"Tension" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shantytown and saw the great old house on the farther side of the street, looming up on its graded embankment, black against a smoldering red sunset, she was almost sobbing aloud, and when Harris answered her ring, she was in such tension that she burst out at him: "Harris! where is Mr. Blair? Do you know? Have you heard—anything?" She seized the old man's arm and held on to it. ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... drawing, and his body swayed, lifted and sank in perfect harmony with the motions and the accompanying sound, with a grace which nature only reaches when the will is utterly surrendered to a power that has charmed the stiffness and tension out of the frame and made it yielding ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... had no time to consider consciously the strangely sophisticated wording of her argument. When she continued to talk in the same gentle voice, the temptation caressed his mind like a narcotic; against his will, the tension began to wash from his muscles. Driven by a kind of madness to escape the sound of her voice, he pulled the trigger. The yellow wall exploded. Concussion throbbed in his ears, deafening him—but he still heard her whisper in the depths of his soul, like the ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... to emphasize the least desirable qualities of the revolution. Further, the needs of the army overwhelm all efforts at meeting the needs of social and economic reconstruction. Agreement with the Soviet Government would lessen the tension of defense and would unmuzzle the opposition, who, while the Soviet Government is attacked, are prepared to help in its defense, while reserving until peace their efforts to alter ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... to success, to furnish evidence of the value of the coming, crowning invention. The "fire engines," as they were then called, of these now famous men were merely contrivances by the use of which the pressure of confined steam of high tension could be brought to act on the surface of a mass of confined water, forcing it downward into pipes through which it was led off and upward to a higher level; and thus a mine could be drained, ineffectively and expensively to be sure, but vastly more satisfactorily ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... allowance must be made for hemming the back edge of the mainsail. If your sewing-machine has a hemmer, find out how wide a hem it makes (the smaller the better), and make allowance accordingly, twice the width of the hem being necessary. Much depends upon the tension at which the machine is set, so be careful that the latter is sufficiently slack so that it does ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... knowing exactly how to define them; therefore, with the excuse of writing, I determined to keep watch. Until about four o'clock in the morning I was able to resist the somnolence which weighed down my eyelids but at last, exhausted with so many hours' march, with the high tension to which my nerves had been pitched and weakened by the abundant blood-letting in the swamp, my body triumphed over my will ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... firmly by the hand. An impulse or motion is imparted to the ball by the hand, that motion being continued by the movement from the hand. The first impulse given to the ball by the hand represents the Primitive Impulse. The tension on the string which holds the ball to its controlling centre represents the Centripetal Force, while the opposite force on the string, which takes up the Primitive Impulse and continues it, is represented by the ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... would probably have imperilled the success of the whole scheme, and most certainly would have plunged the country again into the horrors of Civil War. When he did reveal his negotiations with the exiled Court at Breda, 'London would not have borne many days, or even many hours longer, the extreme tension it was then suffering—the City one way, Westminster the other way; Monk's army between them, and Fleetwood's wolves prowling all round, ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... have cried as a child cries, with the snapping of the tension, when he answered: "It was only that terrible last scene, darling. I've seen you die in other parts. But it never affected me like this. Perhaps it's because you didn't belong to me in those days. Or is it that you were more realistic in your acting to-night than ever before? Anyway, ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... chilled. The fine tension of the spiritual chords relaxed, and gave forth heavier music. Susan failing to ascend to us, we came down to her. She now made haste to atone for her long silence by talking freely of the pretty new church, and the people she saw out Sunday; and she seemed proud ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... bull is jealous and sly, it requires the most careful management to kill him. The disposition of the bull is developed by a few rapid passes of the red flag. This must not be continued too long: the tension of the nerves of the auditory will not bear trifling. I remember one day the crowd was aroused to fury by a bugler from the adjoining barracks playing retreat at the moment of decision. All at once the matador seizes the favorable instant. He poises his sword as the bull rushes upon him. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... various desires I am addressed crescendo as "Herr Ober-Leutenant," or "Herr Hauptmann," or "Herr Majeur," or "Herr Commandant." They always approach me in a becomingly servile attitude—cap or hat in hand—and await with obvious tension my weighty pronouncements. They hide round corners and wait behind doors or down narrow passages until I come past, and then ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... of the burner till a faint glow revealed the girl, white, suffering, her left side convulsed. "You can't do things like that," he went on, addressing himself to Serviss. "In these trances the nervous system is in a state of enormous tension. The psychic must ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... seconds there was the silent tension of expectation in the air and then I realised with a shock that the train did not show any signs of slackening speed. It was, if anything, going faster. I snatched frantically at the cord and pulled about half-a-furlong into the carriage. We flashed past Ealing like a rocket, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... her husband's footsteps aroused her. He bore a crystal goblet containing a liquor colorless as water, but bright enough to be the draught of immortality. Aylmer was pale; but it seemed rather the consequence of a highly wrought state of mind and tension of spirit ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... a wife; and in the rear of that, most pitiful of all, the violent death of the seer who sees in vain and may not help. Between Cassandra and the Chorus it is a duet of anguish and fear; in the broken lyric phrases a phantom music wails; till at last, at what seems the breaking-point, the tension is relaxed, and dropping into the calmer iambic recitative, Cassandra tells her message in plainer speech and clearly proclaims the murder of the King. Then, with a last appeal to the avenger that is to come, she enters the palace ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... depicts the coast and place, And resuscitates therewith our unexpected troublous case All distinctly to my sight, And her tension, and the ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... their extreme tension, she sang as he requested, and all the while her rich mellow voice rolled through the room, he walked very slowly from one end of the library to the other. She forced herself to sing every verse, and when she concluded he was standing behind her chair. He put ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... verse-speech of the Doctor, which closes this scene, lowers the tension towards that of the next scene. His introductory conversation with the Gentlewoman is written in prose (sometimes very near verse), partly, perhaps, from its familiar character, but chiefly because Lady Macbeth is ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... two years was followed by comparative languor. The deadly crisis was past, the freedom of Europe was saved, Holland and England breathed again; but tension now gave place to exhaustion. The events in the remainder of the year 1588, with those of 1589—although important in themselves—were the immediate results of that history which has been so minutely detailed in these volumes, and can be indicated ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... guns and no signal fires; no sign of human habitation whatever; and no sound out of the weird darkness except the lap of the water and the call of the birds . . . . The night passed in anxiety and depression, and in a certain degree of nervous tension, which was relieved at two or three o'clock in the morning by the sound of paddles and the looming of a canoe through the dusky starlight. Native voices were heard from the canoe asking in a loud voice for the Admiral; and when the visitors ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... was half emptied. He had come to tea late, after the others had left the table. Evidently he had not finished, but he made no reply, neither did Beatrice. Vera glanced disgustedly at her father. Gwen sidled up to her mother, and tried to break the tension. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... — On the 18th the wind freshened a little, but as it blew from the same favorable quarter we did not complain, and only took the precaution of putting an extra support to the mast, so that it should not snap with the tension of the sail. This done, the raft was carried along with something more than its ordinary speed, and left a long line of foam ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... conditions. Any such secondary factors may cause some slight accidents with the man who shows rather fair results in the experimental test of his foresight. Finally, we must not forget that some men enter into such tests under a certain nervous tension and therefore may not show so well at the very first test as their mental equipment should allow. Hence it is decidedly desirable not to rely on the first test, but to repeat it. If those various interferences ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... Lower Canada; but La Fontaine, who never had any enthusiasm for British Whig statesmanship,[26] regarded the offer as a bribe to draw him away from his countrymen and their national ideal, and declined it, thereby increasing the tension. Thus, as the time for the election drew near, the French were still further hardening their hearts against the governor-general of United Canada, and Sydenham, his patience now exhausted, could but exclaim ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... the door securely again he spread the blankets on the bench by the window and lay down to sleep. The tension was gone from his nerves now, and he felt that he could fall asleep at once, but he did not. A shift in the wind brought the sound of the artillery more plainly. His imagination again came into vivid play. He believed ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a laugh, rather a hysterical laugh, it is true, but a laugh nevertheless. It showed that the strain and tension were relaxing ...
— The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... still, a capricious and not too scrupulous monarchy of monarchs, is not to be envied, and this was exactly the position of Louis Philippe. He was beset by the noisy clamour of many factions, besides having to keep a shrewd eye on those lofty men to whom he had to look with perpetual nervous tension for the stability and endurance of his throne. He knew the heart of the nation was centred on St. Helena, and that a wave of repentance was passing over the land. The people wished to atone for the crime they allowed to be ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... his glass in meditative fingers. "She wore it as young Chatworth's wife." He held them all in an increasing tension, as if he drew them ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... garrison seemed to have changed in that brief time. In the faint moonlight they could see motionless files of troopers filling the parade, the officers in belted tunics and slouched hats,—but apparently not the same men; the half lounging ease and lazy dandyism gone, a grim tension in all their faces, a set abstraction in all their acts. Then there was the rolling of heavy wheels in the road, and the two horses of the ambulance appeared. The sentries presented arms; the colonel took off his hat; the officers uncovered; the wagon wheeled into ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... wolfishly. His restraint got on her nerves. She could not eat, though she made a pretence of it. When he had eaten his soup with the same careful deliberation, a little color came into his face. She observed this, and her tension relaxed. ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... mental headiness in the admiration we inspire, or in the effect of playing a part, which fends off criticism from reaching the idol. An atmosphere, produced perhaps by unceasing nervous tension, forms a sort of halo, through which the world below is seen. How otherwise can we account for the perennial good faith which leads to so many repeated presentments of the same effects, and the constant ignoring of warnings given by children, such ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... unfortunately true; and the neutrality of these places is strained to its utmost tension, to say nothing of its ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... tension when Dreda had been waiting for Mr Rawdon's announcement, she had felt a strange bursting sensation in her head; but now something really did snap—it must have done, for she heard it with her ears—a sharp, splitting noise, so loud that it seemed impossible ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... mingling with this new-found joy came the thought of the dark shadow hanging over her father's life. How could she be happy when he was in trouble? For his sake she had kept the brave spirit and presented only the bright sunny face, and cheery words of hope. The tension for weeks, nay months, had been a severe strain—and now this sudden joy! It unnerved her. Words would not come to Stephen's passionate pleading, but in their stead tears stole down her cheeks, while her form trembled with ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... was not the action of one individual or of two; it was not Drouet nor was it the Saulce family. It was a great number of individuals (the King had been recognized all along the journey), each thinking the same thing under the tension of a particular episode, each vaguely tending to one kind of action and tending with increasing energy towards that action, and all combining, as it were, upon that culminating point in the long journey which was reached at the archway of the little ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... penis shrink, its tension lessen, its high colour go, then came the feeling of disgust at myself that I have always felt after frigging, a disgust not quite absent even when done by the little hands of fair friends, to whose quims I was paying similar delicate attentions. I was able ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... question which he had answered a hundred times, and if to-day there was a new tone in the voice which spoke it, Geoffrey was not sensitive enough to notice. Few men would mark such differences in a moment of tension. ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... When I lay down to sleep—then the ordeal which I had been unconsciously preparing for myself throughout the day, began to try me. Every nerve in my body, strung up to the extremest point of tension since the morning, now at last gave way. I felt my limbs quivering, till the bed shook under me. I was possessed by a gloom and horror, caused by no thought, and producing no thought: the thinking ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... Strange that where death is busiest the evidence of life beyond and above it all should abound. The invisible, full of awe, is also full of teaching, it is pregnant with whispers. The mind, tuned up to a new tension, receives all kinds of Marconi-like messages. What sends such whispers? Is it that in the moment of supreme self-sacrifice and splendid devotion to duty that spiritual perceptions are sharpened? Who shall say? "He was hit, and he rushed ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... vanished; but in less than a quarter of an hour the phenomena were repeated exactly as described, and were followed by a dark night and torrents of rain. It was a very unusual instance of what is known as electric glow; that is, electricity without tension. ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... often upon "our need for conduct, our need for beauty;" and he finds the springs of the supply to be, not in the "strenuous" life, always at high pressure and extreme tension, but in the thoughtful leisure, in the serenity of repose, in the devotion to poetry and art. "How," he questions, "are poetry and eloquence to exercise the power of relating the modern results of natural science to man's ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... expresses nothing; but when the physiognomy has a marked stamp it is almost always a true index. The passions act upon the muscles, and frequently, although a man says nothing, the various feelings by which he is moved can be read in his face. By this tension, if in the slightest degree habitual, perceptible traces are at last left, and the physiognomy thus assumes ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the spinning frame the bobbin, which rotates on the spindle, is not driven positively, as in the roving frame, by wheel gearing; each spinning bobbin is actually driven by the yarn being pulled round by the arm of the flyer and just sufficient resistance is offered by the pressure or tension of the "temper band" and weight. The temper band is simply a piece of leather or hemp twine to which is attached a weight, and the other end of the leather or twine is attached ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour
... of scared, blanched silence, and then a girl burst into hysterical sobbing, and her voice broke the tension. In a moment all was confusion and terror unspeakable, through which I forced my way to mademoiselle's side. Men shouted and raved, women screamed and prayed. Some flew to the doors, others, again, huddled together like sheep; and from outside rose higher ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... palpitating awfully with the pangs of that earthly hell, and the exquisitely-modeled limbs enduring all the hideous pains of dislocation, as if the fibers that held them in their sockets were drawn out to a tension at which they ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... given to me for that undertaking, by the glamour of romance thrown around an army of 10,000 men lost to view, as it were, for nearly a month, about the fate of which uninformed speculation was rife and pessimistic rumours were spread, until the tension became extreme, and the corresponding relief proportionably great when that army reappeared to dispose at once of Ayub and ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... have to miss your visit the day after tomorrow, of which you sent me word by Mr. Hallberger. You know what a sincere pleasure it always is to me to see you again, and what a lively interest I take in your new works. This time in particular I am at high tension about the completion of your Paradise Lost. If the continuation and the end correspond with the beginning which you showed me, you have reason to be really and truly satisfied with yourself, and you may ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... portion so as to secure rest and this is accomplished by the muscles of the abdominal wall becoming rigid, especially over the cecum. These muscles are contracted to such an extent that the right thigh is often drawn up in order to relieve the tension. ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... the tension became too much for Barrett. He picked up his cap and left the room. Reade continued to be absorbed ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... stir. He lay stiff in his bed, on his back, with his eyes wide open. A metallic light cast up from the white earth and roofs fell upon the walls of the room.... An imperceptible noise made him tremble. Only a man at a feverish tension could have heard it. Came a soft rustling on the floor of the passage. Christophe sat up in bed. The faint noise came nearer, stopped; a board creaked. There was some one behind the door: some one waiting.... Absolute stillness for a few seconds, perhaps for several ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... not withdraw her fingers, but neither did she cease from weeping. Her grief seemed to be something more than that resulting from the tension of strong feelings ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... us. They arrived with their pockets full of crumpled newspapers, and answered my queries casually, with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my interest. And yet I was not indifferent; but the tension in the Balkans had become chronic after the acute crisis, and one could not help being less conscious of it. It had wearied out one's attention. Who could have guessed that on that wild stage we had just been looking at a miniature rehearsal of the great world-drama, the reduced model of ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... reduced to the last point of safety. Let it be affected, if necessary, in a warm bath. When she is reduced to a state of perfect asphyxy, apply a ligature to the left ankle, drawing it as tight as the bone will bear. Apply, at the same moment, another of equal tension around the right wrist. By means of plates constructed for the purpose, place the other foot and hand under the receivers of two air-pumps. Exhaust the receivers. Exhibit a pint of French brandy, and ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... slackness" of which Mrs. Connery had, before the tribunal, made so pathetically much. It might have been, for that matter, the very business slackness that affected Julia as presenting its friendly breast, in the form of a cool loose sociability, to her own actual tension; though it was also true for her, after they had exchanged fifty words, that he had as well his inward fever and that, if he was perhaps wondering what was so particularly the matter with her, she could make out not less that something was the matter with him. It had been vague, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... steaming a good fourteen knots, failed to ascend. She was obliged to lay out a long steel-wire hawser, and heave herself over by means of her windlass, the engines working at full speed at the same time. Hard and heavy was the heave, gaining foot by foot, with a tension on the hawser almost to breaking strain in a veritable battle against the dragon of the river. Yet so complete are the changes which are wrought by the great variation in the level of the river, that this formidable mid-level rapid ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... was reaching out to cut the line, but, just as his blade touched the stout cord in front of Lane's hand, the tension ceased. ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... towards his departed sire. It was merely that his elastic nature could not always be at a tension. His quick bright face was made for smiles, and naturally relaxed to that happy state. He ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... she heaved a deep sigh. The tension had relaxed now that she felt herself to be doing at last. Cooped within the stockade, her plans still waiting to be set in motion, she had felt nigh to choking with nervousness. Her anxiety to be gone had been overwhelming. Perhaps none knew better than she what the ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... laughed at the irony of the argument, and their laugh did much to do away with the constraint, the tension of their mood. More gayly she mentioned certain ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... somewhat else that a man likes to read; a fealty of love to him that would never fail. It went to his heart. But he saw too that Dolly's colour had left her cheeks, though at first they were rosy enough; and in the lines of her face generally and the quiver of her lip he could see that the nervous tension was somewhat too much. He must ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... the triumphant captors behind him know nothing of the story that is told in his face. The eyes, fixed and steady in the shadow of the bloody bandage, tell nothing of the pain of his wound or the tension of the cords which are binding his crossed wrists. In their intense depth, which really seems to convey the impression of looking through forty feet of the still but dangerous waters of Lake George and seeing the glimmering of the golden sand beneath, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and the Colonel growing daily more irritable over the continued mystery of the bonds, it is not strange that matters between them were at a high state of tension. As I saw more of the Colonel's treatment of Rad, I came to realize that there was considerable excuse for Jefferson's wildness. While he was a kind man at heart, still he had an ungovernable temper, and an absolutely tyrannical ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... out-of-door exercise gave him a keen appetite, and a perfect digestion, and he loved the hilarity of the table as well as any man of his day. But in his later life he became a teetotaller. Even in his earlier days it was often the excitement of company which quickened all of his powers to their utmost tension, when the effect was attributed to wine. So fond was he of all sorts and kinds of out-of-the-way company, that he was at one time in the habit of going at midnight to the Angel Inn, where many of the up and down London ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... his finger at him and abusing him like a pickpocket. "The crowd couldn't believe its eyes," Gordon Smith concluded, "and McCloud was pushing for the blacksmith with his cue when Kennedy and I squirmed through to the front and relieved the tension. McCloud wasn't hit." ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... away by the torrent of the orator's force, hung silent, breathing soft, as he went on, till the silence that followed a magnificent peroration broke the spell, and a hurricane of cheers relieved the tension. ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... come to such a tension here that I doubt the wisdom of my discussing international politics with you; nevertheless, I want you not to be weary in well-doing, but continue to give me the views of the Tory Squire. I hope that your ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... secretary then,—would like to hear a very interesting young American professor lecture this morning?—wondered, when they were fanning themselves in the airy lecture-room, if they would care to meet Professor Tension? ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... that bound him and threatening her with what he would do when he got loose, which he said he was sure to do sooner or later. At such times she cocked both triggers of the gun, prepared to meet him with leaden death if he should burst loose, herself trembling and palpitating and dizzy from the tension and shock. ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... The tension which I felt at the beginning of the dinner disappeared completely, and we began to talk about different things, remembering the time when we met, and recollecting our mutual impressions of 1912-1913, when things and people seemed to be so ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... more irritable as the tension increased. The breaking of a shoe lace called forth a flow of profanity, and when the mainspring of his watch snapped, he hurled the instrument against the log ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... Hertz, Lodge and Lenard. The human optic nerve is affected by a very small range in the waves that exist in the ether. Beyond the visible spectrum of common light are vibrations which have long been known as heat or as photographically active. Crookes in a vacuous bulb produced soft light from high tension electricity. Lenard found that rays from a Crookes' tube passed through substances opaque to common light. Roentgen extended these experiments and used the rays photographically, taking pictures of the bones of the hand through living ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... prayer and then the service growing out of such prayer will be charged with unmeasured power. The greater the outer pressure on His closet-life, the more jealously He guarded against either a shortening of its time or a flurrying of its spirit. The tighter the tension, the more time must there ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... made nothing but standing figures. The St. John sits; he is almost inert, and does not seem to await the divine message. But how superb it is, this majestic calm and solemnity; how Donatello triumphs over the lack of giving tension to what is quiescent! The Penseroso also sits and meditates, but every muscle of the reposing limbs is alert. So, too, in the Moses, with all its exaggeration and melodrama, with its aspect of frigid sensationalism, which led Thackeray to say he would ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... principally the weave that lends to a fabric its character, influenced, of course, by the material used, the size and tension of the threads and ...
— Theory Of Silk Weaving • Arnold Wolfensberger
... were just over one foot in diameter, weighing less than five ounces to the yard—gray plastic and fiber, air-rigid fingers pointing away into space—but they could take over two thousand pounds of compression or tension, far more than needed for their job, which was to cancel out the light drift motion caused by crews kicking in or out, or activities aboard. Uncanceled, these motions might otherwise have caused the baby ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... rumble and rattle when it started, but he was surprised at the enormous amount of noise it made, when the wheels really began to turn. It seemed to him that in the silence of the night it could be heard three or four miles. Then he realized that it was merely his own excitement and extreme tension of both mind and body. Canby was taking the train forward so gently that its sounds were drowned two hundred yards away in the ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... I boarded. Upon the way we sat down on a pile of boards, and Zieber asked me if I had not noticed that the loose loops of thread on the upper side of the cloth came from the needle? It then flashed upon me that I had forgotten to adjust the tension upon the needle thread. Zieber and I went back to the shop. I adjusted the tension, tried the machine, and sewed five stitches perfectly, when the thread broke. The perfection of those stitches satisfied me that the machine was a success, and I stopped work, went to the hotel, ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... brightly; but constant disappointment was pressing heavily on her heart and crushing out the holy spark. The heartstrings will bear rude shocks and sudden rough handling, but the gradual tightening, the unremitted tension of long, tediously rolling years, will in time accomplish what fierce assaults cannot. Continually she prayed for his return; but, despite her efforts, her faith grew fainter as each month crept by and her smile became more constrained and joyless. She never spoke of her anxiety, never alluded ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... more or less "ripe,"[45] and that certain portions, now in a transition stage, will in a certain number of centuries have become pure gold; experiments[46] have proved that metals are liable to "fatigue" from excessive tension; and that, after a rest, they acquire greater power of resistance than before; magnets "are fed," i.e., they increase their power of attraction, by exercise; cultivation improves and sometimes altogether transforms certain species of vegetables; ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Concentration and tension of power is an absolute necessity for any effort, no matter how poor may be the aims to which it is directed, and what is needed for the successful prosecution of the lowest transient successes will surely not be less indispensable in the highest forms of life. If ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the tension in Nature and in all her creatures is lessened. The trees drop their leaves, or let go their ripened fruit. The tree itself will fall in a still, damp day, when but yesterday it withstood a gale of wind. A moist south wind penetrates ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... talking, seated by the table, on which her arms rested. She, too, had a look of nervous tension, and her voice ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... comfort it is to be told that God knows how easily our nature may become jangled and out of tune. He can attribute our doubts and fears to their right source. He knows the bow is bent to the point of breaking, and the string strained to its utmost tension. He does not rebuke his servants when they cast themselves under juniper bushes, and ask to die; but sends them food and sleep. And when they send from their prisons, saying, Art Thou He? there is no word of rebuke, but ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... waiting-room, he found Monsieur Dupont asleep in an armchair. The room was very quiet. The danseuse had subsided into an interim condition of mute tension. Mrs. Astley-Rolfe was deathly white, but perfectly composed. The men made occasional remarks ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... men and two women in the closed world of a space ship for five months can only spell tension and trouble—but in this case, ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... sidelong spring might save him: it would take but a second. On the other hand, if during that second or less . . . His eyes were averted from the verge, and yet he saw it, and his senses apprised every foot of the long fall beyond. While he thought it out, keeping tension on himself to meet Charley Hannaford's gaze with a deceptive indifference, his heart swelled at the humiliation of it all. He had escaped from a two years' captivity—and, Heavens! how he had suffered over there, in France! He had run risks: his adventures—bating ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... manage the breast stroke well, try the side stroke, which you will find more speedy, but it has its disadvantages in a long swim, by reason of the tension thrown on the muscles of the neck in keeping the head thrown so far back from its normal position, while the chest and shoulders, square to the front, offer considerable resistance to the water. History has not handed down ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... nagging and an unhappy business to know that they were watched and overheard everywhere save in that one unwired room. It could have made for tension between them. But there was another thought to hold them together. This was the knowledge that they were literally living on top of a bomb. If an Invader's flying ship descended at the villa, everything that happened would be heard and seen by microphones ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and his friend rode on ahead, following some of the cowboys who had been summoned to tear away the dam. Now that the excitement was over Dave felt a little reaction, which generally follows high tension. As Dave looked at the young man riding beside him he could not ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... in contact with the solution from which it has separated. The solution is often kept warm during this period of "digestion." The small crystals gradually disappear and the larger crystals increase in size, probably as the result of the force known as surface tension, which tends to reduce the surface of a given mass of material to a minimum, combined with a very slightly greater solubility of small crystals as compared with ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... all religions: they haunt the artist, the philanthropist, the philosopher, the saint. Often they are due to some strain of egoism or ambition which has intermixed itself with the impersonal desire; sometimes, as in Wordsworth's case, to the persistent tension of a mind which has been bent too ardently towards an ideal scarce possible to man. And in this case, when the objects of a man's habitual admiration are true and noble, they will ever be found to suggest some antidote to the fatigues of their pursuit. We shall see as we proceed how ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... vast steppes of Asia, was mercifully concealed from his eyes; and the elusive "secret of the strait" through which he to the last hoped to pass, though tantalizing in its constant evasion, kept in tension the springs of hope and moral energy which might have succumbed under the knowledge ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... of each other, yet so strict to avoid recognition. His eyes rested on Manuela. "What's the matter, my child?" She met his glance furtively, as if afraid that he was angry; plainly she was ashamed of her panic. Her eyes were now collected, her brow cleared, and the tension of ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... assistant: "Note my symptoms carefully and make an autopsy—I am sure it is a new poison we have liberated!" If the vast majority of men shrink from and evade irksome labor with their muscles—even though life and comfort depend upon it—a still vaster majority shirk the disciplined toil and tension of the mind, which, if it have real purpose, makes little of the only rewards that spur men to ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... together at the end of the common table. Philip had already drunk much more than he was accustomed to, but the only result appeared to be some slight slackening of the tension in which he had been living. His eyes flashed, and his tongue became more nimble. He insisted upon ordering wine. He had had no opportunity yet of repaying many courtesies. They drank his health, forced him into the place of honour by the side of ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... through. The voice that came out was high and wavering. It shook, it chattered, words were indistinguishable. It was thin with tension, and it rang in ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... came down from the bank, and knotted himself in a double-clove-hitch round the Elephant's Child's hind legs, and said, 'Rash and inexperienced traveller, we will now seriously devote ourselves to a little high tension, because if we do not, it is my impression that yonder self-propelling man-of-war with the armour-plated upper deck' (and by this, O Best Beloved, he meant the Crocodile), 'will permanently vitiate ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling |
