Tensely

adv. [f. TENSE a. + -LY².] In a tense manner. 1. Tightly.

1782.  A. Monro, Compar. Anat. (ed. 3), 16. The cellular part of the peritoneum … is tensely stretched over them.

1839.  Longf., Beatrice, xiv. Even as a cross-bow breaks, when ’tis discharged, Too tensely drawn the bow-string and the bow.

1846.  Hawthorne, Mosses, I. v. And girdled tensely by her virgin zone.

1860.  O. W. Holmes, Elsie V., xxiii. To keep the thong tensely stretched between his neck and the peak of the saddle.

  2.  fig. With intellectual, mental, or nervous strain or tension; intensely.

1778.  [W. Marshall], Minutes Agric., Digest, 2. Mathematics (… perhaps this, in preference to every other science, teaches and habituates Mankind to think systematically and tensely).

1849.  Tait’s Mag., XVI. 220. We left,… deeply moved, and with nerves more tensely strung.

1893.  Nat. Observ., 23 Dec., 127/2. There are dozens most tensely anxious for the restitution.