"Rarefied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to me sometimes," I said. "You see I'm tremendously fond of this world exactly as it is now. Mr. Vedder, it's a wonderful and beautiful place! I've never seen a better one. I confess I could not possibly live in the rarefied atmosphere of a final solution. I want to live right here and now for all I'm worth. The other day a man asked me what I thought was the best time of life. 'Why,' I answered without a thought, 'Now.' It has always seemed to me that if a man can't make a go of it, yes, and be happy ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... he enjoyed the quiet, starlit nights before the moon was up; for the moon dazzled the eyes in the rarefied air where they flew, whereas the stars gave just enough light to steer by without making ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... alpine country. There are isolated peaks, there are extensive but separated plateaus, and there are deeper strata which are quite continuous for nearly all mankind. Thus the individuals whose susceptibilities reach the rarefied atmosphere of those peaks where there exists an exquisitive difference between Frege and Peano, or between Sassetta's earlier and later periods, may be good stanch Republicans at another level of ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... this ink does proceed from the fuliginosity or sooty part of the coal of the cork which is exceeding porous and light, and that this fuliginosity is nothing but an oil very much rarefied. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... guest-chamber opinions have been formed; and from it some of the profoundest and most poetic French music has been derived, such as Franck's and Debussy's chamber-music. But its atmosphere is becoming daily more rarefied. That is a danger. It is to be feared that this art and thought may be absorbed by the decadent subtleties or pedantic scholasticism which is apt to accompany all coteries—in short, that its music will be salon-music rather than chamber-music. Even the Society itself seems to have ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... almanac till your eyes ache, and study the thermometer till you get a crick in your neck. You watch the smoke from every farmhouse and cottage within your ken, and still, after curling high up into the pure, rarefied atmosphere, it floats hopelessly away to the southward and corroborates the odious dog-vane that you fondly imagined might have got stuck in its northerly direction. You walk out and ask every labourer you meet whether he "does not think we are going to have a change?" The man ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... so thin and rarefied that breathing is hard work. That's nothing. Now for a good rest and refresh. We must not ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... that would have accompanied those other titles, possessed in an indirect sort of way the authority, and yet managed to remain disentangled from the responsibilities. Had he suddenly vanished the elder Foote would have been left suspended in rarefied heights between heaven and his business, lacking direct contact with the mills and machine shops and foundries; yet, doubtless, would have been unable to realize that the loss of Rangar had left him so. Rangar was a competent, efficient man, ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... too impalpable and moves in an air too rarefied. It sometimes lacks strength. It fails to take grip enough of life. Had he lived he might have given it these things; there are signs in his last poems that he would have given it. But he could hardly have bettered the sheer and triumphant lyricism of ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... that occur only in the Caucasus. The sun had sunk behind the mountains but it was still light. The evening glow had spread over a third of the sky, and against its brilliancy the dull white immensity of the mountains was sharply defined. The air was rarefied, motionless, and full of sound. The shadow of the mountains reached for several miles over the steppe. The steppe, the opposite side of the river, and the roads, were all deserted. If very occasionally mounted men appeared, the Cossacks in ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... at a rate of about 1,090 feet per second. The rate of propagation of sound waves in other materials varies with the density of the material. For example, the speed of transmission is much greater in water than in air, and is much less in highly rarefied air than in air at ordinary density. The propagation of sound waves in a vacuum may be said not to take ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... to the highest order of minds, and what a change! Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... o'clock, and made my way out into the star-blazing night. Such glory of the heavens I had never before seen. I had never before been lifted up so near them, and hence had never before seen them through so rarefied an atmosphere. The clouds and vapors had disappeared, and all the hosts of heaven were magnified. The Milky Way seemed newly paved and swept. There was no wind and no sound. The mighty crater was a gulf of blackness, but the sky blazed ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... neared the hospice I began to feel the effects of the rarefied air very sensibly. It made me dizzy and sick, bringing on a most acute headache—a sharp, knife-like pain. S. was still ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Yet it conceals no mystery. You may see its meaning most easily and clearly, perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes—say Pure Mathematics with Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man's thought and emotion about things. In Pure Mathematics things are rarefied into ideas, numbers, concepts, but still farther and farther away from the individual man. Two and two make four, and fourpence is not ninepence (or at any rate four is not nine) whether Alcibiades or Cleon keep the tally. In Acting on the other hand almost everything depends on personal interpretation—on ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... friends passed through this opening. The air there became so rarefied that their torch threatened to go out at every step. Vallensolle felt drops of ice-cold water falling on ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... bodies, cannot breathe for long at a stretch the rarefied atmosphere of the heights; and towards the end of the second week Evelyn's zeal began to wear thin. Dr Mackay had at last spoken hopefully as to the fate of Desmond's eyes. Night-nursing was no longer ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... nervous state when the brain seems rarefied and empowered to wrest secrets from the very elements in his path. He pursued several chains of thought at once, with lightning rapidity, and, with curious mental inconsistency, dropped them, and lapsed into others. Now a sudden interest sprang up in this wandering traveller. He listened with the ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... tunnels built up to protect the rails from the great drifts arising out of heavy snowstorms. At the highest point is a pyramid, commemorating a certain Mr. Oakes Ames, which looked 20 feet high and very near the line; it is however, 75 feet high and half-a-mile off. The air is so rarefied that ...
— A start in life • C. F. Dowsett
... plant our feet upon the topmost peak of Mount Everest we are about to enter upon a task of no ordinary difficulty and danger, and it is desirable that no avoidable risks should be run. The danger arises from two causes—the excessive cold, and the highly rarefied state of the atmosphere at so enormous an elevation. The first can be guarded against by suitable clothing; the second can only be overcome by the assumption of our diving dresses. The latter, no doubt, seems to you a strange precaution; but it is a fact, that on the top of Mount ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... rather cold light, made pallid by those green curtains that hang all around, in which one would fancy that the light-rays become rarefied, in order to give to the vision of the people walking about the room a certain contemplative justice, the slow crowd goes and comes, pauses, disperses itself over the seats in serried groups, and yet mixing up different sections of society more thoroughly than any other assembly, just ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... continued our zigzag climb. The fifteen hundred remaining feet took us five hours to clear; the circuitous route, the diagonal and the counter marches, must have measured at least three leagues. I could stand it no longer. I was yielding to the effects of hunger and cold. The rarefied air scarcely gave play to the action ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... about through the ministry of invisible substances, such as the angels, as Father Malebranche also believes. These angels or these substances act according to the ordinary laws of their nature, being combined with bodies more rarefied and more vigorous than those we have at our command. And such miracles are only so by comparison, and in relation to us; just as our works would be considered miraculous amongst animals if they were capable of remarking upon them. The changing ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... much aping of the angel, relinquished the woman to his brother. Even though the brother were like to die of it, we have not yet heard the last opinion of the woman. But be that as it may, we have here the explanation of the "rarefied and freezing air" in which I complained that he had taught himself to breathe. Reading the man through the books, I took his professions in good faith. He made a dupe of me, even as he was seeking to make ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... atmosphere. And if perchance you were fortunate enough to escape being blown overboard, you would be made seriously ill by the sudden change, from the dense air which you are now breathing, to the highly rarefied air outside. For this same reason it is also necessary that, while the ship is in flight, all ports and doors communicating with the exterior atmosphere should be kept tightly closed. But come, the sun is rising," he said, as a flash of golden ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... think that Mrs. Strickland was the most harmless of all the lion-hunters that pursue their quarry from the rarefied heights of Hampstead to the nethermost studios of Cheyne Walk. She had led a very quiet youth in the country, and the books that came down from Mudie's Library brought with them not only their own romance, but the romance of London. She had a real passion ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... the Italian warfare against the Austrians was carried on has been sufficient to entail enormous difficulties and a great additional strain, due actually to difficult breathing in a rarefied atmosphere. ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... the fluid contained in them, they would sometimes, says he, appear at a distance to be sucked up from the sea. The theory of waterspouts in the present day does in fact admit the supposition here referred to; that the air, being rarefied by particular causes, has its equilibrium restored by the elevation of the water, on the same principle that mercury rises in the barometer, or the contents of a well in a common pump. The opinions of the learned ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... the donkey's nose to lead him on. Day after day we floundered through swamps and marshes, over rocky, barren hills, and through thick growths of willows and alders, and at the end of the day's journey it would apparently be as far off as ever. The explanation was that in the rarefied atmosphere of interior Labrador distances are very deceptive; when George reported that the "big water" was three miles ahead it must have been ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... Such rarefied confessions were common, and this was one of many occasions when I disgraced William by snickering in the solemn pause ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... Scotch Novels has been a considerable recommendation to them. They are a relief to the mind, rarefied as it has been with modern philosophy, and heated with ultra-radicalism. At a time also, when we bid fair to revive the principles of the Stuarts, it is interesting to bring us acquainted with their persons ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... she did not know what was in them; the only thing she could recall was toads; that Sainte-Croix never revealed his secret to her; that she did not believe he made them himself, but had them prepared by Glazer; she seemed to remember that some of them contained nothing but rarefied arsenic; that as to an antidote, she knew of no other than milk; and Sainte-Croix had told her that if one had taken milk in the morning, and on the first onset of the poison took another glassful, one would have nothing ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... whether the Giants or the Cubs will finish first next season; nobody except you who cares a whoop how Indiana will go for president—in fact, most of them probably haven't heard that Indiana was thinking of going. Their souls are soaring among the stars in a rarefied atmosphere of culture, and even if you could you wouldn't dare venture up that far with yours, for fear of being seized by an uncontrollable impulse to leap off and end all, the same as some persons are affected when ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... rambled, and even up into the octagonal turret chambers in the tower. Here he seemed to be rid of the aura of the dining-room portrait and in a rarefied atmosphere of Tudor turbulence. In one of the turret chambers, that overlooking the orchard, he found himself surveying the distant parkland with the eyes of a captive and longing for the coming of one who ever tarried yet was ever expected. The long narrow ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... Even the men with district experience, and those who had groaned in provincial secretariats under the heavy hand of the Government of India, were quick to adopt more orthodox views as soon as they were privileged to breathe the more rarefied atmosphere of the Olympian secretariats, that prided themselves on being the repositories of all the arcana of "good government." Of what constituted good government efficiency came to be regarded as the one test that mattered, and it was a test which only Englishmen were ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... between; we imagine all sorts of adventures in the interim; strain our hopes and wishes to reach the air-drawn circle, or to 'descry new lands, rivers, and mountains,' stretching far beyond it: our feelings, carried out of themselves, lose their grossness and their husk, are rarefied, expanded, melt into softness and brighten into beauty, turning to ethereal mould, sky-tinctured. We drink the air before us, and borrow a more refined existence from objects that hover on the brink of nothing. Where the landscape fades from the dull sight, we fill the thin, viewless space ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... spring journeys on the Barrier. The temperature dropped into the minus forties; but the worst feature of all was a continuous head-wind blowing from west to east which combined with the low temperature and rarefied air to make the conditions of sledging extremely laborious. The supporting party returned, and the three men continued alone, pulling out westwards into an unknown waste of snow with no landmarks to vary the rough monotony. They turned homewards on December 1, but found ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... the glamour, the uniform, the guard-mount, the military music, the rarefied air, the new conditions, the new interests of my life. Heine's songs, Goethe's plays, history and romance were floating through my mind. Is it to be wondered at that I and Adams together prepared the ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... preparing for the journey. It was highly interesting to see here at this season of the year, as we well could do, so near the equator, the regular systematic procession of the wind and rain following up the sun in its northward passage. The atmosphere, at this time and place, was heated and rarefied by the vertical rays of the sun; that produced a vacuum, which the cold airs of the south taking advantage of, rush up to fill, and with their coldness condense the heated vapours drawn up daily from the ocean and precipitate them back again on the earth below. This occurring and continually repeating ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... and colds and hungers and desolations come to him, they cannot put out the shine of him. But for me it has been very lonely. I wanted to be the thing of soft corners and seduction that you were sickened of. I had to rip myself to bits and make myself the rather rarefied sort of thing you demanded. I didn't dare not to be brave, because you were so much enthroned in my life that every thought was a deliberate homage to you. I might have got considerably happy, and found many thrills out of thinking ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... found that even without my oxygen inhaler I could breathe without undue distress. It was bitterly cold, however, and my thermometer was at zero Fahrenheit. At one-thirty I was nearly seven miles above the surface of the earth, and still ascending steadily. I found, however, that the rarefied air was giving markedly less support to my planes, and that my angle of ascent had to be considerably lowered in consequence. It was already clear that even with my light weight and strong engine-power ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... correctly classified as waves, they bear little resemblance to the waves on water. Instead of being made of crests and troughs, as are the water waves, the sound waves consist of alternating successions of slightly condensed and rarefied layers of air. Then, while the general movement of the water waves is that of ever widening circles over a surface, the sound waves spread as enlarging spherical shells through the air. In sound waves, as in ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... them on top of each other and you'll have a silver shaft more than 1,750 miles high. Sand your hands and climb it. Perchance from the top you'll see many things—among others what is oppressing the poor. And while up in that rarefied atmosphere, where the vision is good and thinking probably easy, you will look around for those other pyramids of expense annually erected by state, county and municipal government, then come down firm in the faith that ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... why the same Body seems greater (without adding to it) one time, than another; they say, when it seems lesse, it is Condensed; when greater, Rarefied. What is that Condensed, and Rarefied? Condensed, is when there is in the very same Matter, lesse Quantity than before; and Rarefied, when more. As if there could be Matter, that had not some determined Quantity; when Quantity is nothing else but the Determination of Matter; that is to say ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... interesting to find out to what extent this rule holds good. The ridges and the hilltops are always the warmest places in cold weather; would this hold as regards mountain tops?—as regards high mountain tops? Probably it would hold in the sunshine, but the rapid radiation of heat in the rarefied atmosphere of mountain tops would swing the balance the other way after dark. There is no doubt, however, that the coldest place in cold weather in Alaska is the river surface, and it is on the river surface that most of our ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... simple enough affair, but, under Mrs. Hading's treatment, it became rarefied. A chef for the supper had been commanded from Johannesburg, a string orchestra for the dance from Salisbury, and exquisite bridge prizes were being sent from a jeweller's at the Cape. The hotel dining-room was to be transformed into a ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... went on, following the diminishing brooks to their snowy source in the peak of St. Gothard. We cut off the bends of the road by footpaths up the rocks, which we ascended in single file, one of the Americans going ahead and little Pietro with his staff and bundle bringing up the rear. The rarefied air we breathed, seven thousand feet above the sea, was like exhilarating gas. We felt no fatigue, but ran and shouted and threw snowballs, in the ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... form and colour, of rest and peace in the grateful shadow of the little church on the cliff, but, above all, in the release from mental tension, and the ease of feeling after the strain of thought, she found the highest form of pleasure she had tasted, the most rarefied, the most intense. The St. Valentine's Day of her development was approaching, and her heart had begun already to practise the notes of the song-significant into which she would burst ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... rituals, and is maintained in its natural order by the same means. The Brahmanas do not indeed often assert on their own authority that Prajapati was himself sacrificed in order to produce the world, and in fact they usually give other accounts of the creation; but as their authors live in a rarefied atmosphere of mystical allegory in which fact and fancy are completely confused with one another and consistency ceases to have any meaning, none of them would have difficulty in accepting the Rigvedic statement that he was sacrificed. Hence they tell us on the one hand that Prajapati has created ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... the