"Ecstasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exorcising them, kept Pete Noel occupied. But suddenly one of these monstrous shapes neglected to vanish. He was just about to throw himself upon it, in half delirious antagonism, when it lurched upward with a snort, and struggled away from him. In an instant Pete was alive in every faculty, stung with an ecstasy of hope. Leaping, floundering, squirming, he followed, open knife in hand. Again and yet again the foundered beast, a big caribou bull, buried halfway up the flank, eluded him. Then, as his savage ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of a saloon in that part of Chicago known as "back of the yards." This information is definite and suited to the matter of fact; but how pitifully inadequate it would have seemed to one who understood that it was also the supreme hour of ecstasy in the life of one of God's gentlest creatures, the scene of the wedding feast and the joy-transfiguration ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... him to what the buckskin had seen, or perhaps he was of a different metal. Near the rear of the premises the big brute came in so great a fury that he broke through the palings. The ensuing collision,—for the boy stood his ground,—was so violent that Ray went down underneath, and an ecstasy thrilled him when the flame swished and the smoke stung, and he felt something sink into his shoulder and a stifle of hot, foamy breath ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... shapely bare arms and on her ankles, and thus arrayed she brings me a guitar, and to my strumming sings a Moorish song, swaying her arms above her head and turning gracefully in their fashion, so that all were in an ecstasy with this strange performance. And the talk spreading, the number of visitors grew apace,—as bees will flock to honey,—and yielding to their urgent entreaties, she would often repeat this piece of business, and always with a most winning grace, that ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... sensibility in his verse. It is curious how often he uses the metaphor of wings: of the winged spirit, soaring, like his skylark, till lost in music, rapture, light, and then falling back to earth. Three successive moods—longing, ecstasy, and the revulsion of despair—are expressed in many of his lyrics; as in the Hymn to the Spirit of Nature, in Prometheus, in the ode To a Skylark, and in the Lines to an Indian Air—Edgar Poe's favorite. His passionate desire to lose {260} himself in Nature, to become one with that spirit ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... choleric outbursts or untempered enthusiasms, and yet, somehow, after a talk with his father he had so often found himself feeling much calmer or really happier. Anger in some way or other came to seem a foolish thing; and even if he had come in from an ecstasy of play, it was certainly pleasant to have the beating throbs in his head die away and to feel his cheeks grow cool again. In looking back, Horace knew that no philosophy had ever so deeply influenced him to self-control ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... to seek further explanation of the pain I had suffered—was suffering then, indeed, as I had reason to know when ecstasy permitted a return of sensation. My back bears the scars ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... Covent Garden on its way. 'Stop at the pastry-cook's at the corner,' said Macassar up through the little trap-door. The cab drew up suddenly. 'She's mine, she's mine!' shouted Macassar, rushing into the shop, and disregarding in the ecstasy of the moment the various customers who were quietly eating their ices. 'She's ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... the railroad, and never be disturbed: Nature knows very well what sounds are worth attending to, and has made up her mind not to hear the railroad-whistle. But things respect the devout mind, and a mental ecstasy was never interrupted." He noted, what repeatedly befell him, that, after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would presently find the same in his own haunts. And those pieces of luck which happen only to good players happened to him. One day, walking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks, and secret ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs! all ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... and I were drawn on a sledge—(i.e. an old hamper, a basket wine-hamper—without a wheel) by two white bullocks, up the precipitous mountains. Think of my travelling in those wild places at four o'clock in the morning! a little frightened, dreadfully tired, but in an ecstasy of admiration. It was a sight to see before one died and went away into another world. But being expelled ignominiously at the end of five days, we had to come back to Florence to find a new apartment cooler than the old, and wait for dear Mr. Kenyon, and dear Mr. Kenyon does not come after ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... you beholds,' when Netta, impatient, looked through a second glass, and exclaimed in ecstasy, 'Where did you get ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... extremely difficult and abrupt. We however remarked on our road seven native huts, which increased our hopes that these mountains would lead by a comparatively easy descent to the coast line of country. Bilboa's ecstasy at the first sight of the South Sea could not have been greater than ours, when on gaining the summit of this mountain, we beheld Old Ocean at our feet: it inspired as with new life: every difficulty vanished, and in imagination we were already at home. ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... was beyond the dream of poet. I trembled in an ecstasy of pain. From the next cell there came to us softly the voice of a poor condemned Appin Stewart. He was crooning that most tender and heart-breaking of all strains. Like the pibroch's mournful sough he wailed it out, the ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... sheds, and groves, throughout the county. These enthusiasts were called all sorts of opprobrious names such as, 'Nigger friends, and disturbers of Israel,' and some were excommunicated from the churches. These were indeed stirring days; Connecticut had received a change of heart, and in her ecstasy ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... talks. Vain hope that mere dry sense should here Explain the holy signs to thee. I feel you, spirits, hovering near; Oh, if you hear me, answer me! [He opens the book and beholds the sign of the Macrocosm.[6]] Ha! as I gaze, what ecstasy is this, In one full tide through all my senses flowing! I feel a new-born life, a holy bliss Through nerves and veins mysteriously glowing. Was it a God who wrote each sign? Which, all my inner tumult stilling, And this poor heart with rapture filling, Reveals to me, by force divine, Great Nature's ...
— Faust • Goethe
... the forest-depths alone, The chase neglected, and his hound 225 Couch'd beside him on the ground. deg. deg.226 —Ah! what trouble's on his brow? Hither let him wander now; Hither, to the quiet hours Pass'd among these heaths of ours. 230 By the grey Atlantic sea; Hours, if not of ecstasy, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... of the world with regard to the North Pole had at this date reached a pitch which can only be described as fevered, though that word hardly expresses the strange ecstasy and unrest which prevailed: for the abstract interest which mankind, in mere desire for knowledge, had always felt in this unknown region, was now, suddenly, a thousand and a thousand times intensified by a new, concrete ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... just as they stood in Rome as Shakspere represents them? Why, we travel hundreds of miles to see the places noted for the doings of these old Romans; and if we could be made to believe that we met one of the smaller men, even, of that day, our ecstasy would be unbounded. 'A tin pan so painted as to deceive is atrocious,' says this writer. Of course, for we are not interested in a tin pan; but give us a portrait of Shakspere or Milton so that we ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... nearest town up a steep hill? Latin, French, English, German, failed to make me understand the situation. At last I took in the Pfarrer's meaning. I was to send it by the milkman after leaving it at a certain hotel. "Ja," I cried in an ecstasy of joy, at last grasping his meaning, "Ja, ich mittam der Gepaeck von der milkman." I arrived the next day. I found the Pfarrer knew Latin, Greek (but he pronounces both quite differently from me), German, French, Russian, Syriac, Hebrew, and a little English. ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... "Bangor," which the worthy old New England clergyman so admired that he actually had the down-east city called after it, and "Windsor," and "Funeral Hymn." But Myrtle was in no mood for these. She let off her ecstasy in "Balerma," and "Arlington," and "Silver Street," and at last in that most riotous of devotional hymns, which sounds as if it had been composed by a saint who had a cellar under his chapel,—"Jordan." So she let her wild spirits run loose; and then a tenderer feeling stole over her, and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Faguet, "the Greece of fair river-banks, of gracious hill-slopes, of comely groups around a well-head or a stream, of harmonious theories beside the voiceful sea, of dancing choirs upon the luminous heights, under the blue heavens, which lift to ecstasy his spirit, light as the light ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the air. It was not exactly to my taste, however, nor did the thought of my poor mother at home make me more sympathetic with Tom's ecstasy; so whilst he chattered I strode ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lenience to the combined effects of Huggeny and of Clement's severe countenance in producing one of those paroxysms of giggle that seem invincible in proportion to their unbecomingness. The door was reached and instantly opened, Stella springing into her arms in ecstasy. 'Sister's come!—O Sister, Sister, Sister, don't ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to the house. But the ecstasy of finding each other, again was too new. They passed the dark old gateway to the sunken garden, and walked on, talking thirstily, drinking deep of the joy ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... he lacks humor. In their search for happiness his characters suffer a great deal and know only temporary ecstasy. They are often witty, but ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the elements and forces of His arming, for a night and a day to two days and nights, but rarely longer. Sometimes he would chant a hymn without words, or offer the ceremonial "filled pipe." In this holy trance or ecstasy the Indian mystic found his highest happiness and the motive power ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... they stepped side by side, their hands brushed together, and he caught hers in his grasp, turning to look full upon her. Her ecstasy was poignant; she trembled in her walk. But she looked straight ahead,—waiting. To both of them it seemed that the earth rocked under their feet. He looked long at her profile, softened in the magic ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... which, with its lofty pillars reaching to the sky, was emblazoned in so wondrous a light, that, notwithstanding the extreme refulgence, it did not dazzle. Within this, upon a ceaselessly revolving sun-orb, stood the most beautiful and tallest of the fairies. In her golden hair gleamed stars. Joy and ecstasy radiated like a glory from her lovely pale face, and vapoury raiment concealed, but as with a breath, her incomparable figure. Towards her pressed the innumerable host; for the sublime creature might be the priestess of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... beauty my whole recreant heart yielded at once—at whose footstool I bowed down without a struggle, in the most ardent, in the most abject worship of love. What, indeed, was my passion for the young girl of the valley in comparison with the fervor, and the delirium, and the spirit-lifting ecstasy of adoration with which I poured out my whole soul in tears at the feet of the ethereal Ermengarde?—Oh, bright was the seraph Ermengarde! and in that knowledge I had room for none other.—Oh, divine was the angel Ermengarde! and as I looked down into the depths of her memorial eyes, I thought ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with adventure and doubloons and crime, Rum and the Ebony Trade: when, time on time, Real Pirates, right Sea-Highwaymen, could mock The carrion strung at EXECUTION DOCK; And the trim Slaver, with her raking rig, Her cloud of sails, her spars superb and trig, Held, in a villainous ecstasy of gain, Her musky course from BENIN to the MAIN, And back again for niggers: When, in fine, Some thought that EDEN bloomed across the Line, And some, like COWPER'S NEWTON, lived to tell That through those parallels ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... my whole, while filling My shadowy first with ecstasy divine! Listen! oh, listen! would ye not be willing Ever in gloom to dwell, and not repine,— Ever to joy in such melodious gladness,— Ever to sorrow ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... an ecstasy of fury) See ye belong to a night-club before the week's out. (He does his glare again.) I'll establish frivolity and a spirit of modernism in this household, if I have to take the stick ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... opiates and cannabis from Central and Southwest Asia to Western Europe and Scandinavia and Latin American cocaine and some synthetics from Western Europe to CIS; limited production of illicit amphetamines, ephedrine, and ecstasy for export ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and received with hisses when she appeared, and discharged with hisses and laughter when she had finished—then instantly encored and insulted again! And how the high-born knaves enjoyed it! White-kidded gentlemen and ladies laughed till the tears came, and clapped their hands in very ecstasy when that unhappy old woman would come meekly out for the sixth time, with uncomplaining patience, to meet a storm of hisses! It was the cruellest exhibition—the most wanton, the most unfeeling. The singer would have conquered an audience of American ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... to behave herself with dignity; but now she burst into a violent fit of laughter, threw herself backwards over the chair, and went rolling about the floor in an ecstasy of enjoyment. The king picked her up easier than one does a down quilt, and replaced her in her former relation to the chair. The exact preposition expressing this relation I do not happen ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... sustained the ecstasy and anguish of that likeness, but of his sayings and of the wonders he wrought in that time ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... convinced that he had inspired the tender breast of Aurelia with mutual affection; and, though she was invidiously snatched from his embrace in the midst of such endearments as had wound up his soul to ecstasy and transport, he did not doubt of being able to rescue her from the power of an inhuman kinsman, whose guardianship would soon of course expire; and in the meantime he rested with the most perfect dependence ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... his measureless faith in his brother and his passion for dreams, the mad arrogance of the declaration was lost. The ecstasy with which Ham spoke tinged the promise with a fire of conviction—so ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... time in this state of religious ecstasy as he improvised prayers and repeated again and yet again, "Lord, have mercy upon me!" Each time that he said, "Pardon me, Lord, and teach me to do what Thou wouldst have done," he pronounced the words with added earnestness and emphasis, as though he expected ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... delightful views of a picturesque Swiss village,—exactly such a cluster of low roofed houses as she had admired many a time in photographs of Alpine scenery. An exclamation from a little boy who clapped his hands in ecstasy caused her to look through a cleft in the nearer hills. With a thrill of wonder she discovered there, remote and solitary, all garbed in shining white, a majestic snow capped mountain. Ah! this was the real Switzerland! Her heart throbbed, and ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... the tall, straggling hedges of dog-roses, brambles and hawthorn that top the banks are luxuriantly overrun with honeysuckle, filling the whole air with its spicy fragrance. On either side are blossoming fields of clover and beans, the larks are mounting and singing in ecstasy overhead, the road climbs a steep ascent, and we have miles and miles of finished landscape in view. There are timber-tied farm-houses here and there, or tiny hamlets whose straw thatches are simply glorious with their patches of velvet moss and the brilliant golden ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... being attached to the bow of the boat, they held their breath with expectation, many of them standing on one leg; and when at last the boat, with four persons in it, shot away to sea at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour, they roared with ecstasy; accompanying the yells with contortions of frame and visage which were so indescribable that we gladly leave it all to ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... held a laboured conversation with her. To him there was a sense of triumph as he sat smoking his blackened pipe, listening to the halting phrases of the woman, and gazing deeply into her wonderful blue eyes. And in the ecstasy of recollection he forgot Ralph and all but his love. There was no generosity in his heart; he had given himself up to the delights of his passion. He claimed the fair Aim-sa to himself, and was ready to uphold his claim so long as ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... joyful ecstasy, the poor, sleepy, half-dead devil should raise his head, we laugh at him. It ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... brilliancy, and a polite cynicism which, at first, surprised one. Had Bertha been unimpassioned, she might have judged him at his value; but she had lost her power of insight. She heard him, plunged in a foolish ecstasy, as one hears a traveller who has returned from far and dangerous countries, who has visited peoples of whose language the hearer is ignorant, and lived in the midst of manners and ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... eyes, yet I knew when their lashes Fringed their cheeks from downcast eyes, And when they turned their heads; And when their garments clung to them, Or fell from them, in exquisite draperies. Their spirits watched my ecstasy With wide looks of starry unconcern. Their spirits looked upon my torture; They drank it as it were the water of life; With reddened cheeks, brightened eyes, The rising flame of my soul made their spirits gilt, Like the wings of a butterfly drifting suddenly into sunlight. And they ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... pieces for the canoes. I should have given four fathoms for each man and the same for each boat. The final scene was most gratifying to the African mind: I solemnly invested old Nessala with the grand cloak which covered his other finery; grinning in the ecstasy of vanity, he allowed his subjects to turn him round and round, as one would a lay figure, yet with profound respect, and, lastly, he retired to charm ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... dizzily up the deck was in an ecstasy. He was oblivious to all the world—even to Pauline, who stood questioning an officer at the rail. The fact that his servant, Catin, slipped silently down the hatchway to the main compartment, and thence on to the pump room at the vessel's bottom, would hardly have interested ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... young foliage of the maples not moving, having the air of observing the Sabbath with propriety. There were benches here and there along the walks, and to one of these Joe crossed, and sat down. The mongrel, at his master's feet, rolled on his back in morning ecstasy, ceased abruptly to roll and began to scratch his ear with a hind foot intently. A tiny hand stretched to pat his head, and the dog licked it appreciatively. It belonged to a hard-washed young lady of ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... and arrows upon the logs; not a Blackfoot was hurt, but several Crows, in spite of their leaping and dodging, were shot down. In this childish manner the fight went on for an hour or two. Now and then a Crow warrior in an ecstasy of valor and vainglory would scream forth his war song, boasting himself the bravest and greatest of mankind, and grasping his hatchet, would rush up and strike it upon the breastwork, and then as he retreated to his companions, fall dead under a shower of arrows; yet no combined attack seemed to ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... craft bumps the shore, Priscilla rises joyously. She stretches her hands in ecstasy toward the new world. She leans forward against the breeze, her whole figure alive with the joy of ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... his hands in his pockets before an unfinished picture on the easel; then, as his habit was, he began to stroll touristlike from canvas to canvas, standing before each in a musing ecstasy of contemplation that no readjustment of view ever seemed to disturb. Her eye instinctively joined his in its inspection; it was the one point where their natures merged. Thank God, there, was no doubt about the ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... animal with eyes half-shut and mouth half-open, drinking in the scented warmth of the air. Then suddenly he flung himself face downwards on the grass at the edge of the stream, burying his face in the daisies and cowslips, and lay stretched there in wide-armed ecstasy, with his long fingers pressing and stroking the dewy herbs of the field. Never before had Darcy seen him thus fully possessed by his idea; his caressing fingers, his half-buried face pressed close to the grass, even the clothed lines of his figure were ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to make a salad dressing like that—and the whole town knows that was the price—the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get their Indian ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... misery, with a sense of its supreme folly, yet with a refusal in their souls to acknowledge defeat or to stop this side of victory. In each battle there were officers and men who risked death deliberately, and in a kind of ecstasy did acts of superhuman courage; and because of the number of these feats the record of them is monotonous, dull, familiar. The mass followed their lead, and even poor coward-hearts, of whom there were ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... right into his mouth,' said Val, while Fergus went into an ecstasy of laughter. 'Wasn't it a ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hovered over him like a dream while waking and like a reality in dreams. But if it might be in God's good providence that this desolate life should come under the influence of human affections once more, what an ecstasy of renewed existence was in store for him! His life had not all been buried under that narrow ridge of turf with the white stone at its head. It seemed so for a while; but it was not and could not and ought not to be so. His first ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... lark!" I cried, when he had finished; and we both then burst into an ecstasy of laughter at the very idea ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... a Happy Life!" cried Babbalanja, in an ecstasy. "My lord, I am lost in the dream of it, as here recorded. Marvelous book! its goodness transports me. Let me read:—'I would bear the same mind, whether I be rich or poor, whether I get or lose in the world. I will reckon benefits well placed as the fairest ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... vast number of phenomena which lie along the border line between the physical and spiritual, and which are conspicuous in the phenomena of somnambulism, sleep, dreaming, hypnotism, spiritualism, clairvoyance, trance, ecstasy, and religious marvels. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... things to civilization is how a white man can degenerate to savagery. Young Radisson's life is an illustration. In the first transports of his freedom, with the Mohawk women dancing and singing around him, the men shouting, he leaped up, oblivious of pain; but when the flush of ecstasy had passed, he sank to the mat of the Iroquois lodge, and he was unable to use his burned feet for more than a month. During this time the Iroquois dressed his wounds, brought him the choice portions of the hunt, gave him clean clothing purchased ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... the countryside bowed in silver quietude, the rivers ran through undistinguishable fields chanting their lonely songs. The seas leaped and withdrew, and called again to the stars, and gathered in ecstasy and roared skywards, and the trees did not rob each other more than was absolutely necessary. The men and women were all hidden away, sleeping in their cells, where the moon could not see them, nor the clean wind, ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... him. (In this way), they all arrived together at the river, and Ananda considered that, if he went forward, king Ajatasatru would be very angry, while, if he went back, the Lichchhavis would resent his conduct. He thereupon in the very middle of the river burnt his body in a fiery ecstasy of Samadhi,(4) and his pari-nirvana was attained. He divided his body (also) into two, (leaving) the half of it on each bank; so that each of the two kings got one half as a (sacred) relic, and took it back (to his own capital), and there ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... under their very eyes, and then, attired in white satin, the neophyte was slowly driven through the streets of Rome that all might witness how a soul had been saved for the true faith. And in the ecstasy of this union with the human brotherhood and the divine fatherhood, and with Christ, its symbol, Giuseppe de' Franchi saw not the dark, haggard faces of his brethren in the crowd, the hate that smouldered in their dusky eyes as the festal ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... chance. For, in fact, the orations which were spoken by him had much more of boldness and confidence in them than those that he wrote. Eratosthenes says that often in his speaking he would be transported into a kind of ecstasy, and Demetrius, that he uttered the famous ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... wringing from him one cry for mercy. He would die a thousand times sooner than sue to him. He thought of Joan — realizing that for her sake he should be called upon, in some sort, to bear this suffering; and even the bare thought sent a thrill of ecstasy through him. Any death that was died for her would be sweet. And might not his be instrumental in ridding her for ever of her hateful foe? Would not Gaston raise heaven and earth to discover his brother? Surely he would, ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the soft ecstasy and boundless relief of the moment, "how I have learned to love you during the fears and agonies ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... as of the sun glinting on the river on a bright blue day, had a sudden way of possessing her, and the longing they induced was pain. Longing for what? For some unimagined existence where beauty dwelt, and light, where the ecstasy induced by these was neither moiled nor degraded; where shame, as now, might not assail her. Why should she feel her body hot with shame, her cheeks afire? At such moments she would turn to the typewriter, her fingers striking ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... himself subject to secret influences of the utmost power over him, able to cast him off or to hold him, to sicken his body and distress his soul, extending his views of the truth by flashes of light into vistas that seem infinite, making his love of right an ecstasy, his sympathy for human misery a passion, controlling his diet and his clothing, ordering him here and there at will and knowing how to be obeyed—when, in a word, a man finds himself treated by God in a manner totally different from any one else he knows or ever heard of, it is plain that he ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... with the Sauades and nymphs of the heavenly host. Men heard them passing in the night, heralded by the piercing notes of the flute provoking to frenzy, and by the clash of brazen cymbals, accompanied by the din of uproarious ecstasy: these sounds were broken at intervals by the bellowing of bulls and the roll of drums, like ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... himself. He bade him come out upon the Adventure of Life, the great Adventure of the earth that will make the atoms our bond-slaves and subdue the stars, that will build up the white fires of ecstasy to submerge pain for ever, that will overcome death. In Him the spirit of creation had become incarnate, had joined itself to men, summoning men to Him, having need of them, having need of them, having need of their service, even as great kings and generals and leaders ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... of abstinence we may account, in part, for that holy ecstasy, that amazing clearness of spiritual vision, sometimes enjoyed on the deathbed. "Administer nothing," said the eloquent dying Summerfield, "that will create a stupor, not even so much as a little porter and water—that I may have an unclouded view." For the same reason, Dr. Rush, who so well ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... horses and carriages and trains and pedestrians in forms grotesque, zigzagging, flitting, amusing, like a shadow-play upon a wrinkled, wind-blown curtain. The sixteenth of June. To Fitzgerald there was something electric in the date, a tingle of that ecstasy which frequently comes into the blood of a man to whom the romance of a great battle is more than its history or its effect upon the destinies of human beings. Many years before, this date had marked the end to a certain hundred ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... leaped into her face, but she stood with upraised head, regarding him with clear and candid eyes that glowed with the ecstasy ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... What fond, delicious ecstasy does early love impart! Resistless, as a spring-tide sea, it flows into the heart, Pervading with its living wave the bosom's inmost core, That thrills with many a gentle hope ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... they had always felt themselves on the same level of nonsense, and had unreservedly shared each other's confidences and projects; and ten thousand bits of intelligence were discussed with mutual ardour, while Clara's ecstasy became uncontrollable as she felt herself coming nearer to her grandmother. She finally descended with a bound almost as distressing to her brother as her ascent had been, and leapt at once to the embrace of Mrs. Frost, who stood there, petting, kissing her, and playfully ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... One alternative remained. He had heard of women aviators. If Doris could be induced to accompany him into the air, instead of clinging sodden-like to the weight of Oswald's woe, then would the world behold a triumph which would dwarf the ecstasy of the bird's flight and rob the eagle of his kingly pride. But Doris barely endured him as yet, and the thought was not one to be considered for a moment. Yet what other course remained? He was brooding deeply on the subject, in his hangar ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... kick me hard!" shouted Cunningham in an ecstasy of delight, as he smote me a blow between the shoulders that made me stagger. "The catamaran!" he continued. "Of course. Oh, what a lot of fools we were not to have thought of that before! But," suddenly bethinking himself, "if we had, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... of the reckless confidence of youth. I was on the verge of one of the most appalling adventures which could befall a man, and yet no premonition disturbed the ecstasy with which I knelt before the glimmering marble and unrolled my bundle of ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... a stridulous barking; and James Polder carried her, in an ecstasy of snarling ill-temper, out. "Cherette doesn't appreciate callers," he stated, with an expression that contradicted the mildness of his words. His gaze, Howat thought, rested on Mariana with the intensity of a fanatic Arab at the apparition of Mohammed. And Mariana ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... direction. The younger boy asked if he might have a ride in the aeroplane; the girl begged Smith to write his name in her album. The governess sat with clasped hands, gazing at him with the adoring ecstasy that she might have bestowed on a godlike visitant from another ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... he would have thirty chambers of gold, all full to the ceiling. Leander, being conducted into the chambers, took his rose and shook it, till every room was filled with all sorts of coin. Furibon was in an ecstasy, and the more gold he saw the greater was his desire to get hold of the Amazon; so that when all the rooms were full, he commanded his guards to seize her, alleging she had brought him counterfeit money. Immediately Leander put on his little red cap and disappeared. The guards, ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... hand on his arm. He shot a swift glance at her face. It was turned away. She staring at the mystic panorama that was being unveiled off there on the rim of the world. Her eyes were bright, her lips were parted in the ecstasy of hope revived, she was breathing deeply. The pulse in her smooth white neck was beating rapidly, rythmically. He could see it. He laid his bandaged hand firmly upon hers and pressed it tightly to his arm. She did not ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... at Ashridge for about a fortnight, and then, to the ecstasy of Sir Reginald, issued orders for return to Berkhamsted. Only a few words passed between the Prior and his patron as they took leave of ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... ever saw in my life. By George, it's ripping!" cried Wilson, who had been left in a kind of ecstasy by the events of the day. "There's a chap over Barnsley way who fancies himself a bit. Let us spring you on him, and let him see what he can make of you. We'll put up a purse—won't we, Purvis? You shall never ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... we notice the same abandonment, the same illusions produced on the imagination, the contortions of the body, the child-like credulity, the superstition, the depression, and exaltations of the feelings, "the agony, the ecstasy, the plentitude of belief." They are the complement of barbaric faith, and not a peculiarity of the Negro. If in these primitive conditions we see the Negro tickled by a straw, or frightened by a ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... open of itself when the time came. Motherhood! There'd be a doctor and a nurse at first, of course, but presently they'd go away and she'd be left with a baby. Her own baby! She could care for him with her own hands, feed him—her joy reached an ecstasy at this—feed him from her ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Archelaus. Him she would lead to the heavenly courts and win forgiveness for the sin of his creation; he, the brand she had lit, should by her be plucked from the burning. Crossing over to her window, she had leaned her hot brow against the pane, closing her eyes in an ecstasy of prayer. It was very dim still in the house, but without the first faint pallor of the dawn was growing, and against it every solid object showed distinct and black. And, opening her eyes, Annie saw, silhouetted darkly with the precision of ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... heart was thumping pretty hard and his breathing was uncertain, as though he had raced the length of the field with a pigskin tucked in the crook of his arm, and his gaze sought the floor for fear those two would read the almost tragic ecstasy that shone in them. "Yes," he repeated, ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life and her own nature. Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan, ignoring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. She appeared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the kind blue ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... vividness which he had never experienced before, in the deepest of the many reveries in which they had been presented to his fancy. Mr Rathbone understood his feelings, and so little doubted of being able to obtain this favour, that he tried to work up still more the ecstasy of hope which he had excited. "I have no doubt Mr Gardiner will spare you, Charles: you can be off by to-morrow ...
— Principle and Practice - The Orphan Family • Harriet Martineau
... impact of his fate. But there is a first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer to endure—admirably expressed in the sudden change to a brief trochaic verse; then the grim mood is dissolved in a momentary ecstasy of remembrance or of idea—and the verse, too, unfolds and ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... how he threw some driftwood into a racing torrent and how Mark went running down-stream after it, waving and shouting in a sort of mad ecstasy. ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... drink. He fired another and another and another.... The Hun was puzzled at this departure from routine, and opened a morose machine-gun fire which skimmed the top of the parapet and covered Second-Lieut. St. John with earth from shattered sandbags. He went on firing Verey lights in a sort of bland ecstasy till his supply ran out, when he went to his Company Commander's dug-out for more. He filled his pockets with fresh ammunition, went back to his post, and began firing again. The first light was mauve. He almost clapped his hands at it, and fired the second. It was pink. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... close resemblance to one another, and their merits and their failures are alike identical. We have to form what broken impression we can of their early habits. Joseph is presented to us as wandering in the woodlands, lost in a melancholy fit, or waking out of it to note with ecstasy all the effects of light and colour around him, the flight of birds, the flutter of foliage, the panorama of cloudland. He and Thomas were alike in their "extreme thirst after ancient things." They avoided, with a certain ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... horse, shouted and prayed in their peculiar style, which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands, of such scenes; and can now see a poor girl, in the very ecstasy of the Methodist "shout," hugging the banner of one of the regiments, and jumping up to the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... for the suppression of strife. I remember spring mornings, when the birds began to sing in the shrubberies, and the beds were full of rising flower-blades, when one's whole mind and heart used to expand in an ecstasy of hope and delight; I remember long rambles or bicycle rides far into the quiet pastoral country, in the summer heat, alone or with a single companion, when life seemed almost too delicious to continue; then there would ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... at this moment with Antinea, and it is to me a bitter and splendid joy to think of his joy. But some evening, in three months, four perhaps, the embalmers will come here. Niche 54 will receive its prey. Then a Targa slave will advance toward me. I shall shiver with superb ecstasy. He will touch my arm. And it will be my turn to penetrate into eternity by the ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... loose their pent-up feelings. The place pulsated with a roar like that of a great waterfall in a deep gorge, salvo after salvo of cheers swelling and merging. The deep boom of their applause pursued Brinnaria and made her cower. The people would never forget her now. They were in ecstasy. She ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... love, there is no such thing as owing between them Waited serenely for the certain disasters to enthrone her What will be thought of me? not a small matter to any of us When testy old gentlemen could commit slaughter with ecstasy Why, he'll snap your head off ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... her love, who sways Her breast, as moon the tide, Whose breath is incense—Ah, again To see him softly glide Before the grave god-idol's gaze Of inward ecstasy, To watch the great bell boom ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... hummed around me, indistinct, Vague, meaningless—seemed to resolve themselves Into a language I could understand; I felt my frame pervaded by a glow That seemed to thaw my marble into flesh; Its cold, hard substance throbbed with active life, My limbs grew supple, and I moved—I lived! Lived in the ecstasy of a new-born life! Lived in the love of him that fashioned me! Lived in a thousand ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... the thrill of passion in the poet's mystic book And I've lingered in delight to catch the rhythm of the brook; I've felt the ecstasy that comes when prima donnas reach For upper C and hold it in a long, melodious screech. And yet the charm of all these blissful memories fades away As I think upon the fortune that befell the other day, As I bring to recollection, with a joyous, wistful sigh, That I ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... such recreations would soon be developed. The writer has seen young boys, of eight and ten years of age, gathering and cleaning shells from rivers, and collecting plants, and mineralogical specimens, with a delight, bordering on ecstasy; and there are few, if any, who, by proper influences, would not find this a source of ceaseless ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher |
