Part 840

Whether any poet of our country since Shakespeare has exerted a greater variety of powers with less strain and less ostentation.

Landor.

Credit is gained by custom, and seldom recovers a strain.

Sir W. Temple.

(b) (Mech. Physics) A change of form or dimensions of a solid or liquid mass, produced by a stress. Rankine.

2. (Mus.) A portion of music divided off by a double bar; a complete musical period or sentence; a movement, or any rounded subdivision of a movement.

Their heavenly harps a lower strain began.

Dryden.

3. Any sustained note or movement; a song; a distinct portion of an ode or other poem; also, the pervading note, or burden, of a song, poem, oration, book, etc.; theme; motive; manner; style; also, a course of action or conduct; as, he spoke in a noble strain; there was a strain of woe in his story; a strain of trickery appears in his career. "A strain of gallantry." Sir W. Scott.

Such take too high a strain at first.

Bacon.

The genius and strain of the book of Proverbs.

Tillotson.

It [Pilgrim's Progress] seems a novelty, and yet contains Nothing but sound and honest gospel strains.

Bunyan.

4. Turn; tendency; inborn disposition. Cf. 1st Strain.

Because heretics have a strain of madness, he applied her with some corporal chastisements.

Hayward.

Strain"a*ble (-*b'l), a. 1. Capable of being strained.

2. Violent in action. Holinshed.

Strain"a*bly, adv. Violently. Holinshed.

Strained (?), a. 1. Subjected to great or excessive tension; wrenched; weakened; as, strained relations between old friends.

2. Done or produced with straining or excessive effort; as, his wit was strained.

Strain"er (?), n. 1. One who strains.

2. That through which any liquid is passed for purification or to separate it from solid matter; anything, as a screen or a cloth, used to strain a liquid; a device of the character of a sieve or of a filter; specifically, an openwork or perforated screen, as for the end of the suction pipe of a pump, to prevent large solid bodies from entering with a liquid.

Strain"ing, a. & n. from Strain.

Straining piece (Arch.), a short piece of timber in a truss, used to maintain the ends of struts or rafters, and keep them from slipping. See Illust. of Queen- post.

Straint (strnt), n. [OF. estrainte, estreinte, F. étrainte. See 2nd Strain.] Overexertion; excessive tension; strain. [Obs.] Spenser.