grade leading up to the hamlet of Ridgeville, within a mile of which lay the little farm to which he was going, he sat at an open window and viewed the scene with delight, drawing into his lungs with a sense of restful content the crisp, rarefied air. To the west, and marking the vicinity of Drake's farm, the mountain loomed up in its blended coat of gray and green, growing more and more indistinct as the range gradually extended into the bluish ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... huckster trip to Craigswold he pinned a similar sign to the bulletin board of that rarefied resort's post-office. And he ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... clouds!" said the professor. "Be careful not to exert yourselves, as it is hard to breathe in this rarefied or ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... In that case, if I were not shot or stoned, my strange predicament, and the secret of my invention, would be exposed to the world. If I did not do this, I must either let myself drop and be killed or mangled, or hang there and die. When, during the course of the night, the air became more rarefied, I might rise higher and higher, perhaps to an altitude of one or two hundred feet. It would then be impossible for the people to reach me and get me down, even if they were convinced that I was not a demon. I should then expire, ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... felt as if he were walking again in a far world, not Cossethay, a far world, the fragile reality. He went on, quiet, suspended, rarefied. He could not bear to think or to speak, nor make any sound or sign, nor change his fixed motion. He could scarcely bear to think of her face. He moved within the knowledge of her, in the world that ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... influx was into the brain, and that this was acted upon in like manner. Lastly, they spoke in such a manner that the speech fell only into the interior understanding; its fluency was like that of rarefied air. I was sensible of the influx itself, but not distinctly of the particulars. These several kinds of speech were circumstanced like different fluids—the first kind was like flowing water; the second like water ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... formed by the revolution of an isoceles rectangular triangle, all the lines from the circumference of which meeting in a center, by holding it in the light of the sun they can collect and concentrate all its rays at this one point of convergence; where the air will now become rarefied, and any light, dry, combustible matter will kindle as soon as applied, under the effect of the rays, which here acquire the substance and active force of fire. Some are of opinion that these vestals had no other business than the preservation of this fire; but others ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the temperate climate and rarefied air of this spot are singularly favourable to the cultivation of the coffee-tree, which is well known to flourish on heights. The prefect of the capuchins, an active and enlightened man, has introduced into the province this new branch of agricultural industry. Indigo was formerly planted ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... stream of water is found, there also is a village, with clusters of trees. From points where a comprehensive view is obtainable the effect of these dark-green spots, scattered here and there among the whitish hills, seen through the clear, rarefied atmosphere, is most beautiful. It seems a peculiar feature of everything in the East - not only the cities themselves, but even of the landscape - to look beautiful and enchanting at a distance; but ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... minute or two later her masts, fine as spiders' webs, began to rise against the warm, golden glow of the western sky, then her funnel appeared, and finally her bridge and chart-house—appearing as completely detached and isolated objects in the rarefied atmosphere— suddenly showed themselves on the horizon, alternately appearing and disappearing with the rise and fall of the ship over the swell. Then Milsom rang down to the engine-room for half speed; and a little later, when the Maranon was hull-up and the two ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... the 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; ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... conducted. Many, of course, hold that it is morally wrong to cause any animals to do battle one with another, and this is also the teaching of the Muhammadan religion. The Malays, however, have not yet learned to breathe the rarefied atmosphere, which can only be inhaled in comfort, by the frequenters of Exeter Hall, and, seeing that Allah has implanted an instinct of combat in many animals, the Malays take no shame in deriving amusement from ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... young), as of a being from another sphere; and a writer in The Fortnightly had swam into his ken, trailing visible clouds of glory. But by and by he finds himself breathing with perfect composure in that rarefied air, and in course of time the grey conviction settles upon him that these fabled people are in no wise different from the booksellers and business men he had found so sordid and dull—no more individual or delightful as a race; and he speedily ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... noticeable because he was habitually of grave demeanor, and his associates, observing the change, taxed him with the fact and demanded an explanation, Hobart in particular wishing to know. Harley lightly ascribed it to the rarefied air, as they were ascending a plateau, and the others, though calling it the baldest and poorest of replies, were forced ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... fashionably, strikingly, gowned, somewhat conspicuously; a large pattern in the figure of the cloth. She carried a little dog. There was about her something, difficult to denote, brilliant and hard in effect, like a polished stone. And we felt the rarefied atmosphere of a wealthy, highly cultivated, rather haughty society. "Charge to Edward Wharton," she said, very nicely, bending over us as we wrote "Lenox, Mass." She pronounced it not Massachusetts, but Mass, as is not ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... elongated, the rich black freshly turned earth in sharp contrast to the prevailing gold, while in a tremendous deep blue arch overhead an unclouded sky swept to cup the circumference of vision. Many miles away, yet amazingly distinct in the rarefied air, the smoke of threshers hung in funnelled smudges above the horizon—like the black smoke of steamers, hull ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... towards the heart, cannot then be closed. But as soon as two drops of blood have thus passed, one into each of the cavities, these drops which cannot but be very large, because the orifices through which they pass are wide, and the vessels from which they come full of blood, are immediately rarefied, and dilated by the heat they meet with. In this way they cause the whole heart to expand, and at the same time press home and shut the five small valves that are at the entrances of the two vessels from ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... threshold, and