"Celtic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... across the river, and stationed them in advance of his main body; which he led out of their camp, and, getting them across the river at two spots, drew them up opposite the enemy. On his left wing, close to the river, he stationed the Iberian and Celtic horse opposite the Roman cavalry; and next to them half the Libyan heavy-armed foot; and next to them the Iberian and Celtic foot; next, the other half of the Libyans, and, on the right wing, the Numidian horse. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... continually swept the ground,—an inconvenience which I once undertook to remedy by trimming it off short with scissors. No Turk could have more indignantly resented the process than did that small quadruped,—his Celtic feelings being so severely wounded by it, in fact, that he abstained from sustenance for three days, putting himself into moral sackcloth and ashes for that period by retiring into his penitential cell under a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... that is, of the Established Church of Ireland—might have accomplished wonders in the way of converting the Irish peasantry to Protestantism if they only could have preached and controverted in the Irish language. We are convinced that they could have done nothing of the kind. The Irish Celtic population is in its very nature a Catholic population. Not all the preaching since Adam {131} could have made them other than that. Still it struck John Wesley very painfully later on that the effort was never made, and that the men who could not talk to the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Highland outlaw, from the colour of his hair, as Roy, or the Red. Donald Roy was the best club-player in the district; and as King James's "Book of Sports" was not deemed a very bad one in the semi-Celtic parish of Nigg, the games in which Donald took part were usually played on the Sabbath. About the time of the Revolution, however, he was laid hold of by strong religious convictions, heralded, say the traditions of the district, by ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... also not impossible that there was a time when the western [213] or Celtic princes made themselves masters of Greece, of Egypt and a good part of Asia, and that their cult remained in those countries. When one considers with what rapidity the Huns, the Saracens and the Tartars ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend. To these two original diversities may be reduced all those impertinent classifications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upon earth, "Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites," flock hither, and do naturally fall in with one or other of these primary distinctions. The infinite superiority of the former, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... give me any information as to this lady? I should, if possible, be glad to have her maiden name and origin, as well as that of her first husband. She might have been the widow of Sir Richard Bingham, Governor of Connaught, &c., whose MS. account of the Irish wars is now publishing by the Celtic Society, and who died A.D. 1598. In that case, I leave a conjecture before me, that she was a Kingsmill of Sidmanton, in Hampshire. I mention this to aid enquiry, if any one will be so good as to make it. If there is such a monument in existence, his arms may be quartered on it, for which I should ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... the Highlanders of Scotland, whom they undoubtedly resemble in dress, figure, and manner of living. "The very mountains seemed Caledonian with a kinder climate. The kilt, though white, the spare active form, their dialect, Celtic in its sound, and their hardy habits, all carried me back to Morven. No nation are so detested and dreaded by their neighbours as the Albanese; the Greeks hardly regard them as Christians, or the Turks ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... und der Masochismus, pp. 30-31.) Wakes and similar festivals may here find their psychological basis, and funerals are an unquestionable source of enjoyment among some people, especially of so-called "Celtic" race. The stimulating reaction after funerals is well known to many, and Leigh Hunt refers to this (in his Autobiography) as affecting the sincerely devoted friends who ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... in its fortress, is fast losing the mystery which made it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St. Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism of Egypt first penetrated ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... Meredith's ideals were neither sceptical nor finicky: but they can be called insufficient. He had, perhaps, over and above his honest Pantheism two convictions profound enough to be called prejudices. He was probably of Welsh blood, certainly of Celtic sympathies, and he set himself more swiftly though more subtly than Ruskin or Swinburne to undermining the enormous complacency of John Bull. He also had a sincere hope in the strength of womanhood, and may be said, almost without ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... then he had carried himself like a schoolboy in her presence, and lastly had frightened her almost to death by his clumsy announcement of her brother's accident. The young lady at his side, with the quick intuition of her Celtic nature, felt his mood, and, not knowing the cause, became ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... survived. This northern portion of the kingdom of Northumbria was affected by the Danish invasions, but it remained an Anglian kingdom till its conquest, in the beginning of the eleventh century, by the Celtic king, Malcolm II. There is, thus, sufficient justification for Mr. Freeman's phrase, "the English of Lothian", if we interpret the term "Lothian" in the strict sense; but it remains to be explained how the inhabitants of the Scottish Lowlands, outside Lothian, ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... clannish view, For clans are naught to me, But 'tis our ancient Tartan Plaid I dearly love to see. 'Tis something grand ye will agree To see a Highland lad, Donn'd in his Celtic native garb, The ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... in a column notice says: "Mr Moore's 'Cornish Catches' are just so good as Cornish cream to a Cornish cat, and even those who do not know the dialect, with its faint, far-away echoes of Celtic verse-forms, will delight in his simple 'vitty' songs of the Delectable Duchy. He is a patriotic Cornish-man sure enough ... as good as anything of the kind written by the dialect-poets of Lancashire or Dorset ... it is a thing to ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... which the steering-paddle was made fast before the modern rudder was invented in the fourteenth century. Skeat informs us that both steor and bord are Anglo-Saxon; in fact, the latter word is the same in all the Celtic and Teutonic languages, so was used by those who first cut trees in Western Europe, and perhaps was here before they arrived to make our civilization what we know it. The opposite to starboard was larboard; but for good reason the Admiralty substituted port ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... is entitled to the applause of his contemporaries, and of posterity;—he who destroys, or heedlessly neglects it, deserves the reprobation of the civilized world. As Dr. Stukely indignantly hung, in graphic effigy, the man who wantonly broke up the vast and wondrous Celtic Temple of Abury, so every other similar delinquent should be condemned to the literary gibbet. The miserable fanatic who fired York Cathedral is properly incarcerated for life, and thus prevented from doing further public mischief; but there are other fanatics still roaming ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... agricultural industry which is not characteristic of the present Algonquin race. The stones have been carefully gathered into heaps, as in the little valley near the arched rock, to facilitate cultivation. These heaps of stones, in various places might be mistaken for Celtic cairns. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... the day is over" were prime favorites, but perhaps the most popular of all was the ancient Hymn of St. Patrick, which Miss Huntley had copied from a book of Erse literature, and had adapted to an old Irish tune. The girls learnt it easily, and its fifth century Celtic mysticism fascinated them. They liked ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... dancing, so must the others. Hobson had dropped in, and he, David, McHenry, Schlyter, and Lying Bill, trod a measure, and I, though with only a Celtic urge and a couple of years in Hawaii to teach me, faced Temanu. The bandsmen could not remain still, and, with Kelly to play the accordion, the rout became general. McHenry did ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... don't see any reason for wonder, Nora. He has been listening to me for three months, vaporing over the wrongs of Ireland; he's of Celtic blood; he has been an adventurer in California; he has the money, it would seem. Why, the wonder would be if he did not do what all the ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... small moss-grown cairn, probably the resting-place of some Celtic chief of other times, and the call of "Officers to the front," soon brought them ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... pages of learning That he turned from to life's open volume, Acquiring indelible lessons, Loyalty, candor, clear seeing, Sincerity, plain speaking, love of his own, Passion for all things American. From Jerry, his father, Came Celtic humor, delight in the dance, And devotion to things of the theatre; From Helen, his mother, Depth, Celtic devotion to things of the spirit, Fineness of soul. Early he turned from his fiddle To write popular songs And tunes so whistly and ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... king laid his finger on the wound and drew with his blood the lilies upon his shield. When we come, presently, to the Abbe Sieyes, we shall see how firmly men believed that the nobles were, in the mass, Franks, Teutonic tyrants, and spoilers of the Celtic native. They intended that feudalism should not be trimmed but uprooted, as the cause of much that was infinitely odious, and as a thing absolutely incompatible with public policy, social interests, and right reason. That men should be made to bear suffering for the sake of what ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... far as Worcester, where he found work, and found something else which he liked better. There is an Antiquarian Society at Worcester, with a large and peculiar library, containing a great number of books in languages not usually studied, such as the Icelandic, the Russian, the Celtic dialects, and others. The directors of the Society placed all their treasures at his command, and he now divided his time between hard study of languages and hard labor at the forge. To show how he passed his days, I will copy an entry or two from a ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... grown—he springs away, A winged god, and thousands own his sway. Some, as thou seest, are number'd with the dead, And some the bitter drops of sorrow shed Through lingering life, by viewless tangles bound, That link the soul, and chain it to the ground. There Caesar walks! of Celtic laurels proud. Nor feels himself in sensual bondage bow'd: He treads the flowery path, nor sees the snare Laid for his honour by the Egyptian fair. Here Love his triumph shows, and leads along The world's great owner in the captive throng; And o'er the master of unscepter'd ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... editor unobtrusively studied Banneker out of placid, inscrutable eyes, soft as a dove's, while he chatted at large about theaters, politics, the news of the day. Afterward the applicant met the Celtic assistant, Mr. Mallory, who broadly outlined for him the technique of the office. With no further preliminaries Banneker found himself employed at fifteen dollars a week, with Monday for his day off and directions to report on ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Revolution, which he polished and revised again Essay on and again before it was finally printed. This ambitious literary essay, though it met with remarkable success, is a disappointment to the reader. Though of Celtic blood, Burke did not understand the French, or the principles for which the common people were fighting in their own way[198]; and his denunciations and apostrophes to France suggest a preacher without humor, hammering away at sinners who are not present in his congregation. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... only have we thus gained access to the most authentic documents from which to study the ancient religion of the Brahmans, the Zoroastrians, and the Buddhists, but by discovering the real origin of Greek, Roman, and likewise of Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic mythology, it has become possible to separate the truly religious elements in the sacred traditions of these nations from the mythological crust by which they are surrounded, and thus to gain a clearer insight into the real faith of the ancient ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... With Celtic fervor and eloquence, William Douglas O'Connor made his plea an intercession in the cause of free letters. He examined the entire range of literature, ancient and modern, in quest of parallels that would prove Whitman's book by comparison to be a masterpiece of literature, and would demonstrate ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... to show that the Irish ballet is assured in advance of a cordial reception from all admirers of the neo-Celtic genius. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... of nearly all peoples, and is likely to have been a spontaneous growth arising from a natural human pleasure in similar sounds. "It lies deep in our human nature and satisfies an universal need." It is an established phenomenon in Sanskrit and Persian prosody, in Arabic, in Chinese, in Celtic, in Icelandic. Greek prosody, and Latin, which was based upon Greek, rejected it, partly perhaps because it was too simple an ornament for the highly cultivated Greek taste, especially on account of the great ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... the early Saxon or English settlers, and with the still more primitive Celtic inhabitants, the Northmen founded a race extremely like that which now inhabits our own country. To this day, the Norman peasants of the Cotentin retain many marks of their origin and their half-forgotten kinship ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... incomplete, yet incipient states, or inchoate nations, with an organization, individuality, and a centre of social life of their own. The families and tribes that migrate in search of new settlements carry with them their family and tribal organizations, and retain it for a long time. The Celtic tribes retained it in Gaul till broken up by the Roman conquest, under Caesar Augustus; in Ireland, till the middle of the seventeenth century; and in Scotland, till the middle of the eighteenth. It subsists still in the hordes of Tartary, the Arabs of the Desert, and the Berbers ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... a Miss Ballantree, and her first name was Barbara, I believe; but she disliked it, and when her husband wished to have the child christened the same, she insisted on Barribel. It seems that is an old Scottish name also, or Celtic perhaps, for she was Irish, though I know nothing of her family. But Barribel has always sounded ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... exciting talk, for I had had no news from that quarter since I left England. I heard that the Portuguese Jew had escaped—had vanished from his native heather when they went to get him. They had identified him as a German professor of Celtic languages, who had held a chair in a Welsh college—a dangerous fellow, for he was an upright, high-minded, raging fanatic. Against Gresson they had no evidence at all, but he was kept under strict observation. When I asked about his crossing to France, Macgillivray replied that that ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... carved and cunning, As the Celtic craftsman makes, Graven all over with twisting shapes ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... ancestors," says the Quarterly Review, "Louis drew the strain of Celtic melancholy with all its perils and possibilities, and its kinship, to the mood of day-dreaming, which has flung over so many of his pages now the vivid light wherein figures imagined grew as real as flesh ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... It is probably substantially represented by the Ambrosian chant as we find it in the oldest MSS. It seems most likely that it is the musical counterpart of the primitive liturgy organized, as is supposed, about the epoch of Pope Damasus, of which the Ambrosian, Gallican, Mozarabic, and Celtic are so many variations, due to national characteristics. Documentary proof of this is but scanty, but a study of the Lessons used at Mass supports the theory as far as the text is concerned. It is further recorded that at Monte Cassino the Ambrosian chant was fused with the Gregorian by order ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt
... conquered. The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... one of the many fine scenes, in the Celtic Parnassus of Ossian: but when Burns saw it, the Highland passion of the stream was abated, for there had been no rain for some time to swell and send it pouring down its precipices in a way worthy of the scene. The descent ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... thus honoured was ever afterwards endowed with the delicate odour that is so highly prized. And beyond this, the rosemary was likewise permitted to put forth masses of flowers of the Madonna's own colour of blue, concerning which a tradition—Celtic, not Italian—avers that on Christmas morning upon every plant of rosemary will be found by those who care to seek them expanded blooms in honour of St Joseph, the Virgin and the Holy Child. Reaching the crest of the Solaro, we are well rewarded for our climb over the stony slopes ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... of Ireland at this time consisted mainly of descendants of the Celtic and other prehistoric races which inhabited Britain at the period of the Roman invasion. When the Saxons conquered Britain, many of the natives, who were of the same stock and spoke essentially the same language as the Irish, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... been said that the Ancients did not know how to hold converse with nature, and that little or no sign of it can be found in their writings. Matthew Arnold has traced to a Celtic source the sympathy with, and deep communing with nature that first appeared among European poets. Under the patronage of Charlemagne the cloisters and brotherhoods became even more learned and cultivated than they had been ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... religions of Babylon, Egypt, the Hindus, and the Jewish people. We know in fact as little about the religion of the old Italian populations as we do about that of our own Teutonic ancestors, less perhaps than we do about that of the Celtic peoples. The Romans were a rude and warlike folk, and meddled neither with literature nor philosophy until they came into immediate contact with the Greeks; thus it was that, unfortunately for our purposes, the literary ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... reader the Celtic Renaissance was a surprise, and even to Irish writers deeply interested in their country the phenomenon or movement, call it which you will, was not appreciated as of much significance at its beginning. Writing in 1892, Miss Jane Barlow ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... what is at once majestic and magical in Tennyson. For those are not qualities they neglect in their other masters. How, valuing singleness of heart in the sixteenth century, splendour in the seventeenth, composure in the eighteenth; how, with a spiritual ear for the note—commonly called Celtic, albeit it is the most English thing in the world—the wild wood note of the remoter song; how, with the educated sense of style, the liberal sense of ease; how, in a word, fostering Letters and loving ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... called Farsistan, north-east of what we now call Persia, the dwelling place of the Persians, there dwelt, in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the purest blood of Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic, Teutonic, Greek, and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue akin to theirs. They had wandered thither, said their legends, out of the far north-east, from off some lofty plateau of Central Asia, driven out by the increasing cold, which left ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... impassable gulf between Etrurian Religion and the comparatively clear and comprehensible systems of the Pelasgo- Phoenician peoples. That Kad or Kab can refer either (as in Quatuor) to a four-footed animal (quadruped, "quad") or to a four- wheeled vehicle (esseda, Celtic cab) I cannot for a moment believe, though I understand that this theory has the support of Schrader, Penka, and Baunder. {10} Any information which your learning can procure, and your kind courtesy can supply, will be warmly welcomed and duly acknowledged.—Believe ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... in the city of Dublin, Ireland, in the year 1779, and was educated at Trinity College. His matchless "Melodies" are the delight of all lovers of music, and are sung all over the world. Archbishop McHale of Tuam translated them into the grand old Celtic tongue. Moore is the greatest of Ireland's song-writers, and one of the world's greatest. As a poet few have equaled him in the power to write poetry which charms the ear by its delightful cadence. His lines display an exquisite harmony, and are perfectly adapted to the thoughts ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... observing him, he led everywhere a severe existence and walked or rode horseback on all occasions. Never at this period did he enter either a chariot or a four-wheeled vehicle. He covered his head neither in heat nor in cold, but alike in Celtic snows and under scorching Egyptian suns he went about with it bare. [Sidenote: A.D. 119 (a.u. 872)] In fine, so thoroughly by action and exhortations did he train and discipline the whole military force throughout the whole empire that even now the methods then introduced ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... Revolution was merely a clash between Teutons and Celts. The nobility of France were descended from Germanic warriors established in the country after the so-called invasion of the barbarians. The middle and lower classes were the Gallic-Celtic element. The inferior race had conquered the superior, disorganizing the country and perturbing the world. Celtism was the inventor of Democracy, of the doctrines of Socialism and Anarchy. Now the hour of Germanic retaliation was about to strike, and the Northern race would re-establish order, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... over, I take refuge in the courtyard of an old temple half-way up the hill, buried in a wood of centennial trees of gigantic branches; it is reached by granite steps, through strange gateways, as deeply furrowed as the old Celtic dolmens. The trees have also invaded this yard; the daylight is overcast with a greenish tint, and the drenching rain that pours down in torrents, is full of torn-up leaves and moss. Old granite monsters, of unknown shapes, are seated in the corners, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... turned the car round that sharp corner which swings you into the Market Square of what is to me the grandest and most historic town of England. Why, it is England! Didn't the Romans get their Venta Belgarum, which finally developed into Winta-ceaster and Winchester, from the far older Celtic name for an important citadel? Wasn't there a Christian church before the days of Arthur, my alleged ancestor? Wasn't the cathedral begun by the father of AElfred on the foundations of that poor church as well as those of a Roman temple? Wasn't ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... When the stronger and more civilised Celt came he drove before him these little dark men, he enslaved their survivors or wedded their women, and in his turn fell into slavery to the cruel Druidic religion of his subjects. To these Iberians, and to the Celtic dread of them, we probably owe all the stories of dwarfs, goblins, elves, and earth-gnomes which fill our fairy-tale books; and if we examine carefully the descriptions of the abodes of these beings we shall find them not inconsistent with the earth-dwellings, ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... for several hundred yards like a cannon-ball; then it struck the ground, ricochetted, and once more bounded along for another short spell; after which it disappeared in the boggy soil, as if it were completely finished and done for. But in another moment it rose again, nothing daunted, with Celtic irrepressibility, several yards away, pursued its ghostly course across a running stream (which shows, at least, there could have been no witchcraft in it), and finally ran to earth for good in the opposite bank, leaving a round hole in the sloping peat at the spot where it buried itself. Where ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... he comes upon a Roman pavement, and below this the weapons and ornaments of a tribe of ancient Britons. One cannot strike a spade into the earth, in Great Britain, without a fair chance of some surprise in the form of a Saxon coin, or a Celtic implement, or a Roman fibula. Nobody expects any such pleasing surprise in a New England field. One must be content with an Indian arrowhead or two, now and then a pestle and mortar, or a stone pipe. A top dressing ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... probably the custom had its origin as far back as the feast of Flora, when pagan rites were performed in the country, or, perhaps, it originally was instituted to celebrate a victory over the Saxons; or it may be a remnant of some old Celtic observance. ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... by Norwegians and Celtic (Scottish and Irish) immigrants during the late 9th and 10th centuries, Iceland boasts the world's oldest parliament, the Althing, established in 930. Independent for over 300 years, Iceland was subsequently ruled by Norway and Denmark. Limited home rule was granted in 1874 and complete independence ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Celtic blood is all in commotion! This boy's business was to ask my candid opinion whether there were anything ungentlemanlike in a clerkship in a bank. It was ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... multitudes who inhabited the unexplored regions of Central Europe, the Celts and Germans, [Footnote: The Cimbri, who formed a portion of this invading body, had their original home in the modern peninsula of Jutland, whence came also early invaders of Britain, and they were probably a Celtic people.] had gathered a mass comprising, it is said, more than three hundred thousand men capable of fighting, besides hosts of women and children, and were marching with irresistible force towards the Roman domains. Nine years before (B.C. 113), these barbarians ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... the celebrated prince of Morvern (or Morven), a province of ancient Caledonia. He is supposed to have been the father of Ossian, the Celtic bard rendered famous by Macpherson. The cave, one of many which pierce the coast-cliffs of Western Scotland, is 227 feet in length, 166 feet in height, and 40 feet in width. On all sides regular columns of basalt, some entire, others broken, rise ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... they are sent, let them go together. I could pledge my watch and wedding diamond ring to help to raise such beauties," said she, passionately. "Surely they cannot be Irish, or they must belong to some race different from the Celtic half savages which we have ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... man who sees his own funeral belongs to the realm of folk-lore. Like superstitions are to be found wherever the Celtic race has settled. In Spain they are especially prevalent in Galicia and Asturias. There the estantigua or "ancient enemy" appears to those soon to die. These spirits, or almas en pena, appear wearing winding-sheets, bearing ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... death warnings were familiar to the ancient Celtic fishermen, for those terrible disasters that were constantly occurring could not help but increase the gloom which acts so strongly upon those who are accustomed to contemplate the ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... river Saone he defeated a large body of Celtic people who were migrating from Switzerland to make their homes in the warmer and roomier plains at the foot ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... too, was fascinated by Oxford. But for all her eager interest, the historic beauty of the place aroused in her an under-mood of melancholy, just as it did in Robert. Both had the impressionable Celtic temperament, and both felt that a critical moment was upon them, and that the Oxford air was charged with fate for each of them. For the first time in their lives they were to be parted. The mother's long guardianship was coming to an end. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Brachycephalic type of the Age of Stone in Lyell's 'Elements of Geology,' C. X., p. 113, as compared with the Dolichocephalic type of the beginning of the Age of Iron, correspondent with that now so prevalent amongst us, and called the Celtic type. It has the same comparative massiveness of forehead, not receding like the Celtic—the same even roundness in the frontal organs; but it is far loftier in the apex, and far less pronounced in the hinder cranial hemisphere where phrenologists place the animal organs. To speak as a ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... subject of the Arthurian cycle, the origin of which has never ceased to be matter for debate, he held essentially the opinions that the highest French authority has adopted that Celtic traditions were the foundation, and that the metrical romances preceded those in prose.[87] The important offices of French poets in giving form to the story he underestimated. When he said, "It is now completely ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... the Irish hero, was once entrapped by a sorceress on a similar pretext into plunging into an enchanted lake, which changed him into an old man. (See Joyce's Old Celtic Romances, "The Chase of Slieve Cullin.") The story is also related ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... clustering locks, With ivy berries wreathed, and his blithe youth, Had by him, ere he parted thence, a son Much like his father, but his mother more, Whom therefore she brought up, and Comus named: Who, ripe and frolic of his full-grown age, Roving the Celtic and Iberian fields, At last betakes him to this ominous wood, And, in thick shelter of black shades imbowered, Excels his mother at her mighty art; Offering to every weary traveller His orient liquor in a crystal glass, To quench the drouth ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... back," the man repeated, while his companions looked down at the Colonel with a strange fixedness. The Celtic nature, prone to sudden rage, stirred in them. The stranger who an hour before had been indifferent to them now wore the face of an enemy. The lake and the bog—ay, the secret grave yearned for him: the winding-sheet was high ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... beginning of a new epoch in science—an epoch when all these earlier discoveries were to be interpreted by means of investigations in a different field: for, in 1847, a man previously unknown to the world at large, Boucher de Perthes, published at Paris the first volume of his work on Celtic and Antediluvian Antiquities, and in this he showed engravings of typical flint implements and weapons, of which he had discovered thousands upon thousands in the high drift beds ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... McClure had tracked with Lag when he made his tours among his neighbours, with confiscation and fine for a main object, and the murder of this or that man of prayer, covenant-keeper or Bible-carrier, as only a wayside accident. Now Galloway is half Celtic, and the other half, at least till the Ayrshire invasion, was mostly Norse. So McClure was hated with all the Celtic vehemence which does not stop short of blood. He was the salaried betrayer of his own, and in time, unless he could make enough ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... scene at parting, when the warmhearted Irishwoman clung to Maren and wept against her bosom, calling her all the hundred words for "darling" in the Celtic and ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... expressed itself in the domed forehead, and in the fine head, lightly touched with gray; the eyes too were gray, the lips prominent and sensitive, the face long, and, in line, finely regular. A face of feeling and of power; the face of a Celt, disciplined by the stress and conflict of a non-Celtic world. Diana's young sympathies sprang to meet it, and they ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not," returned Leila, with a strong Celtic inflection of which she, in her earnestness, was ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... serve"), which, according to time-honoured but unauthenticated tradition, the prince won from the blind King of Bohemia, who was led into the thick of the fighting at Cressy, and died on the field. Welsh archaeologists, however, maintain that these words are Celtic, and mean "behold the man;" their theory suggests that this was the phrase used by Edward I. when he presented his firstborn son to the Welsh people as their prince, and that the words thus became the motto of the princes ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... on these cases, which indicate their combined endeavours, made (under the fiercest opposition) to reform the horrible abuses which had converted a well-intentioned charity into a hell upon earth. Mr. Higgins was the author of a book on Mahomet, the remarkable work on the Celtic Druids (1827), and ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... country, the Romans included under that name only the tribes occupying the countries now known as France, Western Switzerland, Germany west of the Rhine, Belgium, and the British Isles. Blocked together under a generic name, the Celtic nation was, however, composed of many tribes, with separate dialects and customs. It has been surmised that two of these tribes, the British and Irish, early took possession of England and Ireland, where they flourished and ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... the river assumes a character of its own, distinct from all its tributaries, so in English literature there is a time when it becomes national rather than tribal, and English rather than Saxon or Celtic or Norman. That time was in the fifteenth century, when the poems of Chaucer and the printing press of Caxton exalted the Midland above all other dialects and established it as the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... discover, if he had no history to help him, but must rely wholly on the examination of modern French, that the bulk of the population of France is connected by way of blood with ancient Gauls who spoke Celtic, until the Roman conquest caused them to adopt a vulgar form of Latin in its place. The Celtic tongue, in its turn, had, doubtless not so very long before, ousted some earlier type of language, perhaps one allied to the still surviving Basque; though it is ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... to this gulph? If we consider the heat of the sun which is experienced here, and the sparkling of the sandy downs which compose the coast, we cannot help remarking that Arguia in Phenician means what is luminous and brilliant, and that in Celtic, Guin signifies ardent. If this name comes from the Carthaginians, who may have frequented these coasts, they must have been particularly struck with their resemblance to the famous Syrtes in their own neighbourhood, which mariners took so much ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... poets also. I know fifteen. Sometimes they are Irishmen. Sometimes both. I knew one who was one of those Celtic Poets. His name had all the colour of the late Irish literary movement. That is, after he became a man of letters; before that it was Bill Somethingorother. He was an earnest person, without humour (strange for an Irishman!), eloquent, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... Against the tens of millions in Europe would rise up, like the earth-born children of Deucalion and Pyrrha (or of the Theban Cadmus and Hermione) American millions counted by hundreds. But from what radix? Originally, it would have been regarded as madness to take Ireland, in her Celtic element, as counting for anything. But of late—whether rationally, however, I will inquire for a brief moment or so—the counters have all changed in these estimates. The late Mr O'Connell was the parent of ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... DERWENT (Celtic Dwr-gent, clear water), the name of several English rivers. (1) The Yorkshire Derwent collects the greater part of the drainage of the North Yorkshire moors, rising in their eastern part. A southern head-stream, however, rises in the Yorkshire Wolds near Filey, little more than a mile from the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... up under the colonial porte-cochere of Hollywood Inn and were welcomed by the genial Moriarty himself, his Celtic countenance a mirror ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... interested in these new scholars and quite perplexed by the phenomenon of two beautiful dark-eyed children, called Camilla and Cecile Fingal. Judith refused to twist her tongue to pronounce the last syllable accented, and her version of the name made it sound Celtic. "Perhaps their father is Irish and the mother Italian or Spanish," suggested ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... product of that strange race that, through the ages, has so strongly preserved its old Celtic aroma, while it has ever taken a bizarre pride in clothing its ideas with the cast-off clothes and laws of the Roman conqueror. There were to be found in it absolutely pure the Gallic audacity, the spirit of heroic reason, of irony, the mixture of ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... prophecy of its prose does not however extend to the poetry of Wales, for like all other branches of the Celtic race, the ancient Britons have cultivated national song and music with a love, skill and devotion which have produced poems and airs well deserving of extensive circulation, long life and lasting fame. The poetic fire has inspired the nation from the most primitive times, for we ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... old Yorkshire family, Charles Stephen Dale was yet sufficient of a Cockney to justify both his friends and his enemies in crediting him with the Celtic temperament. Nevertheless, he was essentially a modern, insomuch that his contempt for the writings of dead men surpassed his dislike of living authors. To these two central influences we may trace most of the peculiarities that rendered him notorious ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... which had cut off the Anglo-Saxon Church from Rome, and drew the Church in England into closer contact with Rome than she had enjoyed since the days of Archbishop Theodore. Through Queen Margaret, the Anglo-Saxon wife of Malcolm Canmore, Roman customs superseded those of the Celtic Church in Scotland. Gregory VII prevailed on the Spanish churches to accept the Roman for the Mozarabic liturgy. Alexander III attracted to Rome the long-isolated Church in Ireland, and Innocent II reconciled the Milanese at last to the ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... comedy?—this sort of criticism has been heard of even in our own day. However, Goldsmith pounded away at his newly-found work, under the eye of the exacting bookseller and his learned wife. We find him dealing with Scandinavian (here called Celtic) mythology, though he does not adventure on much comment of his own; then he engages Smollett's History of England, but mostly in the way of extract; anon we find him reviewing A Journal of Eight ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... Snowdon's vales To Severn's silver strand! [4] For all the grace of that old race Still haunts the Celtic land. And, dear old Ireland, God save you, And heal the wounds of old, For every grief you ever ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the system of land-holding was followed by a century of reprisals and confiscations, and what war began the law continued. The Celtic race, for the most part impoverished in mind and estate by the penal laws, became rooted to the soil, for, as we have seen, they had, on account of the repression of industries, no alternative occupation, and so became, in fact, if not in law, ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... February used to be "Soul-grove," but I have never heard it called so. The pole of a scythe is the snead; the two handles are the nibs. They are fastened by rings called quinnets. Isaac Taylor says that the few remaining Celtic words we have in use (other than hill or river names) are words for obscure parts of tools. We have some queer intensives—"terriblish" or "tarblish" is one, and "ghastly," meaning ugly, is another. "A terrible ghastly sight" we say, meaning that a ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... origin, but Tennyson did not feel England beyond the Border. There the Celt intruded, and he looked askance upon the Celt. The Celtic spirit smiled, and took its vengeance on him in its own way. It imposed on him, as his chief subject, a Celtic tale and a Celtic hero; and though he did his best to de-celticise the story, the vengeance lasts, for ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... passes. During my life alone, more change has taken place in the ideas and in the customs of my village than had been seen in the centuries before the Revolution. Already half the ceremonies, Celtic, Pagan, or of the Middle Ages, that in my childhood I have seen in their full vigor, have disappeared. In a year or two more, perhaps, the railroads will lay their level tracks across our deep valleys, and will carry away, with the swiftness of lightning, ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... would return to the child. "No", she persisted. "He was lying asleep in my arms last night, and William came to me and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other two." She had in her a strong strain of Celtic superstition, and thoroughly believed that this "vision"—a most natural dream under the circumstances—was a direct "warning", and that her husband had come to her to tell her of her approaching loss. This ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... Germans. To most English and American students of geographic environment it is a closed book, a treasure-house bolted and barred. Ratzel himself realized "that any English form could not be a literal translation, but must be adapted to the Anglo-Celtic and especially to the Anglo-American mind." The writer undertook, with Ratzel's approval, to make such an adapted restatement of the principles, with a view to making them pass current where they are now unknown. But the initial stages of the work revealed the necessity of ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... laughing. Mother was a prosaic person; that is, she had strong common-sense; yet through her sober personality there ran like a streak of light some hint of fairy lightness, derived probably from her Celtic origin. Now, as Rogers watched her, he caught a flash of that raciness and swift mobility, that fluid, protean elasticity of temperament which belonged to the fairy kingdom. The humour and pathos in her had been smothered by too much care. She accepted old age before her time. He saw her, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... came of a Celtic father, gay, humorous, full of impulsive chivalry and intense Irish patriotism, and of a practical New England mother, herself of Revolutionary stock, clear of judgment, careful of the household economy, upright, exemplary, ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... This movement <was suppressed, driven under the surface, but only to break out more appallingly than ever some ten or twelve years later, in brutal assassinations, which have curdled the blood of the world. Ah, must it always be so? Will this tiresome old Celtic Enceladus never lie quiet, and be dead, though the mountain sit upon him ever so solidly, and smoke ever so ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... difficulty with the leek. But April the 23rd is not a time of roses that we can pluck them as we pass, nor can we claim St George as a compatriot—Cappadocius nostras. We have, to be sure, a few legendary heroes, of whom King Arthur and Robin Hood are (I suppose) the greatest; but, save in some Celtic corners of the land, we have few fairies, and these no great matter; while, as for tutelary gods, our springs, our wells, our groves, cliffs, mountain-sides, either never possessed them or possess them no longer. Not of our landscape did ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... said something of the kind. He is also the one among us who is endowed with that Celtic temperament which would make him ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tan disappeared and left his cheeks so white, that the mothers were terrified lest he should die early, and sent offerings of cream on Monday morning. For though his name was Carmichael, he had Celtic blood in him, and was full of all kinds of emotion, but mostly those that were brave and pure and true. He had done well at the University, and was inclined to be philosophical, for he knew little ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... great man felt much interest, and on which he could speak from the abundance of his knowledge and experience. The notes are therefore of special value, as furnishing the latest views of the author on mooted points of Celtic Ecclesiology, while they are conspicuous for the modesty and candour which were combined with Dr. Petrie's ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... body of the army which sees itself as the skirt for the Celtic fringe, ploddingly undemonstrative with memories of the phlegm of their history holding emotions unexpressed; the Scotch in their kilts, deep-chested, with their trunk-like legs and broad hips, braw of face under their mushroom helmets, seemed like mediaeval men of arms ready ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... who knows how rapidly his language has become the language of commerce over the world; how it has almost extinguished the ancient Celtic tongues in Scotland and Ireland; how quickly in the United States it has driven Spanish out of the South West, and has come to be spoken by the German, Scandinavian, and Slavonic immigrants whom that country receives, ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... wide curve that shaded a dimple in each cheek. He was as proud of the fact that both of his maternal grandparents had been born in Ireland as he was that he himself was a native of Texas. The vigorous Celtic strain, that in the clash of nationalities can always hold its own against any blood with which it mingles, had dowered him well with Celtic characteristics. A trace of the brogue still lingered in his speech, along with the slurred r's and the soft drawl ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly |
