far considered, the head, with one or two exceptions, is represented or indicated by symbolic markings. In that which decorates the vessel shown in plate CXL, a, we find a new modification; the wings, instead of being attenuated into a diametric line or band, are in this case curved to form a loose spiral. Between them is the figure of a body and the three tail-feathers, while the triangular extensions which generally indicate the posterior of the body are simply two rounded knobs ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... 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
... unconscious of its own redness, or fragrance, or sweetness, and not, indeed, possessing in itself any real qualities of the kind. For to take redness as an example; how does the sensation of it or of any other colour arise? The waves of a certain very attenuated medium, the particles of which are vibrating with vast rapidity but with very different velocities, strike upon an object and are thrown off in all directions. Of the particles which vibrate with any particular velocity, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... reasonable velocity, and should have accelerated rather more swiftly from the moon's surface than it would have done from Earth. But it should have remained visible during all its flight. Its trail should have been a thick red line. Instead, the red sparks were so far separated—the trail was so attenuated that it was visible only from a spot near its base. The observatory voice said more ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... 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 ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... morrice. Here, tanquam in speculo, the Loafer as he lounges may, by attorney as it were, touch gently every stop in the great organ of the emotions of mortality. Rapture of meeting, departing woe, love at first sight, disdain, laughter, indifference — he may experience them all, but attenuated and as if he saw them in a dream; as if, indeed, he were Heine's god in dream on a mountain-side. Let the drowsy deity awake and all these puppets, emanations of his dream, will vanish into the ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... thought, which might, perhaps, fill a distich, is expanded and attenuated, till it grows weak ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... individual which gave it strength to stay? Whence came the reproductive power which was able to carry on the species under such terrible antagonism as the fact of death? If in the body, where was the common element between that attenuated invalid and my robust organization? If in the soul, between the suffering saint and the joyous man of the world, where again was our ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... 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 ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... 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 progress in the art of writing, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... may fall into the invisible world and be seen and heard no more. The theory is something like this: Space is pervaded by luminiferous ether, which is a material thing—as much a substance as air or water, though almost infinitely more attenuated. All force, all forms of energy must be propagated in this; every process must take place in it which takes place at all. But let us suppose that cavities exist in this otherwise universal medium, as caverns exist ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... was known as Publius Gabinius, who was by far the oldest. Coarse-featured, with broken complexion, it needed but a glance to proclaim him as gifted with no other distinctions than those of a hard drinker, fast liver, and the owner of an attenuated conscience. Servius Flaccus, the second, was of a different type. He was languid; spirited only when he railed at a slave who brushed against his immaculate toga. The frills on his robes made him almost feminine; and he ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... no supplies, and the march was resumed on the morning of the both by a force attenuated by starvation, cold, and despair, diminished further by extensive desertion. After much exertion the advance, consisting of all that remained of the 44th, the solitary gun, and a detachment of cavalry, forced a passage ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... and fruition, but how attenuated are our demonstration and realization of this Science! Truth, in divine Science, is the stepping-stone to the understanding of God; but the broken and contrite heart soonest discerns this truth, even as the helpless sick are soonest healed by it. Invalids say, "I have recovered from sickness;" ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... which such measures are daily and hourly producing? The muscles of the back and chest, restrained in their natural and healthful exercise by the waistcoat called in to aid them, and more signally, in after-life, by the tightly- laced stays or corsets, become attenuated, and still further enfeebled, until at length they are wholly dependent on the mechanical aid, being quite incapable of dispensing with ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... 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 of it ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... is coming on and the evenings are made wonderful by two phenomena—the departure of the cannibalistic flies, and the Northern lights. Twice at home I remember seeing an attenuated aurora and thinking it wonderful. No words can describe this display on these crisp and lovely nights. There is a tang and snap in the air, and the earth beneath and the heavens above seem vibrating with unearthly life. The Eskimos say that the Northern lights ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... to say that furniture has no expression; the small couch, the faded work-table, the straight chairs, with their twisted attenuated legs, had an unspeakable air of sadness. One day she cautiously touched the notes of the instrument. How weak and thin and hollow they were! And yet they blended perfectly with something in her own heart. She played till the tears were on her cheeks, it seemed as if the ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... and an 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 a faint odour of some delicate perfume seemed wafted ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... 