Jessy recognized unwillingly that she looked surprisingly handsome. Handsome, however, was not the word Vane would have used. He thought Evelyn looked exotic: highly cultivated, strangely refined, as though she had grown up in a rarefied atmosphere in which nothing rank could thrive. Exactly what suggested this it was difficult to define; but the man felt that she had brought along with her the clean, chill air of the heights where the cloud-berries bloom. She was a flower of the dim ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... of heat between the freezing-point and the boiling-point, 32 deg. and 212 deg., the expansion of air is about 1/490th part, so that any invention which seeks to use rarefied air as a motive power must employ a very intense degree of heat, enough to fuse ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... come down to earth. I was still soaring in the rarefied heights of love, and inclined to a general amnesty towards ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... three or four months, or settling here permanently. People can safely sleep out of doors for six months of the year. The plains are from 4,000 to 6,000 feet high, and some of the settled "parks," or mountain valleys, are from 8,000 to 10,000. The air, besides being much rarefied, is very dry. The rainfall is far below the average, dews are rare, and fogs nearly unknown. The sunshine is bright and almost constant, and three-fourths of the days are cloudless. The milk, beef, and bread are good. The climate is neither so hot in summer nor so cold in winter as that of ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... I have often been induced to believe from observation, that the twilight of the evenings is lighter than that of the mornings at the same distance from noon. Some may ascribe this to the greater height of the atmosphere in the evenings having been rarefied by the sun during the day; but as its density must at the same time be diminished, its power of refraction would continue the same. I should rather suppose that it may be owing to the phosphorescent quality (as it is called) of almost all bodies; that is, when they have been exposed to ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... Wolverhampton, on September 5, 1862. They ascended to such an elevation that both lost the power of their limbs, and had not Coxwell opened the descending valve with his teeth, they would have ascended higher and probably lost their lives in the rarefied atmosphere, for there was no compressed oxygen then as now to inhale into their lungs. The last reckoning of which they were capable before Glaisher lost consciousness showed an elevation of twenty-nine thousand feet, but it is supposed that they ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... space a fish-shaped vessel of the void—the vessel that was shortly to attack so boldly both the massed fleet of Triplanetary and Roger's planetoid—plunged into the rarefied outer atmosphere, and crimson beams of force tore shriekingly the thin air as it braked its terrific speed. A third of the circumference of Nevia's mighty globe was traversed before the velocity of the craft could be reduced sufficiently to make a landing possible. ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... everywhere, and everywhere that he went he met the Langleys. In the high political and social life in which the Dictator, to his entertainment, found himself, the hostilities of warring parties had little or no effect. In that rarefied air it was hard to draw the breath of party passion, and the Dictator came across the Langleys as often in the houses of the Opposition as in Ministerial mansions. So it came to pass that something almost approaching to ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... comment—so great was the demand upon his lungs—was not too tired to admire the power and resolution of the girl, who seemed not to suffer any special inconvenience from the rarefied air. The dryness of his open mouth, the throbbing of his troubled pulse, the roaring of his breath, brought to him with increasing dismay the fact that he had overlooked another phase of the ranger's job. "I couldn't chop a hole ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... Cynic namesake,) was a pupil of Anaximenes, and wrote a treatise on Nature, of which Diogenes Laertius gives the following account: "He maintained that air was the primary element of all things; that there was an infinite number of worlds and an infinite vacuum; that air condensed and rarefied produced the different members of the universe; that nothing was generated from nothing, or resolved into nothing; that the earth was round, supported in the centre, having received its shape from the whirling round it of warm vapours, and ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... hypothesis which we have formed on that subject is, that the air, coming in contact with the Snowy Mountains, immediately becomes chilled and condensed, and being thus rendered heavier than the air below, it descends into the rarefied air below, or into the vacuum formed by the constant action of the sun on the open unsheltered plains. The clouds rise suddenly near these mountains, and distribute their contents partially over the neighboring plains. The same cloud will discharge hail alone in one part, hail and rain in another, ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... them dignified enough to be termed "mountains"—which they crossed necessitated their flying high. They were generally at an altitude of two thousand feet and the rarefied atmosphere so far above the earth was cool, anyway. Since leaving St. Thomas, on the bank of the St. Lawrence, they had averaged eighty miles an hour, and before moonrise they were cognizant of the fact that they were approaching ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... spire far out there under the very shadow of the Rockies. At least you would have wondered a decade ago in the Centennial year. You note the transparency of the atmosphere. Science has told you that at such an altitude the air is rarefied. There is no light haze to soften outlines and to lend enchantment to a distant view. Roof, spire, chimney, all stand out clear and hard, and the coal-smoke from the railway blots the landscape where it rises, yet is quickly scattered by the mountain breeze. Between you and the little town lies ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... for showing that the Resurrection was both true and glorious. That it was a true Resurrection He shows first on the part of the body; and this He shows in three respects; first of all, that it was a true and solid body, and not phantastic or rarefied, like the air. And He establishes this by offering His body to be handled; hence He says in the last chapter of Luke (39): "Handle and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as you see Me to have." Secondly, He shows that it was a human body, by presenting His ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... went to the million-candle-power restaurants every now and then, and ate a good deal more than sixty-five cents' worth apiece without batting an eye; and we went to see a play occasionally and didn't climb up into the rarefied atmosphere to find our seats, either. And whenever we broke in with the limousine crowd we kept a bright lookout for