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Vapors   /vˈeɪpərz/   Listen
Vapors

noun
1.
A state of depression.  Synonyms: blue devils, blues, megrims, vapours.






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"Vapors" Quotes from Famous Books



... conjectures that this globe was originally a globe of liquid fire, scintillated from the body of the sun, by the percussion of a comet, as a spark is generated by the collision of flint and steel. That at first it was surrounded by gross vapors, which, cooling and condensing in process of time, constituted, according to their densities, earth, water, and air, which gradually arranged themselves, according to their respective gravities, round the burning or vitrified mass that ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... occasion they ushered in a quite peculiar quality of unrest. He felt conscious of a sudden collapse in his moral energy; a current that had been flowing for two years with liquid strength seemed at last to pause and evaporate. Rowland looked away at the stagnant vapors on the mountains; their dreariness seemed a symbol of the dreariness which his own generosity had bequeathed him. At last he had arrived at the uttermost limit of the deference a sane man might pay to other people's folly; nay, rather, he had transgressed it; he had been befooled on a gigantic ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... virtuous reveller all that Falstaff claims for a good sherris-sack, or at least the first half of its "twofold operation:" "It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes, which delivered over to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... clouds, vapors, gases, are well understood; as well as the modifying influence of those atmospheric elements upon what we call sunlight, and sun-heat. But the intangible and vital principle, or basis of the atmosphere, has in a measure escaped ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers

... verdict on the trial. "There is nothing," he wrote, "so crosse to my temper as putting so many witches to death." He saw nothing, in the women condemned at Chelmsford, "other than poore mellenchollie ... ill-dieted atrabilious constitutions, whose fancies working by grosse fumes and vapors might make the imagination readie to take any impression." Wilson wrestled long with his God over the matter of witches and came at length to the conclusion that "it did not consist with the infinite goodnes of the Almightie God to let Satan loose ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... of our disputes are either cut up by the roots, or referred to a new negotiation after the end of the European war. This was gaining everything. This, alone, would justify the engagements of the government. For, when the fiery vapors of war lowered in the skirts of our horizon, all our wishes were concentrated in this one, that we might escape the desolation of the storm. This treaty, like a rainbow on the edge of the cloud, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... earlier on the banks—weeping willows, osier, alder, ash, the aspen of Holland, the poplars of Italy and Virginia, hawthorns and roses, acacias, birches, all choice growths arranged as their nature and the lay of the land made suitable—held amid their foliage a few fleecy vapors, born of the waters, which rose like a slender smoke. The surface of the lakelet, clear as a mirror and calm as the sky, reflected the tall green masses of the forest, the tops of which, distinctly defined ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... tints of decay were replacing the vernal freshness of the forests, flaunting gaudy vestments that could not, however, conceal the sadness of the transition. The days were growing shorter and the leaden-colored vapors, driven by the whip of that taskmaster, the wind, replaced the snow-white clouds becalmed in the tender depths of ether. Soon would the hoar frost crystallize on grass and fence, or the autumn rains descend, dripping mournfully from the water spouts and bubbling ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... were dark; a little higher up, farther from the sun-glow, they grew white and shining, like fine, glistening silver gauze. They spread over the vault of heaven above us, and right away towards the north. They certainly resembled aurora borealis; but perhaps they might be only light vapors hovering high up in the sky and catching the sunlight? I stood long looking at them. They were singularly still, but they were northern lights, changing gradually in the southwest into dark cloud-streamers, and ending in the dust-cloud ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... generous Austin was still under Santa Anna's magnetic spell, but after his departure the whole room was changed to the boy. He saw clearly again. There were no mists and clouds about his mind. Moreover, the wonderful half curve before the window was changing. Vapors were rolling up from the south and the two great peaks faded from view. Trees and water in the valley changed to gray. The skies which had been so bright ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler

... swept like a hurricane over the sands glistening in the moonlight. A deep night fell. The moon, at the beginning as big as a wheel and ruddy, became pale and rolled on high. The distant desert hills were enveloped with silvery vapors like muslin which, not veiling their view, transformed them as if into luminous phenomena. From time to time from beyond the rocks scattered here and there came the piteous whining ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... no reagent that will redden the faded roses of eighteen hundred and—spare them! But, as I was saying, phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its luminous vapors with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance; it comes to me in a double sense "trailing clouds of glory." Only the confounded Vienna matches, ohne phosphor-geruch, have worn my ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... campfires of the victorious French and Indian army, and he heard the swish of paddles, but he did not yet discern any pursuing canoe. He detached his eyes for a moment from the bank of dusk in front of him, and looked up at the skies. The clouds and vapors kept him from seeing the great star upon which his patron saint, Tododaho, sat, but he knew that he was there, and that he was watching over him. He could not have achieved so much in the face of uttermost peril and then fail in the ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... hangs the air, which is heavier than fire, in the same degree that the weight of water is lighter than the weight of the earth. Here he ordered vapors, here too, the clouds to take their station; the thunder, too, to terrify the minds of mortals, and with the lightnings, the winds that bring on cold. The Contriver of the World did not allow these indiscriminately to take ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... even a week. But when a traveller in the morning sees all animated Nature stirring and rejoicing with the throbbings of warmed and rejuvenated life; when he looks out over the landscape and sees the sun raising in misty vapors the water which supplies our springs, lakes, and streams, and refreshes the earth in showers of rain, he realizes that the sun is not only the fire which warms the world, but it is also the mighty hydraulic ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter

... her; her splendid hair, unbound, falling in tangled masses to her waist; her cheeks flushed, her face radiant with devout and fervent supplication, her eyes uplifted to the narrow belt of sky overhead, where filmy vapors were turning to gold, touched by a sun she ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... pages, the record of his revealed idealism, brings specially to Domnei a beauty finely escaping the dusty confusion of any present. It is a book laid in a purity, a serenity, of space above the vapors, the bigotry and engendered spite, of dogma and creed. True to yesterday, it will be faithful of to-morrow; for, in the evolution of humanity, not necessarily the turn of a wheel upward, certain qualities have remained at the center, undisturbed. And, of these, ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al

... 1811, and the first two of the following year. Meanwhile his star was about to rise, soon to transform, without any transition, his misty sky into brightest light, too dazzling, alas! to endure. For the sun, when it shines so radiantly in early morning, absorbs too many bad vapors. But we will not anticipate events which ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... of the vapors That color sunset skies, Time's infinitesimal fraction When planets set ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite

... Carrie's. She seemed very much disposed to make herself at home, for, throwing her hat in one place and her shawl in another, she seated herself at the piano, hastily running over a few notes; then with a gesture of impatience, she said, "Oh, horrid! a few more such sounds would give me the vapors for a month; why ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes

... The sun sank in a cloud of mist and vapors. Thick night crept up, broken only when heat lightning flared on the far horizon, but Anue, bearer of the medicine bag, taker of the first scalp, ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler

... close imitation of the pitching of a carriage when violently jolted. The weather looked threatening. Though several spaces of blue sky still parted the thick black clouds toward the horizon, a flock of fleecy vapors were advancing with great rapidity and drawing a light gray curtain from east to west. As the wind was acting only on the upper region of the air, the atmosphere below it pressed down the hot vapors of the earth. Surrounded by masses of tall trees, the valley through ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac

... far as I could well discern For smoke and dusky vapors of the night, Am sure I scared the Dauphin and his trull, When arm in arm they both came swiftly running, Like to a pair of loving turtle-doves That could not live asunder day or night. After that things are set in order here, We'll ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]

... substance of a very high rate of vibration. In one sense it may be considered as a very subtle form of matter—in another as a semi-materialized form of force or energy. It is finer and more subtle that the rarest vapors or gases known to science. And, yet, it has a strong degree of tenacity and cohesiveness that enables it to resist attacks from the material side of nature. As I have said, each organ, part, centre or cell, of the physical ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... new negotiation after the end of the European war. This was gaining everything, because it confirmed our neutrality, by which our citizens are gaining everything. This alone would justify the engagements of the government. For, when the fiery vapors of the war lowered in the skirts of our horizon, all our wishes were concentred in this one, that we might escape the desolation of the storm. This treaty, like a rainbow on the edge of the cloud, marked to our eyes the space where ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... the ring of rocks to keep from pitching headlong to the ground. Nanette clung to him wordlessly. All around them the giant forces of nature raged sullenly. Twisting seams appeared in the rocky floor of the plateau from which oozed gaseous vapors. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... sapphires, emeralds and other gems—flashing testimony of that thankless past—and, leaning against the wall, gazed afar to the snow-capped volcanoes. Even as he looked, the vapors arose from the solfataras of the "smoking mountain" and a vast shower of cinders and stones was thrown into the air. Unnoticed passed the eruption before the gaze of Saint-Prosper, whose mind in a torpor swept dully back to youth's roseate season, recalling the homage ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... what need, To hide with flowers the curse upon the hills, Or sanctify the banks of sluggish rills Where vapors breed? ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... empty cockpit, but Chris could see all too well that death was pressing at its invisible pilot. The big machine was literally staggering in its course as the hands on its control stick grew weaker; was yawing wildly, even as the ZX-1 had yawed after her crew had been slain by vapors they could ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall

... Also, can any understand the spreadings of the clouds, or the noise of his tabernacles?"[242] The cause of this rarefaction of cold water is as much a mystery to the British Association as it was to Elihu; and even were all the mysteries of the electrical tension of vapors disclosed, "the balancings of the clouds" would only be more clearly discovered to be, as the Bible declares, "the wonderful works of Him who is perfect in wisdom." But the gravity of the atmosphere, the comparative density ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... near our coast, elsewhere a dreary waste of gray rocks, stunted shrubbery, and prostrate Juniper. In the forest the White Pine constitutes the very sanctuary of Nature, its tall pillars extending into the clouds, and its broad canopy of foliage mixing with the vapors that descend in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... knew that the luminous walls had receded. They were more distant now; their glow came to him from far above, and, as his falling body turned again and again in air, he saw that below him was nothing but a vast emptiness filled with luminous vapors that swirled and writhed. ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin

... ability to obey. And was the law of God therefore to be annulled? Must the sun cease to shine because the earth has become a morass, so that even that very glory of the sun hath become a new cause of its steaming up clouds and vapors that strangle the rays? God forbid! 'But for the law I had not sinned'. But had I not been sinful the law would not have occasioned me to sin, but would have clothed me with righteousness, by the transmission of its splendour. 'Let God be just, and ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... Dissenter, Impregnating its pristine clarity, —One, by his daily fare's vulgarity, Its gust of broken meat and garlic; —One, by his soul's too-much presuming To turn the frankincense's fuming And vapors of the candle starlike Into the cloud her wings she buoys on. Each, that thus sets the pure air seething, May poison it for healthy breathing— But the Critic leaves no air to poison; Pumps out with ruthless ingenuity Atom by atom, and leaves you—vacuity. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... wondering what was above them or beyond them, the dissolving views of late afternoon began to throw up a succession of lovely ranges, pierced by valleys, glens, and gorges. Where the eye had ached with the harsh red of the rocks spread with the harsh green of the scant vegetation, soft vapors rose insensibly—purple, pink, and orange—changing into nameless hues as they climbed into the great clefts and veiled the rolling domes and swathed the pinnacles and furrowed the deep passes and put the horizon infinitely ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... causes of inflammation may be mentioned a stone in the frog, causing a traumatic thrush; a badly fitting harness or saddle, causing ulcers of the skin; decomposing manure and urine in a stable, which, by their vapors, irritate the air tubes and lungs and cause ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... our midst this necessary (?) evil. They recoil with disgust from this abyss of iniquity and disease. Within it is coiled a hydra-headed monster, which invades our hearthstones, contaminates our social atmosphere, and whose very breath is laden with poisonous vapors, the inexhaustible source ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... stunned, he stumbled to his feet, his dazed eyes still blurred with a vision of horsemen, vaguely seen through vapors, stampeding northward; and, at the same instant, she sprang at him, striking the drawn revolver from his hand, tearing the sabre free and flinging it into the gulf. White-faced, desperate, she clung to him with the tenacity of a lynx, winding her lithe limbs around ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers

... motions and clamors of so vast a multitude. When the Corinthians had mounted, and stood on the top, and had laid down their bucklers to take breath and repose themselves, the sun coming round and drawing up the vapors from below, the gross foggy air that was now gathered and condensed above formed in a cloud upon the mountains; and, all the under places being clear and open, the river Crimesus appeared to them again, and they could descry the enemies passing over it, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... unmistakable. The flash of that mortar gun and of the others that followed was as the lightning burning its way across the vault of heaven, revealing everything with intense vividness, and rending and consuming all noxious vapors. The clouds rolled speedily away, and from the North came the sound ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... you force me to avow myself?" she asked. "May Heaven absolve me if I err herein! No, give me leisure to reflect: this were too sudden. These passion-hurried vows were too much like those vapors, that, igniting, rush like to unorbed stars across the night, then, vanished, leave it blacker. Do not tempt me. To act in haste is to repent at leisure; and quickliest lighted coals grow soonest cool. Even now I feel my cheek aglow with shame, that burns its passage to my rooted ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... this way from perspiring too freely. Doubtless these leaves of the steeple bush, like those of other plants that choose a similar habitat, have woolly hairs beneath as an absorbent to protect their pores from clogging with the vapors that must rise from the damp ground where the plant grows. If these pores were filled with moisture from without, how could they possibly throw off the waste of the plant? All plants are largely dependent upon free perspiration for health, but especially those whose roots, struck in wet ground, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... Dore; and inland, the towns of the upper ribera floating in an emerald lake of orchard, the distant mountains taking on a violet hue from the setting sun that was creeping like a bristly porcupine of gold into the hot vapors ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... vapors, curling, choked the ground, And the rock writhed like flesh of one in pain. But Cedric mounted up to find the cave, Crying aloud: 'I seek Caradrion.' And so, till from the cavern depth a voice: 'Come not, except to sorrow thou be born.' And ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... perchance some evil person seeth us, perchance not. If we make not the fire, the chill of the fen doth get into our bones. Seest thou how the mist arises? And we be not like the holy hermits of these haunts to withstand chill and vapors." ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger

... stopped the dark cloud which was beginning to throw its shade over the guests. Gourville succeeded so well in animating the poets with the vin de Joigny; the abbe, intelligent as a man who stands in need of his host's money, so enlivened the financiers and the men of the sword, that, amidst the vapors of this joy and the noise of conversation, inquietudes disappeared completely. The will of Cardinal Mazarin was the text of the conversation at the second course and dessert; then Fouquet ordered bowls of sweetmeats and fountains of liquors ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... earth. Here, as we walk over ground that is very hot, we are nearly suffocated by the fumes of sulphur. All around us are hundreds of seething, boiling vats of water, and the whole area is cracked and filled with holes from which noxious vapors rise. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... of the rest. Mutual fear is the principal link in the chain of mutual love, and woe be to that state that breaks the compact. Howe is mercifully inviting you to barbarous destruction, and men must be either rogues or fools that will not see it. I dwell not upon the vapors of imagination; I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... heavenly quiristers, nymphs and demons, huge serpents and snakes of smaller size, birds of mighty wing, and separate companies of Pitirs, or progenitors of mankind; lightnings and thunder-bolts, clouds and colored bows of Indra, falling meteors, earth-rending vapors, comets and luminaries of various degrees; horse-faced sylvans, apes, fish, and a variety of birds, tame cattle, deer, men, and ravenous beasts with two rows of teeth; small and large reptiles, moths, lice, fleas, and ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880

... strong as may be the argument in favor of the system, it is certainly as important that it should be assailed as that it should exist, and that it should be assailed from within; for, carried out unchecked to its last consequences, it results in sinking its victims into the realm of vapors and vacuity, its representative being the all-accomplished London man of fashion who committed suicide to save himself from the bore of dressing and undressing. Besides, in "good society," so called, the best sentiments and ideas can sometimes get expression only through the form of bad manners. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... easily, his chair being low and his thin legs long. His thin, long hands played with that slender cane of his, which he had set down and taken up again, while he tried to recall the passage, and mumbled snatches of it: "'This goodly firmament—congregation of vapors—Man delights not me—no, nor'—the rest ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall

... is one of its most remarkable characteristics. Accordingly immense volumes of the carbon steam in the sun soar at a higher level than do the vapors of the other elements. Thus carbon becomes a very large and important constituent of the more elevated regions of the solar atmosphere. We can understand what happens to these carbon vapors by the analogous case of the familiar clouds in our own ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various

... of generator have been used in the United States for the production of water gas, which, after or during manufacture, is mixed with the vapors and permanent gases obtained by cracking various grades of paraffin oil, and "fixing" them by subjecting them to a high temperature; and in considering the subject of enrichment of coal gas by carbureted water gas, I shall be forced, by the limited time at my disposal, to confine ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various

... the mild, transparent evenings of our own bright clime," said Lucie; "but there we can enjoy, without the fear of perpetual change, while in this land of vapors, the sun which sets with most resplendency ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney

... strode back from the vapors. "Are you trying to provoke me to smash my fist into your face? Are you trying to cook up a blackmail damage suit by the advice of that crook lawyer who bailed you out? I'm beginning to see why a lawyer was enough interested in you to get you ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day

... Greens, Brant's Iroquois, some Jaegers, a few regulars, and the usual partizan band of painted whites who disgrace us all, by Heaven! But there," added Sir Peter, smiling, "I've done with the vapors. I bear no arms, and it is unfit that I should judge those who do. Only," and his voice rang a little, "I understand battles, not butchery. Gentlemen, to the British Army! the regulars, God bless ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers

... Bell this night, it is as though I listen at the boxes and in the pit, in that tinkling time of 'seventy-four. The patched Laetitia sits surrounded by her beaux. It was this afternoon she had the vapors. Next to her, as dragon over beauty, is a fat dame with "grenadier head-dress." "The Rivals" has yet to be written. London still hears "The Beggar's Opera." Lady Macbeth is played in hoopskirts. The Bastille is a tolerably tight building. Robert Burns is strewn with ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... dismay, yet with keen-edged expectancy in evidence. Behind the kingly form there is a tower—strength—though there is the unlighted torch at the top. Some large bird in the back scene will venture into peril. Near the shaft at its base are caverns. On closer inspection you can see the vapors arising. You see the entire world appears interested—so ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara

... with the coins they so highly valued. Diomed, one of the richest men of Pompeii, abandoned his wife and daughters and was fleeing with a bag of silver when he was stifled in front of his garden by noxious vapors. In the cellar of his house were found the corpses of ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... plight of Zora made it almost unbearable. He did not see her in these seven days. He pictured her huddled there in the swamp in the cheerless leaky cabin with worse than no companions. Ah! the swamp, the cruel swamp! It was a fearful place in the rain. Its oozing mud and fetid vapors, its clinging slimy draperies,—how they twined about the bones of its victims and chilled their hearts. Yet here his Zora,—his poor disappointed ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... to rout by a satanic sculpin, whereat an eel swiftly snaked the prize away, and the frost-fish, collecting at a chance of civil war, mingled in the melee, tooth and nail, or rather fin and tail. Then the vapors would darken round them again, till, with the stray rays caught and refracted in their fleece, it seemed like living in an opal full of cloudy color and fire. Far off they heard the great ground-swell of the surf upon the beach, or there came the dull report ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... suppose that exposure to a damp, vapory atmosphere is injurious to health. The danger lies in exposing yourself when the system is in a relaxed state, as it is during rest, after exercise. But, while a general action is kept up, by vigorous exercise, nature itself will resist the most unfriendly vapors of the atmosphere. There is a great and growing evil in the education of ladies of the middling and higher classes, at the present day. The tender and delicate manner in which they are bred, enfeebles their constitutions, ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb

... eight when they left their anchorage, and began to drift once more. There was no moon, and the night would have been dark in any case, but now the fog rendered all things still more obscure. It had also grown much thicker than it had been. At first it was composed of light vapors, which surrounded them on all sides, it is true, but yet did not have that dampness which might have been expected. It was a light, dry fog, and for two or three hours the deck, and rigging, and the clothes of those on board remained quite dry. But now, as the darkness increased, the fog ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille

... The vessels of the whiskey distillers, far from being hermetically closed, allow the spirit to evaporate through every joint. And this is not all: corroded by the acetous acid, they are full of small holes, particularly in the cap, where all the vapors collect themselves, as in a reservoir. It is easy to conceive with what rapidity they escape, which occasions a considerable waste of liquor. In proof of the truth of this observation, we may refer to the smell of whiskey, so strongly perceivable on the roads leading to a distillery, and preceeding ...
— The Art of Making Whiskey • Anthony Boucherie

... weight, and instead of restoring equilibrium to the troubled atmosphere, it introduces a new source of disturbance. Though the weight of the air is diminished by the fall of rain, yet the bulk is increased by the expansive force of the latent heat which the condensed vapors set free. Thus the rainy air expands upwards and flows outwards, and no longer able to balance the pressure of the surrounding air, it is carried still higher by inblowing winds, which rise in turn and continue the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... may arise from the heat caused by the friction in buffing. It is a well known fact, with which every observing practitioner is familiar, that a silver plate at a temperature of 45 deg. or less, exposed to the vapors of iodine, is less sensitive and takes a longer time to coat, than when it is at a temperature ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey

... freaky; ocean mists are often eerie in movements. There are strata, there are eddying air-currents which rend the curtain or shred the massing vapors. The men in the pilot-house of the Nequasset suddenly found their range of vision widened. The fog did not clear; it became more tenuous and showed an area of the sea. It was like a thin veil which disclosed dimly what ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... rising sun, and the contemplation of the magnificent Order of the vast Universe, made me impatient of them. In a word, I was so impatient of them, that I was mightily glad to get out at the next station, and to exchange these clouds and vapors for the free air ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... his disposal the ordinary azotic acid and not the fuming or monohydrate azotic acid, that is to say, acid which emits white vapors when it comes in contact with damp air; but by substituting for the latter ordinary azotic acid, mixed, in the proportion of from three to five volumes of concentrated sulphuric acid, the engineer ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne

... the working of them profitable. But this opinion was based on the old practice of attempting the extracting the mineral by the use of charcoal furnaces. It was M. Larderel who introduced the improved method of employing the hot vapors of the lagoons themselves in the elaboration of the acid, and may be said to have invented the present method, which will probably go on improving ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... that was erst the haunt Of savage bears, into a home for man; Extirpated the dragon's brood, that wont To rise, distent with venom, from the swamps; Rent the thick misty canopy that hung Its blighting vapors on the dreary waste; Blasted the solid rock; o'er the abyss Thrown the firm bridge for the wayfaring man By the possession of a thousand years The soil is ours. And shall an alien lord, Himself a vassal, dare to venture here, On our own hearths insult us,—and attempt To forge ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... her noiseless drapery through the room once or twice, and came back to the window, where he stood looking out. Before them lay the sea, calm in a sheen of blue, gathering faint amethystine vapors, that the sunset would light up in a miracle of bronze and purple ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... manuscript was completed and I determined to walk into the neighboring town, some miles distant, to post it and at the same time to despatch a code telegram to Inspector Gatton. The long walk did me good, helping me to clear my mind of morbid vapors; therefore, my business finished, and immune from suspicion in my character of a London pedestrian, I set out to obtain that vital information ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... the Dog star that the Belt stars point south to, and Rigel, and the ruddy Betelgeuze. Procyon has a yellowish tinge and resembles the condition of our sun, while Betelgeuze is surrounded by heavy metallic vapors and is thought ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott

... idea to continue the wedding-gayeties of yesterday evening by a picnic to-day. People are always more or less out of sorts after a ball, and a day spent in the open air soothes the feverish and braces up the limp. Wherefore the rectory gave a picnic to blow away the lingering vapors of last evening at the Hill, and the place of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors." The condition may result, as in Hamlet's case, from an untoward conjunction of outward circumstances; or it may be of physiological (liverish) origin. The methods of treatment are many—some of them (such as the administration of alcohol in large doses) disastrously unwise. In some ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... was no lonely mountain-peak of mind, Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars, A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind; Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. Nothing of Europe here, Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf or Peer Could Nature's ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various

... missed nothing. The best observer in the end is not he who works at the microscope or telescope most unceasingly, but he whose whole nature becomes sensitive and receptive, drinking in everything, like a sponge that saturates itself with all floating vapors and odors, though it seems inert and unsuspicious until you press it and ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... services required of them, had no restrictions placed upon them, but were at liberty to walk about as they pleased. It will easily be conjectured that all these rival interests, gathering together in vapors, necessarily produced clouds, and that the clouds were likely to be followed by a tempest. The king had no mustache to gnaw, and therefore kept biting the handle of his whip instead, with ill-concealed ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... tempest and I'll quell your pride! Go—bear our message to your master's ear, That wide as ocean I am despot here; Let him sit monarch in his barren caves, I wield the trident and control the waves He said, and as the gathered vapors break The swelling ocean seemed a peaceful lake; To lift their ships the graceful nymphs essayed And the strong trident lent its powerful aid; The dangerous banks are sunk beneath the main, And the light chariot skims the unruffled plain. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the planets differ greatly in size and in physical condition. Three of them—Mercury, Venus and Mars—are somewhat like the earth in size and in general characteristics. So far as we know, they are solid, cool bodies similar to the earth and like the earth, surrounded by atmospheres of cool vapors. The outer planets on the other hand, i.e., Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, are tremendously large—many times the size of the earth, and resemble the sun more than the earth in their physical appearance and condition. They are globes of gases and vapors so hot as to ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper

... hold us down to the dull, tedious monotony of worldly cares, aims, purposes. Like birds withheld from flight into the pure regions of the upper air by cruel, frightening cords, we fluttering go, stifled amid the vapors men have spread, and panting for the freedom ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... tidal waves on the shore and sending down many a gallant ship with all its crew, bears on its destructive wings, "the incense of the sea," to remotest parts, that there may be the blooming of flowers, the upspringing of grass, the waving of all the banners of green, and the carrying away of the vapors of death that ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... and martial, found his lids damp with the moisture of a great happiness. Even now with all the proofs of reality about him, it seemed impossible that this scene could be aught but the ephemeral vapors of a dream—that Leopold of Lutha, the coward, the craven, could have become in a single day the heroic figure that had loomed so large upon the battlefield of Lustadt—the simple, modest gentleman who received ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... As he looked, Ernest could hardly believe but that a smile beamed over the whole visage, with a radiance still brightening, although without motion of the lips. It was probably the effect of the western sunshine, melting through the thinly diffused vapors that had swept between him and the object that he gazed at. But—as it always did—the aspect of his marvellous friend made Ernest as hopeful as if he ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells

... is the mischief, when men like you repeat such calumnies, which, without that, would melt away like the unwholesome vapors which sometimes obscure the most brilliant sunshine; but people like you, repeating them, give them a terrible stability. Oh! monsieur, for mercy's sake ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere

... still, almost too still, as if nature had paused before a sudden and violent alteration of her mood. In the bright sky, a little hard even for September, there was no cloud, except on the western horizon, where dark vapors hovered over the bald head of Thunder Mountain. The scent of the harvest in the meadows blended with the odor of burning pine that came from the ranch house, where Flick built the fire for supper. On the hill the pines were still, but the brook babbled on, and there was an ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... so that they do not really touch each other, consequently the heat can pass into the ice but slowly, having to work its way through the thin layer of rarefied vapor between the two. As soon as pressure is admitted by admitting atmospheric air, vapors can no longer form; an intimate contact will take place between the glass and the ice, and consequently the heat be conveyed over quick enough to make the ice ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various

... ground of the sky." It is important to remember that this star is reddest when faintest, so that if we chance to see it near its maximum of brightness it will not impress us as being crimson at all, but rather a dull, coppery red. Its spectrum indicates that it is smothered with absorbing vapors, a sun near extinction which, at intervals, experiences an accession of energy and bursts through its stifling envelope with explosive radiance, only to faint and sink once more. It is well to use our largest aperture in examining ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss

... red dirt. By day they echoed to blows of axes, the crash of falling trees, the plaint of windlasses, the cries of freighters; by night they became vast caldrons filled with flickering fires; tremendous vats, the vapors from which were illuminated by hidden furnaces. One would have thought that here gold was being made, not sought—that this was a region of volcanic hot springs where every fissure and vent-hole spouted steam. It was a strange, a marvelous sight; it stirred the imagination ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach

... off the ring which formed our moon. Continuing to cool down and shrink, a thin but rigid crust of primary rocks, still bearing marks of the intense heat to which they have been subjected, was formed upon its surface; and then the vapors, with which the atmosphere had been charged, were condensed, and formed seas, which covered the whole, or the greater part, of the earth's rind. The continual agitation of these waters, and their high temperature, ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... room at last reached the street. But the torch of truth which, held aloft, serves as a beacon star to guide the world towards some longed for ideal becomes often a deadly explosive when it falls among the poisonous vapors of inflammable human passions. Liberty, equality, fraternity assumed a new and fatal significance in the minds of the hungry and restless masses who, embittered by centuries of wrong, were ready to carry ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... conditions, and the lack of constancy in the calorific power of fuels have conspired to defeat the automatic roasting machine.[165] It is even doubtful whether De Mattia's[166] process for roasting until the vapors evolved produce a violet color when passed into a solution of fuchsin decolorized with sulphur dioxid is ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... pleasures of our time, desired without shame, accepted without nonsense." (He polished up the little negroes' heads.) "Women had hysterics in those days to get their ends, but now" (he began to laugh) "their vapors end in charcoal. In short, marriage" (here he picked up his pincers to remove a hair) "will become a thing intolerable; whereas it used to be so gay in my day! The reigns of Louis XIV. and Louis XV.—remember this, my ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac

... gaff-topsails. The liberated sunbeams spread and penetrated everywhere, and even came up to play (reflected from the water) beneath the shadowy, overhanging counters of dark vessels. Beyond, the atmosphere was still busy in rolling away its vapors, brushing the last gray fringes from the low hills, and leaving over them only the thinnest aerial veil. Farther down the bay, the pale tower of the crumbling fort was now shrouded, now revealed, then hung with floating lines of vapor ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... mimicries of human or of monster shapes, striding across the gloom, hurtling one upon the other, and vanishing swiftly into the turbulent abyss of shade; so that to the eyes and fancies of the affrighted wanderers the unsubstantial vapors were as the bodily forms of gigantic foes—the agents ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... sorts of queer and absurd ideas afloat as to the shape of the earth. Some people thought it was round like a pancake and that the waters which surrounded the land gradually changed into mist and vapor and that he who ventured out into these vapors fell through the mist and clouds down into—they knew not where. Others believed that there were huge monsters living in the distant waters ready to swallow any sailor who was foolish ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but sometimes when the rest of the landscape is cloudless they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck

... surface, and was observed at different extremities of the kingdom. The sound of an explosion was heard through Devon and Cornwall, and along the opposite coast of Bretagne. Halley conjectured this and similar displays to proceed from combustible vapors aggregated on the outskirts of the atmosphere, and suddenly set on fire by some unknown cause. But since his time, the fact has been established, of the actual fall of heavy bodies to the earth from surrounding space, which requires another hypothesis. To these bodies the term aerolites ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... Herr Kalm. "It is the constant use of the life-giving infusion of tea that has saved China! Tea soothes the nerves; it clears the blood, expels vapors from the brain, and restores the fountain of life to pristine activity. Ergo, it prolongs the existence of both men and nations, and has made China the most antique ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... the legends of the sea invest the mind with a sensitive, poetic passion as delightful as it is unworldly, as reverent as it is credulous. No one would deride these superstitions who has watched, as I have, the various phases of the sea—its motions, its intonations—its mists, its foam, its vapors—its sunlit splendors—its phosphorescent marvels—its moonlit and starlit mysteries; but would feel, with something of the awe of the ancients, that the sea is the place of magic, and that only a film separates between the material and the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... with tears and melancholy. Only far off, where its foul vapors burst, Green glow pours down. The houses, Gray grimaces, ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein

... gloomy shadows lay a mantle of darkness over dreary and lifeless solitudes. The storms raged, and the winds howled; the sun travelled its daily rounds, with its light dimmed and clouded by the pestilential vapors it exhaled, and silence, so far as the sounds of animal life were concerned, reigned supreme—the stillness of the grave, the quiet of utter desolation, save the voice of the wind or the storm, was ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond

... one could pass in or out without the rigidly vised order of the surgeon-in-chief. Braziers of charcoal burned at the foot of each bed, while the atmosphere was heavy with a strong solution of carbolic acid, then just beginning to be recognized as a sovereign preventive of malarious vapors, and an antiseptic against the germs of disease. Rosa inquired for the proteges she was seeking. They were pointed out, on one side of the tent, the steward accompanying her to ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... of the parlor struck her. She shuddered, and said, "This would give me the vapors. But, doubtless, angels come and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... at last the biting with aquafortis, gave me variety of occupation; and I soon got so far that I could assist my master in many things. I did not lack the attention necessary for the biting, and I seldom failed in any thing; but I had not care enough in guarding against the deleterious vapors which are generated on such occasions, and these may have contributed to the maladies which afterwards troubled me for a long time. Amidst such labors, lest any thing should be left untried, I often made wood-cuts ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... with a deadened beating of his heavy wings. Again wolves howled, but so far in the distance that the sound came as the faintest echo. A stronger gust of the fitful wind filled the forest with the sulphurous vapors arising from the evaporating furnaces. A moment more, and the vivid glare of the fires flared luridly through the wild tangle of the undergrowth. Against this red glare many black shadows—the dark forms of the firemen—could now be indistinctly ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks

... lines not previously seen in comet spectra, which Copeland said were due to iron. That the comets do not show a greater number of elements is not in the least surprising: they are not condensed bodies, and we think that their average temperature is low, too low generally to develop the luminous vapors of the more refractory elements. If their temperatures, approximated those which exist in the stars, their spectra would probably reveal the presence of many of the elements which exist in the meteorites. Of course the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... oughter have brought a towel," he said, when at the end of twenty minutes he stopped to remove his hat and allow the hot vapors to escape. He sat down and fanned himself vigorously. Then he took off his necktie and collar and placed them in his pocket, and finally shed his coat under favor of the night. He could scarcely distinguish the road beneath him, and several ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... and listened for an hour or two while the pleasant voice beside her conjured away all her vapors with some of Mrs. ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott

... gray mist, gray sky: Through vapors hurrying by, Larger than wont, on high Floats the horned, yellow moon. Chill airs are faintly stirred, And far away is heard, Of some fresh-awakened ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... itself with a horrible roar into the sea. Dead fish floated on the waters in indescribable multitudes, or were thrown dying on the shore; the cattle throughout the country dropped lifeless to the ground, suffocated by putrid vapors, which condensed and fell down in drops. These manifestations were accompanied by a storm such as the people of the country had never known before. These dreadful commotions lasted for five years. The lavas thrown out covered one-third of the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... is a perpetual malaria reigning throughout the country in question. Even the doctor could hope to escape its effects only by rising above the range of the miasma that exhales from this damp region whence the blazing rays of the sun pump up its poisonous vapors. Once in a while they could descry a caravan resting in a "kraal," awaiting the freshness and cool of the evening to resume its route. These kraals are wide patches of cleared land, surrounded by hedges and jungles, where traders ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... might properly be considered the crater of the volcano. It was four or five acres in extent, irregular in contour, and so filled with gases and vapors that one could not see the bottom, while the jagged boundary on the farther side came out to view only at intervals, when the ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis

... open water between them and the woods. He did not fear to make, on the small hearth of mud and ashes he had improvised in his lugger, the meagre fire needed to prepare his food. Its slender smoke quickly mingled with the hazy vapors and shadows of the swamp. As he cast his eye abroad, he found nowhere any sign of human approach. Here and there the tops of the round rushes still stood three feet above the water, but their slender needles were scarcely noticeable. Far ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable



Words linked to "Vapors" :   blues, depression, blue devils



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