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 ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... languid, pale man, with sharp features, and a frame so attenuated that I involuntarily placed a soft bag for him to lean against, and removed a cane and umbrella that seemed likely to hurt ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... battered down, he undermined. [Sidenote: Methods of argument] Even when he argued against an opinion he called his polemic a "Conversation"—for that is the true meaning of the word Diatribe. With choice of soft vocabulary, of attenuated forms, of double negatives, he tempered exquisitely his Latin. Did he doubt anything? Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt" (subdubito). Did he think he wrote well? Not at all, but he confessed that he produced "something more like Latin than the average" (paulo latinius). Did ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... that special memories of small misery scarce in the least bedim, and this holds true of our next and quite neighbouring refuge; the establishment of M. Vergnes alone darkles and shrinks to me—a sordidly black interior is my main image for it; attenuated only by its having very soon afterwards, as a suffered ordeal, altogether lapsed and intermitted. Faintly, in the gloom, I distinguish M. Vergnes himself—quite "old," very old indeed as I supposed him, and ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... contracts of a gentlemanly nature, with the disproportionately grateful author, who was, of course, entirely at their mercy. When an American writer compares the sturdy figures of the foreign circulation with the attenuated numerals of such visible returns as reach him, he is more puzzled in his mind than surfeited in his purse. But the relation of foreign publishers to "home talent" is an ancient and honorable conundrum, which it is not for this paper ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... rays,[10] but I may be permitted to add that their form and mode of occurrence are eminently suggestive of gaseous exhalations from the volcano illumined by the sun's rays; and owing to the absence of an atmosphere, spreading themselves out in all directions and becoming more and more attenuated until they ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... between," replied Mr Rawlings. "As I told you some little time since, the nearest one to us is at least a hundred miles away. Besides that, the detachments quartered here and there are so attenuated in their numbers that five or six of the so-called companies have to be concentred together from the different outlying depots in order to muster any respectable contingent that could take the field against the Indians should they rise ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... exclamation of impatience 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 ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... 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 from that ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... 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 of delicacy and refinement, a lovely superficiality such as civilisation ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... agitation, that her hair was loosened by her haste of motion, and that her eyes sparkled as they were wont when the spirit of Henry VIII. mounted highest in his daughter. Nor were they less astonished at the appearance of the pale, attenuated, half-dead, yet still lovely female, whom the Queen upheld by main strength with one hand, while with the other she waved aside the ladies and nobles who pressed towards her, under the idea that she was taken suddenly ill. "Where is my Lord of Leicester?" she said, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... sunstroke, and that was a camel that had no sun-bonnet. If anything could have added to the naturally lugubrious expression of those lumbering freight carriers, it was the jaunty poke-bonnets with the attenuated "Oh, let us be joyful" visages grinning beneath. The transport department was managed by Colonel F. W. Kitchener, brother of the Sirdar. His care it was, when the army actually took the field, to see that the supplies of food, ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... 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
... and we reach a cottage, where other parents were watching over a little son of five years, who is wasting away with consumption. His attenuated limbs bear his little frame but feebly, and he often talks of death, for he has recently seen a little sister younger than himself fall a prey to the fearful malady. A burning fever is raging in his veins, and lights up his eye with unwonted brilliancy, as he tossed restlessly ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... of age, and old for his years, when the Pope delegated to him the office of preaching the Second Crusade. Pale and attenuated to a degree which seemed almost supernatural, his contemporaries discovered something in the mere glance of his eyes which filled them with wonder and awe. When his words of love, aspiration and sublime self-sacrifice reached their ears, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... received of his poems, but it is a signal example of aspiring verse that misses both the sensuous beauty of poetry, and the intellectual content of philosophy. Milton is portrayed as the life-long lover of an incarnation of beauty too attenuated to be human and too physical to be purely ideal. At first Milton devotes himself to this vision exclusively, but, hearing the call of his country in distress, he abandons her, and their love is not suffered to culminate till ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... worthy of such parentage, Esther, Sarah, Mary, and Jerusha, all beautiful and artless as herself. Here a world of daily interest is found in the studies and duties of a New England home. But who is he, of tall and attenuated form, whose days are passed in his solitary study, secluded like a hermit from the common experience of life? Like Moses, he is slow of speech, and might be considered almost severe of countenance. The lineaments tell their story ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... passed, and it seemed that the arc of fire became less sharply defined. It appeared to me to grow more attenuated, and I thought blackish streaks showed, occasionally. Presently, as I watched, the smooth onward-flow ceased; and I was able to perceive that there came a momentary, but regular, darkening of the world. This grew until, once more, night descended, in short, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... sometimes in the great dreary desert of a salon, and listened respectfully while Mademoiselle Servin, the young music-teacher, played dismal sonatas of Gluck or Gretry on a cracked old piano that had been one of the earliest made of those instruments, and was now attenuated and feeble as the very ghost of music. He listened to Madame Magnotte's stories of departed splendour. To him she opened her heart as she never had opened it to ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... degree of exhaustion, and brought on so morbid an action of the functions, that the stomach rejects, with a sort of abhorrence, every species of food, the most holy Eucharist is received without difficulty, and seems not only to be thus received, but to furnish sufficient sustenance for the attenuated frame. Not unfrequently corruption has no power over a sacred corpse; and without the employment of any of the common processes for embalming, centuries pass away, and the body of the Saint remains untouched by decay, bearing the impress of life in death, and not crumbling to dust, as ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... 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
... Tresco placed the digger upon the couch. In the midst of this operation the big card-player and his attenuated accomplice, whose unconsciousness had been more feigned than actual, were about to slip from the room, when Mr. Crewe's voice was heard loudly above the chatter, "Stop! stop those men, there!" The old gentleman's stick was pointed dramatically towards ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... with, uninjured. As a natural sequence, the first inroads made upon its strength were rapidly repaired. The fever once conquered, in a week he was sufficiently convalescent to walk out, leaning on the arm of Gaston de Bois, or Ronald Walton. His gait was feeble, his form attenuated, his countenance had lost its ruddy glow,—the lines had sharpened until their youthful, healthful roundness was wholly obliterated; but the nervous, untranquil expression had passed away from his face, and the restless glancing from side to side had left his eyes. Through the stimulating ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... attired in her trousseau. She had travelled down from London in a shady straw hat trimmed with pink roses. A white veil swept loosely round her face; she carried in her hand an attenuated mottled cane, with an elaborate silver top. A black fan hung from her waist by a thin silver chain, and, as usual, she was peering through her eyeglasses at her surroundings. Mr. Amarinth and Lord Reggie were dressed ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Dorthe lay on the bank of the creek in the fern forest. She and the frogs had held long converse, and she was staring up through the feathery branches, waving in the night wind, at the calm silver face which had ignored her overtures. Upon this scene entered a man. He was attenuated and ragged. Hair and beard fell nearly to his waist. He leaned on a staff, and tottered like ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... than fifty, thatched with a sparse growth of iron-gray hair, he looked several times the age of Dowsett. Yet Nathaniel Letton possessed control—Daylight could see that plainly. He was a thin-faced ascetic, living in a state of high, attenuated calm—a molten planet under a transcontinental ice sheet. And yet, above all most of all, Daylight was impressed by the terrific and almost awful cleanness of the man. There was no dross in him. He had all the seeming of having been purged by fire. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... 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 ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... steaming hot, and there was a smell of mildew in the air. A swarm of mosquitoes buzzed in the glare thrown by the lamp with a shrill, attenuated sound like the skirl of far-away bagpipes. A creature with bat-like wings flapped with a monstrous ungainliness between the outer posts of the verandah. From across the compound an owl called on a weird note of defiance. And in the dim waste of distance beyond ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... enter the new tunnel, followed by Captain Spade. If I could but follow them! If I could but breathe for awhile the bracing air of the Atlantic, of which the interior of Back Cup only receives attenuated ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... green-baize tables were deposited small parcels of stationery, consisting of a large sheet of sanguinary blotting-paper, a quire or so of foolscap, a piece of indiarubber, an attenuated lead-pencil, a dozen of quill pens, with others of Gillott's or Mitchell's manufacture, and an ink bottle—the whole putting one in mind of those penny packets of writing requisites that itinerant pedlars, mostly seedy-looking individuals who "have seen better days," pester one's private ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... fifty-three years of age; but if you could forget his gray hair, and look only at those small, piercing black eyes, you would hardly think him forty. His black dress-coat is buttoned around his somewhat attenuated form, and he wears a stiff white cravat because it looks religious. In this respect, and perhaps in others, you will find Flint's prototype on every corner—people who look religious, if religion can be associated with the aspect ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Head and Train; the Head especially, keeping at the time as well of the last observations, as of the {302} first, the brightness of its single kernel, though the environing more dilute matter were then almost all lost; it being, according to the Author, more and more attenuated, and grown narrow, the nearer the Star approached ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... 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 on 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, and called upon many of her ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... 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 must weep alone ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... ochraceous. The flagellum fulvous beneath, the mandibles 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
... mental weakness inherited from long generations trained upon the system of starvation. The system, indeed, too often reminds me of an old picture in Punch, of genteel poverty dining in state; in a room hung with portraits, attended by footmen, two attenuated persons sit, while a silver cover is removed from a dish containing a roasted mouse. The resources that ought to be spent on a wholesome meal are wasted in keeping up an ideal of state. Of course there is something noble in all sacrifice of personal comfort and health ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... their dry state, would, we imagined, ignite; though it would require a large number of them to make even a tolerable fire. We carried our fuel to a hole between two sand-hills, hoping that the smoke, by the time it had ascended above them, might become so attenuated as not to be observed by any passing Arabs. The difficulty was how to light our fire. We required first the means of striking a spark, and then the tinder to catch it, and finally to produce a flame. Boxall tried with his knife and ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... of 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 ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... later, trumpeted complete victory. The right note was struck; all was settled. Carlisle, it appeared, had trusted insufficiently to the virtue of the Heth name. Of horrid gossip there had been, at the worst, no more than a bare hint or two, an attenuated suggestion. Malicious as the world was, few, indeed, had dreamed any justification of Dalhousie's blackguardism. Already, it appeared, the hotel rang with objurgations of it, and him. Still, Mrs. Heth had struck the ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... which informed his movements—something stronger than common sense. It was a stirring of the insatiable curiosity of the human being who has begun to be sexually interested in another. Though not exactly coarse-fibred, he was so far removed from anything attenuated as almost to be so. He only ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... 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 ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this matter out correctly, Mr. Passford," said Captain Chantor, as they gazed at the attenuated ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic
... father threatened me,' gasped the boy, clasping his attenuated fingers, 'and I dread him—I dread ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... tomatoes which festooned the doorways; and the only shops which were at all attractive were those of the pork butchers with their salted provisions and their cheese, whose pungent smell slightly attenuated the pestilential reek of the gutters. Lottery offices, displaying lists of winning numbers, alternated with wine-shops, of which latter there was a fresh one every thirty yards with large inscriptions setting forth that the best wines of Genzano, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... peeped into a cupboard in which an overcoat surmounted by a felt hat hung from a peg like an attenuated suicide; he looked in all the corners and into the sitting-room, but no ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... its splendours not continuously, but like the intermitted flashes of the firefly—this forms a picture of airy grace and loveliness that baffles description. All this glory disappears when the bird is dead, and even when it alights to rest on a bough. Sitting still, it looks like an exceedingly attenuated kingfisher, without the pretty plumage of that bird, but retaining its stiff artificial manner. No artist has been so bold as to attempt to depict the bird as it actually appears, when balanced before a flower the swift ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... tried every avenue to destruction, and failed in all, he felt like a man doomed to live for ever. Henceforward he shrunk and shrivelled by slow degrees, until in the course of time he became so attenuated, that the grossness of human vision could no longer ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... Saving he 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. ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... success on the platform is given in detail in a volume written by George Dolby, who accompanied him and managed his American tour. The mental and physical strain was such that in fifteen years of combined editorial, literary, and reading labours, it left him attenuated and finally curtailed his ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... therefore, according to all experience, that, if no interest were allowed, the deposits would be generally withdrawn for investment elsewhere; and thus another serious reduction would be made from the already attenuated amount of the Scottish bankers' profits. But besides the loss of profit on the small notes, there would be a further loss sustained by the necessity of keeping up a large stock of gold in the coffers of the bank. Hear Mr Thomson again ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Lord 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 ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... "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 other words that very night at Woollett that he himself ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... open ground are available. It may be said at once that for culture in pots and boxes under glass a high temperature is neither requisite nor desirable. Sturdy healthy growth is essential to the formation of a crop of tubers, and if the plants be forced into an attenuated condition the labour will have been in vain. Another matter which needs to be specially mentioned is the choice of suitable varieties. Only dwarf-growing kinds, thoroughly adapted for forcing, should be considered. The date of planting will necessarily ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... individual soul who is 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 projecting ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... this world, stood the world-born shapes of the sons of Science, upon an embryo world, upon a crude, wan, attenuated mass of matter, one of the Nebulae, which the suns of the myriad systems throw off as they roll round the Creator's throne*, to become themselves new worlds of symmetry and glory,—planets and suns that forever and forever shall in their turn multiply their shining ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... their gestures wonderfully distinct, drawn upon the sea of mist that filled the valley below and the air above. It revealed naught of the earth, save here and there a headland, as it were, thrusting out its dark, narrow, attenuated demesne into the impalpable main. Further and further one might mark this semblance of a coast-line as the vapor grew more tenuous, till far away the series of shadowy gray promontories alternating with the colorless inlets was as vague of essence as ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... 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 occasional tinge ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... London somewhat attenuated, having been away six weeks and two days, without a single allusion to the subject which had hardly ever ceased to occupy ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... pride of the place. It marched across from end to end and seemed—with its bright colours, its high panelled windows, its faded flowered chintzes, its quickly-recognised portraits and pictures, the blue-and-white china of its cabinets and the attenuated festoons and rosettes of its ceiling—a cheerful upholstered avenue ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... or opening into room 2. In their turn these sound waves will be diffused all through room 2, and again but a small percentage of them will find access into room 3. The sound waves will by this time be so much attenuated that the voice of the man standing in room 1 will be lost. Any little tone, however, that may remain will become dissipated in room 3, and it will not be possible for a person standing in room ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... womb be affected, she feels, as it were, a heavy burden representing a mole,[7] yet differing from it, in that the breasts are attenuated, and the whole body grows less. If the neck of the womb be affected, no outward humours will appear; its mouth is retracted and feels hard to the touch, nor can the woman have sexual intercourse without ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... of virtue are more spiritually conceived; they are inward peace, the silence of the passions, the possession of truth, and the love of God and of our fellows. This is a different conception of happiness, incomplete, perhaps, in a different direction. But were even this attenuated happiness impossible to realise, all rationality would vanish not merely from Christian charity and discipline, but from the whole Christian theory of creation, redemption, and judgment. Without some window open to heaven, religion would be more fantastic than ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... or were heard, or some filthy bundle of rags and straw was seen to move. Perhaps the poor children presented the most piteous and heart-rending spectacle. Many were too weak to stand, their little limbs attenuated, except where the frightful swellings had taken the place of previous emaciation. Every infantile expression had entirely departed; and, in some reason and intelligence had evidently flown. Many were remnants of families, crowded together in ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... long, and was often delayed for hours at fords and creeks, where scenes of wild confusion took place and you were deafened with yelling Kaffirs and cracking whips. This convoy has of course to be guarded throughout, which means a very attenuated and consequently weakened force, an attack on one part of which might be carried on without the knowledge of the rest of the column, or the possibility of its giving much help anyway. When we left Lindley we had a sharp rearguard action, and the Boers pushed their attack very vigorously. ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... 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
... who die early. They have exhausted themselves of the material from which a new life is created, and so it is not properly started at the beginning and never reaches its highest development. To the truth of this statement attests the mental imbecility, the pallid and attenuated forms, of the children who are the earlier products of marriage. The effect of excessive coitus in women is seen by the confirmed ill health of so many women after marriage and repeated child-bearing. A large number of these cases are dependent upon alteration and diseases ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... Ages, 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 Mrs. Jones is but ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... 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: embezzlers ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... these arches, and from it to the main cornice, the walls, covered with blue and white tiles, are perfectly blank, broken only by square-headed windows. Only at the crossing do pilasters run up to the vault, and they are of the usual attenuated Doric form. As usual the roof is covered with plain coffers, as ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... sat silent, not provokingly, as though to prolong his distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her, it was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It was the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything; and she had lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not wanted, ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... the deputation, 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
... atmosphere it must be so very attenuated indeed that human beings could not possibly live in it at all; but nothing has yet been detected which would enable us to say positively that any atmosphere does exist there, although there have been some indications observed which support the supposition that there may be ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... The attenuated neck of land between the Mersey and the Dee had an evil reputation for affairs of this description. Men pressed at Chester, and sent across the neck to the tenders or ships of war in the Mersey, seldom reached their destination unless attended by an exceptionally strong ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... 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 most part, impressionist; they suggest ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... which succeeds this, Fig. 57, takes the form of the cartouche, or oval, in which royal names were inscribed, and is held forth by a female figure of graceful proportions. Fig. 58 is a still more grotesque combination; a hand holds forth a shell, the arm being elongated and attenuated according to the exigencies of the design, and terminating in the head of a goose. The abundance of quaint fancy that may be lavished on so simple a thing as a spoon cannot be better illustrated than it has been by an American author, who published, ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... 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 ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... coming up to him, I quickly put him out of pain by a shot behind the ear. This makes a proud addition to my hitherto rather small list of game, which now comprises jack-rabbits, a badger, a fierce gosling, an antelope, and a thin, attenuated coyote, that I ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... rate his pretensions to nobility. This proud cavalier was followed by one servant only, who carried a capacious wallet, not over-well replenished with provision, as was apparent from its long lank shape and attenuated proportions. His master's cloak was slung on the other shoulder; and his belt displayed some implements that appeared alike formidable as means of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... sea-breeze, springing up as the sun declines, revives their flagging spirits. The smartest turnout and the finest horses generally belong to John Chinaman, got up in irreproachable English costume, with his pigtail showing beneath a straw hat, though considerably attenuated, and lacking those adornments of silken braid and red tassels, generally plaited into the imposing queue of the orthodox Celestial. The indefatigable Chinese, frequently arriving on an alien shore without a dollar in their ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... Schiaparelli, Knobel, Terby 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. He noted many brilliant spots on Mars and indicated ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... game in the neighborhood. The explanation was obvious: the Lady Hortense had no faults to be discovered. The closest inspection through two pairs of glasses, Percival's and her own, failed to reveal a flaw. Her birth and position were equal to his own; her beauty, if attenuated, was sufficient; while her discriminating taste amounted to a virtue. The Honorable Percival proffered his hand, and was accepted. Hascombe Hall ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... automatically. If the majority of influential persons held the opinions and occupied the point of view that a few rather uninfluential people now do, there would, for instance, be no likelihood of another great war; the whole problem of "labor and capital" would be transformed and attenuated; national arrogance, race animosity, political corruption, and inefficiency would all be reduced below the danger point. As an old Stoic proverb has it, men are tormented by the opinions they have of things, rather than by ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... entirely unroofed, the thatches having been given to feed the cattle, which had nevertheless died; so that cattle had disappeared altogether from the land. He says that a few attenuated beings, more like skeletons than human creatures, were seen hovering about among the graves of those who had been snatched away by the famine; that desertion was everywhere visible, and that the silence of death reigned. In one of the villages, he says, an old man from ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... days this attenuated frame will be mingled with the dust from which it sprung, and scattered by the winds of heaven, or by the labour of future generations, as chance may dictate, will yield sustenance to the thistle which wars against the fertility of nature, or the grain which is the support of our existence,—to ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... 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
... to the remark, that female education should embrace our whole nature, and not one portion of it. Why sacrifice the body to the improvement of the mind? It is a melancholy spectacle to witness the pale countenances and attenuated forms of many youth of this sex, as they issue from the school-room. How long shall consumption prey on so many at this age? When will American females imitate those of our fatherland, where sickness among this sex is almost ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... large, the Tories have flourished 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
... the life-boat was rather unaccountably attenuated; Peter turned around and looked into the bland, unsmiling face of Jen, a Chinese deck-boy. Pig-tails were coming back in style again. About six inches of wispy, purple-black braid extended downward from Jen's white cap. His face was quite yellow, and his eyes were green. An understandable light ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... trimmed to a point; and he wore a moustache, the long ends of which projected athwart his upper lip like a spritsail yard. His hands were thin, showing the tendons of the fingers working under the loose skin at every movement of them, while the fingers themselves were long, attenuated, ingrained with dirt, and furnished with long, talon-like yellow nails, that looked as though they never received the slightest attention. Finally, his clothing consisted of a cotton shirt, that looked as though it had been in use for ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... otherwise resembled her only in the poise of her neck and an occasional gesture; she was fair and with a kind of ignoble and premeditated refinement in her speech and manner. She was dressed with the restraint of a prolonged and attenuated widowhood, in a rich and complicatedly quiet dress of mauve and grey. She was obviously a transitory visitor and not so much taking the opulence about her and particularly the great butler for granted as pointedly ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... ever-receding commencement, and toil to gain some adequate grasp of an apparently endless succession. A beginning there must have been, though we can never hope to fix its point. Even speculation droops her wings in the attenuated atmosphere of a past so remote, and the light of imagination is quenched in the darkness of a history so ancient. In time, as in space, the confines of the universe must ever remain concealed ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... 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 ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... the bobbins from the card is taken to the mule spinning frame where it is passed through rolls, and the sliver attenuated by means of a ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... degrees; but was afterwards ten degrees longer. Towards its centre it showed great intensity of light, becoming visible in the crepusculum before stars of the second magnitude. Through its more attenuated extremity, the stars were plainly seen, the coma seeming to be much less dense, showing the sky through the centre like ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... to do so, he 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 ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... 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 battery, a few rods distant. The ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... 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 cat ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... the subsequent degeneration and necrosis of the granulation tissue results in the breaking down and destruction of the tissue in which it is formed. Another group is that in which chronic inflammation is due to mild or attenuated forms of pyogenic infection affecting especially the lymph glands and the bone marrow. In the glands of the groin, for example, associated with various forms of irritation about the external genitals, different types of chronic lymphadenitis are met with; they do not frankly suppurate as ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... looking after the trousseau, and ordered the whole of it from a village needlewoman, without choosing or discussing anything. Thus she did not amuse herself with those preparations that stimulate the tenderness of mothers, and so her affection was from the very outset, perhaps, to some extent attenuated. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... 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
... 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 ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... their arms like walking-sticks, or in their hands like truncheons. At a certain period of the ceremony, however, each carried his candle up to the Pope, laid it across his two knees to be blessed, took it back again, and filed off. This was done in a very attenuated procession, as you may suppose, and occupied a long time. Not because it takes long to bless a candle through and through, but because there were so many candles to be blessed. At last they were all blessed: and then they were all lighted; and then the Pope was ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... and brittle. Whenever she moved she crackled, and one went in constant dread of seeing a wizen-looking limb break off short like the branch of some dead tree. When she spoke it was in a voice hard and shrill, not unlike the chirp of a cricket. When—as was frequently the case—she clothed her attenuated form in a faded brown silk gown, her resemblance to that lively insect ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... means to have a throw at the Administration, and of consequence, at Clay; and 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 muscles ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... few infantry uniforms skirting them, were sitting in the pleasant cooling evening air, fanned by the fresh springing breeze, outside one of the Piazza Bra caffes, close upon the shadow of the great Verona amphitheatre. They were smoking their attenuated long straw cigars, sipping iced lemonade or coffee, and talking the common talk of the garrison officers, with perhaps that additional savour of a robust immorality which a Viennese social education may give. The rounded ball of the brilliant September moon hung still aloft, lighting ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wrote many comic songs there is ever in them something of the melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces and arabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad form was extremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so completely that it seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated and repeated to furnish full gratification to the ear. His form when compared with the modern ballad's amplitude seems like a Tanagra figurine beside a Michelangelo statue—but ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson |
