"Rarefied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with my legs on either side of the manhole and prepared to unscrew it, but Cavor stopped me. "There is first a little precaution," he said. He pointed out that although it was certainly an oxygenated atmosphere outside, it might still be so rarefied as to cause us grave injury. He reminded me of mountain sickness, and of the bleeding that often afflicts aeronauts who have ascended too swiftly, and he spent some time in the preparation of a sickly-tasting drink which he insisted on my sharing. It made me feel a little numb, but otherwise ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... hers, the mere fact of Girard's bodily presence in the house, down-stairs, seemed something overpoweringly insistent; she couldn't get away from it. It gave her, apparently, neither pleasure nor pain; it called forth no conscious excitement as had been the case with Lawson—unless this strange, rarefied sense was a higher excitement. This consciousness of his presence was, tiresomely enough, something not to be escaped from; it pulsed in every vein, keeping her awake. She tried to lose it in the thought ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... travel at a rate of about 1,090 feet per second. The rate of propagation of sound waves in other materials varies with the density of the material. For example, the speed of transmission is much greater in water than in air, and is much less in highly rarefied air than in air at ordinary density. The propagation of sound waves in a vacuum may be said not ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... was lack of the rarefied air of the clouds, there was no lack of fresh atmosphere. The big tanks carried a large supply, and whenever more was needed the oxygen machine ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... relinquished the woman to his brother. Even though the brother were like to die of it, we have not yet heard the last opinion of the woman. But be that as it may, we have here the explanation of the "rarefied and freezing air" in which I complained that he had taught himself to breathe. Reading the man through the books, I took his professions in good faith. He made a dupe of me, even as he was seeking to make a dupe of himself, wresting philosophy ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hopes and wishes to reach the air-drawn circle, or to 'descry new lands, rivers, and mountains,' stretching far beyond it: our feelings, carried out of themselves, lose their grossness and their husk, are rarefied, expanded, melt into softness and brighten into beauty, turning to ethereal mould, sky-tinctured. We drink the air before us, and borrow a more refined existence from objects that hover on the brink ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... measure right in his contention, though it had needed his folly to persuade her of his wisdom. She was out of her element here. And now she began to despair of ever learning to breathe with ease the rarefied atmosphere of the socially elect. The stifling midsummer air that stagnated in Huckster's Bargain Basement was preferable, heavy though it was with the smell of those to whom soap is a luxury and frequently a luxury uncoveted; there, at least, sincerity and charity did not suffocate ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... to him as he went to Les Bains that next evening that the world had somehow changed into another dimension, so much clearer the air was, so much brighter the stars.... He had discovered a higher, more rarefied stratum of life, in the dim, keen atmosphere of which things took on incomparable beauty and mystery, so that the water on his left hand, unseen, yet so blue, was not the Gulf of Lyons, but the whole Mediterranean, which washed Genoa and Naples and Sicily, and the little islands ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... man, who took an interest not only in all matters connected with his profession, but in very many outside of it. He was, also, a man of very lofty character. His wife once wrote me concerning him somewhat as follows: "He walks, habitually, on such moral heights, in such a rarefied spiritual atmosphere, that I, the daughter of an English clergyman, reared accordingly, and myself (as you know) deeply in sympathy with it, find difficulty in following him." Obviously, he was precisely the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... light-headed and giddy as though the rush above had rarefied the air under the cliffs. Not a drop of rain fell, the wind held the sky and the whole world. It seemed loosed from some mysterious keeping never to be recaptured until it had blown the sea ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Mrs. Strickland was the most harmless of all the lion-hunters that pursue their quarry from the rarefied heights of Hampstead to the nethermost studios of Cheyne Walk. She had led a very quiet youth in the country, and the books that came down from Mudie's Library brought with them not only their own romance, but the romance of London. She had a real passion ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... free and humane government. It is the liberty, Lords and Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that which hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged and lifted up our ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... currents.(q. v.) may be regarded as secondary currents due to small but rapid changes in the earth's magnetism. The subject is very obscure. Stewart treats the earth as representing the magnetic core of an induction coil, the lower air is the dielectric, and the upper rarefied and therefore conducting atmosphere is the secondary coil. This makes the aurora a phenomenon of induced currents. Then the sun may be regarded as the instigator of the primary changes in the earth's lines of force representing the primary ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... auric egg of Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the world are there men more free. They have the serenity of a bird soaring in the still air. On such a height the air was so pure and rarefied that Christophe could hardly breathe. There he met artists who claimed the absolute and limitless liberty of dreams,—men of unbridled subjectivity, like Flaubert, despising "the poor beasts who believe in the ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... the narrative, the material framework of the fiction, has been made so subordinate to the delineation of character and motive, that the reader ceases to feel much interest in what men do in the study which is furnished him of why they do it. In this highly-rarefied air of philosophic analysis, incident and event wither and die. Work of this kind is apt to have within its sphere an unbounded popularity; but its sphere is limited, and can never include a tithe of that vast (p. 282) public for which Cooper wrote ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... the new and strange scenes dimly presented to their view. In imagination they climbed to the summit of this lofty peak. They let themselves down to the abyss of that yawning crater. Here they imagined they saw vast seas hardly kept in their basins by a rarefied atmosphere; there they thought they could trace mighty rivers bearing to vast oceans the tribute of the snowy mountains. In the first promptings of their eager curiosity, they peered greedily into her cavernous depths, and ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... belief in a crackling sound has arisen, not among the people generally, but rather among learned travelers, because in earlier times the northern light was declared to be an effect of atmospheric electricity, on account of the luminous manifestation of the electricity in rarefied space, and the observers found it easy to hear what they wished to hear. Recent experiments with very sensitive electrometers have hitherto, contrary to the expectation generally entertained, yielded only negative results. The condition of the electricity in the atmosphere* p 291 is not found ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... to the Rockies and not over them when it had conquered individually higher mountains was not understood, but people were quick once more to take hope and remember the plant's normal distaste for cold or think there was perhaps something in the rarefied atmosphere to paralyze the seeds or inhibit the stolons, so preventing further progress. Even through the comparatively low passes it came at such a slow pace methods tried fruitlessly in Los Angeles were successful in keeping it back. Everyone was ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... expansion, dilatation, inflation, subtilization[obs3]. vaporization, evaporation, diffusion, gassification[obs3]. ether &c. (gas) 334. V. rarefy, expand, dilate, subtilize[obs3]. Adj. rare, subtile, thin, fine, tenuous, compressible, flimsy, slight; light &c. 320; cavernous, spongy &c. (hollow) 252. rarefied &c. v.;; unsubstantial; uncompact[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... walls, when those travellers were yet climbing the mountain. As the heat of the glowing day when they had stopped to drink at the streams of melted ice and snow, was changed to the searching cold of the frosty rarefied night air at a great height, so the fresh beauty of the lower journey had yielded to barrenness and desolation. A craggy track, up which the mules in single file scrambled and turned from block to block, as though they were ascending the broken staircase ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... phenomena of light were inexplicable until the existence of an imponderable substance—an ether—was recognised, so mediumistic phenomena seemed mysterious until the now fully established fact was recognised, that between the particles of ether there exists another still more rarefied imponderable substance not subject to the law ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... atmospheric currents, when blowing through an open window upon smoke. What do you see? Sometimes the impression is strong upon your ocular belief that the window is driving the smoke in. You can hardly be convinced of the contrary—scarcely when five or seven minutes has absolutely rarefied the smoke so much that a book-lettering previously invisible has become even legible. And at last, when the fact, the result, the experience, has corrected the contradictory theory of the eye, you begin to suspect, without any aid from science, that there were two currents, one of which ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... perchance the root, from which alone can grow a tenacity of purpose which takes hold upon life, utterly eradicated and vanished within you? Or is your whole being actually rarefied into a hollow shade, devoid of sap and blood and of individual power of movement, or dissolved to a dream in which, indeed, a motley array of faces arise and busily cross one another, but the body lies stiff and dead? Long since it has been openly proclaimed to our generation ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... shafts, whose crude timber-hoists appeared merely as vague outlines in the fast-fading light. The distance to the camp from where they stood was not over three miles as the crow flies, but it appeared much less in the rarefied atmosphere. ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... he realised—yes, in a sense—the degradation of his twenty years' absorption in business. This keen atmosphere under the stars where men thought only of their souls, and of the souls of others, was too rarefied for the world he was now associated with. He found himself making comparisons to his own disadvantage,—comparisons with the mystical little dreamer that had stepped thirty years before from the stern ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... enjoyed the quiet, starlit nights before the moon was up; for the moon dazzled the eyes in the rarefied air where they flew, whereas the stars gave just enough light to steer by without ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married Tess, and only a few days less than a year that he had been absent from her. Still, to start on a brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a dry clear wintry morning, through the rarefied air of these chalky hogs'-backs, was not depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream at starting was to win the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her whole history to that lady, enlist her on her side, and ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... no action of "Natural Selection;" it was not that certain puppies happened accidentally to be capable of enduring more rarefied air, and so survived, but the offspring were directly modified by the action of surrounding conditions. Neither was the change elaborated by minute modifications in many successive generations, but appeared at once in ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... fire-companies an active school of exercise. But the benefits of this are neutralized by the violence and irregularity of their exertions. Quitting the workshop half-clad, and running long distances, the fireman arrives panting at the fire, to breathe in, with lungs congested by the unusual effort, the rarefied and smoky atmosphere of the burning buildings. We should naturally suppose this a fertile source of pulmonary complaints. Besides, were it the most healthy of exercises, it is followed only by the mechanic and the laborer, who use ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... She had not the least ambition to benefit the young. She was, in fact, young herself, but her head was fairly turned with the most selfish of considerations. It was true that she planned to spend the money which she would earn largely upon others, but that was, in itself, a subtle, more rarefied form of selfishness. ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... what I felt to be a very striking personality, but it was borne in upon me that he was a man apart from his fellows, a mind that followed a line leading away from ordinary human intercourse and human interests, and into regions that left in his atmosphere something remote, rarefied, chilling. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the earth is pleasant underneath, nothing can be more glorious than the heavens above. Being under the parallel of 18 deg. N. lat., of course we have a full view of all the northern heavens, and of all the southern heavens, except 18 deg. about the South Pole. The rarefied atmosphere gives peculiar brilliancy to the stars; and on a clear night—and most nights are clear—the heavens are indeed flooded with white fire, while, according to the season of the year, Orion and his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... a seemingly endless circular staircase. After an interminable climb he saw the purplish Martian sky through the glass doors of an airlock. Then they were outside, in the rarefied atmosphere that sorely tried Sime's lungs, still laboring after the fight and long ascent. The Sun, smaller than on Earth but ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... water is raised to the surface of the earth or is pumped into elevated tanks. From a commercial and industrial standpoint a most important class of pump is that known as the compression type; in these, air or any other gas is compressed rather than rarefied. ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... ship as she rushes through the atmosphere. And if perchance you were fortunate enough to escape being blown overboard, you would be made seriously ill by the sudden change, from the dense air which you are now breathing, to the highly rarefied air outside. For this same reason it is also necessary that, while the ship is in flight, all ports and doors communicating with the exterior atmosphere should be kept tightly closed. But come, the sun is rising," he said, as a flash of golden light darted in through ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Mr. Belloc's most copious revelation of his personality. But this is true—that the most personal expression of all for any man is in verse: even though it be small in quantity and uneven in quality. It is as though, here, in a more rarefied and more complex form of composition—we will not say "more difficult"—some kind of effort or struggle called out all of a man's characteristics in their intensest shape. Such emotions as a man ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... or state of matter is not revealed by either of our five senses, but by the sixth sense, or intuition of man. This is the ether—supposed to be "matter in a very rarefied form, which permeates all space." So rare and fine is this matter that it interpenetrates carbon or steel as water interpenetrates a sponge, or ink a blotting pad. In fact, each atom of "physical" matter—by which is meant matter in the first condition—floats in an atmosphere of ether ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... made pallid by those green curtains that hang all around, in which one would fancy that the light-rays become rarefied, in order to give to the vision of the people walking about the room a certain contemplative justice, the slow crowd goes and comes, pauses, disperses itself over the seats in serried groups, and yet mixing up different sections of society more thoroughly than any ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... deposited on the eastern hilly slope; and when the moving mass of air reaches its greatest elevation, it is then on the verge of the great valley, or, as in the case of the Kalahari, the great heated inland plains; there, meeting with the rarefied air of that hot, dry surface, the ascending heat gives it greater capacity for retaining all its remaining humidity, and few showers can be given to the middle and western lands in consequence of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... the central masses, not centrally but obliquely, low rotations of the condensed nebulous masses will occur. Stupendous quantities of heat will be generated in the building-up process. This heat will radiate rapidly into space because the gaseous masses are highly rarefied and their radiating surfaces are large in proportion to the masses. With loss of heat the nebulous masses will contract in volume and gradually assume forms more and more spherical. When the forms become approximately spherical, the first stage of stellar ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... something he suggests "ethereal air" or "liquid fire," neither of which, we contend, were empty terms. With Bacon's knowledge of experimental chemistry it is a question, and a most interesting one, whether he had not in his mind those two actual principles respectively of gas and air rarefied by heat on which we launch our ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... nose to lead him on. Day after day we floundered through swamps and marshes, over rocky, barren hills, and through thick growths of willows and alders, and at the end of the day's journey it would apparently be as far off as ever. The explanation was that in the rarefied atmosphere of interior Labrador distances are very deceptive; when George reported that the "big water" was three miles ahead it must have been ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of War, the Attorney-General, the Postmaster-General, and the Secretaries of the Navy and of the Interior. This gives the Secretary of Agriculture an extremely remote and rarefied chance at the Presidency. Still, he should be just as faithful to his trust as he would be if ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... felt as if he were walking again in a far world, not Cossethay, a far world, the fragile reality. He went on, quiet, suspended, rarefied. He could not bear to think or to speak, nor make any sound or sign, nor change his fixed motion. He could scarcely bear to think of her face. He moved within the knowledge of her, in the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... climb, winding about the snowbeds of the mountain side. Sometimes we scaled straight up the acclivity on "all fours," throwing ourselves down on the rocks at frequent intervals to rest our aching limbs and fill our lungs with the rarefied air; up and up and up, until at last, with a long pull and a strong pull, we stood on the sky-haunting ridge above all the surrounding elevations, looking down upon the rest of the world, which seemed to be crouching ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... same temperature, there would be a universal calm, whatever might be the rotatory motion impressed upon the earth. If, however, we next suppose, what really is the case, that the air over the tropical region is more heated than that which is farther from the equator, this rarefied air will instantly ascend, and occupy a place above the colder and denser air, which will flow in from the belts lying beyond ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... Siemens read 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 attenuation; ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... in them, they would sometimes, says he, appear at a distance to be sucked up from the sea. The theory of waterspouts in the present day does in fact admit the supposition here referred to; that the air, being rarefied by particular causes, has its equilibrium restored by the elevation of the water, on the same principle that mercury rises in the barometer, or the contents of a well in a common pump. The opinions of the learned traveller ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... in the middle of the opening was fixed a kind of basket grate, in which faggots and sheaves of straw were burnt. The air, rarefied in passing through this flame, rose in the balloon, swelled out its sides, and filled it. The persons, who were placed in the gallery made of wicker and attached to the outside near the bottom, had each of them a port through which they could pass sheaves ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... advanced, they seemed glad to pause from time to time, that they might recover their breath; for the air, becoming more and more rarefied, made respiration somewhat difficult and the ascent fatiguing. Before they had reached an altitude of 600 feet they noticed a sensible diminution of the temperature; but neither cold nor fatigue deterred ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... on the material world, and strengthening with material fact the tenuous thoughts of the spiritual. The words which he used of Shelley are, in this respect, applicable to himself. "To Shelley's ethereal vision the most rarefied mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the sand ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... medicines in high-potency doses are so highly refined and rarefied that they cannot possibly produce harmful results or suppress Nature's cleansing and healing efforts; on the contrary, if employed according to the Law of Homeopathy: "like cures like," they assist in producing acute reactions or healing ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... the grade leading up to the hamlet of Ridgeville, within a mile of which lay the little farm to which he was going, he sat at an open window and viewed the scene with delight, drawing into his lungs with a sense of restful content the crisp, rarefied air. To the west, and marking the vicinity of Drake's farm, the mountain loomed up in its blended coat of gray and green, growing more and more indistinct as the range gradually extended into the ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... or charcoal are to form the fuel, by which means smoke will be avoided; the flues will be above the level of the seated passenger, and it is calculated that the motion of the carriage will always disperse the heated rarefied air ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... frequented, because it is not fashionable, although it would be difficult to point out a more appropriate occasional residence for the numerous class of invalids just mentioned, than Christiania, with its picturesque environs, sublime scenery, and clear and rarefied atmosphere.