Jarvis. We wanted to see him and show him that we were coming along. We wanted him to be proud of us. I'd ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... streams flowed out like a rocket tail behind us. The Planetara caught their impetus. In the rarefied air, our bow lifted slightly, like a ship riding a gentle ground swell. At a hundred thousand feet we sailed gently forward, hull down to the asteroid's surface, cruising to seek ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... the apocryphal book known under that name? He is the first of the Mystics, and perhaps has gone the furthest in his theological definitions. He lives in the rarefied air of the mountain tops, above the gulfs, on the threshold of the other world which he sees in part by flashes of grace, and he remains lucid, undazzled in the blaze of ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... imponderable substance—an ether—was recognised, so mediumistic phenomena seemed mysterious until the now fully established fact was recognised, that between the particles of ether there exists another still more rarefied imponderable substance not subject to the law ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... cloud heights for a day or two," went on Mr. Sharp. "I want you, to gradually get used to the rarefied atmosphere, Mr. Damon. Tom and I are getting to be old hands at it. But, if you think you can stand it, I'll go up about a ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... engineering science and capabilities far in advance of ours, they may be conceived to have grappled with the stupendous problem of keeping their world in a habitable condition as long as possible. Supposing them to have become accustomed to live in their rarefied atmosphere (a thing not inconceivable, since men can live for a time at least in air hardly less rare), the most pressing problem for them is that of a water-supply, without which plant life cannot exist, ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... elevation. That's what I wanted the extra money for, to get a new one. But of course if you feel that you can't spare it, why, we'll simply have to fly higher, that's all. The carburetor we have will work all right at a high elevation on account of the rarefied air, but with a different one, of course we could stay ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... was unaccustomed to reading country from a great altitude. It was also bitterly cold, and even in my fur-lined combination I was shivering. I noticed, too, that I had to take long, deep breaths in the rarefied atmosphere. Looking downward at a certain angle, I saw what at first I took to be a round, shimmering pool of water. It was simply the effect of the sunlight on the congealing mist. We had been keeping an eye ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... what we call water. It is a liquid, clear, and transparent body. On the one hand it flows, slips, and runs away; and on the other it assumes all the forms of the bodies that surround it, having properly none of its own. If water were more rarefied, or thinner, it would be a kind of air; and so the whole surface of the earth would be dry and sterile. There would be none but volatiles; no living creature could swim; no fish could live; nor would there be any traffic by navigation. ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... perchance the root, from which alone can grow a tenacity of purpose which takes hold upon life, utterly eradicated and vanished within you? Or is your whole being actually rarefied into a hollow shade, devoid of sap and blood and of individual power of movement, or dissolved to a dream in which, indeed, a motley array of faces arise and busily cross one another, but the body lies stiff and dead? Long since it has been openly proclaimed to our generation and repeated ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... admiring Cowperwood and following his every daring movement with almost excited interest. To be the wife of such a man, she thought—to even command his interest, let alone his affection—must be wonderful. After the dull world she had known—it seemed dull compared to the upper, rarefied realms which she was beginning to glimpse through him—and after the average men in the real-estate office over the way where she had first worked, Cowperwood, in his good clothes, his remote mood, his easy, commanding manner, touched the most ambitious ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the crabbed, old, round-backed, red-headed news editor, and I rather hoped that he liked me. Of course, Beaumont was the real boss; but he lived in the rarefied atmosphere of some Olympian height from which he could distinguish nothing smaller than an international crisis or a split in the Cabinet. Sometimes we saw him passing in lonely majesty to his ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pine-slab buildings, and scattered around in various places were shafts, whose crude timber-hoists appeared merely as vague outlines in the fast-fading light. The distance to the camp from where they stood was not over three miles as the crow flies, but it appeared much less in the rarefied atmosphere. ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... too, imposed upon and penetrating a taste naturally catholic, we owe the rare flavour of the many literary judgments scattered about his letters. They have a taste of native earth, beautifully rarefied: to change the metaphor, they illuminate the page with a kind of lambent common sense. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... alongside of the tremendous granite ranges which divide the Indus from its great tributary, the Shayok. Colossal scenery, desperate aridity, tremendous solar heat, and an atmosphere highly rarefied and of nearly intolerable dryness, were the chief characteristics. At these Tibetan altitudes, where the valleys exceed 11,000 feet, the sun's rays are even more powerful than on the 'burning plains of India.' The day wind, ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... doctrine of what were afterwards known as the 'elements'—Fire, Air, Earth, and Water—and to regard all these as states of a single substance, which presented different appearances according as it was more or less rarefied or condensed. Moreover, Anaximander at least (c. 546 B. C.), the successor of Thales, shook himself free of the idea that the earth required support of some kind to keep in its place. He held that it swung free in space and that it ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... with the horse-power required to drive great ships across the ocean; it is so with the lifting power required to raise balloons in the air. A balloon goes up quite easily for a certain distance, but after a certain distance it refuses to go up any farther, because the air is too rarefied to float it and sustain it. And, therefore, I would say let us ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... even a middle-aged English writer, extremely fagged and hot and breathless, could enjoy the same privilege. All this, you must understand, had gone on at a level to which the ordinary tourist rarely climbs, in a rarefied, chest-tightening atmosphere, with wisps of clouds floating in the clear air below and club-huts ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... appears to be reached with regard to the corona, i.e. that the matter of which it is composed, must be exceedingly rarefied; as it is not found, for instance, to retard appreciably the speed of comets, on occasions when these bodies pass very close to the sun. A calculation has indeed been made which would tend to show that the particles composing the coronal matter, are separated from each other by a distance of perhaps ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... beings the clouds," went on Mr. Lavender, without taking on the interruption, "seemed to await our coming in the morning glory of their piled-up snows; and we, with the rarefied air in our lungs, felt that we must shout to them." And so carried away was Mr. Lavender by his own style that he really did begin to address the clouds: "Ghosts of the sky, who creep cold about this wide blue air, we small adventuring mortals great-hearted salute you. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... question of changing customs arises is not valid, for customs ratified by Aristophanes, by Rabelais, by Shakespeare, have no right to change. If they have changed, let us try immediately to return from our disgraceful refinements to the nobler and more rarefied heights of lyric laughter, tragic intensity, and wit, for we cannot have the first two without the last. And anyhow, how can a social custom claim precedence over the undying material of the senses and the emotions of man, over the very generating ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... another by a process of condensation and rarefaction. Fire first became solidified into air, then air into water and lastly water into earth. The process of dissolution took place in the reverse order, earth being rarefied into water, water into air, and air into fire. It is allowable to see in this old world doctrine an anticipation of the modern idea of different states of matter—the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous, with a fourth beyond the gaseous which science can still only guess at, and in which matter ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... when shaken. It was first observed by Jean Picard, and formed the subject of many experiments at the hands of Francis Hawksbee. The latter showed that the Torricellian vacuum was not essential to the phenomenon, for the same glow was apparent when mercury was shaken with air only partially rarefied. The glow is an effect of the electricity generated by the friction of the mercury and the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... had carried the weapon in an outer pocket where the frost had stiffened the grease. Had it been warmed next his body, the fatal check would not have occurred. Even so, he pulled again and it exploded sharp and deafening in the rarefied morning air. In that instant's pause, however, Captain had whirled so that the bullet tore through the loose fur beneath his arm. He struck, simultaneously with the report, and the gun flew ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... of Apollodorus, the Athenian, pronounceth, that the principles of all things have their origin from an infinite air rarefied or condensed. Air rarefied is fire, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... this disorder. Persons in good health and of a spare habit speedily recover from it, but on plethoric and stout individuals its effects are frequently very severe. After an abode of some time in the mountainous regions, the constitution becomes inured to the rarefied atmosphere. I suffered only two attacks of the veta; but they were very severe. The first was on one of the level heights; and the second on the mountain of Antaichahua. The first time I ascended the Cordillera I did not experience the slightest illness, and I congratulated myself on having ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... exerts an expansive, thrusting force of thirty thousand pounds to the square inch, over two thousand tons to the square foot; an incomprehensible force, but applicable in nature to little besides splitting rocks. On the other hand, when water is rarefied into steam its power is vastly more versatile, tractable, and serviceable in a thousand ways. Take a bit of metal called zinc. It is heavy, subject to gravitation, solid, subject to cohesion. But cause it to be burned, to pass away, ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... moved more swiftly when farthest from the earth's surface, because the air was more rarefied and offered less resistance, Rob mounted upwards until the islands of Japan were mere specks visible through the ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... night upon the boulders above the wood her sureness, both of the depth of her own feeling for Ishmael and for the country method of life that went with him, had been declining, as from some crest set in too rarefied an air for her to breathe with comfort. Poise had been slipping from her, and she was genuinely distressed. In the first stage of her declension she was chiefly occupied with a frantic snatching at her passion—a sustained effort to pull it back and keep it with her; in the second ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... adjectives exhaling an essence of sex. Banneker could imagine one of these females straying into Mr. Gaines's editorial ken, and that gentleman's bland greeting as to his own sprightly second maid arrayed and perfumed, unexpectedly encountered at a charity bazar. Too rarefied for Banneker's healthy and virile young tastes, the atmosphere in which The New Era lived and moved and had its consistently successful editorial being! He preferred a freer air to the mild scents of lavender and rose-ash, even though it might blow roughly at times. Nevertheless, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... autumnal evening, just when you smell the first indication of winter in a rarefied atmosphere, and see it in the clear curling of the smoke, as its woolly flakes rise from the cottage chimney and gradually are lost in the clear blue sky. Although not a cold evening, a log fire was extremely welcome. My father, Heaven rest him! had a slight touch ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... his elephant-catching in Silhet, says: "At night each man lights a fire at his post, and furnishes himself with a dozen joints of the large bamboo, one of which he occasionally throws into the fire, and the air it contains being rarefied by the heat, it explodes with a report as loud as a musket." (Lives of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... his feet slowly and walked up and down the room for a moment, glancing out occasionally towards the clump of palms which marked the disappearance of the Nile into the desert beyond his vision. At intervals a cannon-shot crashed upon the rarefied air, as scores of thousands had done for months past, torturing to ear and sense and nerve. The confused and dulled roar of voices came from the distance also; and, looking out to the landward side, David saw a series of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... warned of air sickness. But he found the pulsating movement of the monoplane as it drove up the faint south-west breeze was very little in excess of the pitching of a boat head on to broad rollers in a moderate gale, and he was constitutionally a good sailor. And the keenness of the more rarefied air into which they ascended produced a sense of lightness and exhilaration. He looked up and saw the blue sky above fretted with cirrus clouds. His eye came cautiously down through the ribs and bars to a ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... Romans in which my text is found. The earlier stages of the great epistle are devoted to a massive and stately presentation of the doctrines of redemption. But when I turn over the pages where the majestic argument is concluded, I find the doctrine persisting in a diffused and rarefied form, and appearing as the determining factor in the solution of practical problems. If he is dealing with the question of the "eating of meats," the great doctrine reappears and interposes its solemn and yet elevating principle: "destroy not him with thy meat for whom ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... to the eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines And yet water it was and sea-water at that—true Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid-air among ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson
... connexion between them. We may think of space as unresisting matter, and of matter as divided into objects; or of objects again as formed by abstraction into a collective notion of matter, and of matter as rarefied into space. And motion may be conceived as the union of there and not there in space, and force as the materializing or solidification of motion. Space again is the individual and universal in one; or, in other words, a perception and also a conception. So easily do what are sometimes ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... whole time since he was estranged from her, and now she was a corpse. Yet the absurdity did not make his grief the less: and the consciousness of the intrinsic, almost radiant, purity of this newsprung affection for a flown spirit forbade him to check it. The flesh was absent altogether; it was love rarefied and refined to its highest attar. He had felt nothing like ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... subtle for his ready comprehension, for the intellect of the Swiss was a little frosted by constant residence among snows and in full view of glaciers, and it wanted the volatile play of the Genoese's fancy, which was apt to expand like air rarefied by the warmth of the sun. This difference of temperament, however, so far from lessening their mutual kindness, was, most probably, the real cause of its existence, since it is well known that friendship, like love, is more apt to be generated by qualities that vary ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... appear to inflame by friction against the particles of air, and even at the height of eighty miles very faint clouds have at times been discerned, which are possibly composed of volcanic dust floating in the very rarefied medium, such as must ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... men seem to us, where we are, mere bubbles; and if we raise our eyes and look above, all there is blue. Behold that diadem of stars! Here the tints of earthly impressions disappear; standing on this nature rarefied by space do you not feel within you something deeper far than mind, grander than enthusiasm, of greater energy than will? Are you not conscious of emotions whose interpretation is no longer in us? Do you not feel your ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... make this hypothesis provisionally—that comets are large meteors, or a compact swarm of meteors, which, coming near the sun, find a highly rarefied sort of atmosphere, in which they get heated and partly vaporized, just as ordinary meteorites do when they dip into the atmosphere of the earth. And let us see whether any facts bear out the analogy and ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... non-scientific reader. These are doubly illuminative, casting spiritual light on the material world, and strengthening with material fact the tenuous thoughts of the spiritual. The words which he used of Shelley are, in this respect, applicable to himself. "To Shelley's ethereal vision the most rarefied mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the sand ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... is impossible. Hence the mist, the vague dimness that surrounds faith, baffling every effort to penetrate it; and within, a sense of rarefied perception that disquiets and torments unless humility born of common sense be there to soothe and set us at rest. Moral truths are not geometric theorems and multiplication tables, and it is not necessary that they ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... without a spring, and the slender streams suddenly become furious rivers, which often sweep away the improvements of man, and change the face of the country in a single night. During the dry season the inhabitants depend upon the sea-breeze which blows in over the heated land to replace the rarefied air. It blows from six in the morning to three in the afternoon, in the eastern part of the island; in other parts, from nine to three. But frequently a furious northeast wind interrupts this refreshing arrangement: the air becomes hard and cold; thick, wintry-looking clouds sweep ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... incrustation of salt—pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense of oppression in my head, and I noticed that I was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air to be more rarefied than it is now. ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... functions were not vitiated? In fine, the source of the disease lay, not in the weakness of the brain, but in an access of heat, caused possibly by exposure to the sun, by which the matter of the brain had become so rarefied that it showed unhealthy activity in absorbing moisture from the other parts. This heat, therefore, must ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Ormont's consent to look on at the little bout of arms was counted an achievement; for even in his own rarefied upper circle, where the fervid sentiments are not allowed to be seen plunging, he had his troop of enthusiasts; and they were anxious that he should make an appearance in public, to take what consolation a misunderstood and injured man could get from evidence of the grateful ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... rarefied air, the traveller at first experiences great difficulty in breathing, accompanied by a sharp, piercing pain at each inspiration. This increases until he becomes what the natives call "emparamento,"—when his extremities ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... the truth to rank Racine among the idealists. The world of his creation is not a copy of our own; it is a heightened and rarefied extension of it; moving, in triumph and in beauty, through 'an ampler ether, a diviner air.' It is a world where the hesitations and the pettinesses and the squalors of this earth have been fired out; a world where ugliness ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... question was suggested by his present occupation. If he could now and again leave the rarefied atmosphere of the hill for some such diversion as the one in prospect, he would return better able to make good use of that solitude in ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins |
