"Attenuated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... affinity of the words in which they are found to others in different languages, or in different dialects of the Celtic. The aspirated form of the consonant in writing sufficiently shows that, in speaking, its articulation is either attenuated or wholly suppressed. ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... concessions to the mental weakness inherited from long generations trained upon the system of starvation. The system, indeed, too often reminds me of an old picture in Punch, of genteel poverty dining in state; in a room hung with portraits, attended by footmen, two attenuated persons sit, while a silver cover is removed from a dish containing a roasted mouse. The resources that ought to be spent on a wholesome meal are wasted in keeping up an ideal of state. Of course there is something noble in all ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in the presence of a prince whose exterior so ill accords with the grandeur of his titles and the vastness of his power? His form is below the middle height and very slender, the limbs having even an attenuated look. The whole appearance is that of a man of delicate and even feeble organization. The blonde complexion, the pale blue eyes, and the light sandy hue—save where they are prematurely touched with gray—of the hair, moustache, and short, pointed beard, all indicate the Flemish origin ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... the ministerial wife. Here, too, is her group of daughters, well worthy of such parentage, Esther, Sarah, Mary, and Jerusha, all beautiful and artless as herself. Here a world of daily interest is found in the studies and duties of a New England home. But who is he, of tall and attenuated form, whose days are passed in his solitary study, secluded like a hermit from the common experience of life? Like Moses, he is slow of speech, and might be considered almost severe of countenance. The lineaments tell ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... Many were stove among the rocks, and others were overset; some of the men were dragged back by the surf and drowned; some lost their muskets, and were drenched to the skin: but the greater part got safe ashore. Among the foremost was seen the tall, attenuated form of Brigadier Wolfe, armed with nothing but a cane, as he leaped into the surf and climbed the crags with his soldiers. As they reached the top they formed in compact order, and attacked and carried with the bayonet the nearest French ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... dare say that this fact had insensibly a great deal to do with my liking. Afterwards I came to see it, and at the same time to see what was Irving's own in Irving; to feel his native, if somewhat attenuated humor, and his original, if somewhat too studied grace. But as yet there was no critical question with me. I gave my heart simply and passionately to the author who made the scenes of that most pathetic history live in my sympathy, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... explanation of this I would say: that the fire there is that which heats the globe, inside of it is the water, and it happens that this humid element, being rarefied and attenuated by virtue of the heat, and thus resolved into vapour, it requires much greater space to contain it, therefore if it does not find easy exit, it goes on with extreme force, noise, and destruction to break the vessel; but if it finds space and easy exit, so that it can evaporate, it goes ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... Eddy became convinced of the Principle of Mind-healing, discovering that the more attenuated the drug, the ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... folly to say that furniture has no expression; the small couch, the faded work-table, the straight chairs, with their twisted attenuated legs, had an unspeakable air of sadness. One day she cautiously touched the notes of the instrument. How weak and thin and hollow they were! And yet they blended perfectly with something in her own heart. She played till the tears were on her cheeks, it seemed as if the ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... Sometimes our half-starved infantry went into the field; but the depth of the snow hindered them from acting successfully against the flying cavalry of the enemy. The artillery vainly thundered from the ramparts, and in the field it could not advance, because of the weakness of our attenuated horses. This was our way of making war; this is what the civil service employes of Orenbourg ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... hopping step that no human limb could manage, turned their paper-white, long, expressionless faces toward me for an instant, then were gone, on the trail of the mole-man. Beneath those robes must have been a body as attenuated as a skeleton, as different as an insect's from man's. Within those odd egg-shaped heads must have been a mind as alien to mine as ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... calculated upon nineteen pounds only of twenty-five pounds per barrel of fermentable matter being attenuated, and have even in that quantity included five pounds eight ounces of lees and yest, (the least quantity produced,) such calculation must not be admitted to preclude the practicability of attenuating almost every particle of fermentable matter, and replacing it with an equivalent particle ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... Hence Horus assumed many of the functions of Osiris; and amongst them those which in foreign lands contributed to making a dragon of the Water God. But if the distinction between Horus and Osiris became more and more attenuated with the lapse of time, the identification with his mother Hathor (Isis) was more complete still. For he took her place and assumed many of her attributes in the later versions of the great saga which is the nucleus of all the literature ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... life of which he had been so long deprived, Heurtebise spent two years far from his friends, buried in the country, or in out-of-way suburban nooks, within easy distance of that great city Paris, which overexcited him even while he yet sought its attenuated atmosphere, just like those invalids who are recommended sea air, but who, too delicate to bear it in all its strength, are compelled to inhale it from a distance of some miles. From time to time, his name appeared in a newspaper or magazine ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... comes out of the bottle is, generally, much larger than the neck into which it has been forced. It is seldom that one hears a buyer ask to see the cork. The average buyer of champagne would not understand the cork's story. He is accustomed to large and bulging corks and if he were to see an attenuated specimen, of dark complexion and as hard as a piece of vulcanized rubber he would look at it with great suspicion and, doubtless, refuse the wine. But an experienced waiter will know his man and will bring him the sort of "large bottle" to which he ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... At first I was as incapable as a swathed infant—stepping with limbs I could not see. I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist. I had to hang on to the table and press my ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... delicacy, and on the delicacy of the hands and feet, the slender figure, and especially the slender waist. In the pictured representations of the women of that time, and in modern romantic imitators of the chivalric thought and feeling, the waist is attenuated to a degree that implies extreme debility. The same ideal is still extant among a considerable portion of the population of modern industrial communities; but it is to be said that it has retained its hold most tenaciously ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... recommended for this purpose, but delicate and pleasing washes or glazings may be produced from burnt sienna, yellow ochre, burnt umbre, and lake, in various combinations, and laid on extremely attenuated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... a pretext for visiting the Temple the very attenuated colonial fact that some Mortons akin to him of Merrymount in Massachusetts, have their tombs and tablets in the triforium of the Temple Church. But when we had climbed to the triforium by the corkscrew stairs leading to it, did we find there ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... air, and consequently of oxygen, in the lungs; and as the absorption of oxygen is a cause of solidity in many bodies, this tenuity of the blood may proceed from a deficient absorption of oxygen. However this may be, it is certain that the blood is very much attenuated, though with considerable variations in degree, as it is sometimes found thin on opening a vein, and at a subsequent period is thicker; varying perhaps according to the continuance of ease or difficulty in respiration. It is certain, that this attenuation of the blood must tend to an increase ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... transformed into visions and figures which are believed to be real. This in its turn depends upon the other two causes, and on the physiological relaxation of the body, which is to a great extent isolated, so that the effectual impulses of external nature are greatly attenuated. ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... duties, a knowledge of this is acquired by those who are regarded as persons of knowledge. Uniting all these together, viz., the senses, the objects of the senses, and the five great entities, one should hold them in the mind.[116] When everything is attenuated (by absorption) in the mind, one no longer esteems the pleasures of life. Learned men, whose understandings are furnished with knowledge, regard that as true happiness.[117] I shall after this, tell thee of renunciation with respect ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... stream to the left promised more seclusion than the way across the bridge and decided his choice. On the bosom of the water were scattered the wrecks of what had recently been a beautiful bed of Egyptian lotos. Here, where all had been glistening greenness with splashes of yellow blossoms, attenuated stalks lifted what looked like crumpled fragments of brown paper, which quivered in a breeze too light to move the surface of the stream. Here alone the fingers of the frost had left a blight, like that of flames, and had denied ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... noon when we reached the entrance to the garden. Merry but orderly sightseers thronged its alleys, and stared with wondering admiration at a rather attenuated jet of water which rose into the clear air some thirty feet above a rockwork fountain in the centre. Dignitaries strolled about under the stemless umbrellas like huge shields, with which assiduous attendants protected them from the sun; and were followed by posses of retainers, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... family from which I sprang. Now, some authors would weary their indulgent readers with a flatulent chapter upon the moral beauty of this virtue; but as my first wish is to win favor by my candor, I must honestly confess, that necessity was the parent of this lean attenuated offspring!—For, alas! ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... laburnum blossoms made the sunshine of the shaded grass, as it did here, where else no spot of sun might enter, so dense was the night of shade. The life of another day and time lived, however, beneath that shade; Charm and the cure, as they drooped over the canvas, confronted a graceful, attenuated courtier, sickening in a languor of adoration, and a sprightly coquette, whose porcelain beauty was as finished as the feathery edges ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... lately,' said the landlord, in the tone of having had twenty at least—not caring to acknowledge the attenuated state of business that afflicted Prospect Hotel ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... patriarchal, leaned out over an abrupt drop. No more sweeping or splendid view could be had within miles, but it was not for any reason so general that Sally had made her pilgrimage. Down below, across the treetops, were a roof and a chimney from which a thread of smoke rose in an attenuated shaft. That was Spicer South's house, and Samson's home. The girl leaned against the gnarled bowl of the white oak, and waved toward the roof and chimney. She cupped her hands, and raised them to her lips like one who means to shout across a great distance, then she whispered so low that only she ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... vortices), that the different atoms of which matter is composed are, as suggested in View Three, apertures of different complexity of outline—namely, those points at which Ether is absent or its density attenuated. Have we not apparently here another example of Positive and Negative, the Invisible the Ether, as the Real, and the Visible, the Material Universe, as its Negative the Unreal, similar to our list of Positives and Negatives in View ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... oozed in, but not so voluminously as at first. It had evidently become attenuated, and was growing thinner. It appeared also to be ascending with rapidity, as up the funnel of a chimney having a good draught. For this reason it was carried past the mouth of the grotto without much of it drifting in, and they saw that they could soon safely withdraw ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... after the warmth of the preceding days, so there was no haste, no hurry, in the dispersion of the cloud blankets that covered the rocky walls and plateaus below. Slowly they began to rise, then to stretch out and become attenuated. Tiny gusts of wind played with them, and tossed them hither and thither. Banks of smoky gray lay over certain portions, but there was no regularity, no evenness, either in the clouds themselves, or in their disposition. East ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... The attenuated frame of this son of the soil, his hollow cheeks and glaring eye-balls, his belt drawn with extreme tightness round his waist, to repress the gnawings of hunger, as well as his enfeebled gait, proved that he was approaching the last ...
— Silver Lake • R.M. Ballantyne
... bear or an emu, or any other such animal as his totem-creed led him to fix his mind upon. Hence we find that a familiarity and common consent existed between primitive man and many of his companion animals such as has been lost or much attenuated in modern times. Elisee Reclus in his very interesting paper La Grande Famille (1) gives support to the idea that the so-called domestication of animals did not originally arise from any forcible ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... into room 2. In their turn these sound waves will be diffused all through room 2, and again but a small percentage of them will find access into room 3. The sound waves will by this time be so much attenuated that the voice of the man standing in room 1 will be lost. Any little tone, however, that may remain will become dissipated in room 3, and it will not be possible for a person standing in room 4 ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... Angela's instinct or intuition failed, had she hesitated for a few minutes, Jim would have drowned within a few hundred yards of the spot where the balloon struck. Since, Jim has maintained that he was sinking when he heard her voice; her faint, attenuated tones infused strength into his limbs ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... which the numerous petty details of frontier irregularity made up the chief material. Plots and counterplots were rife in his story, and more than once the outlaw interrupted his officer in the hope of abridging the petty particulars of some of their attenuated proportions—an aim not always successful, since, among the numerous virtues of Lieutenant Dillon, that of precision and niceness in his statements must not be omitted. To this narration, however, though called for by himself, the superior yielded ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... long spells of immunity from foreign interference. Her people, defended by the Himalayan wall and the ocean, were free to develop their own scheme of national life; and world-forces which pierce the thickest crust of custom, reached them in attenuated volume. Their isolation ended when the sea was no longer a barrier; and for maritime nations it is but an extension of their territory. A third invasion began in the sixteenth century, and has continued till our own day. The underlying motive was not economic necessity, nor religious enthusiasm, ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... moon has any atmosphere it must be so very attenuated indeed that human beings could not possibly live in it at all; but nothing has yet been detected which would enable us to say positively that any atmosphere does exist there, although there have been some indications observed which support the supposition that ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... generally five lines: the first and third consisting of 5 syllables, the second, fourth and fifth of 7, making a total of 31 in all. The number of lines is not compulsory: sometimes they may reach to thirty, forty or even more, but the alternation of 5 and 7 syllables is compulsory. The most attenuated form of all is the hokku (or haikai) which consists of only three lines, namely, 17 syllables. Necessarily the ideas embodied in such a narrow vehicle must be fragmentary. Thus it results that Japanese poems are, for the most part, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... his elbows propped on the table, his eyes fixed on the swaying waters outside, from which the moon gradually faded, leaving them to make a denser blackness in the night. As Pellerin read, this density of blackness—which never for a moment seemed inert or unalive—was attenuated by imperceptible degrees, till a greyish pallour replaced it; then the pallour breathed and brightened, and suddenly ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... was known as Publius Gabinius, who was by far the oldest. Coarse-featured, with broken complexion, it needed but a glance to proclaim him as gifted with no other distinctions than those of a hard drinker, fast liver, and the owner of an attenuated conscience. Servius Flaccus, the second, was of a different type. He was languid; spirited only when he railed at a slave who brushed against his immaculate toga. The frills on his robes made him almost feminine; and he spoke, even in invective, in a soft, lisping voice. Around him floated the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... period, would return to the inclinations of the first period. This regressive metamorphosis—for I cannot style it otherwise—is rare but not without examples. Ordinarily the creative imagination, when it has passed its adult stage, becomes attenuated by slow atrophy without undergoing serious change of form. Nevertheless, I am able to cite the case of a well-known scholar who began with a taste for art, especially plastic art, went over rapidly to literature, devoted his life to biologic studies, in which he gained a very deserved ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... death, and was constantly seen anxiously examining the buckle of his belt, to make sure that he had not increased in girth since his last meal. Voluntary Tantalus, he scarcely allowed himself enough to keep life in his attenuated frame, and if he had but fasted as carefully from motives of piety he would have been ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... furnished with stout hooks to which to suspend our hammocks, which, by the by, when slung, left, I noticed, but a very small space on either side of the table; and depending from a beam overhead there hung a common horn lantern containing the most attenuated candle I ever saw—a veritable "purser's dip." This lantern, which was suspended over the centre of the table, afforded, except at meal-times or other special occasions, the sole illumination of the place. Although the ship ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... attenuated variola is well known, and has been extensively adopted by English physicians. If the opinion means anything, it signifies that the two diseases are in essence one and the same, differing only in degree. M. Pasteur has recently found ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... into a ticklish position. Reinforcements are now to be diverted elsewhere and my command is not an enviable one. I quite understand the necessity of trying to maintain a barrier between Essen and Constantinople. I quite understand also the danger of doing so at the expense of this attenuated, exhausted force. I have represented the facts home, and it is for them ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... turned dull and harsh faces toward the garden, the sun came above the circle of blue hills, so that the mingled shadows of these two giants fell across the garden. For an instant Jurgen saw the place oppressed by that attenuated mile-long shadow, as in heraldry you may see a black bar painted sheer across some brightly emblazoned shield. Then the radiancy of everything twitched and vanished, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... moodily measuring the rise and fall of the glaringly white stanchions above and below the sky-line. At frequent intervals they swept back to the other man, who still lay motionless. It was late afternoon and the smoke-stack shadows pointed off in attenuated lines to the bow while the sky, off behind the wake, brightened into the colors of sunset. Finally Benton rose. The unexpected sight of Blanco brought a start and an immediate masking of his face, but in the first ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... indications of the good gentleman's having gone down in the world of late: for a great scarcity of furniture, and total absence of comfort, together with the disappearance of all such small moveables as spare clothes and linen, bespoke a state of extreme poverty; while the meagre and attenuated condition of Mr. Sikes himself would have fully confirmed these symptoms, if they had stood ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... whole bearing of the man,—his thin figure was well-built and upright, showing no tendency to feebleness,—his shoulders were set square, and his head was poised in a manner that might have been called uncompromising, if not obstinate. Even the hand that rested on the balcony, attenuated and deeply wrinkled as it was, suggested strength in its shape and character, and a passing thought of this flitted across the mind of his companion who, after a ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... which required Senators to appear in dress suits of black broadcloth, and asserted his State pride and State independence by wearing, when the weather was warm, a suit of nankeen, made from nankeen cotton grown in South Carolina. Mr. Calhoun had a pale and attenuated look, as if in bad health; his long black hair was combed up from his forehead and fell over the back of his head, and his thin lips increased the effect of the acute look with which he always regarded those around him. His personal intercourse with friends ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... deductions from its influence so confident and universal, that it is worth while to point out what a very hollow thing the word in most cases really is, a large empty object in thought, of the most vague and faded associations and the most attenuated content, and to inquire just exactly what the original implications and present realities of "Democracy" may be. The inquiry will leave us with a very different conception of the nature and future of this sort of political arrangement from that generally assumed. We have already seen ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... illustration of the fascination of force, for she, at all events, has done her best to court the violence she undergoes. In Middleton's Spanish Gypsy we find exactly the same episode, and the unhappy Portuguese nun wrote: "Love me for ever and make me suffer still more." To find in literature more attenuated examples of the same tendency is easy. Shakespeare, whose observation so little escaped, has seldom depicted the adult passion of a grown woman, but in the play which he has mainly devoted to this subject he makes Cleopatra refer to "amorous pinches," and she ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... particularly on the lengthy cable between England and the Hague. Faraday showed that it was caused by induction between the electricity in the wire and the earth or water surrounding it. A core, in fact, is an attenuated Leyden jar; the wire of the core, its insulating jacket, and the soil or water around it stand respectively for the inner tinfoil, the glass, and the outer tinfoil of the jar. When the wire is charged from a battery, the electricity induces an opposite charge in the water ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... reports that Northern Washo describe some degree of ritualism connected with fishing (d'Azevedo personal communication). Dreamers are said to have predicted the day of the spawning run. Dances were held and prayers said, suggesting a rather attenuated first-fish ceremony for some of the Washo (2618). Other Washo report "big times," which included dancing and prayer, during the spring gathering on the lake. However, in the actual catching of fish there was much ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... average height is about five feet, or perhaps a little under. The anterior part of the brain is more limited than in the male; the apex of the head is carried further back; the facial angle is more acute; and the extremities are more attenuated. The latter circumstance may probably be accounted for from the fact, that the females have to endure, from a very early age, a great degree of hardship, privation, and ill-treatment. Like most ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... precious hat until the owner needed it again; a service which, if predicted two years before, would probably have astonished him. The oath of office was administered by Chief Justice Taney, whose black robes, attenuated figure, and cadaverous countenance reminded me of a galvanized corpse. Then the President came forward and read his inaugural address in a clear and distinct voice. It was attentively listened to ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... and not yet verging into the proportions of obesity,—take him for all in all, a very fine and favorable specimen of the solid men of Boston. And seen in contrast (oh! could he but have known it!) with the attenuated figure of the poor, ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... was rather unaccountably attenuated; Peter turned around and looked into the bland, unsmiling face of Jen, a Chinese deck-boy. Pig-tails were coming back in style again. About six inches of wispy, purple-black braid extended downward from Jen's white cap. His face was quite yellow, ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... and an introductory wave of his hand in the direction of the attenuated and sallow-faced personage who had accompanied him, he graciously permitted Madame Patoux to humbly precede him by a few steps, and then followed her with a soft, even tread, and a sound as of rustling silk in his ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... arguing anew as they paused upon the bluff, their gestures wonderfully distinct, drawn upon the sea of mist that filled the valley below and the air above. It revealed naught of the earth, save here and there a headland, as it were, thrusting out its dark, narrow, attenuated demesne into the impalpable main. Further and further one might mark this semblance of a coast-line as the vapor grew more tenuous, till far away the series of shadowy gray promontories alternating with the colorless ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... without, the fire burned low on the rude hearth, and the little apartment, but illy protected from the searching blasts, grew chilly. Still the hermit sat silent, his bowed head resting between his small, attenuated hands. Edgar rose, brought the long overcoat and spread it over his shoulders, as a protection from the increasing cold. Then wrapping a blanket around his own light form, he stole softly to the window, and turned his gaze ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... once been able to afford good music-books, and in the attenuated list of subscribers to the first-edition Boyce you may see to this day, "The Rector and Foundation of Cullerne Minster (6 copies)." Mr Sharnall loved the great Boyce, with its parchment paper and largest of large margins. He loved the crisp sound of the leaves as he turned them, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... This evening at seven o'clock, just as I was going out to dine, I saw, a few yards away, a tall, broad-brimmed hat surmounting a head of lank white hair, a long neck throttled in a white neckcloth, a frock-coat flapping about a pair of attenuated legs. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... can't give a razor an edge, it can only smooth and refine an edge that has already been given. I judge that a razor fresh from the hone is this shape V—the long point being the continuation of the edge—and that after much use the shape is this V—the attenuated edge all worn off and gone. By George I knew that was the explanation. And I knew that a freshly honed and freshly strapped razor won't cut, but after strapping on the hand as a final operation, it will cut.—So ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... guests began to arrive. First and foremost appeared the Bishop and his Vicar-General, dignified and reverend figures both, though no two men could well be more unlike, his lordship being tall and attenuated, and his acolyte short and fat. Both churchmen's eyes were bright; but while the Bishop was pallid, his Vicar-General's countenance glowed with high health. Both were impassive, and gesticulated but little; both appeared to be ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... have occurred in the United States. The most serious epidemic occurred in the latter part of the '70's, and the last one in 1900-'01. Influenza is present in the principal horse centers in a somewhat attenuated form. ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... faded finery, and which was wanting in the owner of the fresher and more appropriate attire. Her face was beautiful, with a singular and weird beauty which owed nothing of its fascinations to the ordinary charms of delicate outlines and dainty coloring. Her features were small and attenuated, and her complexion was of a sallow paleness, whose lack of freshness seemed caused by dissipation and late hours or by the ravages of illness. Heavy masses of soft silken hair, black as midnight, with bluish ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... the Highlanders, Long Lauchie was aptly described by his name. He was a tall, thin, attenuated man. Everything about him seemed to run to a point and vanish; his long, thin hands, his flimsy pointed beard, even his long nose and ears helped out his character. He rarely indulged in conversation, coming out of an habitual reverie only occasionally to make a remark. Nevertheless ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... shoe buckles and powdered hair usually mark the high tide of imaginative originality among this sort of people. So it was to be the inevitable Louis XVI fete—or as near to it as attenuated, artistic intelligence could manage, and they altered Duane's very clever and correct sketches to suit themselves, careless of anachronism, and sent the dainty water-colour drawings to town in order that those who sweat and sew in the perfumed ateliers of Fifth ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... marble; and it sounds, at first, the height of absurdity to say that all these qualities are modes of our own consciousness, which cannot even be conceived to exist in the marble. But consider the redness, to begin with. How does the sensation of redness arise? The waves of a certain very attenuated matter, the particles of which are vibrating with vast rapidity, but with very different velocities, strike upon the marble, and those which vibrate with one particular velocity are thrown off from its surface in all directions. The optical apparatus of the eye gathers some of these together, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... face is like the sun setting in the time of harvest, his waist garment excessive, and the undoubted symmetry of his middle portions honourable in the extreme. So welcome in my eyes, after witnessing an unending stream of concave and attenuated barbarian ghosts, was the sight of these perfections of Jones Bob-Jones, that instead of the formal greeting of this Island—the unmeaning "How do you do it?"—I shook hands cordially with myself, and exclaimed affectionately in our own language, "Illimitable ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... an enlargement, or stretching, of the cavities of the heart, and may be confined to one or extend to all. Two forms of dilatation may be mentioned—simple dilatation, where there is normal thickness of the walls, and passive, or attenuated, dilatation, where the walls are simply distended or stretched out ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... Ganges. My boat was fastened to the shore near a slimy creek, that came oozing into the river from some dense jungle near. I was washing my hands and face on the bank, and the boatmen were fishing with a small hand-net, for our breakfast. Numbers of attenuated melancholy-looking paddy-birds were stalking solemnly and stiltedly along the bank, also fishing for theirs. I noticed one who was particularly greedy, with his long legs half immersed in the water, constantly ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... rich trappings of gold and silver. It may all seem strange, to hear me tell those things of the long ago and to look upon me now"—and the speaker stretched forth his skinny, twisted fingers and attenuated arms, and for ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... Jarvis appeared an altered man. His sinewy frame became bent and attenuated, his step fell feebler, his hair was bleached to snowy whiteness, and his homely, tanned features assumed an expression of stern and patient endurance. It was evident to Flora that his heart was breaking for the ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... and reached London somewhat attenuated, having been away six weeks and two days, without a single allusion to the subject which had hardly ever ceased to occupy ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... weedy, skinny; scrawny slinky [U.S.]; starved, starveling; herring gutted; worn to a shadow, lean as a rake [Chaucer]; thin as a lath, thin as a whipping post, thin as a wafer; hatchet-faced; lantern-jawed. attenuated, shriveled, extenuated, tabid^, marcid^, barebone, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of Rossetti at twenty-seven conveys the idea of a nature rather austere and taciturn than genial and outspoken. The face is long and the cheeks sunken, the whole figure being attenuated and slightly stooping; the eyes have the inward look which belonged to them in later life, but the mouth, which is free from the concealment of moustache or beard, is severe. The impression conveyed is of a powerful intellect ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... Huxley says,[43] "the results of recent inquiries into the structure of the nervous system of animals, converge toward the conclusion that the nerve-fibres which we have hitherto regarded as ultimate elements of nervous tissue, are not such, but are simply the visible aggregations of vastly more attenuated filaments, the diameter of which dwindles down to the limits of our present microscopic vision, greatly as these have been extended by modern improvements of the microscope; and that a nerve is, in its essence, nothing but ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... there was enough in the small glimmer of moonlight entering by one of the holes to carry objects to eyes that would have pierced the deepest gloom. There is said to be no darkness in the world sufficient to conceal objects entirely; but here there was, in addition to the attenuated beam, the white dress of Ady, and the bed where Kalee lay. Janet had described it, and the table and the chair: what more than the bare walls was there to describe? Nothing. On that bed, covered by a thin ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... half of the contents of the rubber sack out on the sand and made a selection for dinner, and he chuckled in his big happiness as he saw how attenuated his list of supplies was becoming. There was still a quarter of a pound of tea, no sugar, no coffee, half a dozen pounds of flour, twenty-seven prunes jealously guarded in a piece of narwhal skin, a little salt and pepper mixed, and fresh ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... resolution working out what we may call a strictly mechanical theory of the universe. Even the soul or life-principle in living creatures was simply a structure of the finest and roundest (and therefore most nimble) atoms, with which he compared the extremely attenuated dust particles visible in their never-ending {79} dance in a beam of light passed into a darkened room. This structure of exceeding tenuity and nimbleness was the source of the motion characteristic of living creatures, and provided that elastic ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... then be it so! Let it all come! As for me, I would look on, as it seemed my part to do, understandingly, if my intellect could fathom the meaning and the moral, and, at all events, reverently and sadly. The curtain fallen, I would pass onward with my poor individual life, which was now attenuated of much of its proper substance, and diffused ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... anticipation of again mixing with the fashionable world, and talked of chaperoning Isabel to private parties and public amusements, when she was standing at the brink of eternity. Isabel sighed as she listened to her mother, and observed her attenuated frame; occasionally she would refer to her mother's state of health, and attempt to bring her to that serious state of mind which her awful situation demanded; but in vain: Mrs Revel would evade the subject. Before a week had passed she ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and the "family compact" so ably brought to a crisis. The secretary of all the governors Lower Canada had yet had, corresponded, most confidentially, with his home masters, somewhat, perhaps, to the prejudice of his honor the administrator. As general Simcoe loathed the nasal twang, attenuated appearance, and the vulgar republicanism of a downeast American, so Mr. Witsius Ryland abominated Romanism. Speaking of the Roman Catholic clergy of Canada, he says:—"I call them Popish to distinguish ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... on the trail travels naturally best in an extended form, two deep, seldom more than three or six, except towards the tail end, called the "drag": so that a herd of 2000 steers will form a much-attenuated line a mile in length from ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... Just as he entered one great tuft of green reeds, rushes, and withes, there was an extra amount of splashing, and away flew, or rather ran along the surface of the water, a moorhen, with her thin attenuated toes ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... ruled crosswise throughout, like that of the sun, were seen to be interrupted by three massive bars of darkness—two in the blue and one in the green;[380] the light of Pollux, on the other hand, seemed precisely similar to sunlight attenuated by distance or reflection, and that of Capella, Betelgeux, and Procyon to share some of its peculiarities. One solar line especially—that marked in his map with the letter D—proved common to all the four last-mentioned stars; and it was remarkable that it exactly coincided in position with ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... was the devil's own device, and the teaching of the catechism to small black slaves the chief end of existence. But the blood of the "most finished dancer of her day" still circulated beneath the old lady's gown and the religious life, and in her attenuated romances she forever held the sinner above the saint, unless, indeed, the sinner chanced to be of her own sex, when, probably, the book would never have reached her hands. For the purely masculine improprieties, her charity was as boundless ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... reduced to impalpable mud. That blue crystalline flood that gushed from the Lake of Leman, unsullied by a particle of earth, is now a river of brown mud—thick as pea-soup, and as nutritious. The stones that would have killed all vegetation have been pounded into a condition so attenuated, that they form rich alluvial matter. The river now seeks to deposit all this mud. On reaching the sea, the difference in gravity between the meeting waters, and their variation in temperature, produces rapid precipitation of all the earthy matter held in suspense by ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... respecting the English jockey, whose attenuated form is accounted for in the following dialogue in an old work entitled 'Newmarket, or an Essay on ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Coleridge's person by the tender-hearted Elia, gives the best view possible of Coleridge's scanty and suffering commencement of life. At that time, it may be premised, the dietary of Christ's Hospital was of the lowest: breakfast consisting of a "quarter of penny loaf, moistened with attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from," and the weekly rule giving "three ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... uninjured. As a natural sequence, the first inroads made upon its strength were rapidly repaired. The fever once conquered, in a week he was sufficiently convalescent to walk out, leaning on the arm of Gaston de Bois, or Ronald Walton. His gait was feeble, his form attenuated, his countenance had lost its ruddy glow,—the lines had sharpened until their youthful, healthful roundness was wholly obliterated; but the nervous, untranquil expression had passed away from his face, and the restless glancing from side to side had left ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... merely associative memory as Loeb maintains. It may well be that behaviorists are right and that thought is just "the rhythmic mimetic rehearsal of the first hand experience in motor terms." If the act of thinking is itself motor, its expression is somewhat attenuated in adults. Be that as it may, a small child's expressions are still in unmistakable motor terms. It is obviously through the large muscles that a baby makes his responses. And even a three-year-old can scarcely think "engine" without showing the pull of his muscles and the puff-puffing of ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... and had indeed suggested as possibly the best course, can have brought him but little increase of expectation. If, in its best estate, after its first restoration, the Rump had disappointed him, what could he hope from it now in its attenuated and crippled condition, with Vane expelled from it because of his actings during the Wallingford-House Interruption, with Salway out of it, who had worked so earnestly with Vane on the Church-question, and with ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... so well the voice she had expected at the other end of the wire that the husky, boyish note which reached her, attenuated by distance, struck her with dismay ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... symmetrical body poised in space. It is quite possible to conceive a body occupying the position of the earth with reference to the sun which would cast a shadow having such a tenuous form as the Milky Way presents. Such a body obviously would not be a globe, but a long-drawn-out, attenuated figure. There is, to be sure, no direct evidence preserved to show that Anaxagoras conceived the world to present such a figure as this, but what we know of that philosopher's close-reasoning, logical mind gives some warrant to the assumption—gratuitous though in a sense ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of his first enthusiasm, and having nothing else to do, he spent several days in visiting the scenes of historic events with which his reading had made him familiar. But his slender purse grew daily more attenuated, and he soon found himself in a truly desperate situation, a friendless, unprepossessing young man, knowing no trade or profession, and without an acquaintance in the city. His last penny was spent. A whole day passed without ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... in Elizabethan English on the word 'begetter,' that of 'inspirer' is by no means the only one or the most common. 'Beget' was not infrequently employed in the attenuated sense of 'get,' 'procure,' or 'obtain,' a sense which is easily deducible from the original one of 'bring into being.' Hamlet, when addressing the players, bids them 'in the very whirlwind of passion acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.' 'I have some cousins ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... we reach a cottage, where other parents were watching over a little son of five years, who is wasting away with consumption. His attenuated limbs bear his little frame but feebly, and he often talks of death, for he has recently seen a little sister younger than himself fall a prey to the fearful malady. A burning fever is raging in his veins, ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... the tone of contempt with which his mother would say: "Those are workmen, men in blouses,"—the care she took in the streets to avoid the contact of their soiled garments. Labassindre's fine speeches on the duties and influence of the working-man in the nineteenth century attenuated and contradicted, it is true, these vague impressions. But what he did understand, and that most clearly and bitterly, was that he must go away, leave the forest whose tree-tops he saw from the window, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... dry state, would, we imagined, ignite; though it would require a large number of them to make even a tolerable fire. We carried our fuel to a hole between two sand-hills, hoping that the smoke, by the time it had ascended above them, might become so attenuated as not to be observed by any passing Arabs. The difficulty was how to light our fire. We required first the means of striking a spark, and then the tinder to catch it, and finally to produce a flame. Boxall ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... Colour, both of the Head and Train; the Head especially, keeping at the time as well of the last observations, as of the {302} first, the brightness of its single kernel, though the environing more dilute matter were then almost all lost; it being, according to the Author, more and more attenuated, and grown narrow, the nearer the ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... happen, especially when a man falls asleep after eating and drinking copiously. If, however, the evaporation be somewhat less, phantasms appear, but distorted and without sequence; thus it happens in a case of fever. And if the evaporation be still more attenuated, the phantasms will have a certain sequence: thus especially does it happen towards the end of sleep in sober men and those who are gifted with a strong imagination. If the evaporation be very slight, not only does the imagination retain its freedom, but also the common sense is partly ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... Spouse," though mutilated and unfinished, is pleasing from its greater breadth of style, although such breadth is rarely found in the works of this school, which toned down, elongated, and attenuated the figure till it often lost in vigour what it gained in distinction. The one point in which the Saite artists made a real advance, was in the treatment of the heads ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... overlooking the Granny White pike. The hill was occupied by the enemy in considerable force, but was not intrenched. My order was not executed with the promptness or energy which I had expected, yet probably with as much as I had reason to expect, considering the attenuated character of General Cox's line and the great distance and rough ground over which the attacking force had to move. The hill was, however, carried by General Wilson's cavalry (dismounted), whose gallantry and energy on that ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... the look of misery on the young man's face, his pale cheeks, his otherwise vigorous frame obviously attenuated by fear, the motherly instinct present in every good woman's heart caused her to go up to him and to address him timidly, offering such humble solace as ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... you have improved! You have gained a splendid color in the woods. The only trouble is that you are as attenuated as some of the ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... was dreadfully embarrassed." (Ned never was disturbed at anything.—if an elephant had walked into the cabin, he would have offered him a seat and cigar.) "by the sentries all presenting arms to my coat, which sat upon me as a shirt is supposed to on a bean-pole. I overheard one man attribute my attenuated frame to the effects of sea-sickness. We went into various shops, and finally into one where all sorts of sea-notions were kept, and Marston said, 'Here's what I've been in search of this month past. I began to think I should have to send to London for it. The 'Ercolano' is a perfect sieve, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... as I could judge, but oh, how attenuated! Her lower limbs absolutely made no impression on the mattrass, to which her frame appeared to cling, giving a ghastly conspicuousness to the oedematoust swelling of her feet, and to her person, for, alas! She was in a way to ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... which I would illustrate is skimpy. It signifies something mean and defective; and in the following history, told to me by a clerical friend, it refers to an attenuated and bony female. When a curate in a remote country parish, he took a raw village lad into his service, to train him for some better place; and, when his education was sufficiently advanced, and he had made some progress in the art of writing, he was permitted to accompany his master to a ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... "simple possibility" of an object, have meaning only in relation to a reality that drives into the region of the ideal, or of the merely possible, the object which is incompatible with it. Suppose the stronger and more substantial existence annihilated: it is the attenuated and weaker existence of the merely possible that becomes the reality itself, and you will no longer be representing the object, then, as non-existent. In other words, and however strange our assertion may seem, there is more, and not less, in the idea of an object conceived ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... The audience which now welcomed Browning was in fact substantially that which had hailed the first fresh runnels of Mr Swinburne's genius a few years before; the fame of both marked a wave of reaction from the austere simplicity and attenuated sentiment of the later Idylls of the King. Readers upon whom the shimmering exquisiteness of Arthurian knighthood began to pall turned with relish to Browning's Italian murder story, with its sensational ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... his orders and buckled on his sword. The gorgeous clothes, which had suited him so well in the prime of his manhood, hung somewhat loosely on his attenuated frame, but he looked a grand and imposing figure, with his white hair tied behind with a great black bow, and the fine jabot of beautiful point d'Angleterre falling in a soft cascade below ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... materials would allow, both in order to render it more durable, and to make it serve the purposes of defence." This, I am afraid, is still very unsatisfactory. A fire lighted along the entire line of a wall inclosing nearly an acre of area could not be other than a very attenuated, wire-drawn line of fire indeed, and could never possess strength enough to melt the ponderous mass of rampart beneath, as if it had been formed of wax or resin. A thousand loads of wood piled in a ring round the summit of Knock Farril, and set at once into a blaze, would ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... length of head, narrow and rounded at tip; face abruptly narrowed in front of eyes; muzzle long, narrow, cylindrical; lower jaw slightly projecting; eyes large; tongue very long, last third attenuated, covered with brush-like papillae; interfemoral membrane very narrow, especially at root of tail; fur ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... expression, also, it may be, a number of linguistic elements expressing certain modalities, such as dubitative or potential forms, which may be interpreted as reflecting the emotional states of hesitation or doubt—attenuated fear. On the whole, it must be admitted that ideation reigns supreme in language, that volition and emotion come in as distinctly secondary factors. This, after all, is perfectly intelligible. The ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... the toe for the reception of this shoe that, with the shoe in position, there will still be maintained a tread that is normal. To our minds harm is far more likely to arise from a shoe of this class through the thinned iron heels of the shoe becoming attenuated under wear to the point of bending, and so inflicting an injury ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... grasped his wrist tightly with one hand—and both feeble and attenuated was that poor wrist—the baronet, we say, grasped it, and in an instant had regained possession of the mask, which he deliberately replaced on his face, after which he seized the unfortunate young man by the neck, and pressed it with such force as almost to occasion suffocation. ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Christs. Wherever we may pass, this master-spirit of the Lombard style enthralls attention. His curious treatment of drapery as though it |were made of crumpled paper, and his trick of enhancing relief by sharp angles and attenuated limbs, do not detract from his peculiar charm. That is his way, very different from Donatello's, of attaining to the maximum of life and lightness in the stubborn vehicle of stone. Nor do all the riches of the choir—those multitudes of singing angels, those Ascensions and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... different. The moment I heard it I said, "There is a new bird, a new thrush," for the quality of all thrush songs is the same. A moment more, and I knew it was Bicknell's thrush. The song is in a minor key, finer, more attenuated, and more under the breath than that of any other thrush. It seemed as if the bird was blowing in a delicate, slender, golden tube, so fine and yet so flute-like and resonant the song appeared. At times it was like a musical whisper of great sweetness and power. The birds were numerous ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... great that Dr. Baraduc received an electric shock from head to foot, which produced a temporary vertigo. Emerging from the body are dark, tree-shaped emanations, issuing in formal lines, which gradually diverge, and become more and more attenuated and misty as they recede further and further from the body. Although this photograph[24] does not in itself prove anything supernormal, it is highly suggestive, and it aroused Dr. Baraduc's interest in the subject, and enabled ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... glass and reconnoitred. There was my friend, sure enough; moreover, he was playing a very respectable trout. But he was fishing on the near side of the loch, and though I had quite a distinct view of his back, and indeed of all his attenuated form, I was as far as ever from recognising him, or guessing where, if anywhere, I had seen him before. I now determined to stalk him; but this was not too easy, as there is literally no cover on the hillside except a long ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... The appearance and actions of the parties indeed seemed to justify, not only the delusion, but the alarm of the worthy citizen. Both Gerald and Sambo were disguised in large dark cloaks, and as the light fell upon the thin person and pale, attenuated, sunken countenance of the former, he could scarcely persuade himself this was the living man, who a few months before, rich in beauty and in health, had questioned him of the very spot in which he now, under such ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... that time were those belonging to a decadent period—neither the Elgin marbles nor the Venus of Milo were accessible before 1816—so that the works from which they drew their inspiration were without character in themselves, or merely the feeble and attenuated copies of ancient Rome. In the pictures of this school, accordingly, we find only the monotonous perfection of rounded and well-modelled limbs, classical features and straight noses. Colour, to the ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... and attenuated; some are concentrated; others are so tenacious of the body to which they belong that they are all but steadfast. Some are sympathetic; some antipathetic, attracting or repelling each other; some mingle gently; ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... it did come, came attenuated. 'We heard there had been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,' Barnet relates; 'but it didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still somewhere elaborating their plans and issuing orders. When the enemy began to emerge from the woods in front of us, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... crossing of the room to the window—where she reclined on an invalid-chair and gazed out on Paris, flaming with the ruddy light of the dying sun—seemed too great a strain for her wearied frame. Her attenuated limbs could scarce bear their burden, and she would declare with a wan smile that the blood in her veins would not suffice for a little bird, and that she must have plenty of soup. Morsels of raw meat were dipped in her broth. She had grown to like this mixture, as she longed to be ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... go was broad enough to begin with, although very rough and wild here and there. But after he had gone a little way, it got so narrow that he found it difficult to secure a foot-hold. At this point the ridge became so attenuated that the youth saw at the first glance that it was impossible to proceed in an upright position; he therefore crept along on all fours, or sat astride the ridge and urged himself on with his hands ...
— Harper's Young People, November 11, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a paper before the Royal Society in March 1882, on "A New Theory of the Sun". His views in many respects coincided with mine.* [footnote... Interstellar space, according to Dr. Siemens, is filled with attenuated matter, consisting of highly rarefied gaseous bodies— including hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and aqueous vapour; that these gaseous compounds are capable of being dissociated by radiant solar energy while in a state of extreme ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... Lord Selsey with his wife. He looked suave and debonair as ever, with his touch of attenuated Georgian dandyism. She had not changed, nor had her long brown eyes lost their sly and fascinating twinkle. Evidently Lord Selsey had not been able—if indeed he had tried—to persuade her to take ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... especially in the case of inanimate objects. This is where Hans Christian Andersen reigns supreme. Horace Scudder says of him: "By some transmigration, souls have passed into tin soldiers, balls, tops, money-pigs, coins, shoes and even such attenuated things as darning-needles, and when, informing these apparent dead and stupid bodies, they begin to make manifestations, it is always in perfect consistency with the ordinary conditions of the bodies they occupy, though the several ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... mental aspect of Overbeck is well known. I myself had the privilege of first seeing the painter when in the Cenci Palace, as far back as the year 1848. My journal describes a man impressive in presence, tall and attenuated in body, worn by ill-health and suffering, the face emaciated and tied round by a piece of black silk. The mind had eaten into the flesh; the features were sorrow-laden. The voice sank into whispers, the words were plaintive and sparse; noiselessly the artist glided ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... at large, the Tories have flourished on the sickness of the patient. They have, with Falstaff, "turned diseases to commodity;" their only concern being to keep out the undertaker. Whilst there's life, there's profit,—is the philosophy of the Tory College; hence, poor Mr. Bull, though shrunk, attenuated,—with a blister on his head, and cataplasms at his soles,—has been kept just alive enough to pay. And then his patience under Tory treatment—the obedience of his swallow! "Admirable, excellent!" cried a certain doctor (we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... pressed forward. The Indians accompanied and even led them, and constantly supplied them with food. With food? No, it was not such food as their weakened, debilitated systems craved. The acorn bread was not sufficient to sustain lives already so attenuated by repeated starvations. All that the starved experience in the way of pain and torture before they die, had been experienced by these people at least four different times. To their horror, they now discovered that ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... hope forecast Indeed one hour again, when on this stream Of darkened love once more the light shall gleam?— An hour how slow to come, how quickly past,— Which blooms and fades, and only leaves at last, Faint as shed flowers, the attenuated dream." ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... the case of a third medium, the substance of which puzzled the philosophers of ancient time and still continues to puzzle the scientists of the present. This is the ether, that attenuated fluid which fills all inter-stellar space and all space in masses and between molecules and atoms not otherwise occupied by gross matter. When a lamp is lit the light radiates from it in all directions in ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... woods, found himself within a few yards of the whole British regular army, formed in line of battle, and presenting within a given space at least three men fresh from their camp, to a single one in his own attenuated and exhausted line. After receiving and returning two or three fires, the enemy rushed forward with charged bayonets, when hearing nothing from General Scott, he gave the order to retreat and form again on the left of General Scott's brigade, ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... some few weeks passed, ere Emmeline was sufficiently convalescent to leave her room, and then her pallid features and attenuated form were such constant and evident proofs of that mental as well as bodily fever, that Mrs. Hamilton could not look on her without pain. She was still inwardly restless and uneasy, though evidently struggling for cheerfulness, and Mr. Maitland, to whom some necessary particulars ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... attenuated, but powerful figure, and a face chiefly remarkable for its cadaverous hollows and a pair of hungry eyes and ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... the other, "and observe what is yet more worth your study;" and he pointed to the third bystander, whose face, sharp and attenuated, was bent with an absorbed, and, as it were, with a hungering attention over ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... manlier bearing as I passed along in the sunshine, and saw defined on the grass before me the shadow of a gigantic being, elongated in the slanting rays to about twelve feet high, with limbs and shoulders certainly a little attenuated by the same solar deception, but still not quite such thread-papers as I have since seen do duty in ball-rooms, to the evident satisfaction of then possessors. The Wilderness was reached at last: and here I must premise that the aristocratic appearances ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... agricultural communities these ceremonies persist in attenuated form. There is a sacrifice of first-born animals to a deity and an offering of the first fruits of the field; and as children, no less than crops, are the gift of the gods, whose bounty must be recognized, it is not surprising to find that, along with the first fruits of the field, first-born ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... labors; and that other Thaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched the rest so long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards, that it almost seemed as if he meant to sit up until the morning of the resurrection; and bringing up the rear, attenuated but vivacious little Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated, reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in wickedness or wit. The good-humored junior member of our family always ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... succumbed to sunstroke, and that was a camel that had no sun-bonnet. If anything could have added to the naturally lugubrious expression of those lumbering freight carriers, it was the jaunty poke-bonnets with the attenuated "Oh, let us be joyful" visages grinning beneath. The transport department was managed by Colonel F. W. Kitchener, brother of the Sirdar. His care it was, when the army actually took the field, to see that the supplies of food, forage, and ammunition advanced ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... physician less skilled and determined than Westmoreland he must have gone out. But Westmoreland, with his jaw set, followed his code and fenced with death for this apparently worthless and forfeited life, using all his skill and finesse to outwit the great Enemy; in spite of which, so attenuated was the man's chance that we were astonished when he turned the corner—very, very feebly—and we didn't have to place another pine box in the potter's field, alongside other unmarked mounds ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... more experience of sensation than many whose existence is protracted. 'If I die to-morrow,' he said, on the eve of his unanticipated death, 'I have lived to be older than my father.' The weight of thought and feeling burdened him heavily; you read his sufferings in his attenuated frame, while you perceived the mastery he held over them in his animated countenance and ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... of these dark, shining, little evergreen leaves, spread at the foot of forest trees, whether sprinkled over in June with pairs of waxy, cream-white, pink-tipped, velvety, lilac-scented flowers that suggest attenuated arbutus blossoms, or with coral-red "berries" in autumn and winter, is surely one of the loveliest sights in the woods. Transplanted to the home garden in closely packed, generous clumps, with plenty of leaf-mould, or, better still, chopped sphagnum, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... M.E.L. Trouvelot of Meudon drew attention to a curious appearance which he noted in connection with certain rills when near the terminator, viz., extremely attenuated threads of light on their sites and their apparent prolongations. He observed it in the ring-plain Eudoxus, crossing the southern side of the floor from wall to wall; and also in connection with the prominent cleft running ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... to resist the tendency to depend upon those portraits, and to enjoy vicariously through them a high consideration. But, after all, what girl is complimented when you curiously regard her because her mother was beautiful? What attenuated consumptive, in whom self-respect is yet unconsumed, delights in your respect for him, founded in honor for his ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... in this affair were hidden from me, but in the end my aunt triumphed. He did not so much throw as jerk over Mrs. Scrymgeour, and she did not so much make a novel of it as upset a huge pailful of attenuated and adulterated female soul upon this occasion. My aunt did not appear in that, even remotely. So that it is doubtful if the lady knew the real causes of her abandonment. The Napoleonic hero was practically unmarried, and he threw ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... quaint embellishments and plates, and staring at the strange title-pages, some of which I thought resembled the mustached faces of foreigners. Among others was a Parisian-looking, faded, pink-covered pamphlet, the rouge here and there effaced upon its now thin and attenuated cheeks, entitled, "Voyage Descriptif et Philosophique de L'Ancien et du Nouveau Paris: Miroir Fidele" also a time-darkened, mossy old book, in marbleized binding, much resembling verd-antique, entitled, "Itineraire Instructif de Rome, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... precocious powers needed judicious repression. Instead, they were unduly forced by the paternal pride of Chatham. At Cambridge, at Lincoln's Inn, and in Parliament the intellectual pressure was maintained, with the result that his weakly frame was constantly overwrought and attenuated by a too active mind. Further, the pressure at Westminster was so continuous as to preclude all chance of widening his nature by foreign travel. He caught but a glimpse of the life of France in 1783; and his ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose |
