"Mystical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you know where I can find some picturesque rites? Mystical dances, human sacrifice? I've got to work up ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... first-class athlete, and for two years stroked the Magdalen boat. Nor did he altogether neglect his books, but his reading was of a desultory and out-of-the-way order, and much directed towards the investigation of mystical subjects. Fairly well liked amongst the men with whom he mixed, he could hardly be called popular; his temperament was too uncertain for that. At times he was the gayest of the gay, and then when the fit took him he would be plunged into a state of gloomy ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... graduated from Yale in 1720, studies theology, and at twenty-four becomes the colleague of his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the church at Northampton. He marries the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he describes in his journal in a prose rhapsody which, like his mystical rhapsodies on religion in the same youthful period, glows with a clear unearthly beauty unmatched in any English prose of that century. For twenty-three years he serves the Northampton church, and his sermons win him the rank of the foremost preacher ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the painter's choice to proceed with both the portraits at the same time, assigning as a reason, in the mystical language which he sometimes used, that the faces threw light upon each other. Accordingly, he gave now a touch to Walter and now to Elinor, and the features of one and the other began to start forth so vividly that it appeared as if his triumphant ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was a public person representing you, that so you may conclude with Paul, "I am crucified with Christ," Gal. ii. 20. "We are buried with him by baptism into his death," Rom. vi. 4. Consider that mystical union with Christ crucified, and life shall spring out of his cross, out of his grave, to kill sin in you,—that the great business is done already, and victory gained in our Head, "This is our victory, even faith." Believe, and then you have ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... materialism—in either case to catch man in the causal machinery of nature. In this dilemma many were tempted to throw reason overboard as an instrument of ultimate truth, and to seek for certainty through other functions of the human soul—in feeling, faith, or mystical vision of some sort; the claims of the heart and will were urged against the proud pretensions of the intellect (Hamann, Herder, Jacobi). Another way of escape was found by substituting the organic conception of reality for the logical-mathematical view of the Aufklaerung; nature and life, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Sages were nearly put to the route by a quarto pack of artillery, fired on them by Mr. John Chamber, in 1691. Apollo did not use Marsyas more inhumanly than his scourging pen this mystical race; and his personalities made them sorely feel it. However, a Norwich knight, the very Quixote of Astrology, arrayed in the enchanted armour of his occult authors, encountered this pagan in a most stately carousal. He came forth ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... M. Venizelos's ambitious and adventurous temperament. Military considerations had little meaning for his civilian mind. Taking the speedy victory of the Entente as a foregone conclusion, and imbued with a sort of mystical faith in his own prophetic insight and star, he looked upon the European War as an occasion for Imperialist aggrandizement which he felt that Greece ought to grasp ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... powers of mind were gigantic. I felt this, and, in many matters, became her pupil. I soon, however, found that, perhaps on account of her Presburg education, she placed before me a number of those mystical writings which are usually considered the mere dross of the early German literature. These, for what reason I could not imagine, were her favourite and constant study—and that in process of time they became my own, should be attributed to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... discomfort, prejudiced him also against him. Then Polwarth seldom went to a place of worship, and when he did, went to church! A cranky, visionary, talkative man, he was in Mr. Drake's eyes. He set him down as one of those mystical interpreters of the Word, who are always searching it for strange things, whose very insight leads them to vagary, blinding them to the relative value of things. It is amazing from what a mere fraction of fact concerning him, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... by the observance of which eternal life was won, remained fixed in Christian thought along with the philosophical conception of the faith as formulated by the apologists. This moralism was the opposite pole to the conceptions of the Asia Minor school, the Augustinian theology, and the whole mystical conception ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... seemed able to hold his thinking in a straight line, one tangential to theirs. He seemed, in these hours, to have turned wholly mystical, to a stronger belief that they were being watched and cared for by some higher power, and that this was for a purpose. Yet not so tangential, for Cal had come to the same conclusion, although ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... up or down the long vista of blue air till it turned mirk at either vanishing-point under a sky of measureless cloudlessness. That dimness, almost smokiness at the closes of the prospect, was something unspeakably rich. It made me think, quite out of relation or relevance, of these nobly mystical lines ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Yet he could not evade the justice of Kao's implied rebuke, so drawing to his side a jade cabinet he opened it, and from among the contents he selected an ebony staff, a paper umbrella, and a fan inscribed with a mystical sentence. These three objects he placed in Kao's hands, and with his last breath signified that he should use them ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... sharpens my hunger.' In one form or another it recurs in practically every novel.[12] Certain of the later portions of this book, especially the chapter entitled 'Her Path in Shadow' are delineated through a kind of mystical haze, suggestive of some of the work of Puvis de Chavannes. The concluding chapters, taken as a whole, indicate with tolerable accuracy Gissing's affinities as a writer, and the pedigree of the type of novel by which he is best known. It derives from Xavier ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... flaming arrow of death fell on his flock, and pierced the heart of his dearest! Silent the music now, as the shepherd entered the mystical temple of sorrow: Long he tarried in darkness there: but when he ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... the purpose of "uplifting" their fellow-countrymen. A certain number of figures written on a check and signed by a familiar name, what may it not accomplish? Some years ago at the opening exercises of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg, Mr. Andrew Carnegie burst into an impassioned and mystical vision of the miraculously constitutive power of first mortgage steel bonds. From his point of view and from that of the average American there is scarcely anything which the combination of abundant resources and good intentions may ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... how insignificant he was and how insignificant every one is in this world where beings, agitated like grains in a van, are mixed and separated by a shake of the rustic or of the god. This idea of the agricultural or mystical van represented measure and order too well to be exactly applied to life. It seemed to him that men were grains in a coffee-mill. He had had a vivid sensation of this the day before, when he saw Madame Fusellier ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... piano and the violin give her a fluttering drape. But there are things to be seen. This is not the Aphrodite of the Blue Danube waltz—but a duskier, more mystical lady. There are no roses on her cheeks, no lilies in her skin. She is colored like a panther flower and her limbs are heavy with taboo magic. But she is still imperial. In vain the mountebanks and burlesqueries of her court. Her lips place themselves against the hearts of the ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... man—if, notwithstanding, he perceive devotion to these interests, he calls it desinteresse, and wonders how it is possible to act "disinterestedly." There have been philosophers who could give this popular astonishment a seductive and mystical, other-worldly expression (perhaps because they did not know the higher nature by experience?), instead of stating the naked and candidly reasonable truth that "disinterested" action is very interesting and "interested" action, provided that... "And love?"—What! ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... good, and that 'wisdom is better than rubies,' the very same standard, when applied in another direction, declares that above the treasures of the intellect and the taste are to be ranked all the mystical and great blessings which are summoned up in that mighty word salvation. And we must take a step further, for neither the treasures of the intellect, the mind, and the heart, nor the treasures of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... matter in a different way; it is great and mystical: it is no common thing; nor given to every man. Wisdom alone, it may be, will not suffice for the care of youth: a man needs also a certain measure of readiness—an aptitude for the office; aye, and certain bodily qualities; and above all, to be counselled of God Himself ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... revival, and I faced William. Spiritually speaking, we parted company. He passed into a praying and fasting trance, and my heart was nearly broken with the loneliness, for praying and fasting did not agree with me, and William seemed to recede in some mystical sense hard to define, so that I became a sort of ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... men are substituted for the word of God. With Origen was introduced a new mode of interpreting scripture, which afterwards became prevalent. The scriptures, instead of being received in their natural and obvious sense, were regarded as mystical and allegorical. Milner, in his Church History, says: "From the fanciful mode of allegory, introduced by him, and uncontrolled by scriptural rule and order, there arose a vitiated method of commenting on the sacred pages." And ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... imagine that any mystical glory belongs to the schoolboy who happens to "score one" off his master. If he does it consciously, the chances are he is a snob for doing it. If he does it unconsciously, as Dick did here, then the misfortune ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... Watch tick'd behind the panel'd oak, Inexplicable tremors shook the arras, And echoes strange and mystical ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... will the most mortal maid of warmest flesh and blood become an abstraction to her lover—sometimes shrink to the significance of one more flower, and sometimes expand to the significance of a microcosm, a firmament in mystical miniature. ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... Ethics know that with me the ultimate foundation of morality is the truth which in the Vedas and the Vedanta receives its expression in the established, mystical formula, Tat twam asi (This is thyself), which is spoken with reference to every living thing, be it man or beast, and is called ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... yellow fields she recited the closing lines of "The Land of Heart's Desire," doing her level best to put into it some little portion of its mystical beauty. She was not altogether successful because she was only a girl without any training or knowledge of her art, but perhaps because of her youth she was less afraid and filled with ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... which has been sent to you, or who may be its author, I have heard nothing but through your letter. If the person you suspect, it may be known from the quaint, mystical, and hyperbolical ideas, involved in affected, newfangled, and pedantic terms, which stamp his writings. Whatever it be, I hope your quiet is not to be affected at this day by the rudeness or intemperance of scribblers; but that you may continue in tranquillity to live and to rejoice ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... a wild and frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her inmost heart, and you learn her secrets—arcana unintelligible to you in the new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win new color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once charmed away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your motion. Now, at last, you ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... interrupted Mr. Greenville, "we will not allow our imagination to wander forth into the mystical regions of the future, or picture to ourselves scenes of wretchedness, if such await us. Flatter me not with the ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... the narrative of Eden itself, there has been, from the very earliest times, some disposition to regard it as mystical or "allegorical," i.e., to regard it as representing spiritual facts of temptation and disobedience, under the guise or story of an actual audible address by a serpent, and the eating of an actual fruit. The earliest translators seem to have glossed the "Gan-'Eden," everywhere in the Old Testament ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... these fables and fancies. Her own singular experiences in this enchanted region were certainly not suggested by anything she had heard, and may be considered psychologically curious by those who would not think of attributing any mystical meaning to them. We are at liberty to report many things without attempting to explain them, or committing ourselves to anything beyond the fact that so they were told us. The reader will find Myrtle's "Vision," as written out at a later ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... carelessness; but he was accused of having poisoned his patient. This event might have been expected to bring his career to an end; but it was not long before he recovered the confidence of the people whom he deluded with his mystical language and promises of cure. He had three methods of treatment, all consisting of baths—hot, tepid, or cold—preceded or followed by the taking of wonder-working medicines. Horatillavus treated every kind of ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... his flesh penetrated by a perfume, felt himself overborne by a voluptuous yearning for self-annihilation. Pious and habituated to ecstatic experiences in sumptuous chapels, he there re-encountered precisely the same mystical sensations as when he knelt under some painted window and gave way to the intoxication of organ music and incense. Woman swayed him as jealously and despotically as the God of wrath, terrifying him, granting him moments of delight, which were like ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... there was a striking dignity and weight in his look and manner, which suddenly roused in Catherine the sense that she was speaking to a man of distinction, accustomed to deal on equal terms with the large things of life. She raised her eyes to him for a moment, and he saw in them a beautiful, mystical ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... interior realms of knowledge than we perhaps now dream of, and, in the words of the master: "A true knowledge of the stars will include a true knowledge of the soul," and we shall realize "the mystical link that binds the soul to the stars." ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... creation, composed as it was of scattered and discordant parts, then became a source of future punishments and rewards, in which divine justice was supposed to correct the vices and errors of this transitory state. A spiritual and mystical system, such as have mentioned, acquired so much the more credit as it applied itself to the mind by every argument suited to it. The oppressed looked thither for an indemnification, and entertained the consoling hope of vengeance; the oppressor expected by the costliness ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... carried, he had in a cake of gold, weighing three score and eight marks, a fair piece enamelled, wherein was portrayed a man's body with two heads, looking towards one another, four arms, four feet, two arses, such as Plato, in Symposio, says was the mystical beginning of man's nature; and about it was written in Ionic letters, Agame ou zetei ta eautes, or rather, Aner kai gune zugada anthrotos idiaitata, that is, Vir et mulier junctim propriissime homo. To wear about his neck, he had a golden ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... theology and industry. In theology itself Egyptian learning early became dissatisfied with the popular deities, and sought for a unity of the godhead either in some one supreme deity such as the sun or, more often, in a mystical identification of all the gods as so many incarnations or impersonations of a single principle. But though these and kindred speculations were not without influence on Greek thought, the entire achievement of Egypt in this direction, so far as known to us, was of little importance ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... superstitions of the Rhine valleys or the Hartz Mountains. It is something that has tinged the nature of our whole life, whatever its varied sources, and when its color seems gone out of us, or, going, it renews itself in all the mystical lights and shadows so familiar to us that, till we read some such tales as those grouped together here, we are scarcely aware how largely they form the complexion of our ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... inscrutable, secret, dark, mystic, transcendental, enigmatical, mystical, unfathomable, hidden, obscure, unfathomed, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... naughty in my bachelor den, Polly," said Mr. Bird, smiling. "Mrs. Bird does n't waste any girlish frills and poetic decorations and mystical friezes on her poor brother-in-law! He is done up in muddy browns, as befits his ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... exchange for them the proud, glad pulse of full womanhood?—not I. I mind me, too, that in those days the great world of which I used to hear them speak always seemed to me lying across the river, and over the fields and the hills, and away down and out by the skirts of the mystical sea; and on the morning when I set sail for Edinboro', I felt to be forever drawing nigher its skurry and bustle, its sins and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and most disinterested men who have lived in this century, Bentham and J. S. Mill, whose lives were a long devotion to the service of their fellows, have been among the most enthusiastic supporters of utility; while among their contemporaries, some who were of a more mystical turn of mind, have ended rather in aspiration than in action, and have been found unequal to the duties of life. Looking back on them now that they are removed from the scene, we feel that mankind has been the better for them. The world was against them while they lived; but this is rather ...
— Philebus • Plato
... is in a sense mystical. It is not apparent to the senses, nor can it be logically demonstrated as an inference from anything of which the senses can take cognizance. It can only be stated accurately, and left to make its appeal to men's minds. It may be stated theologically by saying, as the Christian theology says, that ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... me to restore tranquillity, if possible, to its perturbed spirit. Instead, therefore, of dibbing, I now allowed the fly to float, a little submerged, from a couple of yards above the fish, which, I fear, had never in its youthful days been taught the mystical proverb, "First, second, but beware of the third." It came up with a gallant charge, and ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... Polytheism, in short, was outgrown. It was outgrown both intellectually and morally. People were ceasing to believe in its doctrines, and were ceasing to respect its precepts. The learned were taking refuge in philosophy, the ignorant in mystical superstitions imported from Asia. The commanding ethical motive of ancient republican times had been patriotism,—devotion to the interests of the community. But Roman dominion had destroyed patriotism as a guiding principle of life, and thus in every way the minds of men were left in a sceptical, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... sort of feeling forms, I think, the innermost soul of army-writings. Without any exception known to me, militarist authors take a highly mystical view of their subject, and regard war as a biological or sociological necessity, uncontrolled by ordinary psychological checks and motives. When the time of development is ripe the war must come, reason or no reason, for the justifications ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... she is expected to read her Bible or some religious book, or engage in some meditation which is in keeping with the holy day. Where this idea originated, the writer is unable to say. He, with those who have observed this mystical quiet hour, is puzzled concerning its religious efficacy. One naturally asked those in authority why not a "quiet" hour for the boys as well. There seems to be either a very high compliment paid to the boys or quite an unpardonable ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... saying 1 Cor. 10, 17; Rom. 12, 5; Gal. 3, 28: We are all one body in Christ; although we are many, we are, nevertheless, one in Him; for we are all partakers of that one bread. Does he perhaps think that the virtue of the mystical benediction is unknown to us? Since this is in us, does it not also, by the communication of Christ's flesh, cause Christ to dwell in us bodily? And a little after: Whence we must consider that Christ is in us not only according to the habit, ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... festival in which they appeared, though without any mystical signification. In the Panathena, the daughters of the Metceci, or foreign residents, carried Parasols over the heads of Athenian women as a mark ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... or two, he suddenly halted before a jeweller's shop. Arrayed in the window were priceless gems that shone in the glare of electricity, like mystical serpent-eyes—green, pomegranate and water-blue. And as he stood there the dazzling radiance before him was transformed in the prism of his mind into something great and very wonderful that might, some ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... verses. To read Miss Coleridge's poems was to make acquaintance with a charming and delicate soul that wished to be understood and was willing to be intimate. Life astonished her, and her comments on life are her poems. They are often mystical, not to say obscure; and the obscurity, as a rule, is caused by vagueness rather than profundity, by the fact that she hardly knows herself what she feels, or thinks, or believes. But from so gracious a spirit one accepts without ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... request of Dichu (but for what cause I know not), did the saint build the church, having its aspect against the north, and looking toward the southern point. Perchance that by this mystical structure the worshippers of idols might be persuaded from the northern coldness of unbelief unto the meridian fervor of the faith and the charity of Christ—the which to this day is called Sabhall Phadruig, that is, the Barn of Patrick; for in process of time ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... should be consulted by whomsoever would pay proper attention to his own outward appearance. The merely useful may possibly make the shape approximate to that of a Quaker's or a jarvey's, but the beautiful has to elevate and modify it into the mystical proportions fit for a man of taste. One other quality, however, which is intimately connected with the useful, has to be noticed. The substance should not be hard and unyielding. Witness, ye reminiscences—ye painful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... 1792 Paine lodged in the house and book-shop of Thomas "Clio" Rickman, now as then 7 Upper Marylebone Street. Among his friends was the mystical artist and poet, William Blake. Paine had become to him a transcendental type; he is one of the Seven who appear in Blake's "Prophecy" ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... ambitious endeavor to reinstate the Caesarean power in Italy he appears alternately in the figure of a hero and the character of a charlatan. Believing himself the founder of a new era, he was inflamed by his successes, and ended in "mystical extravagances and follies which could not ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the suggestions which come out of a recognized human need. If a man proposed that the judges of the Supreme Court be reduced from nine to seven because the number seven has mystical power, we could ignore him. But if he suggested that the number be reduced because seven men can deliberate more effectively than nine he ought to be given a hearing. Or let us suppose that the argument is about granting votes to women. The suffragist who bases ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... examine Mr. Allen's record in the matter of natural selection. For years he was one of the foremost apostles of Neo- Darwinism, and any who said a good word for Lamarck were told that this was the "kind of mystical nonsense" from which Mr. Allen "had hoped Mr. Darwin had for ever saved us." {216b} Then in October 1883 came an article in "Mind," from which it appeared as though Mr. Allen had abjured Mr. ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... compelled considerably to abridge this story to suit our limits.—The mystical portion of it, or "the story of the Demon," as the narrator, a Pole, calls it, is thus told ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... creeds. That solid foundation stone of belief in the One Eternal God, laid by Arab pirates centuries ago, amid the lust of rapine and the smoke of war, which ever heralded the onward march of conquering Islam, should serve as a firm basis for building up these simple children of Nature into the mystical sanctuary of the Christian Church. The lapse of time obliterates countless landmarks of Moslem creed in localities removed from external contact, but amid the dust of disintegrating forces and forgotten ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... historical interest to us to know that Moses ibn Ezra, so famous as a poet, was interested in philosophy, and that the views which appealed to him were those of Ibn Gabirol, whose "Fountain of Life" he knew, and from which he quotes a celebrated mystical passage. A few details will suffice to ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... garden-house. In a poem now printed for the first time, Toru refers to the scene of her earliest memories, the circling wilderness of foliage, the shining tank with the round leaves of the lilies, the murmuring dusk under the vast branches of the central casuarina-tree. Here, in a mystical retirement more irksome to an European in fancy than to an Oriental in reality, the brain of this wonderful child was moulded. She was pure Hindu, full of the typical qualities of her race and blood, and, as the present ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... heart, where hill is heaped upon hill; For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... would have answered all purposes equally well with a plunge in the burning crater. If the tradition of Empedocles is a real story of a thing which really happened, we may feel sure that some peculiar feeling connected with the mountain itself, some mystical theory or local tradition, led such a man as he was to such a ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... and, mysteries. Of one thing I am sure, however: that they were considerably less extraordinary than her appearance announced. Miss Ambient was a restless, disappointed, imaginative spinster, consumed with the love of Michael-Angelesque attitudes and mystical robes; but I am pretty sure she had not in her nature those depths of unutterable thought which, when you first knew her, seemed to look out from her eyes and to prompt her complicated gestures. Those features, in especial, had a misleading ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... alarming discovery that, in the lurch which their hack-fly had made at the cross roads, her brother Alfred's patent boots had not only dragged off some yards (more or less) of her flounces, but had also - to use her own mystical language - "torn her skirt at ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... not understand it. But a feeling almost of jealous envy stole into his heart toward the two disciples of the Baptist, who, hearing the witness, followed Jesus. His hungry soul echoed their "Where dwellest Thou?" in the mystical sense in which he instinctively read it, and he felt it would be joy indeed to hear that One say, "Come and see." Would he not come, indeed, ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... of the course she had followed. Harvey could not question her sincerity, but she seemed to him a trifle morbid. It might be natural reaction, in a temper such as hers, against the monstrous egotism by which her life had been subdued and shadowed. She inclined to mystical views; mentioned Christina Rossetti as one of her favourites; cared little or nothing for the louder interests of the time. Impossible to detect the colour of her thoughts with regard to Cecil; she spoke of him gravely and gently, but without the ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... this. The teaching—and there is teaching in every one of them—is plain and ethical. So also, with the Greek myths; they teach plainly—they hold no esoteric interpretations. Watts is no Neo-Platonist weaving mystical doctrines from the ancient hero tales; he is rather a stoic, a moralist, ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... of mankind. Or, again, because by the firmament is simply understood the cloudy region of the air, which is not one of the permanent parts of the universe, nor of the principal divisions of the world. The above three reasons are given by Rabbi Moses [*Perplex. ii.], and to these may be added a mystical one derived from numbers and assigned by some writers, according to whom the work of the second day is not marked with approval because the second number is an imperfect number, as receding ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... was determined to keep him to herself. That was why none of them had seen anything of Nina for six months. There was (he came back to it again) something very murky about Nina. And Nina, with her murkiness, was manifestly in love with this spiritual, this mystical young man. So amazing was the part set her in the mortal comedy. He would give a good deal to know what Prothero thought ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... Poppy was on the ground under a green scarf. And so the accumulating dilation, on to the whirling climax of the perfect arum lily. Sudden curtain, and a yell of ecstasy from the colliers. Of all blossoms, the arum, the arum lily is most mystical and portentous. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... the mystical visionary feeling of the Spaniards even in his religious pictures. He was too much in love with life for that, and so, sometimes, we are offended by stout Flemish Saints and Madonnas too healthy to ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... elsewhere, water was also apparently thought to acquire a certain mystical virtue at midsummer. "At Stoole, near Downpatrick, there is a ceremony commencing at twelve o'clock at night on Midsummer Eve. Its sacred mount is consecrated to St. Patrick; the plain contains three wells, to which ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... counselling them if they will needs be barrelled up for fear of smelling in the nostrils of her Majesty and the State, that they would use the advice of Reverend Martin for the providing of their Cooper; because the Reverend T. C. (by which mystical letters is understood either the bouncing parson of East Meon or Tom Cokes his chaplain), hath shewed himself in his late admonition to the people of England to be an unskilful and beceitful [sic] tub-trimmer. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... I was sixteen, and not until the last two or three years of my life have I known anything at all of that phase of existence which is expressed by the word 'society.' I indulge in this preamble in order to apologize in advance, for any breaks I may make in that mystical line of talk which ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... from billiard rooms to foundries, from brewing yards to bedstead warehouses in the same region. That brightest of all our historical blades, "P. Whittle, F.A.S.," states that it is located on the south-west side of Friargate—a better, but still very mystical, exposition to all not actually acquainted with the place; whilst Hardwicke comes up to the rescue in the panoply of modern exactness, and tells us that it is on the south side of Fishergate. These historians must have missed their way in trying to ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... of doctrine long ago passed from the Hindu remembrance, lost in the multiplying developments and specifications of a mystical philosophy, and a teeming superstition ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... relates how Joseph of Arimathea—that good man and just, who laid our Lord in his own sepulcher, was persecuted by Pontius Pilate, and how he fled from Jerusalem carrying with him the Holy Grail hidden beneath a cloth of samite, mystical and white. ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... promised hats and failed to provide hats. The modern mind is that which says that if we only cut off the heads of two of the little boys, they will not want hats; and then the hats will exactly go round. The suggestion that heads are rather more important than hats is dismissed as a piece of mystical metaphysics. The assertion that hats were made for heads, and not heads for hats savours of antiquated dogma. The musty text which says that the body is more than raiment; the popular prejudice which would prefer the lives of boys to the mathematical arrangement ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... continuous Church; with the same territory, the same succession, the same hierarchy, the same civil and political position, the same churches. Yes," he proceeded, "we have the very same fabrics, the memorials of a thousand years, doctrine stamped and perpetuated in stone; all the mystical teaching of the old saints. What have the Methodists to do with Catholic rites? with altars, with sacrifice, with rood-lofts, with fonts, with niches?—they call it ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... let us set forth on our intellectual journey. Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and history ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... been baptized in Christ have put on Christ."(349) We are adopted into the same family with Jesus Christ. What He is by nature we are by grace—children of God, and consequently brethren of Christ. Nay, our union with Jesus is still more close. We become true members of His mystical body, which is His Church, and His Divine image is ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... flourished. To be fat was, in those days, the most desirable attribute of a wife in the eyes of an Algerine husband, therefore kooskoos was eaten in quantity. It was made largely of flour, rolled, in some mystical manner, into the form of little pellets, like small sago; this, boiled with butter and other fatty substances, with bits of meat and chicken, and other viands mixed through it,—the whole being slightly seasoned and spiced,—was deemed food fit for ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... Dickens (Heaven forgive you) or the ornament of Tennyson. Some of the great writers of that age definitely excluded God from their scheme of things: others included God fiercely, but with circumscription and limitation. I think it fair to say of them generally that they hated alike the mystical and the mysterious, and, hating these, could have little commerce with such poetry as Crashaw's and Vaughan's or such speculation as gave ardour to the prose of the Cambridge Platonists. Johnson's famous ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... by his beauty, gifts, promises, to come unto him; [6316]"the whole Scripture is a message, an exhortation, a love letter to this purpose;" to incite us, and invite us, [6317]God's epistle, as Gregory calls it, to his creatures. He sets out his son and his church in that epithalamium or mystical song of Solomon, to enamour us the more, comparing his head "to fine gold, his locks curled and black as a raven," Cant. iv. 5. "his eyes like doves on rivers of waters, washed with milk, his lips as lilies, drooping ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... she was in the position of a bad woman, the more she struggled to be a good one. She flew to religion as a refuge. There was no belief in her religion, no faith, no creed, no mystical transports, but only fear, and shame, and contrition. It was fervent enough, nevertheless. On Sunday morning she went to The Christians, on Sunday afternoon to church, on Sunday evening to the Wesleyan chapel, and on Wednesday night to ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... common national power has been the saving of the principal French historians, notably of Michelet. It has furnished them with the key by which alone the history of their country could be made plain. Nothing is easier than to ridicule or deny so mystical a thing. Taine, by temperament intensely anti-national, ridiculed it as he ridiculed the mysteries of the Faith; but with this consequence, that his denial made it impossible for him to write the history of his country, and compelled him throughout his work, but especially in his history ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... correspondent applied for a notice of Mons. Consort, said to have been a mystical impostor similar to the famous Cagliostro. I beg to renew ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... of a neophyte. Some portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long. These were based on the mystical or sacramental principle, and spoke of the various Economies or Dispensations of the Eternal. I understood these passages to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable: Scripture was an ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... striking contrast to Italian fourteenth-century painting, especially as illustrated by the frescoes of Giotto. The latter are characterized by an extreme simplicity of outline and by vivid narrative power. In Padua, for instance, Giotto tells us the story of Christ as he saw it in his mystical vision, without any concern for accessories or detail. He clings to essentials, to the figures of Christ and his apostles, while scorning any subordinate object, such as trees, architecture, costumes, etc., which are only represented in a rude fashion when necessary to the story. It is characteristic ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... a certain mode of embodying truth, common, in various degrees, to almost all, if not all, the writers of the New Testament. The attempt to define it thoroughly would require an essay. I will hazard but one suggestion towards it: A mystical mind is one which, having perceived that the highest expression of which the truth admits, lies in the symbolism of nature and the human customs that result from human necessities, prosecutes thought ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... thoughts which the wild prophecy of the monk had inspired. "To die early —without lineage—without lamentation! A heavy sentence, and well that it is not passed by a more competent judge. Yet the Saracens, who are accomplished in mystical knowledge, will often maintain that He, in whose eyes the wisdom of the sage is but as folly, inspires wisdom and prophecy into the seeming folly of the madman. Yonder hermit is said to read the stars, too, an art generally ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... advancing, etc., and led on by God's hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me." His touching verses, beginning "Lead, kindly Light," betray the same feeling. Gloom did encircle him, but in the midst of it there was a light, which he strove and craved to follow. Though mystical, in a certain sense, by temperament, he resolved, he tells us, to be guided, not by his imagination, but by his reason. He had once a strange emotional experience, but when it was over he wished that it should not unduly influence him. "I had to determine its logical value," ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... into. Such was the essence of her creed, the only creed she held, and it lay darkly in her heart, never expressed even to herself. But when she ran into the night to comfort the little fox, she was living up to her faith as few do; when she gathered flowers and lay in the sun, she was dwelling in a mystical atmosphere as vivid as that of the saints; when she recoiled from cruelty, she was trampling evil underfoot, perhaps more surely than those great divines who destroyed one another in their zeal ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... appearance, he was by no means deficient in intelligence. The courage displayed in his taming exercises (which he gravely attributed to his recent conversion), a solemn and mystical style of speech, and a hypocritical affectation of austerity, had given him a species of influence over the people he visited in his travels. Long before his conversion, as may well be supposed, Morok had been familiar with the habits of wild beasts. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... atmosphere of evil took Gilbert to no new thing but to a strengthening of old ties and a mystic renewal of them. The J.D.C. was idealised into a mystical city of friends: ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... melancholy cadence. Before and behind us abrupt craggy islands rose from the water, assuming every imaginable and unimaginable shape in the uncertain light; while on the right the eye ranged over the inky lake till it was lost in thick darkness. A thin, transparent night-fog added to the mystical appearance of the scene, upon which I looked with mingled feelings of wonder and awe. The only distinct sound that could be heard was the measured sound of the paddles, which the men plied in silence, as if unwilling to break the stillness of the night. Suddenly the guide uttered ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... of De Quincey's boyhood, however, was passed under influences so serious and mystical as these. He was early compelled to undergo what he is pleased to call his "introduction to the world of strife." His brother William, five years the senior of Thomas, appears to have been endowed with an imagination as remarkable as his own. "His ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... possible to recognise the idea which brings into unity the mass of his work—the spirit, as it were, that breathes into it its life. It may be found in the clear appreciation of the superstitious and mystical element in primitive man, and their close interweaving with the sexual life. As I understand Herr Bachofen, the sex-act was the means which first opened up ways to great heights, but also to ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... fortune with cards; while the queen gathered around her ministers of the gospel and pious scholars, the princess called to the prophets and fortune-tellers. While Elizabeth found comfort in reading the Holy Scriptures, Amelia found consolation in the mystical and enigmatical words of her sooth-sayers. While the queen translated sermons and pious hymns into French, Amelia wrote down carefully all the prophecies of her cards, her coffee-grounds, and the stars, and both ladies sent their ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... it, and does so with a clearness and fairness that have not been equaled since the days of Lessing—and then he drifts off in a new direction. The mutual opposition between Jews and Catholics becomes an opposition between the skeptical and the mystical temperaments. It is as if he wanted to say that all differences are unreal except those between individuals as such. And if that be his intention, he is right, I believe, and his play is the greater for bringing that thought home ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... to be profound or mystical or even scientific, but I have tried to present clearly, simply, and as nearly without bias as possible, an account of what I have seen and heard. The weight of evidence seems, at the moment, to be on the side of the biologists; but I am willing to reopen the case at any time, although I am, ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... autograph, because Walt gave it to me; rather I paid him for it, the proceeds, two dollars (I think that was the amount), going to some asylum in Camden. In addition, the "good grey poet" was kind enough to add a woodcut of himself as he appeared in the 1855 volume, "hankering, gross, mystical, nude," and another of his old mother, with her shrewd, kindly face. Walt is in his shirt-sleeves, a hand on his hip, the other in his pocket, his neck bare, the pose that of a nonchalant workman—though in actual practice he was always opposed to work of any sort; on his head is a slouch-hat, and ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... wave, Flowers grown as from thy grave, From the green fruitful grass in Maytime hot, Thy grave, where thou art not. Gather the grass and weave, in sacred sign Of the ancient earth divine, The holy heart of things, the seed of birth, The mystical warm earth. O thou her flower of flowers, with treble braid Be thy sweet head arrayed, In witness of her mighty motherhood Who bore thee and found thee good, Her fairest-born of children, on whose head Her green and white and red Are hope and light and ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... aureole, cloud-capped mountains, great gulfs of sea-water flowing up and reflecting as in a mirror the steep cliff's side; the straight white feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is torn, and the pure, strange soul continues its mystical exhortations. Then the radiant vision, a white glory, the last outburst and manifestation, the trumpets of the apocalypse, the colour of heaven, the closing of this stupendous allegory—Seraphita lying dead in the rays of the first sun of ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... circumstance had no observational utility. It could afford no indication of time, because a pole-star moves very slowly, and the pole-star of Cheops' day must have been in view through that tunnel for more than an hour at a time. But, apart from the mystical significance which an astrologer would attribute to such a relation, it may be shown that this slant tunnel is precisely what the astrologer would require in order to get the ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... knees, wrapping her form in a veil vivid as woven gold, with the emerald eyes of Dante's Beatrice, a skin of yellow whiteness, and that mould of figure in which undulating softness quenches majesty,—the mould of the mystical Lucretia." There are sea-sketches scattered among these leaves which no painter's brush will ever equal, and morning and twilight gain new splendor and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... vintage colours still opulent in decay, and not without its solemn touch of biblical symbolism. For differences, we detect in that primitive life, and under that Greek sky, a nimbler play of fancy, lightly and unsuspiciously investing all things with personal aspect and incident, and a certain mystical apprehension, now almost departed, of unseen powers beyond the material veil of things, corresponding to the exceptional vigour and variety of the Greek organisation. This peasant life lies, in unhistoric ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... receipt and seal was proportioned according to the amount paid—if you had a son or a daughter in Purgatory, it was wise to pay a large amount. The certificates were in Latin and certified in diffuse and mystical language many things, and they gave great ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... seemed to be accepted on either side, was known to the children, or, at all events, to the elder daughter Lucie, yet scarcely in her teens. There had been terrible scenes with this child, who evinced a mystical disposition, and was ever talking of becoming a nun when she grew up. Gaston, her brother, resembled his father; he was brutal in his ways, narrow-minded, supremely egotistical. Very different was the little girl ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... talismans and amulets were generally used as remedial agents. A mystical emblem, representing the inexpressible name of God, which was preserved at the Temple in Jerusalem, is found on many engraved gems. And two triangles, crossing each other, are said to have been the diagram of the Gnostics, with which many ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... humanity: "All things transitory but as symbols are sent." From the beginning man has divined that the things open to his senses are more than mere facts, having other and hidden meanings. The whole world was close to him as an infinite parable, a mystical and prophetic scroll the lexicon of which he set himself to find. Both he and his world were so made as to convey a sense of doubleness, of high truth hinted in humble, nearby things. No smallest thing but had its skyey aspect which, by his winged and quick-sighted fancy, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... whose tall arches spring Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing From Michael's white shoulder, is hewn and defaced By iconoclast axes in desperate waste, And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long, Cassandra-like, crooning its mystical song? Then the legends go with them,—even yet on the sea A wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree, And the sailor's night-watches are thrilled to the core 50 With the lineal ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... completely a priori, nay, even to mathematics, although this science cannot possess an object otherwhere than in Possible experience. I cannot follow him in this, and as little can I follow him in his mystical deduction of these ideas, or in his hypostatization of them; although, in truth, the elevated and exaggerated language which he employed in describing them is quite capable of an interpretation more subdued and more in accordance with fact and the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... the tendency towards what was at once practical and mystical which drew the large majority of the Farmers to the preaching of William Henry Channing, who was one of the most gifted preachers which America has produced. He was imaginative, mystical, and eloquent, liberal ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... pin to choose on the score of piety, between universal Deity and no Deity at all. The 'Shepherd' of a new philosophic flock should have known better than to attempt the reform of 'vulgar theology' by setting forth the mystical nonsense of 'vulgar' Pantheism. All falsehood is 'vulgar'; but the most 'vulgar' of falsehood is that which assumes the convenient garb of transcendentalism, with a view to throw dust in the eyes of 'vulgar' lookers-on. ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... are in Christ. And not only priests, but kings as well. And not only kings and priests, but prophets as well. All these blessed privileges are theirs, solely by virtue of their union and fellowship with Christ, who, in a mystical and spiritual sense, makes them to be partakers of His own priesthood, His own royalty, and His own ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... however, of love-making in his talk. His ideas were all of the most serious kind; some were even mystical and profound. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... "The Treasure of the Humble," is, undoubtedly, mystical. He does not argue, or define, or explain, he asserts, but even in that book and far more so in his second, "Wisdom and Destiny," it is real life which absorbs him as Alfred de Sutro his translator points out. ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... himself alone. This much is certain that when, in 1863-64, the subject of the Duchies cast its shadow on the path, it revealed its importance to Bismarck, as it had done fourteen years previously to Dahlmann, and stood forth distinctly as the initial syllable of the one mystical word, Unity. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... found in the unctuous juice of a certain fern an ingredient which he thought made his black ink still more glossy. His book was written all in symbols, and in the same spirit of symbolism he decorated it, causing wonderful foliage to creep about the text, and showing the blossom of certain mystical flowers, with emblems of strange creatures, caught and bound in rose thickets. All was dedicated to love and a lover's madness, and there were songs in it which haunted him with their lilt and refrain. When the book was finished it replaced the loose leaves as his constant companion ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... intellect. And he had an illumination but of the soul. And she saw God as merciless law, And he knew God as divine love. And she was a man, and he in part was a woman. He stood in a pulpit and preached the Christ, And the remission of sins by blood, And the literal fall of man through Adam, And the mystical and actual salvation of man ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... ring, and the necklace, Darken her eyelids with delicate art, Heighten the beauty, so youthful and fleckless, By the Gods favored, oh, Bridegroom, thou art! Twine in thy fingers her fingers so slender, Circle together the Mystical Fire, Bridegroom,—a whisper,—be gentle and tender, Choti ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... is one of the wildest and most striking of the whole series: there is a mystical effect and a passionate striving throughout the whole. The Scriptural struggle between Jacob and the angel, which is only dimly expressed in the words, seems all uttered in the music. I think it impressed my imagination ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... 2. Does mystical religion involve a man in conflict? Does ascetic religion? Which books him for more conflict with social evil—a life set on the Kingdom of God on earth, or a faith set on ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... bustling and festive air, securing its friends from less important quarters, engaging in animated discussions of the cases in hand, and exhibiting an astonishing amount of legal knowledge, using the most mystical terms in ordinary conversation, and secretly feeling ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... difficult than he anticipated, or whether in fact he could not bend his mind away from the broodings and wanderings of thought, divested from human interest, which he best loved, I cannot tell; but he proceeded slowly, and threw it aside for one of the most mystical of his poems, the "Triumph of Life", on which he was employed ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... keenly conscious of some mystical sympathy between himself and the lovely scenes through which he passed—conscious still more of it when the sun had set and the moon rose—dim and inscrutable—over the lonely way, and filled the narrow glen ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... with mystical green orbs. She could offer no help, but she served as a peg upon which Jean could hang her eloquence. She stretched herself luxuriously ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... "appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." Scott's genius was antipathetic to Dante's; and he was as incapable of taking a lasting imprint from his intense, austere, and mystical spirit, as from the nebulous gloom of the Ossianic poetry. Though conservative, he was not reactionary after the fashion of the German "throne-and-altar" romanticists, but remained always a good Church of England man and an obstinate opponent of Catholic emancipation.[48] "Creeds ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... fervid religious mind. He expressly says, "The doctrine I hold is a protest against mysticism since it professes to reconstruct the bridge (broken since Kant) between metaphysics and science." Yet, if by mysticism one means a certain appeal to the inner and profound life, then his philosophy is mystical— but so is all philosophy. We must beware of any attempts to run Bergson's thought into moulds for which it was never intended, and guard against its being strained and falsely interpreted in the interests of some special form of religious belief. Intuition ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... of semi-mystical writings and short stories. There is a great fertility of imagination about these, and they are composed in a very finished style. It is not improbable that I shall re-edit these, as they seem to me to be distinctly first-rate work. ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... destination, he paused on the sidewalk to light a cigarette, shielding it against the wind and drizzle with cupped hands while his mind made one last check on the surroundings. Then he strode quickly up the five steps to the double doors which were marked: The Society For Mystical And Metaphysical Research, Inc. ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... find Alexander Hamilton taken in charge by certain mystical kinsmen. Evidently he was well cared for, as he grew into a handsome, strong lad—small, to be sure, but finely formed. Where he learned to read, write and cipher we know not; he seems to have had one of those active, alert minds that can acquire knowledge ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... together they agreed on this verdict: That, while it certainly proved he could write as well in prose as in verse, people would not be attracted by it, and that it would be found lacking in human interest. His friend saw in it also too much of the Celtic tendency to the mystical and allegorical, as distinguished ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... heaved, and she began to wiggle her bottom. For some time she played with the hair which thickly covered my mount of Venus—twisting it around her fingers, she then gently divided the folding lips and endeavored to penetrate the interior of the mystical grotto—but she could not effect an entrance but was obliged to satisfy herself with titillating the inside of the lips. Suddenly flows of pleasure shot through my entire body—for her finger had come in contact with the peeping sentinel that guarded the abode of bliss, an article ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... of Greece and Rome fail to substantiate the reality of an immortal existence; other philosophical systems, as well the mystical conceptions of Eastern nations, as the metaphysical speculations of modern Europe, have equally failed to arrive at certainty respecting this verity. Now, it will be found, I think, to be established by the argument of ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... on him the substance of man and was united with humanity as a whole, according to the Pauline interpretation, which was generally accepted by our race. The divine nature was continually imparted to man, the body and members in which the divine spirit was incarnated, since the Church or mystical community of Christians was the temple of God. Through this lively sense of the divine incarnation, the Christian avatar with which the race had been acquainted under other forms, God was no longer essentially ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... Still mystical, still enigma, still woman, she would have it that the stars, the mountains—-the witnesses—and not ourselves, made the wedding. I left it so, sure of nothing so much as that, whatever her way of thought might be, it was ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... How calm and still it seemed! Had he wandered there, years before, with a beating heart, in search of his destiny, merely to find it at last after the humiliation of a public scandal? Had his idyllic, almost mystical romance, with all its aspirations, grace, and unspeakable strength, been given to him just to be called from the house-tops and discussed in the streets? Was this the end of all sublime ideals? Did every delicate, secret sentiment have to endure, soon or late, the ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... exhibition, which was of the nature of the Tussaud Museum or a masquerade, positively frightened Amedee. He had recently been to his first communion, and was still burning with the mystical fever, but so much ugliness offended his already fastidious taste and threw him ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object." "It must be allowed," says Dr. Mansel,[87-2] "that it is not through reasoning that men obtain their first intimation of their relation to a deity." In writers and preachers of the semi-mystical school, which embraces most of the ardent revivalists of the day, we constantly hear the "feeling of dependence" quoted as the radical element of religious thought.[87-3] In America Theodore Parker, and in Germany Schleiermacher, were brilliant ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... the Protestants. Her views of the fundamental doctrine of justification by faith and the paramount authority of the Holy Scriptures were those for which many a Protestant martyr had laid down his life. Even on the question of the Lord's Supper, her opinions, if mystical and somewhat vague, were certainly far removed from the dogmas of the Roman Church. She condemned, it is true, the extreme to which the "Sacramentarians" went, but it was difficult to see precisely wherein the modified mass ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... has gone about the world, this Efflorescence, has of course laid hold of that. I know that when you say that the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the world is set free for love-making. Down there,—under the clouds, the lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into a luminous haze of love—sexual love.... I don't think you are right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and you see life—ardently—with the eyes of ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... in these, she wore a species of sightly handkerchief like a turban upon her head and about her person those mystical swathings in which old ladies of the African race delight. But she most pleasured our sense of beauty and moral fitness when, after the last pan was washed and the last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and, taking her stand at the kitchen door, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... something mystical in the exact hour of midnight. The rich note startles Hardin. Cold, haughty, crafty, and able, his devotion to the South is that of the highest moral courage. It is not the exultation which culminates rashly on the battle-field. These ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... They swept him to the rhythm of some haunting music back to the days when his blood had run strong—back to the beauty of the hills at twenty when he had not felt big enough by himself to absorb their full marvel. In a dim mystical way he had realized even then that the keenest edge of their meaning was escaping him. The blue sky above the trees had seemed like the laughing eyes of a woman and the rustle of leaves like the whisper of her skirt. He had laughed back boldly ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Jeanie, always with her two arms embracing mine in a pretty way she had. I was obliged to go at last, but what could I say? I could only kiss him, and tell him to keep still,—that I was doing all I could. There is something mystical about the patience of a child. "It will come all right, won't it, father?" he said. "God grant it may! I hope so, Roland." "Oh, yes, it will come all right." Perhaps he understood that in the midst of my anxiety I could not stay with him as I should have done otherwise. But the ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... of poetry, enjoying high esteem and wide circulation, while unhappily their character to me was utterly offensive. I shall only mention Heinse's Ardinghello and Schiller's Robbers. The first I hated for its having undertaken to exhibit sensuality and mystical abstruseness, ennobled and supported by creative art: the last, because in it, the very paradoxes moral and dramatic, from which I was struggling to get liberated, had been laid hold of by a powerful though an immature genius, and poured in a boundless ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... The name of one of the mystical weapons the command over which was given by Visvamitra to Rama, as related ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... speculations and mystical reveries of the ancients are still law in a great part of the philosophic world; and being adopted by modern theology, it is heresy to abandon them. They tell us "of aerial beings, of spirits, angels, demons, genii," and other phantoms, which are the ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... up his head with: "Ha!—O'Hara"; announced his immediate departure with only a secretary and two lords-in-waiting, left a mystical note for Loveday, saying that he had decided to go alone in quest of Margaret, and went almost secretly, only the salute informing the Boodah as he steamed away. In reality he was in haste to face O'Hara, and the yacht's bows turned, not eastward, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... the religion of their times; and are not only definitive in themselves, but give us the means of completing those parts of it which are not found in them. Considered, then, as a living body, the primitive Christian community was distinguished by its high sacerdotal, ceremonial, mystical character. Which among modern religious bodies was it like? Was it like the Wesleyans? was it like the Society of Friends? was it like the Scotch Kirk? was it like any Protestant denomination at all? Fancy any model Protestant of this day in a state of things so different ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... matters, the quiet, calm figure of Sadie Waters has a peculiar interest and charm generated by her tranquil and persistent pursuit of an ideal—an ideal she attained in her later works, an ideal of the highest mental order, mystical and human, and so far removed from the tendencies of our time that one might truthfully say, it stands alone. Her talents were manifold. She was endowed with the best of artistic qualities. She cultivated them diligently, and ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... each other, and corresponding with the more massive columns that sustained the balcony. At the foot of these latter, various creeping plants had taken root. A broad-leafed vine pushed its knotty branches and curled tendrils up to the very roof of the dwelling, and a passion-flower displayed its mystical purple blossoms nearly at as great a height; while the small white stars of the jasmine glittered among its narrow dark-green leaves, and every passing breeze wafted the scent of the honeysuckle and clematis through the open windows, in puffs of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... which the air of Geneva has been steeped since the days of Calvin. The religious teaching which a Genevese lad undergoes prior to his admission to full church membership, made a deep impression on him, and certain mystical elements of character, which remained strong in him to the end, showed themselves very early. At the college or public school of Geneva, and at the academie, he would seem to have done only moderately ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... religion as of ethics. If morals are strengthened and made clear, and Personal Responsibility as Conscience, is recognized and accepted, the Vicarious Atonement will have to go, and Theologians will have to change their mystical and miraculous interpretations from Vicarious Atonement to personal at-one-ment ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... the sounds of life far up in light above her. And descent was exquisite, easy and natural, and, indeed, inevitable. Nothing called her from below. For where she was going there were no voices. Yet she felt that at last there would be something to receive her; mystical stillness, mystical peace. ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... of awe possessed him. He was Celtic; he had been fed on the supernatural when he was a child; he had had strange, indefinable experiences or hallucinations in the days when he lived at Castlegarry, and all his life he had been a friend of the mystical. It is hard to tell what he thought as he stood there and peered into the darkness of the other room-the living-room of the house. He was in a state of trance, almost, a victim of the night. But as he closed the door softly the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his remarks the acutest worldly wisdom I had ever heard,—his veiled method of treating my case the shrewdest, delicatest, and most consoling, most inspiring. It had something of the mystical power of the Oracles,—the power which belongs to anonymous writing. Had he disposed of my apparent rival, and exalted me to the level of a princely family, in open speech, he would have conveyed no balm to me—I should have classed it as one confident man's opinion. Disguised and vague, but emphatic, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ecclesiastical or divine, since their will was united to God's will; and that they need make no effort to resist carnal thoughts or desires, as these came from the devil and could not possibly stain the soul. Such, however, was not the teaching of the great Spanish authorities on mystical theology, Saint Teresa, Saint John of the Cross, and Louis of Granada, whose works on spiritual perfection and on the ways that lead to it have never been surpassed. But side by side with this school of thought, another and less orthodox form of mysticism manifested itself in Spain. Many of the ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... no reason extant in the universe why they should be doubted, the beliefs are true in the only sense in which anything can be true anyhow: they are practically and concretely true, namely. True in the mystical mongrel sense of an Identitatsphilosophie they need not be; nor is there any intelligible reason why they ever need be true otherwise than verifiably and practically. It is reality's part to possess its own existence; it is thought's ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James |
