"Rapture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore. There is society where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... cannot imagine the luxury of enjoyment I have experienced! The mysterious rapture of creation!—in, general outlines, as I said. Applause, gratitude, eulogies, crowns of laurel!—all these I have culled with full hands trembling with joy. In my secret ecstasies I have steeped myself in a ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... chill and empty playhouse, upon the narrow stage where, sitting in the September sunshine, she had asked of Haward her last favor, she now learned to speak for those sisters of her spirit, those dead women who through rapture, agony, and madness had sunk to their long rest, had given their hands to death and lain down in a common inn. To Audrey they were real; she was free of their company. The shadows were the people who lived and were happy; who night ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... at the Capitol! Oh, what a spell comes o'er me, As I view the gorgeous pageantry that passeth now before me; But I would I knew the meaning of the tears which like a stream In pearly drops are shining through the rapture of her dream. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... discern it, he becomes aware of the approach of that long-invoked idea. A mingled joy and terror warn him that before another day, another hour have passed, the inspiration shall have crossed the threshold of his soul and flooded it with its rapture. All day I had felt the need of isolation and quiet, and at nightfall I went for a row on the most solitary part of the lagoon. All things seemed to tell that I was going to meet my inspiration, and I awaited its coming as a ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life.' There, surely, is the poem of London, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover's catalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, he could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death), 'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter not one known one were remaining.' ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... She had lived for her lover and herself. To him and to her (it had seemed) this warm, transitory life belonged; a fleeting space of time, a lodge leased to bliss. . . . Now she fronted the truth, that between the selfish rapture of lovers Heaven slips a child, smiling at the rapture, provident for the race. Now she read the secret of woman's nesting instinct; the underlying wisdom stirring the root of it, awaking passion not to satisfy passion, but that the world may go on and on to its ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Charles, throwing himself into his arms with rapture, and kissing him in the Italian fashion, which Dick did not half like, "you are, indeed, worthy of your reputation; and these are the celebrated Seven-league Boots? Harry," he cried to his brother, "come here at once and let me present ...
— Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia - being the adventures of Prince Prigio's son • Andrew Lang
... a little rapture of George Richmond himself on those fair slopes of sunny sward, ending in a vision of Tobit and his dog—no less—led up there by the helpful angel. (I have always wondered, by the way, whether that blessed dog minded what the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... study is on the second floor, A wee blind dog barks at me as I enter through the door; The Cerberus would fain begrudge what sights it cannot see, The rapture of that visual feast it cannot share with me; A miniature edition this—this most absurd of hounds— A genuine unique, I'm sure, and ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... say too, that of all hearts Thine is the most loving, and so thou wilt know how it is that, in spite of all my misery, it still seems to me that I am a happy woman. The very breath of a God must be rapture, and that Thou too must have learned when they tortured and mocked Thee, for Thou halt suffered out of love. They say, that Thou wast wholly pure and perfectly sinless. Now I—I have committed many follies, but not a sin—a real sin—no, indeed, I have not; and Thou ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that there was no more of the old exultation about his heart that had formed so large a part of his former courtship; there were no extravagances, no quickened pulses—rapture's warmth had yielded to the mildest of after-glows; but there was no reason that it should not prove as satisfactory in the long run. It is an open question whether the doctor, popular though he undoubtedly was, would have been considered an eligible suitor from the maternal point ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... times no! That man in love?... That man was loathsome with his bilious, yellow face, his nervous, cat-like movements, crowing with conceit... loathsome! No, not in such words would Kister have uttered to a devoted friend the secret of his love.... In overflowing happiness, in dumb rapture, with bright, blissful tears in his eyes would he have flung himself on ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... later, refreshed and invigorated by a most delectable lunch, eaten in the beautiful dining-room of the hotel, our travelers were ready for the last stage of the preparatory journey. Nothing remained now but the short ride to the wharf and then—the rapture of embarking on the wonderful "Mauretania," which had hitherto been but a magic name to them, breathing of romance and wonder. Then a final farewell to their friends, and before them stretched the great European continent, holding ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... unconsciously transfer its durability as well as its splendour to ourselves. So newly found we cannot think of parting with it yet, or at least put off that consideration sine die. Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night. We know our existence only by ourselves, and confound our knowledge with the objects of it. We and nature are therefore one. Otherwise the illusion, the 'feast of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... overcome the first giddy rapture of returning life, and was sure that I was steady on my feet, I dared to dally with the subject. I asked if bad news had come for Freule Menela, expressed devout relief that it had not, and piped regret at being deprived of ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... wonderful rapture came into Douglas' soul as he listened to this candid confession. So Ben was nothing to Nell. It was almost too good to be true. ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... the cenotaph in which the roses and rapture of our youth lie entombed in one red burial blent, we see the shimmering strands of St. Martin's Summer drawn athwart the happenless days of Autumn, with the dewdrops of cosmic unction sparkling in the rays of a sunshine never yet seen on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... dying Christian, can scarcely help believing that the beginning of a blissful eternity has impressed itself upon the rapt features, actually breaking through the shackles of time before the prisoner was emancipated from its fetters. And those brief intervals of rapture which are sometimes experienced in the midst of earnest and ardent devotion—what are they but eternity thus manifesting itself through time in the soul? Those who have been rescued from the very jaws of death, frequently tell us that the moment preceding insensibility ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... word. At last, as the handsome prince was drawing his last breath, the lovely fairy sprang from his sword and brought the dead to life with her warm kisses, Fritz was in an ecstasy of excitement, and interrupted Charles by an outcry of rapture. ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... excitement, and filled with such rapture as a bird may feel when it first soars from its narrow nest high up into the ether she cried ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... ah! my dream is broken by a step upon the stair, And the door is softly opened, and—my wife is standing there; Yet with eagerness and rapture all my visions I resign To greet the living presence of that old ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... that shimmered and glistened like burnished silver in the rays of the setting sun. How proudly and serenely it rode above their heads as if conscious of its own unparalleled beauty, and its blessed mission in this present instance. She gazed upon it a few moments in speechless rapture, her poor emaciated ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... world, and find in Thy Providence an unfailing defense and support. Whether she live, let her live to Thee; or whether she die, let her die to Thee. And, at the great day of account, may she and her parents meet each other with rapture and rejoice together in Thy redeeming love, through Jesus Christ, forever and ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... complete—I heard things, or felt things, or smelled things, and was satisfied—and yet there was another medium of knowledge entirely unknown to me, and until then unnecessary. How eagerly I looked forward to the time when I should learn to see and my heart was filled with childish rapture on the day when I entered the school for the blind at Berkeley. My first question, on meeting the Superintendent, was, "are you going to teach me to see?" How well he performed this task, how wisely he guided my childish feet, how carefully he developed my eager ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... tongue, and I will cut off his eyelids with little scissors, and set him facing the sun. Caballero, you would love me; I have a gentle spirit. I am a pleasant companion." He rose and squeezed round the table. "Listen"—his eyes lit up with rapture—"you shall hear me. It is divine—ah, it is very ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... of our society. There they stand, like the majestic statues that line the entrance to an eternal pyramid. And when I look upon one statue, and another, and another, and contemplate the colossal greatness of their proportions, as Canova gazed with rapture upon the sun-god of the Vatican, I envy not the man whose heart expands not with the sense of a new nobility, and whose eye kindles not with the heart's enthusiasm, as he thinks that he too is numbered among that glorious company,—that he too is ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Westmore sitting alone in his little room, reading by the shaded lamp. He glanced quickly up and was surprised to see Stephen standing by Nellie's side. He saw the look of rapture upon their faces, and read at once the meaning of it all, and into his own weary face came a light which Nellie had not seen in many a day. She tried to speak, but words failed, and moving quickly forward she threw ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... of his book; audaciously challenges both men and angels to imitate the beauties of a single page; and presumes to assert that God alone could dictate this incomparable performance. [92] This argument is most powerfully addressed to a devout Arabian, whose mind is attuned to faith and rapture; whose ear is delighted by the music of sounds; and whose ignorance is incapable of comparing the productions of human genius. [93] The harmony and copiousness of style will not reach, in a version, the European infidel: he will peruse with impatience the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... disappointed in her mental qualities, but he laid all that to the want of education, and the blame upon those who brought her up. He delighted in the thought of instructing and cultivating her mind himself, and dwelt with rapture on the prospect of possessing such a creature, formed exactly to his own taste, and according to his own rules of right. The devoted lover indulged himself, in these pleasing expectations during several interviews that he had with his idol, ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... ungrateful, and yet, is not thy whole life a series of ingratitude, and to whom?—to thy Maker. Has He not endowed thee with a goodly and healthy form; and senses which enable thee to enjoy the delights of His beautiful universe—the work of His hands? Canst thou not enjoy, even to rapture, the brightness of the sun, the perfume of the meads, and the song of the dear birds which inhabit among the trees? Yes, thou canst; for I have seen thee, and observed thee doing so. Yet, during the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... myself, leaning forth from my chamber window into a fragrant summer night radiant with an orbed moon. But for once I was heedless of the ethereal beauty of the scene before me and felt none of that poetic rapture that would otherwise undoubtedly have inspired me, since my vision was turned inwards rather than out and my customary serenity ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... delight, upon hearing this account: and the person who gave it me happening to understand the Balnibarbian language, which I spoke very well, I could not forbear breaking out into expressions, perhaps a little too extravagant. I cried out, as in a rapture, "Happy nation, where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal! Happy people, who enjoy so many living examples of ancient virtue, and have masters ready to instruct them in the wisdom of all former ages! but happiest, beyond all comparison, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... objection. There could be only the most proper alacrity, a most obliging compliance for public view; and smiles reined in and spirits dancing in private rapture. In half a minute Charles was at the bottom of Union Street again, and the other two proceeding together: and soon words enough had passed between them to decide their direction towards the comparatively quiet and retired gravel walk, where the power of conversation would make ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... it is!" murmured the lady after a brief still appreciation. "Delightfully bright. As though it would shine even if the sun didn't." And she abandoned herself to the rapture of seeing a house and garden that were for once better even than the agent's superlatives. And within her grasp if ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... like so many children of the cultured classes, with the pagan and fairy-tales of nature, she forgot them all the moment she was really by herself with earth and sky. In their breadth, their soft and stirring continuity, they rejected bookish fancy, and woke in her rapture and yearning, a sort of long delight, a never-appeased hunger. Crouching, hands round knees, she turned her face to get the warmth of the sun, and see the white clouds go slowly by, and catch all the songs that the birds sang. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... said Joe, breaking in upon Rob's contemplative fit of rapture as he gazed with hungry eyes ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... the bliss of completest union is attained anguish and rapture in exquisite extremes will be experienced. For the soul of each will be exposed in all its quivering sensitiveness, and any but the most delicate touch will be a torture to it. Fortitude of the firmest will be required to bear the wounds which must ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... showing my unhappiness, and you, who have shared all my sorrows, alone can understand my rapture at the faintest ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... all the homage of the bees that wing Laden with honey through the clover days Wearies the tiny queen with heavy tune! Not all the rapture of the birds that fling Love melodies adrift through leafy ways Burdens the mothers on ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... light from the window behind him, and though Coryndon could not see his face, he knew that it was lighted with a great rapture of self-denial and ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... Her rapture instructed me. I perceived that the old Homestead had not yet served its purpose. So far as my father was concerned it was a story told, a drama almost ended, but as the undivided home of my young wife it developed new meaning. Another soul was coming into being; another tenant ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... oh Nanna Awaken Balder from his dream of rapture; Let him enjoy it; let him read his destiny, His hope, his life, ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... paid to Mr. Desmond Mulligan. Political enthusiasm is his forte. He lives and writes in a rapture. He is, of course, a member of an inn of court, and greatly addicted to after-dinner speaking as a preparation for the bar, where as a young man of genius he hopes one day to shine. He is almost the only man ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mountains of Savoy. I could not help envying the feelings of the Swiss who, after long absence from their native land, first see the Alps from this road. If to the emotions with which I then looked on them were added the passionate love of home and country which a long absence creates, such excess of rapture would be almost too great ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... courage, and I spoke to her of the glories of the heavenly world which would soon break upon her. She sang snatches of sweet songs, following which I said but little. When I addressed her, 'My dear daughter, you will soon rejoin your noble mother,' she answered, 'Oh, yes, and what rapture will I enjoy!' I fell down at her bedside, and again committed her soul to the almighty and enduring care of God. Then just before I went to my lecture I went to see her again: I asked her if she still remembered the hymn, 'Thou art mine, because I hold thee;' when she said, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... proceeded to disclose to her the plan suggested by my friend, and to explain all the consequences that would flow from it. I need not say that she assented to the scheme. She was all rapture and gratitude. Preparations for departure were easily and speedily made. I hired a chaise of a neighbouring farmer, and, according to my promise, by noon the same day, delivered the timid and bashful girl into the arms of her ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... one day to me Some blessed Saint will come and say, 'All hail, beloved; but for thee My soul to death had fallen a prey'; And oh! what rapture in the thought, One soul to glory to ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... not admire much. He preferred the Pastor Fido, of which, says Amicus, he "spoke with rapture," and the Eclogues of Virgil. Amicus put in a word in favour of the poet of his own country, but Smith would not yield a point. "It is the duty of a poet," he said, "to write like a gentleman. I dislike that homely style which some think fit to call the language of nature and simplicity and ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Antonio was all Rapture with the Thoughts of the approaching Day; which tho' it brought Don Henrique and his dear Ardelia to him, about five o'Clock in the Evening, yet at the same Time brought his last and greatest Misfortune. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... are of this kind: out-births at once of rapture and of charity. Written in the popular Hindi, not in the literary tongue, they were deliberately addressed—like the vernacular poetry of Jacopone da Tod and Richard Rolle—to the people rather ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... craftsman as the great John Sebastian in his. The difference between the two is the difference of their ages and races, not the difference of their artistry. For few composers can match with their own Debussy's perfection of taste, his fineness of sensibility, his poetic rapture and profound awareness of beauty. Few have been more graciously rounded and balanced than he, have been, like him, so fine that nothing which they could do could be tasteless and insignificant and without grace. Few musicians ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... bent his course for home, where he arrived after three tedious days' journey along an Indian path, fording streams, and crossing hills and ravines, and was once more in the bosom of his family. All were glad to see him, and listened with rapture to the glowing account he gave of a country so wild and beautiful, until Mayall reached the story of the proposed marriage of his young son with the daughter of an Indian chief. The young man was of the Caucasian race, young and sprightly. He declared that ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... he produced. He was an enthusiast in music, and when he played he seemed to be inspired. Almost invariably his pipe was in his mouth when seated at the instrument, and I supposed his two joys afforded him a double rapture. I used to think, if it had been my case, I could have dispensed with the pipe, for it seemed like adding gall ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... Wake from the dream of rapture to a reality far more rapturous, for the time is at hand, the hour has come, heralded by the shadow which falls over the floor as Peterkin's burly figure crosses the threshold and ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... to contrast this state of religious rapture with some of our modern phases of mind in parallel circumstances. You see that the promise of Jeremiah's, "Thou shalt go forth in the dances of them that make merry," is immediately followed by this, "Thou shalt yet plant vines upon the mountains ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... unsteadily on, without feeling that they were walking; without feeling anything but that long, grave, mutual gaze which has the solemnity belonging to all deep human passion. The hovering thought that they must and would renounce each other made this moment of mute confession more intense in its rapture. ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... room—you will not, again, because of the mocking sensuality which will keep you rooted where you stand; again, you ought to stuff your ears against the throbbing of the drum—but that will you not do because of the words of love which fall, seemingly reft from the dancer's lips in the rapture of his movements. It is the last word in sensual ecstasy, and should be prohibited for public exhibition to Europeans, yet it is quite impossible to point at any one movement and label it as the cause of the ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... much, and reduced the circle of our friendship to three or four families, who were content to know our sympathies without exacting constant expression of them. So we learned to depend mainly upon passing Americans for our society; we hailed with rapture the arrival of a gondola distinguished by the easy hats of our countrymen and the pretty faces and pretty dresses of our countrywomen. It was in the days of our war; and talking together over its events, we felt a brotherhood with ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... was evident even on the faces of those maidens from Kos who were arranging the folds of his toga; and one of whom, whose name was Eunice, loving him in secret, looked him in the eyes with submission and rapture. But he did not even notice this; and, smiling at Vinicius, he quoted in answer an expression of Seneca about woman,—Animal impudens, etc. And then, placing an arm on the shoulders of his nephew, he conducted him to ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... shy. One day she ran out in the rain to meet Katya, and made her frock muddy; her father saw her, and called her a slut and a peasant-wench. She grew hot all over, and there was something of terror and rapture in her heart Katya often sang some half-brutal soldier's song. Elena learnt this song from her.... Anna Vassilyevna overheard her singing ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... for an ambulance to convey the pair to hospital, when the learned savant opened his eyes and gazed vacantly around him. For an instant he seemed to forget how he had come there, but next moment he astonished his audience by waving his skinny arms above his head and crying out in a voice of rapture, "Gott sei gedanket! I am myself again. I feel I am!" Nor was the amazement lessened when the student, springing to his feet, burst into the same cry, and the two performed a sort of pas de joie in the middle of ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tall soldier, with a bark that choked in his throat from sheer rapture. He flung himself on the ground and writhed in a frenzy of welcome. He tried to climb the soldier's khaki legs and slipped down and groveled in an ecstasy that seemed as if it must tear his little body in pieces. He licked his boots and when the lieutenant had, with laughter ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... beautiful remains of antiquity, he enjoyed the unrivalled landscape which surrounds that city, so much dignified by the noble works of ancient days, that every hill is classical, the very trees have a poetic air, and everything combines to excite in the soul a kind of dreaming rapture from which it would not be awakened, and which those who have not ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... to Hughie's keen enjoyment of the ride. Billy Jack's bays were always in the finest of fettle, and pulled hard on the lines, and were rarely allowed the rapture of a gallop. But when the swamp was passed and the road came to the more open butternut ridge, Billy Jack shook the lines over their backs and let them out. Their response was superb to witness, and brought Hughie ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... gay and animated. There were delighted welcomings of parents, enthusiastic meetings between old school chums, and a hearty greeting to all visitors. Mrs. Stanton and Oswald had driven in a taxi from Elwyn Bay, and were received with rapture by Ulyth. ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... service. He had done more things than I, and earned more pence, though there were chances for cleverness I thought he sometimes missed. I could only however that evening declare to him that he never missed one for kindness. There was almost rapture in hearing it proposed to me to prepare for The Middle, the organ of our lucubrations, so called from the position in the week of its day of appearance, an article for which he had made himself responsible and of which, tied up with a stout string, he laid on my ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... focus of the subject treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope, transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality, and such wearing iteration, as at length ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the mortar all round. You understand, of course, that during the day I replaced everything in its position, and that the warder was never permitted to see a speck upon the floor. At the end of three weeks I had separated the stone, and had the rapture of drawing it through, and seeing a hole left with ten stars shining through it, where there had been but four before. All was ready for us now, and I had replaced the stone, smearing the edges of it round with ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shines!" cried Jason in a rapture. "It has surely been dipped in the richest gold of sunset. Let me hasten onward and ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... music sweet Their hearts and ears did greet, As never was by mortal finger strook, Divinely-warbled voice Answering the stringed noise, As all their souls in blissful rapture took: The Air, such pleasure loth to lose, With thousand echoes ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... to the joking, and to the burnt pancakes, in order that she herself might put her hand to the work. Under her eye all went well; the pancakes turned out excellently. Jacobi besought one from her own hand, as wages for his work; graciously obtained it, and then swallowed the hot gift with such rapture that it certainly must have burnt him inwardly, had it not been for another species of warmth (which we consider very probable)—a certain well-known spiritual fire, which counteracted the material burning, and made it harmless. Have we not here, in all simplicity, suggested ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Christmas house-party. On the evening before had occurred the Christmas dance, and Richard had led the festivities, with his bride-elect at his side. It had been a glorious merry-making and his pulses had thrilled wildly to the rapture of it. But to-day—to-day ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... wheels, what thunder, scare, And stun the reader with the din of war! With fear my spirits and my blood retire, To see the seraphs sunk in clouds of fire; But when, with eager steps, from hence I rise, And view the first gay scenes of Paradise, What tongue, what words of rapture, can express A vision so profuse of pleasantness! Oh, had the poet ne'er profaned his pen, 80 To varnish o'er the guilt of faithless men, His other works might have deserved applause; But now the language can't support the cause; While the clean current, though serene and bright, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... time you see in me a sort of scientific rapture, and many superficial judges would regard me as a man devoid of feeling. I have to announce a discovery to-morrow to the College of Medicine, for I am studying a disease that had disappeared—a mortal disease for ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... entrance, with handsomely carved columns supporting the nearly perfect roof, and the wonder was that the brigands had not utilised it for a dwelling or store. But there it was, empty, and the professor gazed around it with rapture. ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... my darling!" he said, after the rapture of that first moment, "I am not worthy, and the sacrifice on your side is too great. I had no right ever to ask you to marry me. What will the world say of me? I could wish ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... a question of geography; the Englishman expresses rapture by the phrase "not half-bad" where the foreigner piles superlative on superlative of gush. It is our quality and our defect that we have a strange shyness, which prevents the exhibition of emotion for fear of ridicule. On our stage, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... darkness darkening still; Folly for wisdom, guilt for innocence; Anguish for rapture, and for ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... production, strangely enough, consisted of two plays by his closest friend, Barrie. This double bill was "The New Word," a fireside scene, which was followed by "Rosy Rapture." ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... surely the very rapture of ambition! and those who have heard Mrs. Siddons pronounce the word hereafter, cannot forget the look, the tone, which seemed to give her auditors a glimpse of that awful future, which she, in her prophetic fury, beholds ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... brought many fine things to England. But the wicked fairy was there with her gift: Pythagoras and Plato. We were not like the Italians who, after the first rapture of discovery was over, soon outgrew these distracted dialectics; we stuck fast in them. Hence our Platonic touch: our demi-vierge attitude in matters of the mind, our academic horror of clean thinking. How Plato hated a fact! He could find ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... been as eager as Gabriella to obliterate all memory of the difference between them, though, of course, after his yielding that supreme point she had felt that she must give up everything else—and the giving up had been rapture. He had shown not the faintest disposition to crow over her when at last, after consulting Mrs. Carr, she had told him that her mother really preferred to stay with Jane until summer, though he had remarked with evident relief: "Then we'll put off looking for an apartment. It's easier ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... its intention was as thickly evident as the rice powder on the black sweating faces of the prostitutes. Hypocrisy was peculiarly the vice of civilization. His necessity was an escape from either fate—the defilement of a pandering to the flesh and the waste of a negation with neither courage nor rapture. Damn it, couldn't he be freed from one without falling into the other? Lee told himself that it must be possible to leave permanently the fenced roads of Eastlake for the high hills; it wasn't necessary to go down ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... generosity would be the measure of the greatness of my crime. My eyes, always uneasy, would be for ever reading an invisible condemnation. My heart would be full of confused and struggling memories; marriage can never move me to the cruel rapture, the mortal delirium of passion. I should kill my husband by my coldness, by comparisons which he would guess, though hidden in the depths of my conscience. Oh! on the day when I should read a trace of involuntary, even of suppressed reproach in a furrow on his brow, in a saddened ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... Sir Jonas; which is satisfactory to know. For of the Carrousel kind, or of the Royal-Mummery kind in general, there has been, for graceful arrangement, for magnificence regardless of expense,—inviting your amiable Lord Malton, and the idlers of all Countries, and awakening the rapture of Gazetteers,—nothing like it since Louis the Grand's time. Nothing,—except perhaps that Camp of Muhlberg or Radowitz, where we once were. Done, this one, not at the King's expense alone, but at other people's chiefly: ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... the track. Mid the shouts and yells of the excited multitude he passed Lady Thorn, overtook Dexter and shot ahead of him! But he cannot stand that tremendous pace, and down goes Creeping Peter on his knees. Every man who had bet against him set up a howl of rapture, but Mr. P. never relaxed a muscle, and on went Creeping Peter, just as fast as ever, his horny bones dashing away the sand and gravel like spray from the cut-water of a scudding yacht, and, amid the wildest clamor, he shot past ...
— Punchinello Vol. 2, No. 28, October 8, 1870 • Various
... enchantin', o' you I 'm now wearie, An' thou, ance dear haunt, 'neath the aul' thornie tree, Where in rapture I sat an' dawtit fause Mary, Fareweel! ye 'll never be seen mair by me. Awa' as a pilgrim, far distant I 'll wander, 'Mang faces unkent, till the day that I dee. Ye shepherds, adieu! but tell Mary to ponder, To think on her vows, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... thee, Land of the noble, free, Thy name I love; I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills; My heart with rapture thrills Like ...
— The Good Old Songs We Used to Sing, '61 to '65 • Osbourne H. Oldroyd
... very breath of my nostrils'; and he fell upon his official work greedily, not so much in the spirit of a conscientious labourer as with the rapture of a man who has at last obtained the chance of giving full sway to his strongest desires. The task before him surpassed his expectations. His functions, he says, are of more importance than those ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... dear brother!' She kissed his hand in a little rapture. 'The dear girls will be dreadfully disappointed,' added Rosa, laughing, with the dewdrops glistening in her bright eyes. 'They have looked forward ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... delicious cell!' she exclaimed, 'but still I should feel it a prison, if I had to spend six weeks in the year in it. I never stay more than six weeks anywhere out of London; and I always find six weeks more than enough. The first fortnight is rapture, the third and fourth weeks are calm content, the fifth is weariness, the sixth a fever to be gone. I once tried a seventh week at Pontresina, and I hated the place so intensely that I dared not go back there for the next three years. But now tell me. Diana, have you really performed suttee, have ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... dispense with the duties of every-day life, with mercy, truth, industry, generosity, self-control. The unworthy man who is excluded from the kingdom is not the man of blunt, homely feeling, incapable of ecstatic rapture and exalted emotion, but the man who locks up for himself the gold God gave him for the general good, who shuts his ear to the cry of the poor, who entrenches his heart behind a cold inhumanity, who permits the naked to shiver unclothed, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... groaned under the pressure of this spiritual panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip. Another figure fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners' bench rose a chant of terror and rapture: ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... was possible for no other human being, and it is one of the traditional sayings of our Lord: "He that is near Me is near fire." And fire burns as well as warms and lights. She is wonderful, the Virgin of Nazareth, in this moment when she becomes Mother of God: and we share in the rapture of the moment when in the fulness of her joy she hardly notices S. Gabriel's departure: but we feel, too, a great pity for her as we think of the coming days. So we kneel to her who is our Mother, as well as Mother of God, and say our Ave, ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... company and to their silence. Far beyond the common human horror of dead humanity, if one of them had all at once nodded to him and spoken to him he would have started with delight and listened with rapture. But they were all still dead, and they neither spoke or moved a finger. A thought that had more hope in it than any which had passed through his brain for many years now occupied and absorbed him. A heavy book lay open on the table by his side, and from time to time he glanced ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... holy rapture wanted they to praise Their Maker in fit strains, pronounced or sung Unmeditated, such prompt eloquence Flowed from their lips, in prose or numerous verse, More tuneable, than needed lute or harp ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... who listened memory drew aside the curtains of twenty years. He beheld again the sweet-faced wife glorified with the blessed halo of motherhood. He thrilled at the remembrance of her intense rapture as she clasped her babe in moments of vivid ecstasy, or held it tenderly in her arms as she sang the slumber song. The man was lost in revery—the sweet voice of the mother had suddenly grown weak and drifted ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... sank upon one knee, and so true was his eye, and so firm his hand, that the heart of the savage was cloven by the spear. The youth rose to his feet, dizzy from the shock, and, springing nimbly upon the grim body of his prostrate victim, his fine form swelling with the rapture of his recent triumph, brought his horn to his lips, and again its notes went ringing merrily ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... accidents of the dull grey dawn unquenched and lingering; the present Bacchus, with the past Ariadne; two stories, with double Time; separate, and harmonising. Had the artist made the woman one shade less indifferent to the God; still more, had she expressed a rapture at his advent, where would have been the story of the mighty desolation of the heart previous? merged in the insipid accident of a flattering offer met with a welcome acceptance. The broken heart for Theseus was not lightly to be ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... heart promised itself a treat, in witnessing the sweet emotions of Matilda, on hearing the joyful tidings of her mother's arrival; nor was she disappointed—the delighted girl manifested all the rapture of which her warm susceptible heart was capable; and on hearing her mother slept in the crimson room, was hastily bending her steps to the chamber, thus named from ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... psychology does not arise at all in the modern cases of mere public discomfort or inconvenience. The causes of Miss Pankhurst's cheerfulness require no mystical explanations. If she were being burned alive as a witch, if she then looked up in unmixed rapture and saw a ballot-box descending out of heaven, then I should say that the incident, though not conclusive, was frightfully impressive. It would not prove logically that she ought to have the vote, or that anybody ought to have the vote. But it would prove this: that there was, for some reason, ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... apples. He imagines that inventions, as they form themselves in the head of the inventor, leap direct into use, without any intervening process; while the inventor himself is a being so superior to the world he works in, that the rapture of being allowed to work for it is the only reward he covets, that he has never dreamed of such selfish things as profits, and does not even know the meaning of a patent or a founder's share; and that the oil kings and the steel kings and all other able men, will ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... the time of life for ardour, and both the Vicar and his Curate were unmarried. Paul, whose proper place of Sabbath boredom was Ebenezer, was welcome as a proselyte, and had a seat in the family pew, and the rapture of walking homeward sometimes by the side ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... morning he walked over early to Great Beeding. His aunt would have received the pamphlet by the first post and he wished to seize the first fine careless rapture of her comments. But he found her in a mood of distress rather than ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... In the rapture of life and of living, I lift up my heart and rejoice, And I thank the great Giver for giving The soul of my gladness a voice. In the glow of the glorious weather, In the sweet-scented, sensuous ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... endeavoured to dissuade her, by every argument of which he was master, to go on; but she positively refused; when, as the last resource, he determined to work on her fears, and accordingly told her, that Mr.—— had long spoken of her, in terms of impatient rapture; that he was a man, unhappily, of a most passionate temper, and that he had vowed, sooner than he would go back to London without making her his wife, he would blow out his brains, for which purpose he was provided with a brace of pistols, then in his pocket, and double loaded. To this ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity, as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much;" and whom Baxter had once heard, in a battle, when the enemy began to flee, "with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God, with fluent expressions, as if he had been in a rapture." But there were also in the army Sectaries of a cooler or easier order— Arminians, Anti-Sabbatarians, Anti-Scripturists, Familists, and Sceptics. Hardly a form of odd opinion mentioned in our conspectus of English Sects ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... lights, fruits, greens, and confections, with setting of plate and glass, that to Matilda it was almost as much of a sight as the Christmas tree had been. But the others were accustomed to this sort of thing, and fell to tasting, with very little rapture about the seeing. What a buzz the room was in, to be sure! Tongues were fairly unloosed over oysters and sandwiches; and all the glory of the Christmas tree was to talk about, with comparisons of presents, plans, and prospects. ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... then alive with the spirit of art, and everywhere he turned there was something beautiful to quicken his pulse and feed the flame within his soul, that was half rapture and half bitterness. No idle ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... feelings as she read the different departments in the magazine. Of course, Bok, as editor of the Tonic, promptly pigeon-holed the reporter's "copy"; then relented, and, in a fine spirit of large-mindedness, "printed" Kipling's peans of rapture over Bok's subscriber. The preparation of the paper was a daily joy: it kept the different members busy, and each evening the copy was handed to "the large circle of readers"—the two women of the party—to ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... with my repentance, she gave me a look so expressive of forgiveness that, without being afraid of augmenting my guilt, I took my lips off her hand and I raised them to her half-open, smiling mouth. Intoxicated with rapture, I passed so rapidly from a state of sadness to one of overwhelming cheerfulness that during our supper the advocate enjoyed a thousand jokes upon my toothache, so quickly cured by the simple remedy of a walk. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... a whispered word echoes through the air and enters the ear. It touches the chords and finds them tuned to its own harmony. It plays tenderly on responsive strings, and what an awakening is within that soul! What rapture in the blending, what delight in the union! From it is born a ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover, a lady and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harrass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered; is the business ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... deliciousness of those tears soon seduced me into endeavouring to stir up such emotions artificially, into abusing this mysterious close relation to infinite love as a stimulus of the most refined sensual excitement, which I then extinguisht in a rapture of tears. I was appalled by this lie in my soul, when I detected and could no more deny it; and the fearfullest desolation of despair, the dismallest solitude of death closed round me again, when the deception had been broken, and the ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck |
