"Mirage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the top of that mountain, clouds or no clouds. For he had heard it said that the mirage of Portcausey was being seen again—the Devil's Troopers, and the Oilean-gan-talamh-ar-bith, the Isle of No Land At All, and the Swinging City, and they were to be seen in the blue heat haze over the sea from the ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... hastening, yet no guest there shall enjoy more than I enjoy,—nor so much, if he considers the meats the best part of the dinner. The beauty of the beautiful Aurelia I see and worship as she drives by. The vision of many beautiful Aurelias driving to dinner, is the mirage of that pleasant journey of mine along the avenue. I do not envy the Persian poets, on those afternoons, nor long to be an Arabian traveller. For I can walk that street, finer than any of which the Ispahan architects dreamed; and I can see sultanas as splendid ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... Heva: "I believe I'll look about a little;" and he went to the northern extremity of the island, where there was a little, narrow neck of land connecting it with the mainland; and the devil, who is always playing pranks with us, got up a mirage, and when he looked over to the mainland, such hills and dells, vales and dales; such mountains, crowned with silver; such cataracts, clad in robes of beauty, did he see there, that he went back and told Heva: "The country over there is a thousand times better than ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... He'll probably go on to harm me further, for I remind him of his vileness. This, then, is life, not as I imagined it, but as it is, and such creatures as Hutchings are human beings. Well, after all, it is better to know the truth than to cheat oneself with a mirage. I shall appreciate large natures with noble and generous impulses better, now that I know how ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... of the MIRAGE," said the doctor, "and nothing else—a simple optical phenomenon due to the unequal refraction of light by different layers of the ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... romantic genius of Britain is beginning to see the contour of Gallipoli invested with a mist of sadness, and presenting an appearance like a mirage of lost illusions." ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... Death we cannot dream of a fair consoling Hereafter. The thing we loved has not only perished—alas! we realise that it has never existed! What we worshipped was the shadow of our own making, a mirage conjured up by our heart's desire. To those who love most, love ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... see the island is to land, as we did, at Waimea; ride to a singular spot called the "barking sands"—a huge sand-hill, gliding down which you hear a dull rumble like distant thunder, probably the result of electricity. On the way you meet with a mirage, remarkable for this that it is a constant phenomenon—that is to say, it is to be seen daily at certain hours, and is the apparition of a great lake, having sometimes high waves which seem to submerge the cattle which stand about, apparently, ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... did solve itself, at least part of it, that very night; the remaining part of the problem was to be solved months later under conditions so strange that, had the girls been able to vision them lying away, like a mirage on the horizon of the future, they would have been tempted to change their plans for ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... Lolita!" she cried; "a tenderfoot is sure funny. The chances are, Mr. Hanson, that if you started to walk around those dunes you'd never get back. Goodness! ain't that mirage pretty?" ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... became. Pessimism set a cold, hard stamp upon his face, and marred his beauty. Cynicism lies like a black mark across his pages. At last, in his bitterness, the philosopher tells us the whole universe is a mirage, and that yonder summer-making sun is a bubble that repeats its iridescent tints in the colors of the rainbow. Despair ate out his heart. He became the most miserable of men, and knew no freedom from sorrow and pain. And ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... for her in past days took new force in view of the sudden barriers that rose between him and the tender, graceful, confiding, charming Adele, whose image had so long and (as he now thought) so constantly dwelt in the dreamy mirage of his future. Under the spur of these feelings, he presently gave over his excited walk up and down the study, and, coming close to the Doctor, whispered, with a grave earnestness that made the old gentleman recognize a man in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... general features the country was, quite simply, the desert of Arizona over again. There were the same high, distant, and brittle-looking mountains, fragile and pearly; the same low, broken half-distances; the same wide sweeps; the same wonderful changing effects of light, colour, shadow, and mirage; the same occasional strips of green marking the watercourses and oases. As to smaller detail, we saw many interesting divergences. In the foreground constantly recurred the Bedouin brush shelters, each with its picturesque ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... trotted away as we approached and we started up a fox. Otherwise we came across no sign of life. As we advanced mile upon mile the mysterious tower seemed to get further away, an illusion possible in flat countries. I have often observed a similar phenomenon in Holland. Perhaps in this case mirage had something ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... and yesterday we have seen the mirage of the sun again; to-day it was high above the horizon, and almost seemed to assume a round, disk-like form. Some of the others maintain that they have seen the upper edge of the sun itself; Peter ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... hills near it, as well as those of the trees upon them, could be distinctly traced on the unruffled surface. As we continued to advance, the water however constantly retreated before us and at last surrounded us. I now found that we had been deceived by mirage; the apparent islands being really such only when these plains are covered by the sea. In many places the sandy mud was so moist that we sank deeply into it, and after travelling for fifteen miles on ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... the foremost travellers send word along the file that water is in sight Though each little party that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water to which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less has it been true in all ages and for human beings of every creed which recognized a future, that those who have fallen worn out by their march through the Desert have dreamed at least of a River of Life, and thought they heard its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... disordered mind would be gone. Again he glanced up in the direction of the kopjie. The apparition was still there, a horrible, monstrous, distortion of himself, standing still, speechless, staring at him. That it was only a mirage there could be no doubt. He had heard of such mirages at sea and also in the Sahara where wandering Arabs have beheld long caravans journeying in the skies. But he had never heard of a mirage lasting as long as this one. Would ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... the earliest childhood to the latest age, day by day, and step by step, the busy waking life is followed and reflected by the life of dreams—waking dreams, sleeping dreams. Weird, misty, and distorted as the inverted image of a mirage, or a figure seen through the mountain mist, they are still the ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... that awakened Harry Cresswell to a sense of endless well-being. Rich! No longer the mirage and semblance of wealth, the memory of opulence, the shadow of homage without the substance of power—no; now the wealth was real, cold hard dollars, and in piles. How much? He laughed aloud as he turned on his ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Why should there be caustic plants where everything is hot and burning? In deserts where thirst is enthroned, and where the rocks and sand appeal to a pitiless sky for moisture, it was a savage trick to add the mockery of mirage. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... a series of huts, each like Burns' birthplace, grouped on the shelving side of a stony cliff. The bay itself is semi-circular, with a long cape jutting out to the south, the extremity of which almost always is floating in the air, owing to the mirage. In the bay were two rusty steamers—one the Benedetto, which had been promised to us by the Italian governor—several old wooden sailers, and a lot of smallish fishing smacks very brightly painted and with raised poop and prow. A group ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... Porphyrius Petrovitch; I won't quite allow that yet! I'll make a stand and tell you some plain truths to your faces, and then you shall find out my real opinion about you!" He had some difficulty in breathing. "But supposing that all this is pure fancy?—a kind of mirage? Suppose I had misunderstood? Let me try and keep up my nasty part, and not commit myself, like the fool, by blind anger! Ought I to give them credit for intentions they have not? Their words are, ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... world would be like this oasis, and the only necessity ever imposed on her would be that of choice from its rich profusion. But ere she was aware she had lost herself in a desert; the oasis had vanished like a mirage, and she had no choice at all. That which her heart craved with an intensity which fairly made it ache, seemed as hopeless as a sudden bloom and ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... before going to bed, to see that its electricity, which had departed for a while, was out in it again, so that it would snap and stand out horizontally from her head. The little spark of a smile was constantly over her face like a mirage before her lips and her eyes and seeming to hover on the very peak of her brows ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... Magistrate, but a prospective one, looking to the chances of reelection, and mingling in all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an unhappy talent for making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the White House lures our public men away from present duties and obligations; and if matters go on as they have gone, we shall need a Committee of Congress to count the spoons in the public plate-closet, whenever a President ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... its great masters, under what influence did it spring up, what causes led to its decline, and to what source may we trace its sudden and aggressive renaissance? To the student who looks beneath the surface of fashionable art-culture the Queen Anne and Georgian periods seem almost like a mirage, where he sees dimly reflected vistas of city streets lined with tall houses built of red brick, with tiled roofs, long and narrow sash-windows painted white, and outside shutters painted green. If ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... that time innumerable, and a steady stream of immigration was pouring westward by rail and wagon into the high and dry plains of the country, where at that time farming remained a doubtful experiment. In the course of our travels, we saw one morning, rising before us in the mirage of the plains, what seemed to be a series of crenelated turrets, castles peaked and bastioned. We knew this was but the mirage, and knew that it must have some physical cause. But what was a town doing in that part of the world? We drove on and in ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... crowd shouting my name impatiently: 'Crane! Crane! let us have a speech from the gallant General P. Crandall!'—yes, even though the aristocratic brown-stone mansion, which was to have been a testimonial of esteem from admiring friends; though all these fade before me like the beautiful mirage that proves only an illusion of the senses, yet I am equal to this act of self-denial, and submit to pass my life in ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... of potted meats, cheese, butter, and other luxuries, of which we have almost forgotten the very taste; and that when things come to the worst we shall turn the corner, and enter into a period of universal abundance. These stores seem to me much like the mirage which lures on the traveller of the desert, and which perpetually recedes as he advances. But the great difficulty of the moment is to procure fuel. I am ready, as some one said, to eat the soles of my boots for the sake of my country; but then they must be cooked. All the mills are on the ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... English, shops for gowns and hats and shoes, and furs and gloves and corsets. At numberless counters they studied and counselled, and lunching at Sherry's they shopped on. And the shimmer and sheen of pretty things made life a glamourous mirage, in which Ethel could feel herself rapidly becoming a New Yorker, gaining assurance day by day, feeling "her type" emerge in the glass where she studied herself with ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... morning, he had been off for game for the dogs unsuccessfully, and, when he came back to his men, learned that they had seen seventeen deer. After them goes Pim; finds them to be three hares, magnified by fog and mirage, and their long ears answering for horns. This same day they got upon the Bay of Mercy. No ship in sight! Right across it goes the Lieutenant to look for records; when, at two in the afternoon, Robert Hoile sees something black up the bay. Through the glass ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... he saw the mirage of his own fireside. Perhaps for the moment his homing spirit rested there, and it was only the body from which the soul had fled that was in the saddle here before us riding through a hostile land. Perhaps more powerfully than the fulminations of any orator had this greeting of a little child ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... arable land. At infrequent intervals our motor passed a train of laden mules, or a group of peasants about a well, and sometimes, far off, a fortified farm profiled its thick-set angle-towers against the sky, or a white koubba floated like a mirage above the brush, but these rare signs of life intensified the solitude of the long ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... stars their map, And Knowledge spreads them on her ample lap; But Rome is as the desert, where we steer Stumbling o'er recollections: now we clap Our hands, and cry "Eureka! it is clear—" When but some false mirage ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... long from before them The mirage smokes away — That daylight ghost of an ocean Creeps close behind all day With an evil, snake-like motion, As the waves of a madman's brain: 'Tis a phantom NOT like water Out there on the ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... Croustillac were destroyed; he saw himself reduced to the deplorable alternative of forever traversing the ocean with Captain Daniel, or of returning to France to encounter the rigors of the law. Chance suddenly offered to the chevalier the most dazzling mirage, and awakened ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... of white and gold, that Rea called a sun-dog, hung in the sky all afternoon, and dazzlingly bright over the dazzling world of snow circled and glowed a mocking sun, brother of the desert mirage, beautiful illusion, smiling cold out of the ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... examination to be made of every part. In the case of a small disc it is sufficient to polish two or three facets on the edge, and to examine the glass in a field of uniform illumination through the windows thus formed. Very slight irregularities will cause a "mirage" easily recognised.] ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... Sirius, a Venus, a moon, as though the earth had stopped rotating and adopted a direct motion toward the heavenly bodies. Early on fine mornings the horizon gets tired, as it were, of being suppressed, and looms up in a mirage, with an outfit of imaged trees and hills reflected in an imaginary lake,—a pictured protest of Nature against monotony. There are local depressions, nevertheless, which you would not believe in but for the shallow little ponds which fill them ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... gate of one of these comfortable places, Squire Goodlet's home, but he is urged back into the road, and again the pursuit sweeps on. Those blue mountains, the long parallel ranges of Old Bear and his brothers, seem no more a misty, uncertain mirage against the delicious indefinable tints of the horizon. Sharply outlined they are now, with dark, irregular shadows upon their precipitous slopes which tell of wild ravines, and rock-lined gorges, and swirling mountain torrents, and great, beetling, gray ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... some three miles from the ship, and often, deceived by the effects of the mirage and refraction, he went farther away than he intended. It was imprudent, for recent tracts of ferocious animals were to be seen. He did not wish, however, to return without some fresh meat, and continued on his route; but he then experienced a strange feeling, which turned his head. It ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... the rich and tasteful book shop of Chevet, hovering in suspense between the hundred francs of expense, and the joys of a Strasbourg pate de fois gras, you are struck dumb on finding this pate proudly installed on the sideboard of your dining-room. Is this the vision offered by some gastronomic mirage? In this doubting mood you approach with firm step, for a pate is a living creature, and seem to neigh as you scent afar off the truffles whose perfumes escape through the gilded enclosure. You stoop over it two distinct times; all the nerve centres of your palate ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... these infernal plains? If it is not water and a lake those buffalo are standing in, what in the name of sense is it?" I told them that what they saw was nothing more than merely buffalo at a distance on the plain; that what they saw that resembled water was simply an optical illusion, called the "mirage." Webster describes the word as follows: "An optical illusion arising from an unequal refraction in the lower strata of the atmosphere and causing remote objects to be seen double, as if reflected in a mirror, or to appear as if suspended in the air. It is frequently ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... I have seen battalions of men just out of battle stripping themselves and hunting in their shirts for the foul beast. They had a technical name for this hunter's job. They called it "chatting." They desired a bath as the hart panteth for the water—brooks, and baths were but a mirage of the brain to men in Flanders fields and beyond the Somme, until here and there, as at Nieppe, officers with human sympathy organized a system by which battalions of men ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... a man was sincere, I was, Elise. Since I left you at Roselawn I have followed the one path, thinking there was a great light ahead. Now I am afraid that, perhaps, it was only a mirage.' ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... we want is a little more reality and a little less rhetoric. We are most grateful to them that they have not as yet accepted any frigid formula, nor stereotyped themselves into a school, but we wish that they would talk less and think more. They lead us through a barren desert of verbiage to a mirage that they call life; we wander aimlessly through a very wilderness of words in search of one touch of nature. However, one should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only relaxation of the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... with them, the brothers started on another quest for the Lynd, which, like the mirage of the desert, seemed to recede from them as they approached; setting out late in the day, they camped at night once more on the lagoon, at the end of their marked-tree line, a distance of about 18 miles. They took with them four days' rations of flour, tea, and sugar, trusting ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... simple enough. Of the mirage the dictionary says it is "an optical illusion arising from an unequal refraction in the lower strata of the atmosphere, causing images of remote objects to be seen double, distorted or inverted as if reflected in a mirror, or to appear as ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... enticing figures in dreams. They moved about and around her, not as things actually identical with her, but as ills which she could view at a distance. Sometimes both she and they (for she saw herself also as in a kind of mirage or inverted vision) seemed beings of another state, troubled, but not bitterly painful. The old nepenthe of the bottle had seized upon her. After a few accidental lapses, in which she found it acted as a solace or sedative, the highball ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... passionate young defiance, talking glibly of love, and marriage, and living her own life—all the beautiful, romantic nonsense that comes so readily to the soft lips of youth, the beckoning rose and gold of sunrise—and of mirage—which is all ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... rustic seat, and gave herself up to one of those delicious day-dreams which lure the spirit as the mirage ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... with Wallingham, not only a glorious prospect, but an educative force; and never had he a moment of such despondency that it confounded him upon his horizon in the faded colours of some old Elizabethan mirage. ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... earth, were scenes from every age: Cleopatra's galleys, Alexander's legions, the pomp of the Mamelukes, Ptolemy and Pompey, Napoleon and Gordon—their times and deeds were all pictured here. Perhaps the spirit world has its "movies," and only here in the desert mirage is the "screen" of stuff that can ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... expanse of desert is before us, and then a beautiful lake comes into view. Real water, is it?—no; just the desert mirage, but it seems real enough to quench a genuine thirst. But the illusion is lessened by the surroundings, for we are approaching a dry sink—an old lake-bed that was filled with brackish water once when a cloud-burst that occurred in Calico ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... the unlimited freedom of it, its infinite expansion, its air like wine to the senses, the floods of sunshine, the waves of color, the translucent atmosphere that aids the imagination to create in the distance all architectural splendors and realms of peace. It is all like a mirage and a dream. We pass swiftly, and make a moving panorama of beauty in hues, of strangeness in forms, of sublimity in extent, of overawing and savage antiquity. I would miss none of it. And when we pass to the accustomed again, to the fields of verdure and the forests and the hills of green, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... had seen was what is called a mirage—a trick of the clouds and the sun and the sea that makes people imagine they see what they would like to, but really do not. But after this Columbus had a harder time than ever with his men, for they were sure he was leading ...
— The True Story of Christopher Columbus • Elbridge S. Brooks
... about this time, my father startled me by calling my attention to a novel sight far in front of us, almost at the horizon. "It is a mock sun," exclaimed my father. "I have read of them; it is called a reflection or mirage. It ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... rippled and curled like the hair of a nymph, and from the woods wrapt in the evening gloom there came forth a simultaneous murmur, as though they were awakening from a black dream. Call it reality or dream, the momentary glimpse of that invisible mirage reflected from a far-off world, 250 years old, vanished in a flash. The mystic forms that brushed past me with their quick unbodied steps, and loud, voiceless laughter, and threw themselves into the river, did not go back wringing their dripping robes as ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... opens into the world of long ago so graphically depicted on the monumental tablets of the processional paths, while type and symbol point also to the infinite future intensely realised by Eastern mysticism. Mortal life was but a fleeting mirage besides this vision of the life beyond. For the words "Shadow, Unreality, Illusion," perpetually repeated by the yellow-robed monks on the beads of the Buddhist Rosary were inscribed on the inmost heart of the faithful disciple, who ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... continent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... window to see what became of the tangle of horses and auto-car precipitated by the sudden stop of the tally-ho. Mirage effects are common on the western plains, and if Ormsby had not been familiar with them he might have marveled at the striking example afforded by the backward look. In the rapidly increasing perspective the ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... In the south was Teal' (Frog) in a house of blue fog, and Tiel'i[ng], who is afterward a water monster, lay at that doorway. Acihi Estsan (Salt-woman) was in the west, and her house was of the substance of a mirage; the youth Co'nen[)i]li (Water-sprinkler) danced before her door. In the north Cqaltlaqale[1] made a house of green duckweed, and S[)i]stel' (Tortoise) ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... didn't know whom I had there, opposite me, busy now devouring a slice of pate de foie gras. Not in the least. It never entered my head. How could it? The Rita that haunted me had no history; she was but the principle of life charged with fatality. Her form was only a mirage of desire decoying one step by ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... secular but feebly expresses the totally unmoral influence they for the most part exert. They are the extension of the unreligious school into the homes of the people. When Father Hecker and Mrs. George V. Hecker and their associates began The Young Catholic, this vast mirage of the desert of life had but glimmered upon the distant horizon; they saw it coming and they did their best to point Catholic youth away from it and lead it to the real oasis of God, with its grateful shade, its delicious ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... familiar things. I look to the horizon expectant of I know not what magical occurrences, what mysteries. I am aware of the summons to advance to marvellous lands, where marvellous things must happen. I am taken by that sensation of almost trembling magic which came to me when first I saw a mirage far out in the Sahara. But Egypt, though it contains so many marvels, has no longer for me the marvellous ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... the great wave swept over the Spray until she reached Cape Virgins nothing occurred to move a pulse and set blood in motion. On the contrary, the weather became fine and the sea smooth and life tranquil. The phenomenon of mirage frequently occurred. An albatross sitting on the water one day loomed up like a large ship; two fur-seals asleep on the surface of the sea appeared like great whales, and a bank of haze I could have sworn was high land. The ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... wondered if the pair were staying at the place of that name. He knew it well, the beautiful little pointed mountain above Mentone, with its deserted convent, its sad watching cypresses, its one hotel in a fragrant garden, and its famous view of the Corsican mirage. If Vanno's cousin lived in that hotel, which could be reached only by a funicular or a picturesque mule path, it looked as if she had ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... distance—invisible thread of land, with the dark waters rolling around them far and near, they presented an insubstantial dream-like aspect, seeming rather like castles floating between air and ocean than actual fortifications—a deceptive mirage rather than reality. There was nothing imaginary, however, in the work which they ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mirage, lifts only a part of the past into view, leaving much that we should like to know in oblivion. At this distance the Middle Ages wear an aspect of smooth uniformity of faith and opinion, but that is only one of the many illusions of time by which we are deceived. What ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... white specks diminish swiftly,— dwindle to the dimensions of salt-grains,—finally vanish. Then the island grows uniformly bluish; it becomes cloudy, vague as a dream of mountains;—it turns at last gray as smoke, and then melts into the horizon-light like a mirage. ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... from the silt and weeds Lifting thy golden filaments and seeds, Thy sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest! White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of palaces and strips of sky; I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting In ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... boy lived in obscurity, he was bound by one link with the great things of the world. But for the unjust disinheritance of his father, he would have been heir to a vast property; and through all his youth, this had been the golden mirage that had floated before his vision—this had been the fabled country from which his castle rose. Steadily, unfalteringly, one idea had expanded in his mind. By some brave action—by some deed of heroism—he was to win back ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... night, the day came, hot and clear, with the sun beating down from a cloudless sky and the mirage dancing upon the distant horizon. To the men from the north, it was a bit of a shock to exchange Christmas greetings, while the thermometer went sliding up to the mark of one hundred degrees. Nevertheless, ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... Romance—that subtle thing that is mirage—that is life. It is the goodness of the years we have lived through, of the old time when we did this or that, when we dwelt here or there. Looking back, it seems a wonderful enough thing that I who am this, and she who is that, commencing so far away a life that, after ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... for the sun told me the course. I was suddenly roused from my stupor. A glad sight was before me. A lake!—a lake shining like crystal. Was I certain I saw it? Could it be the mirage? No. Its outlines were too sharply defined. It had not that filmy, whitish appearance which distinguishes the latter phenomenon. No. It was not the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... there were periods of grace when the trouble seemed almost to vanish and I would be delighted to believe that perhaps it was gone forever—happy hope! But it was but a delusion, a mirage in the distance, a new road to lead me astray. The affliction always returned, as every stammerer knows—returned worse than before. All the hopes that I would outgrow my trouble, were found to be false hopes. For me, there ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... ennui, that vile ennui, the precursor of storms, which she had so much reason to dread? In any event, she suffered herself to be deceived and had been living for several days in a state of delicious unrest, for love is so strong, so beautiful, that its semblance, its mirage, takes us captive and may move us ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... others, that are, that are not, that always flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as other appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of countless appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know is mirage. You know mirages of desire. These very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past, and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances to people the ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... fantastic tumult—a magical vision of romance, such as his heart never knew in its youth, never can know except in visions, now that youth has passed? There's joy as well as pain in the vision, though, I can tell you, as there must be in any mirage. And it was in a mirage of moonlight and mystery that we took up our journey again, after that second picnic, swooping bird-like, from hill to valley, on our way to the ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... of the night's journey; for they found even the morning air bitter, and the atmosphere a wet fog. The aspect of the country had now changed. Chains of hills disappeared, and all was level sand. On the way they saw the mirage, sometimes assuming the appearance of a distant harbour, at others, of an inland lake reflecting the surrounding objects on its surface; and they met one of the picturesque displays of Arabia, a wealthy Bey going on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He had a train of twenty or thirty camels. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... fancies," thought Philip; and he laid hold of the handrail, and started afresh. The step came on. He knew it now; it was his own step. "An echo," he told himself. "A dream," he thought, "a mirage of the mind;" and he compelled himself to go up. The step came down. It passed him on the stairs, going by the wall as he went by the rail, with an irresistible ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... reality, that which has been destroyed is only an illusion, and that which is left is the Truth. Losing belief in it and its contents, we have lost absolutely nothing but that which the traveller loses when the mirage, which has displayed cool waters and green shades before him, melts swiftly away. There were no cool fountains really there to allay his thirst, no flowery meadows for his wearied limbs; his pleasure was delusion, and the wilderness is blank. Rather the mirage with ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... with joyful anticipation, yet not without some anxiety. Was it a mirage? It might be—often had I been deceived by such appearances. But no: it had not the filmy, gauze-like halo that hangs over the mirage. Its outlines were sharply defined by the prairie turf, and the last lingering rays of the sun glistened upon ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... and unexpecting step the narrow margin of the lake. Sometimes a heavy swell gave it expression; at others, only its varied coloring, which I found more admirable every day, and which gave it an air of mirage instead of the vastness of ocean. Then there was a grandeur in the feeling that I might continue that walk, if I had any seven-leagued mode of conveyance to save fatigue, for hundreds of miles without an obstacle and ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... been standing on a brick path bordered with holly hocks, and she had smiled, a little shyly and gravely, at her father's rather eccentric-looking guest. But on that war-summer morning she had appeared to the stranger as does a mirage of spring water to a man who is dying of thirst in ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... as a field of spring flowers, and as full of delicate changing colour. Away on a remote horizon—remote as all trouble and worry seemed, in this fair spot—hovered islands, opaline and shimmering, like a mirage. Nearer rose a stretch of green hills, travelling by the seashore until they fell back for Fiume, a white town veiled with ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... wondering sadly over the "headache and heartache" of it all, and then saying, gleefully, "at all events Chancery will work none of its bad influence on us"? "None of its bad influence on us!" poor lad, whose life is wasted and character impaired in following the mirage of the suit, and who is killed by the mockery of its end. Thus do the two intertwined stories run; but apart from these, though all in place and keeping, and helping on the general development, there is a whole profusion of noticeable characters. In enumerating them, however baldly, one ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... irritation reined in by propriety, "you may rely upon me for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the facile conjectures of ignorant onlookers. It had been easy for me to gain a temporary effect by a mirage of baseless opinion; but it is ever the trial of the scrupulous explorer to be saluted with the impatient scorn of chatterers who attempt only the smallest achievements, being indeed equipped for no other. And it were well if all such could be admonished to discriminate judgments ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... followed quietly, making no further objection for fear of irritating the old man. At the same time he fervently hoped that General Sokolovitch and his family would fade away like a mirage in the desert, so that the visitors could escape, by merely returning downstairs. But to his horror he saw that General Ivolgin was quite familiar with the house, and really seemed to have friends there. At every step he named some topographical ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet trousers and jacket, slashed with gold. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her. A white yashmak, violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free only her large ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... but I dared not believe my eyes. Clyde, who was helping to draw water from the eighty-foot well without a pulley, thought I was bereft as I ran from the camp toward the advancing rider. But although I thought what I saw must be a mirage, still I knew Mrs. ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... the sun's rays could form a perfect picture in the air of objects on the earth, like the images one sees in glass or water, but they were not generally upright, as in the case of this ship, but reversed—turned bottom upwards. This appearance in the air is called a mirage. He told a sailor to go up to the foretop and look beyond the phantom-ship. The man obeyed, and reported that he could see on the water, below the ship in the air, one precisely like it. Just then another ship was seen in the air, only this one was a steamship, and was bottom-upwards, ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... the prevailing west wind, and the pavement of the Jungfernstieg damp and muddy. A thin veil of yellow fog lay over the Binnen Alster, giving the objects far and near the indefinite, wavering appearance of a mirage. Above the dark masses of houses to the right rose four sharp spires, from the points of which, smoke-wreaths seemed to rise and trail away. Far away in front the Lombardsbrucke was just distinguishable, its three arches apparently hung with gray draperies. Swans glided lazily in groups or singly ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... of heaven," he stood watching all day long, careless of food and rest, as every forward plunge of the ship displayed some fresh wonder. Islands and capes hung high in air, with their inverted images below them; long sand-hills rolled and weltered in the mirage; and the yellow flower-beds, and huge thorny cacti like giant candelabra, which clothed the glaring slopes, twisted, tossed, and flickered, till the whole scene seemed one blazing phantom-world, in which everything was as unstable as it was fantastic, even to the sun itself, distorted into strange ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... multitude to do all the evil which he saw being done around him; it looked a joyous and delightful prospect. He gazed on the bright vision of sin, on the iridescent waters of pleasure; and did not know that the brightness was a mirage of the burning desert, the iridescence a film of ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... distance a line of trees, which I felt sure indicated the presence of water. I pushed on more eagerly, but as I advanced they changed their outline, and suddenly disappeared. All I could see before me was a low line of grass and bushes, which had evidently been magnified by a mirage into the proportion of lofty trees. I went on, but continued to be deceived time after time in the same way. In every direction the mirage danced on the plain. I found that in reality the range of my vision was restricted to a very moderate distance. Suddenly a herd of animals ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... not enamoured of it. It is not the artist's business (be he dramatist or other) to preach. Admitted! His business is to portray; but portray truly he cannot if he has any of that glib doctrinaire spirit, devoid of the insight which comes from instinctive sympathy. He must look at life, not at a mirage of life compounded of authority, tradition, comfort, habit. The sincere artist, by the very nature of him, is bound to be curious and perceptive, with an instinctive craving to identify himself with the experience of others. This is his value, whether he express ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... taken, and the chances of rescue upon which they had reckoned—all those elaborate calculations of hours and distances—were as unsubstantial as the mirage which shimmered upon the horizon. There would be no alarm at Haifa until it was found that the steamer did not return in the evening. Even now, when the Nile was only a thin green band upon the farthest horizon, the pursuit ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... an excellent oil, was a very good eyesalve. It disenchanted her admirer, and made him wonder how a reverend divine could ever fancy a spoiled child, who had scarcely matured into a petulant girl. And as the mirage melted, and Clarinda again resolved into Kitty, other realities began to show themselves in a sedater and truer light to the awakened dreamer. As an excuse for an attachment at which Doddridge himself soon learned to smile, it is fair to add that love was in this instance prophetic. Clarinda ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... delight to look upon. As the state of the atmosphere varies they seem near or far away, clearly defined, or with a hazy outline. But in sunlight or shadow, mist or mirage, they are ever beautiful. Within the peaceful channel ships are safe while a wind storm rages just beyond. The government sends big war-ships here for a trial of speed. None of these islands are now desirable for ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... became the order of the day; from four in the morning to eight at night, even at an ox's pace, leaves every landmark of the day far in the rear at nightfall. Thus for the next few days we moved forward, the monotony of existence broken only by the great variety of mirage, the glare of heat-waves, and the silent signal in the sky of other voyageurs like ourselves. On reaching Pig Boggy, nothing but pools greeted us, while the regular crossing was dry and dusty and paved with cattle ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... you will not mistake the shrill chorus of a few interested courtiers and speculators for the voice of your time, nor imagine that you precede your generation because you stand alone. He dreamed of far-away glory, and his flatterers told him his dreams were prophetic. He saw across the seas the mirage of a great Latin empire in the West, and beheld the Muse of history inscribing his name beside that of his great kinsman as the restorer of the political and commercial equilibrium of the world, as well as the benefactor who had thrown El Dorado open to civilization. ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... Luck was with him. Half an hour after leaving the harbor he sighted a ship flying a red flag, which showed him at once that she was carrying a cargo of powder. He badly needed the ammunition, and he prepared to capture her. But this operation was interrupted by a mirage, which caused the small French destroyer Mosquet to appear like a huge battleship. When he discovered the truth, Von Mueller closed with the Frenchman, who came to the rescue of the Glenturret, the powder ship. Destroyer and cruiser closed ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... is a mirror we break in a minute In snatching the image our soul has cast in it, What is the use of the Summers and Springs, The wave of the woods and the waft of the wings— Since all means nothing, and good things and ill Make madness,—a mirage tormenting ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... dusk,—and so on for more than a page, until finally, step by step, through laboriously elegant sentences, I worked my way up to the top of a lofty hill, the view from which to be graphically described as a picture and a poem dissolved together into mingled glory and mirage, and inundating with a billowy sea of beauty the landscape below;—and then further depicting to the delighted fancy of the reader, how on one side was a most remarkable river,—such as was never heard of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... 31,457. The situation is typical of the north of Jutland. To the west the Linifjord broadens into an irregular lake, with low, marshy shores and many islands. North-west is the Store Vildmose, a swamp where the mirage is seen in summer. South-east lies the similar Lille Vildmose. A railway connects Aalborg with Hjorring, Frederikshavn and Skagen to the north, and with Aarhus and the lines from Germany to the south. The harbour is good and safe, though difficult of access. Aalborg is a growing industrial and commercial ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... what it was. He saw in a mist the naked priest, his friend and rescuer, seated upon the sandy floor regarding him with a wrinkled brow and compressed lips, and then he sank into fever visions uncouth and dreadful, or mirage-pleasing with a mirage-ecstasy. ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... Finding a Prairie. Encamping for the Night. Singular incident. A Mirage on the Prairie. The Prairie on fire. Flight to the Sand Hills. Their final escape. Finding a stream. ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... comforting, talk to me of my wife. Say how sweet and lovely she is. Say that her arms are tender, her eyes gentle and kind. I am the thirsty traveller in the desert, who sights pure water, hastens eagerly forward, and finds—a mirage! But a deadly stream flows from the roots of the Upas—Hullo! Here comes Aubrey Treherne. Look out, Mrs. Dalmain! He owes you a grudge. Hey, presto! Vanish from the chair, or Helen's cousin will lean over, with a bleeding face, threatening to ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... night was magnificent; he could scarcely comprehend that this languid world of sea and palm, of heavy odour and slow breezes, was his own land still. Under the spell the Occident vanished; it was the Orient—all this dreamy mirage, these dim white walls, this spice-haunted dusk, the water inlaid with stars, the fairy foliage, the dew drumming in the stillness like the ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... he spoke once more of this projected journey which became ever more and more remote, like a mirage in the desert: "My health is good, the weather very mild; the bad season has not begun, but the roads are bad in a country where there are no highways. So Hortense will come with Napoleon; I am delighted. I am impatient to have things settle themselves so that you can come. I have ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... cries Burton, "the bourn of my long and weary pilgrimage, realising the plans and hopes of many and many a year,"—the Kaaba, the place of answered prayer, above which in the heaven of heavens Allah himself sits and draws his pen through people's sins. "The mirage of fancy invested the huge catafalque and its gloomy pall with peculiar charms." Of all the worshippers who clung weeping to the curtain, [129] or who pressed their beating hearts to the sacred black stone built into the Kaaba, none, thought Burton, felt for the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... like Schubert, he could not afford to buy music paper; he wanted all the money he could save to pay a publisher to publish his polka—just as we do in England—and if it succeeded his fortune would be made. I felt a sinking at the heart, as though he was telling me he had been gazing on the mirage of the lottery until he had dreamt a number. He had filled about two pages and a half with polka stuff, but had ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... "It's only mirage," said the Road-Runner; "even Indians are fooled by it if they are strange to the country. But it is quite true about the ground being the place to hear things. All day the Iron Shirts would ride in a kind of doze of sun and weariness. But when they sat at meals, loosening ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... be a curiosity; big water-snakes raise their slimy heads a couple of feet above the sea; the tiny nautilus floats in myriads upon the undulating waves, and at times the ship is surrounded by a shoal of the indolent jelly-fish. Mirage plays us strange tricks in the way of optical delusion in these regions. We seem to be approaching land which we never reach, but which at the moment when we should fairly make it, fades into ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... the scene slowly melted away and disappeared. [Footnote: This is a poetical description of a phenomenon which is said to be really exhibited in the strait of Messina, between Sicily and Calabria. It is called Fata Morgana, or Mirage.] ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... by something on the western horizon. It seemed to be in the sky—a faint red glow, across which shadows appeared to move like phantoms. Like a picture from the ghost world, it flickered for a few minutes like heat lightning, then disappeared, leaving the night as dark as before. It was a night mirage, and something more than an optical illusion. It was a rare thing on the plain. The Kid knew that it meant something. That glow was the reflection in the sky of a camp fire! Those shadows were men! The Texan quickly ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... Carstairs to keep her engagement to-morrow, his one great problem this morning, had become an unimportant detail now. Charlie Hammerton, with his merciless knowledge, filled the whole horizon like a menacing mirage. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... His weird old eyes, peculiarly tinted from years of looking into the mirage-draped distances of ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... impetuous spirit beneath her flesh that, flashing, somehow lightened all her tints; this woman, albeit dark, had somehow about her a deep golden hue as of dusk in a deep wood beheld against a sunset. Her face had always had a boyish look and still, with years, was boyish. There was a mirage in her face. The stranger glanced and saw a mother—extraordinarily shielding and maternal and benignant things; and looked again and saw a boy—astonishingly reckless and impetuous and rather boyish, hard and mutinous things. Or glanced and saw a boy, perhaps laughing ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... day of the going away of my Love, When the litters, carrying the women of the tribe, Traversed the valley of Dad, like a sea, mirage, They were like ships, great ships, the work of the children of Adoul, Or like the boats of ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... ghost of a great house with many solemn windows for eyes. It looked blank, uninhabited, lifeless. Between the house and the river moonlight smoothed the lawns. The moon made that cold stone phantom imponderable, a grey mirage. Radway could not believe, for a moment, that it was real; but the sense of Gabrielle's cold cheek against his lips, her fingers twined in his, and her soft, unhurried breathing recalled him, telling him that he was a lover, ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... neglecting our duties to others, ourselves and God) to let doubt range unchecked through the whole fabric of our customary convictions. One by one they refuse to render any reasonable account of themselves; each seems a mere chance, and the whole tends to elude us like a mirage which some malignant power creates for our illusion. Attacked in detail, they vanish one after another into as many teasing spectra of uncertainty. We are seeking from them what they cannot give. But when we have done our worst in unsettling them, we come to an ultimate point ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... would be without dreams—waking dreams, I mean—the dreams that we call "castles in the air," built by the kindly hands of Hope! Were it not for the mirage of the oasis, drawing his footsteps ever onward, the weary traveler would lie down in the desert sand and die. It is the mirage of distant success, of happiness that, like the bunch of carrots fastened an inch beyond the donkey's nose, seems always just within our reach, if only we will ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... the tall woman wrung her hands and groaned. How I hated her! And in my madness I accused her of putting it there to ruin me. And some one (a man) said slowly, 'She is impossible!—quite impossible!' That one memory stands out like a little oasis in a desert of mirage and shifting sand, and thirst. I should know the room again if I saw it. There was a window opening into a little paved courtyard with a fountain in it, and doves drinking. But I shall never see it again. And the drug ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... a great distance. To use M. Stroobant's own words, "My guide, who had for some time appeared to be walking in search of something, suddenly led me to an elevation whence I had the singular privilege of contemplating for a few instants the magnificent effect of mirage, which is termed the Spectre of the Brocken. The appearance is most striking. A thick mist, which seemed to emerge from the clouds like an immense curtain, suddenly rose to the west of the mountain, a rainbow was formed, then certain indistinct shapes were delineated. First, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... sunlight warm on my body, and not wake to that old dull misery. I can even dream with a light heart, for my fair dreams will not be spoiled by waking, and my bad dreams will be cured the moment I open my eyes. I can look up at that blue sky without seeing trailed across it a mirage of the long horror, a film picture of all the things that have been done by men to men. At last I can gaze up at it, limpid and blue, without a dogging melancholy; and I can gaze down at that far gleam of sea, knowing that there is no murk of murder ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy |