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... you whether the Giants or the Cubs will finish first next season; nobody except you who cares a whoop how Indiana will go for president—in fact, most of them probably haven't heard that Indiana was thinking of going. Their souls are soaring among the stars in a rarefied atmosphere of culture, and even if you could you wouldn't dare venture up that far with yours, for fear of being seized by an uncontrollable impulse to leap off and end all, the same as some persons are affected when on the roof of a tall building. So you back into ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... over the car and perceived a small blackish mass. It was Spires. The Rhine, which is so large, seemed an unrolled ribbon. The sky was a deep blue over our heads. The birds had long abandoned us, for in that rarefied air they could not have flown. We were alone in space, and I in presence of ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... among the snowy Peaks, entirely surrounded by the rarefied Atmosphere so highly boosted in the Hotel Circulars, sampling a tall bottle of every kind ending with "heimer," and yet he didn't seem to get ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... capable of becoming amassed, condensed and rarefied. In the tornado that happened at Natchez, in 1840, the houses exploded whenever the doors and windows were shut, the roofs shooting up into the air, and the walls even of the strongest buildings bursting ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... where, to get any gas to speak of into the cylinder the air-supply would have to be cut down or throttled to an abnormal extent, we will realise at once that such a small quantity of both air and gas would have been drawn in, and consequently the mixture would be so rarefied that on the compression stroke the pressure would possibly be extremely low and totally inadequate to produce efficient working. Moreover, working at such a high vacuum as this would not only prevent us obtaining ...
— Gas and Oil Engines, Simply Explained - An Elementary Instruction Book for Amateurs and Engine Attendants • Walter C. Runciman
... slightly cold and pale as it falls on the green decorations of the walls, where the rays become rarefied, one would say, in order to afford the spectators an opportunity for concentration and accuracy of vision, the crowd moves slowly back and forth, pauses, scatters over the benches, divided into groups, and yet mingling castes more thoroughly than any other gathering, just as the fickle ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... seem to us, where we are, mere bubbles; and if we raise our eyes and look above, all there is blue. Behold that diadem of stars! Here the tints of earthly impressions disappear; standing on this nature rarefied by space do you not feel within you something deeper far than mind, grander than enthusiasm, of greater energy than will? Are you not conscious of emotions whose interpretation is no longer in us? Do you not feel ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... conspicuously; a large pattern in the figure of the cloth. She carried a little dog. There was about her something, difficult to denote, brilliant and hard in effect, like a polished stone. And we felt the rarefied atmosphere of a wealthy, highly cultivated, rather haughty society. "Charge to Edward Wharton," she said, very nicely, bending over us as we wrote "Lenox, Mass." She pronounced it not Massachusetts, but Mass, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... distance, and hastened on to them; and then they fancied they were close to rivers and islands, covered with luxuriant foliage, but still were doomed to disappointment; as all was the result of the highly-rarefied air, and the refraction of the sun's rays on the sultry plain. What would they have given for a bush even to afford them any shelter from the noonday sun, for the crowns of their heads appeared as if ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year's pension as a solatium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it? Is this a man to traduce? Foul-mouthed doctor and slandered professor—such would be your respective roles! That's genius, ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the hospice I began to feel the effects of the rarefied air very sensibly. It made me dizzy and sick, bringing on a most acute headache—a sharp, knife-like pain. S. was ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... stunted under-growth and found ourselves traversing the smooth granite mass which constitutes the entire mountain top. The rock is full of minute particles of mica, which glitter and flash in the sun like "gems of purest ray serene." A brisk wind was blowing and the rarefied air infused us with new strength to make ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... colds and hungers and desolations come to him, they cannot put out the shine of him. But for me it has been very lonely. I wanted to be the thing of soft corners and seduction that you were sickened of. I had to rip myself to bits and make myself the rather rarefied sort of thing you demanded. I didn't dare not to be brave, because you were so much enthroned in my life that every thought was a deliberate homage to you. I might have got considerably happy, and found many thrills out of thinking about you softly, imagining kisses, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... to this question was suggested by his present occupation. If he could now and again leave the rarefied atmosphere of the hill for some such diversion as the one in prospect, he would return better able to make good use of that solitude in which ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... feared to trust—infuriated by the destruction of their homes, committed awful atrocities upon the starving, freezing soldiers, who, maddened by cold and hunger and by the singing in their ears of the rarefied air, many of them leaped into the bivouac fires. It was a colossal tragedy. Of the 678,000 soldiers only 80,000 ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... to his feet slowly and walked up and down the room for a moment, glancing out occasionally towards the clump of palms which marked the disappearance of the Nile into the desert beyond his vision. At intervals a cannon-shot crashed upon the rarefied air, as scores of thousands had done for months past, torturing to ear and sense and nerve. The confused and dulled roar of voices came from the distance also; and, looking out to the landward side, David saw a series of movements of the besieging forces, under the Arab leader, Ali Wad Hei. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... can get in, so the engine has a good suck at the air in the boat, the result of all this being a slight vacuum in the boat. It is a very unpleasant sensation, and made me very sick. This is really a form of sickness due to the rarefied air. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... so cold up here, even with the windows closed, that all the boys were shivering in their warmest wraps. The air, too, was so rarefied that it was with considerable difficulty that they could breathe, for they had been in it for some time. Not one flyer in a hundred can live at an altitude of twenty thousand feet, as he bleeds at the nose and mouth; and our aviators were up to within five thousand feet of that height. It was ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... in that country that they think nothing of a walk of many miles, but the intensely rarefied air of the mountains made my ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... grateful shadow of the little church on the cliff, but, above all, in the release from mental tension, and the ease of feeling after the strain of thought, she found the highest form of pleasure she had tasted, the most rarefied, the most intense. The St. Valentine's Day of her development was approaching, and her heart had begun already to practise the notes of the song-significant into which she ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... defensible form— that is to say, a conception which makes the differences in various substances consist in differences in condensation or rarefaction of the particles of the primary substance. The simple normal condition of this substance he deemed to be air. In its rarefied condition, it becomes fire, and in its condensed condition it progresses by stages from liquid to solid. And just as the modern chemist is beginning to have good ground for believing that all substances, or so-called elements, ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines And yet water it was and sea-water at that—true Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied, rolling in ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was luxuriously but monstrously furnished. Its frank, opulent ugliness was a relief to the girl after the rarefied atmosphere of aesthetics in which for three years she had lived with Charles, upon whom all her thoughts were still concentrated. Of herself she had no thought. It did not concern her what she was called: wife or mistress. She was Clara Day and would remain so whatever happened to her. ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... the clouds!" said the professor. "Be careful not to exert yourselves, as it is hard to breathe in this rarefied or thin atmosphere." ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... thrusting force of thirty thousand pounds to the square inch, over two thousand tons to the square foot; an incomprehensible force, but applicable in nature to little besides splitting rocks. On the other hand, when water is rarefied into steam its power is vastly more versatile, tractable, and serviceable in a thousand ways. Take a bit of metal called zinc. It is heavy, subject to gravitation, solid, subject to cohesion. But cause it to be burned, to pass away, and be ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... conferred on the mlencchas (foreigners) no grant of Hindustan inscribed on imperishable brass. Shivaji strove to drive them forth out of the land of his birth, but he was guiltless of the sin of covetousness. Do not circumscribe your vision like frogs in a well. Rise above the Penal Code into the rarefied atmosphere of the sacred Bhaghavad Gita and consider ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... yet held fast to the Christian faith. His father set psalms to music, his sister wrote madrigals, and his mother played sweet strains on a harp to waken him at morningtide. The entire household united in a devotion to poetry and art. Possibly this atmosphere of high thinking was too rarefied for real comfort—the gravity of the situation being sustained ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... interesting experiments might be tried. Suppose an eastern blue jay should be carried to the top of Pike's Peak, or Gray's, and then set free, how would he fare? Would the muscles and tendons of his wings have sufficient strength to bear him up in the rarefied atmosphere? One may easily imagine that he would go wabbling helplessly over the granite boulders, unable to lift himself more than a few feet in the air, while the pipit and the leucosticte, inured to the heights, would mount up to the sky and shout "Ha! ha!" ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... Pile them on top of each other and you'll have a silver shaft more than 1,750 miles high. Sand your hands and climb it. Perchance from the top you'll see many things—among others what is oppressing the poor. And while up in that rarefied atmosphere, where the vision is good and thinking probably easy, you will look around for those other pyramids of expense annually erected by state, county and municipal government, then come down firm in the faith that if ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... it that all the cerebral functions were not vitiated? In fine, the source of the disease lay, not in the weakness of the brain, but in an access of heat, caused possibly by exposure to the sun, by which the matter of the brain had become so rarefied that it showed unhealthy activity in absorbing moisture from the other parts. This ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... I, "will with difficulty exist in such an atmosphere as you create. It is a sublime altitude, doubtless, but no ordinary 'spiritual' beings can breathe that rarefied air. It is for the honor of Shaftesbury and some few other Deists, that they aspired to this transcendental virtue! You are imitating them. I fear you will not be more successful. Once leave a man to conclude, or even to suspect, that he and his cat end together, and, if a bad man, he will gladly ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... an hour asleep, increased to a tempest. It was one of those sudden uprisings of the elements common in all tropical countries, but especially so in the desert tracts of Arabia and Africa,—where the atmosphere, rarefied by heat, and becoming highly volatile, suddenly loses its equilibrium, and rushes like a destroying angel over the surface of ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... also, when we are warmed by air thrown into a room at a high temperature, and dry at that, a greater degree of heat is necessary for comfort than if our bodies and clothing absorb heat from a radiating surface. The furnace, in short, compels us to breathe an atmosphere highly rarefied. We have the most careful and competent authority for believing this ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... what were afterwards known as the 'elements'—Fire, Air, Earth, and Water—and to regard all these as states of a single substance, which presented different appearances according as it was more or less rarefied or condensed. Moreover, Anaximander at least (c. 546 B. C.), the successor of Thales, shook himself free of the idea that the earth required support of some kind to keep in its place. He held that it swung free in space and that it remained where it was because there was no reason ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... grows warmer as he flies, 350 And through the net-work of the skin perspires; Leaves a long-streaming trail behind, which by The cooler air condensed, remains, unless By some rude storm dispersed, or rarefied By the meridian sun's intenser heat. To every shrub the warm effluvia cling, Hang on the grass, impregnate earth and skies. With nostrils opening wide, o'er hill, o'er dale, The vigorous hounds pursue, with every breath Inhale the grateful steam, quick pleasures sting 360 Their tingling ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... essence of sex. Banneker could imagine one of these females straying into Mr. Gaines's editorial ken, and that gentleman's bland greeting as to his own sprightly second maid arrayed and perfumed, unexpectedly encountered at a charity bazar. Too rarefied for Banneker's healthy and virile young tastes, the atmosphere in which The New Era lived and moved and had its consistently successful editorial being! He preferred a freer air to the mild scents of lavender and rose-ash, even though it might blow ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... lived on and on; If so, of what material was the soul? The eye could not behold it; why not then The viewless air be filled with living souls? Not only these, but other shapes and forms Might dwell unseen about us at all times. If air was only matter rarefied, Why could not things still more impalpable Have real existence? Whence came our thoughts? As angels came to shepherds in Chaldee; They were not ours. He fancied that most thoughts Were whispered to the soul, or good, or bad. The bad were like a demon, a vast shape With measureless ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... of this ink does proceed from the fuliginosity or sooty part of the coal of the cork which is exceeding porous and light, and that this fuliginosity is nothing but an oil very much rarefied. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... previsions have been verified by experiment. It has also invaded optics; and by relying on the principle of Doppler, Professor Michelson has succeeded in obtaining from it an explanation of the length presented by the spectral rays of even the most rarefied gases. ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... About the vernal equinox, however, I caught a violent cold, which was attended with a difficulty of breathing, and as the sun advances towards the tropic, I find myself still more subject to rheums. As the heat increases, the humours of the body are rarefied, and, of consequence, the pores of the skin are opened; while the east wind sweeping over the Alps and Apennines, covered with snow, continues surprisingly sharp and penetrating. Even the people of the country, who enjoy good health, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... with the glamour, the uniform, the guard-mount, the military music, the rarefied air, the new conditions, the new interests of my life. Heine's songs, Goethe's plays, history and romance were floating through my mind. Is it to be wondered at that I and Adams together prepared the most atrocious meals that ever ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... artistic faculties move in an atmosphere above as well as on the earth, as I know that above the atmosphere of oxygen and hydrogen which envelops the earth there is an ethereal, a rarefied atmosphere, which stretches to worlds of which all we know is that they exist. If your spirit can soar above this earthly atmosphere, well and good. I, for one, shall do nothing to limit or hinder it: I shall only ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... now see are bubbles of air, which were either dissolved in the water, or attached to the inner surface of the flask, and which, being rarefied by the ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... and he came out to India with a rarefied religion over and above his work. It was not much of a creed. It only proved that men had no souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and that you must worry along somehow for the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... and glorious. That it was a true Resurrection He shows first on the part of the body; and this He shows in three respects; first of all, that it was a true and solid body, and not phantastic or rarefied, like the air. And He establishes this by offering His body to be handled; hence He says in the last chapter of Luke (39): "Handle and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as you see Me to have." Secondly, He shows that it was a human body, by presenting His true features for them to behold. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... appearance, though not in manner, having a quick, alert way. He was breathing with such difficulty that I was almost tempted to give him nitroglycerin, instead of strychnine, but he said he would be all right as soon as he became accustomed to the rarefied air, quite pooh-poohing my suggestion that he take No. 2 back to Trinidad; and while I was still urging, the train started. Leaving him the vials of digitalis and strychnine, therefore, I went back, and dined solus on my own car, indulging at the end in a cigar, the ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... arrival, a week ago: in fact the thing was practically settled when I brought back his submission, and even he must have had sense enough to know it was when she wrote him that one word, 'Come.' So what on earth is the use of making a fuss about it now? But I will not press this view, which may be too rarefied and lofty ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... almost hopeless task of clearing the ship of the inflowing water—when a sudden and dreadful change occurred in the weather. The wind, which had been blowing a whole gale a moment before, fell dead in an instant, an appalling darkness overspread the firmament, and the atmosphere suddenly became so rarefied that it seemed impossible for one to draw a full breath; the sea, which a moment earlier had been breaking furiously, ceased to do so, and instead began to leap high into the air, falling back with a splash that, in the sudden stillness, seemed positively terrifying, and the schooner, swinging ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... in a purity that did not seem of the earth; the vague bulk of the mountains rose on either side of her in a mystery that was not of this life. Yet it was not oppressive; neither was its restfulness and quiet suggestive of obliviousness and slumber; on the contrary, the highly rarefied air seemed to give additional keenness to her senses; her hearing had become singularly acute; her eyesight pierced the uttermost extremity of the gorge, lit by the full moon that occasionally shone through slowly drifting clouds. Her nerves thrilled with a delicious sense of freedom ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... branching feathers streaming out, like aigrettes, which extend a very considerable distance from the solar surface. This aureole, the nature of which is still unknown to us, has received the name of corona. It is a sort of immense atmosphere, extremely rarefied. Our superb torch, accordingly, is a brazier of unparalleled activity—a globe of gas, agitated by phenomenal tempests whose flaming streamers extend afar. The smallest of these flames is so potent that it would swallow up our world at a single ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... any move to descend to the lower and less rarefied altitudes the horse began executing a few fancy steps, and he started traveling sidewise with a kind of a slanting bias movement that was extremely disconcerting, not to say alarming, instead of proceeding straight ahead as a regular horse would. I clung there astraddle ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... have accompanied those other titles, possessed in an indirect sort of way the authority, and yet managed to remain disentangled from the responsibilities. Had he suddenly vanished the elder Foote would have been left suspended in rarefied heights between heaven and his business, lacking direct contact with the mills and machine shops and foundries; yet, doubtless, would have been unable to realize that the loss of Rangar had left him so. Rangar was a competent, efficient man, if ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... pictures, which, for all the unreality of their atmosphere, produce their effect owing to a mass of accurate observation and a profound sense of the realities of life. His characters, like Watteau's, seem to possess, not quite reality itself, but the very quintessence of rarefied reality—the distilled fragrance of all that is most refined, delicate and enchanting in the human spirit. His Aramintes, his Silvias, his Lucidors are purged of the grossnesses of existence; their minds and their hearts are miraculously one; in their conversations the subtleties ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... used—(1.) For passing currents through glass tubes almost exhausted of air or containing highly rarefied gases. The luminous effects of these "Geissler" tubes are very beautiful. (2.) For producing the now famous X or Roentgen rays. These rays accompany the light rays given off at the negative terminal (cathode) of a vacuum ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... son of Apollodorus, the Athenian, pronounceth, that the principles of all things have their origin from an infinite air rarefied or condensed. Air rarefied is fire, condensed ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... places of the world flies the vulture of madness, pausing to wheel above isolated farm-houses, where a wife, already dizzy with the pressure of rarefied silence, looks up, magnetized. Then across the flat stretches, his shadow under him moving across moor and the sand of desert, slowing at the perpetually eastern edge of a mirage, brushing his actual wings against the brick of city walls; the garret of ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... maintained in its natural order by the same means. The Brahmanas do not indeed often assert on their own authority that Prajapati was himself sacrificed in order to produce the world, and in fact they usually give other accounts of the creation; but as their authors live in a rarefied atmosphere of mystical allegory in which fact and fancy are completely confused with one another and consistency ceases to have any meaning, none of them would have difficulty in accepting the Rigvedic statement that he was sacrificed. ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... fragment of one among countless talks. Some were lighter in tone, others darker, the mood of man being much like a child's balloon which rises or falls as the strata of air are more rarefied or more dense. Perhaps during the time of strain, the atmosphere was more often rarefied, and our conversation had the day's depressing incidents for its topics. We rarely spoke of the dead man. He was scarcely a subject for panegyric, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... them dignified enough to be termed "mountains"—which they crossed necessitated their flying high. They were generally at an altitude of two thousand feet and the rarefied atmosphere so far above the earth was cool, anyway. Since leaving St. Thomas, on the bank of the St. Lawrence, they had averaged eighty miles an hour, and before moonrise they were cognizant of the fact that they were approaching a great ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood |
