"Mystic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rage, hate, and violence. Innocent, guileless fear has been the cause of many wars. Not, of course, the fear of war itself, which, in the evolution of sentiments and ideas, has come to be regarded at last as a half-mystic and glorious ceremony with certain fashionable rites and preliminary incantations, wherein the conception of its true nature has been lost. To apprehend the true aspect, force, and morality of war as a natural function ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the quiet grey that hung over the Atlantic. Not a breath of wind passed over land or sea. To the northward Chun Castle stood darkly on the summit of the neighbouring hill, and the cromlech loomed huge and mysterious; southward were traces of mystic circles and upright stones, and other of those inexplicable pieces of antiquity which are usually saddled on the overladen shoulders of the Druids. Everything, in fact—in the scene, the season, and the weather—contributed to fill the mind of the ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... history will reveal a fact that is not observant to the casual reader—that man, as an individual, has ever been groping in darkness, seeking hither and thither to find a ray of light that would safely guide him and lead him through the mystic vale of doubt and uncertainty—be a "light to his pathway, a ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... total destruction of life." He then quotes apparently the language of the text, "He consumed his body by Agni (the fire of) Samadhi," and says it is "a common expression for the effects of such ecstatic, ultra-mystic self-annihilation." All this is simply "a darkening of counsel by words without knowledge." Some facts concerning the death of Ananda are hidden beneath the darkness of the phraseology, which it is impossible for us to ascertain. By or in Samadhi he burns his body in the very ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... Mystic, with introspection, asks the question in the form "Can the Absolute find me out and possess me and thus make me feel that that which is within me is akin to, is, in fact, a part of Him and that I am possessed thereby?" ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... that this people had rather a tendency to the useful, than to the beautiful. Unable to assimilate the elements of beauty and grace furnished by more genial races, this mystic and vanished nation was rather prone to the stupendously and minutely practical, than devoted to the beautiful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... world began now and ended for Skavinski on his island. He had grown accustomed to the thought that he would not leave the tower till his death, and he simply forgot that there was anything else besides it. Moreover, he had become a mystic; his mild blue eyes began to stare like the eyes of a child, and were as if fixed on something at a distance. In presence of a surrounding uncommonly simple and great, the old man was losing the feeling of personality; ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... cultivated and generous contemporary ways it reveals a pre- established harmony. As you live in it day after day its beauty and its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions. If in the absence of its masters you have happened to have it to yourself for twenty-four hours you will never forget the charm of its haunted stillness, late on the summer afternoon for instance, when the call of playing ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... did call upon his Snake with due and portentous ceremony and, according to Stephen, who was present, which I declined to be, that mystic reptile declared that Dogeetah, alias Brother John, would arrive in Beza Town precisely at sunset on the third day from that night. Now as he had divined on Friday, according to our almanac, this meant that we might hope to see him—hope exactly described my state of mind on the matter—on ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... of Florence, for which he received 1200, contributed by the inhabitants of every part of Italy in 1872. The statues are in white marble, the tablets and friezes in bronze, and the pedestal in granite. The monument is tame and mystic. Cavour, in an upright position, holds in his hand a scroll bearing the words, "libera chiesa in libero stato." (See p.294.) The climate of Turin is more suitable for bronze than for marble statues. To the west is the Piazza S.Carlo, with a bronze ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... Iacchus! power excelling, here in stately temple dwelling, O Iacchus! O Iacchus! Come to tread this verdant level, Come to dance in mystic revel, Come whilst round thy forehead hurtles Many a wreath of fruitful myrtles, Come with wild and saucy paces Mingling in our joyous dance, Pure and holy, which embraces all the charms of all the Graces When the mystic ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... have rolls or cylinders inscribed with their prayers, which they twirl round on an axis, continually pronouncing these mystic words, and they believe that all the prayers on these rolls are virtually pronounced at each turn of the roll; The religion of the Dalai-Lama, is a branch of the Shamanian and Braminical superstitions, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... ring-side of Indian sporting grounds, and only tacitly accepted in the extra-official circles of Hindustan. For it figured not in the official Army List, either as active or retired. The whole panorama of the mystic land of the Hindus was unrolled once more by the memories of fifteen clouded years, He saw again his far-away theater of varied action, with its huge grim mountains towering far over the snow line, its arid wastes, its fertile plains bathed ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... River. In this they were successfully aided by Tecumseh, the Shawanee chief, and his brother, the Prophet. These were sons of a Creek mother and a Shawanee brave. By relationship, and by the rude eloquence of the former and the mystic arts and incantations of the latter, they brought into confederacy with Northern tribes—which they had organized as allies of the English in a last hope of destroying American power in the West—almost the entire Creek nation. These savages, though at peace under treaty and largely ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... its mystic sense of entranced Love for the Soul of Souls. Umar was hated and feared because he spoke boldly when his brethren the Soofis dealt in innuendoes. A third quotation has been trained into a likeness of the Hymn of Life, despite the commonplace and the navrante vulgarit which characterize ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... senseless wood, And chatter in a mystic strain, Is a mere force on flesh and blood, And shows some ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... was sipping a whisky toddy, with the feeling that he had been privileged to assist at some mystic rite. Mr. Beach, posting himself before the fire and placing his hands behind his back, permitted ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the eye is a good working lens. But they don't notice them except by accident, when the light slants sideways, and when there's a specially good background for them to be projected and magnified upon." And, taking him into his mystic chamber, and reconstituting the conditions, "Look!" says he, "there are your old friends again!" And there they were, sure enough, in all their amorphous horror. It is, in fact, not so much the actual external object that determines ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... darkens as the night descends; And through the mystic atmosphere I feel the creeping coldness that portends A change of spirit in my dream The multitude that moved with song and cheer Have vanished, yet a living stream Flows on and follows still the flag, But silent now, with leaden ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... blackness of night. And then out of the belly of the cloud there sprang a woman arrayed as a bride, and behind her there followed men with faces strange to me, whose stamping footsteps shook the island to its roots in the deep sea. Then came a mystic voice to me, ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... gradually its glories became more perceptible. Begun by Hubert in 1420 and finished by Jan in 1432, its pristine splendour has vanished; and the loss of the wings—the Adam and Eve are in Brussels, the remaining volets in the Berlin Museum—is irreparable despite the copies. But this Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, with its jewelled figures of the Christ, of St. John the Baptist, St. Cecilia, and the central panel with its mystical symbolism, painted in sumptuous tones, the lamb on the altar, the prophets and ecclesiastics in worship, the singing angels, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Average Jones. "I shouldn't have vaunted my poor French. But must I really take my little friends all the way back? You suggested to the mystic voice within that ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Thirteenth. This absurd priest determined to try what the weight of his authority could effect in favour of the orthodox Maria Theresa against a heretic king. At the high mass on Christmas-day, a sword with a rich belt and scabbard, a hat of crimson velvet lined with ermine, and a dove of pearls, the mystic symbol of the Divine Comforter, were solemnly blessed by the supreme pontiff, and were sent with great ceremony to Marshal Daun, the conqueror of Kolin and Hochkirchen. This mark of favour had more than once been bestowed ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he had done well, but with the next question he betrayed his ignorance. A good man arose, also hot on Church affairs, to discourse on some disabilities, and casually described himself as a U.P. George's wits busied themselves in guessing at the mystic sign. At last to his delight he seemed to achieve it, and, in replying, electrified his audience by assuming that the two ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... wearisome at times. In his "Pageant of Summer" he babbles prettily of green fields, but it is a long, long summer and one is hardly sorry to see its close. In some of his writings he affects one unpleasantly, gives an uncanny feeling; one divines the invalid as well as the mystic back of them; there is a hectic flush, perhaps a neurotic taint. Beautiful, yes, but not the beauty of health and sanity. It is the same indescribable feeling I get in reading that pathetically beautiful book, "The Road-Mender," by "Michael Fairless"—the gleam of the White ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... had risen to devote The mystic wafer, from the band that stood About the altar came a sudden note Of sweetness over my disdainful mood; A voice that, speaking from the brazen throat Of warlike trumpets, came like the subdued Moan of a people bound in sore distress, And ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... The disturbance will pass away; and we shall find that Abraham and Moses knew more about the universe than Hegel or Comte. The prophets of the sacred race were divinely endowed with an esoteric knowledge concealed from the vulgar behind mystic symbols and ceremonies. If the old oracles are dumb, some gleams of the same power still remain, and in the language of mere mortals are called genius. We find it in perfection only amongst the Semites, whose finer organisation, indicated by their musical supremacy, enables them to catch the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... wound the procession of sleighs and horsemen, without sound of voice or jingle of bell till, one by one, they passed out of our sight and dipped down into the canyon. But we knew every step of the winding trail and followed them in fancy through that fairy scene of mystic wonderland. We knew how the great elms and the poplars and the birches clinging to the snowy sides interlaced their bare boughs into a network of bewildering complexity, and how the cedars and balsams and spruces stood in the bottom, their dark boughs ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... power and miraculous gifts of the early Church. But when the pure doctrine became corrupted, and the Christian Church (like the Jewish of former times) gave itself up to idolatry, masses, image-worship, and the like, the knowledge of the mystic name was withdrawn, and all miracles have ceased in the Church from that up ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... that will bestow Earth's joys and blessings on a man. Each one must choose the path he'll go, Then win from it what joy he can. And he that battles with the odds Shall know success, but he who waits The favors of the mystic gods, Shall never ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... be, but only discover the beauty of her feminine stillness. Not far from that consummate caryatid, among the black columns of the tall trees laid against the lave of the blue, and beneath their cloudy branches, there are mystic enlacements which move to and fro; and hardly can one distinguish the two halves of which they are made, for the temple ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... native land. The number, indeed, was so considerable, that the priest who officiated was obliged to make use of the mop, or hyssop, with which the Roman Catholic missionaries were wont to scatter the holy drops, whose mystic virtue could cleanse the soul in a moment from the foulest stains of infidelity. "Thus," says a Castilian historian, "the calamities of these poor blind creatures proved in the end an excellent remedy, that God made use ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... work both ways, and all who are interested in it must see to it that their religion does not escape control and wreck fraternity. Even mystic prayer and contemplation, which is commonly regarded as the flower of religious life, may make men indifferent ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... outline cast On yonder wall, to arrest with poet's finger Thy beauty's mystic image fading fast, As round thy form fond ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... show that he, a man wise beyond his fellows, had not yet learned the unwisdom of striving to lift the veil of tomorrow, behind whose mystic curtain what is to be ever jostles out of place what ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... fashion since their return and new ones engaged by letter; to these the editor and his immediate associates remained an unseen presence, issuing its instructions solely through the medium of curt typewritten notes. Something mystic and Tibetan and forbidden had replaced the human bustle and democratic simplicity of pre-migration days, and the same experience was encountered by those who made social overtures to the returned wanderers. The most brilliant ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... babies, but she clung to Maren as she had ever done,—and now, in her twenty-sixth year, Maren had risen to the call as her father had done before her, and lifted her face, rapt as some pagan Priestess', toward that mystic West,—bound for the Land of the Whispering Hills, whence had come that old, vague rumour, lured alike by love of the unknown and shy, unspoken longing for the father whose heart must be ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... were, to warn the beholder of an unrevealed danger. The young man had long ago, it must be added, demanded of his grandfather the documents included in the legacy of Professor Swinnerton, and had spent days and nights upon them, growing pale over their mystic lore, which seemed the fruit not merely of the Professor's own labors, but of those of more ancient sages than he; and often a whole volume seemed to be compressed within the limits of a few lines of crabbed manuscript, judging from the time which it cost even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... genius to his fellow-citizens; and who, having once felt the strange charm of that genius, but recalls with joyful interest the happy hour when he was first brought under its influence? I well remember, even at this distance in time, the mystic, charmed presence that hung about the "Jeremiah dictating his Prophecy to Baruch the Scribe," "Beatrice," "The Flight of Florimel," "The Triumphal Song of Miriam on the Destruction of Pharaoh and his Host in the Red Sea," and "The Valentine." I was then young, and had yet to learn that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... nymph, her bonnet pushed over her face, her hayrake in her hand, a river-god in coat of velveteen, elbow on knee and pipe in mouth, who, rising when he sees us, lifts his wide-awake, and halloas back a roar of comfort to our mystic adjuration, - ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... coffin-shaped board was roughly drawn, in black paint, a skull and cross-bones and, underneath them, the words "Eliab Hill and Nimbus Desmit," and below these still, the mystic cabala, "K.K.K," a formulary at which, just at that time, a great part of the nation was laughing as a capital illustration of American humor. It was accounted simply a piece of grotesquerie intended to frighten the ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... of devils, and gave unto them grace through the very thing that had been disclosed to his own sight as a sign of victory against the onrush of foes; and how on the third day the Glory 185 of men and Lord of all mankind rose from the tomb and from death, and ascended into heaven. Men wise in the mystic things of the Spirit thus said unto the victory-inspired monarch as they had 190 learned from Silvester. And at their hands the prince of the people received baptism, and held to the faith according to the will of the Lord from that ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... pile chanting his incantations for hours, till sheer exhaustion obliges him to desist, when his place is taken by his assistant. Water is sprinkled on the stone and huge fires are kindled. No layman may approach the sacred spot while the mystic ceremony is being performed. When the Sulka of New Britain wish to procure rain they blacken stones with the ashes of certain fruits and set them out, along with certain other plants and buds, in the sun. Then a handful of twigs is dipped in water ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Strachan. I began to wax wroth, muttered anathemas against my faithless friend, rang for the waiter, and—having ascertained the fact that a Masonic Lodge was that evening engaged in celebrating the festival of its peculiar patron—I set out for the purpose of assisting in the pious and mystic labours of the Brethren of the Jedburgh St Jeremy. At twelve, when I returned to my quarters, escorted by the junior deacon, I was informed that Strachan had not made his appearance, and accordingly I went ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... of several Kansa gentes. The ancestors of these gentes were spoken of as birds which descended from an upper world. The phratries in that tribe, the "Wa-yun min-'dun," or "(Those who) sing together," refer to mystic songs and strengthen the view that the secret society exists among these Indians. Several members of the tribe ...
— Osage Traditions • J. Owen Dorsey
... 400 carved stones of a more or less religious character. A few are Buddhist; some are memorials to priests or teachers; several bear that representation of a man and a woman facing one another (p. 265) which is one of the oldest mystic emblems; the majority are devoted apparently to the horse god. Every man who loses a horse erects a stone. There are two persons in the village who can carve these stones at a cost of about 2 yen. Some stones which are painted red are dedicated ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger, Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker, Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... mystic cavern, whenever any of them has dropped out of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling to one another, so did they with shrilling cry ...
— The Republic • Plato
... in Hwochow, Chaocheng, and Fensi had a marvellous escape. The Boxers, practising their mystic rites, overran the district. Whole families fled to the mountains, and no one was safe from robbery and violence. The mandarin of Chaocheng, fearful lest massacres should take place in the county under his jurisdiction and desiring at any cost to ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... overnight, by the help of a cigar and a moonlight contemplation on deck, for sensations on landing in Egypt. I was ready to yield myself up with solemnity to the mystic grandeur of the scene of initiation. Pompey's Pillar must stand like a mountain, in a yellow plain, surrounded by a grove of obelisks as tall as palm-trees. Placid sphinxes brooding o'er the Nile—mighty Memnonian countenances calm—had revealed Egypt to me in a sonnet of ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... four men sat silent, two in slouching postures at the head of the coffin; the third, with the driver, was at its foot. It seemed drearily suggestive, the last journey of this humble mortality, in all the splendid environment of the mountains, under the vast expansions of the aloof skies, in the mystic ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... resuming the manuscript, "of dividing all art into two great classes, the landscape subjects, and the figure subjects; and I venture to describe these classes, in their highest development, under the respective titles of Art Pastoral and Art Mystic. The 'Golden Age' is an attempt to exemplify Art Pastoral. 'Columbus in Sight of the New World' is an effort to express myself in Art Mystic. In 'The Golden Age' "—(everybody looked at Columbus immediately)—"In the 'Golden Age,'" continued Mr. Blyth, waving his wand persuasively towards the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... field and alight near a rock-strewn hill. Candles are given us and we grope our way through narrow passages till we come to the centre of the hill. Here is a chamber some twenty feet in height. On the great stones which support the roof are mystic emblems. On the floor is a large stone hollowed out in the shape of a bowl. It suggests human sacrifices. My guide did not encourage this suggestion. There was, he thought, no historical evidence for it. But it seemed to ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... wondered at that men, endowed with such powers of blessing or banning, possessed of such mystic communion with the then utterly unknown powers of nature, should have exercised an all but unlimited influence over the minds of their countrymen, especially at a time when the powers of evil were still supposed to stalk the earth in all their native malignity, and no light of any revelation ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... physiognomy, being all 'right here'; intensely so, taking in everything around her. I was very much attracted towards her in this way, not as a youth would be towards a maiden—there was none of that feeling whatever. I felt she was a mystic, a powerful one, and she interested me greatly. When sitting in the room with all the members of the family, I noticed at times she would eye me very closely; and if I returned the gaze I saw such an expression in her face as if she did not belong here at all, but was living on some other planet. ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... the rounds after the Boer fashion, and beginning with the old lady in the chair, received a lymphatic shake of the hand from every single soul in the room. They did not rise—it is not customary to do so—they merely extended their paws, all of them more or less damp, and muttered the mystic monosyllable "Daag," short for good-day. It is a very trying ceremony till one gets used to it, and John pulled up panting, to be presented with a cup of hot coffee that he did not want, but which it would be ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... Existence goes on unceasingly, at our doors; thousands struggling for gold and fame and mere bread, and resorting to infamous devices to obtain them; the great commercial currents flow and flow, according to their mystic laws; the price of stocks goes up, goes down, and with them, the life and fate of thousands; the inconsequent bells ring out from Craddock Church, and the people congregate; the grave of the schoolmistress sleeps in the sunshine, and the ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Trynyte, by Henry Pepwell. In the yere of our lorde God, M.CCCCC.XXI., the xvi. daye of Nouembre." They may, somewhat loosely speaking, be regarded as belonging to the fourteenth century, though the first and longest of them professes to be but a translation of the work of the great Augustinian mystic of an earlier age. ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... New York prepared to resume her artist-life. The musical world remembered with respect and admiration the Camilla Urso of her brilliant girlhood. The wonderful child-life had ended. The new artist-life now begins. Once more the swift fingers might fly over the mystic strings. Again the bow arm wield its ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... of Time; and the days and hours were reckoned by a new standard; everything in the world had suffered some wondrous change, which Valentine Hawkehurst tried in vain to understand. The very earth upon which he walked had undergone some mystic process of transformation; the very streets of London were new to him. He had known Kensington-gardens from his boyhood; but not those enchanted avenues of beech and elm in which he walked with Charlotte. In the plainest and most commonplace ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... sense of awe inspired by a tropic forest is certainly greater than the mystic fear which any wooded wilderness of the North could ever have created. The brilliancy of colors that seem almost preternatural; the vastness of the ocean of frondage, and the violet blackness of rare gaps, revealing its in conceived profundity; and the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... or Fruit Basket, only instead of taking parts of a coach or names of fruits you take articles that belong to the Camp Fire, like bead band, ring, moccasin, bracelet, fire, honor beads, symbol, fringe, Wohelo, hand sign, bow and drill, Mystic Fire, etc. Then somebody tells a story about Camp Fire Girls, and every time one of those articles is mentioned every one must get up and turn around. But if the words 'Ceremonial Meeting' or 'Council Fire' are mentioned, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... two will lie i' the shadow of That living mystic tree Within whose secret growth the Dove Is sometimes felt to be, While every leaf that His plumes ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... is the thought of the wonders underground, Of the mystic changes wrought in the silent, dark profound! How each thing upward tends by necessity decreed, And the world's support depends on ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... Her chaplet, wound about her right arm, had beads of a milky whiteness, whilst the links and the cross were of gold. And on her bare feet, on her adorable feet of virgin snow, flowered two golden roses, the mystic roses of this divine ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... sunlight falls more brightly on the gold, the incense curls in mystic spiral wreaths, its strong perfume penetrates and dims his senses; little by little, his thoughts wander till they are strangely fixed on something far away, and he no longer sees Pope nor altar nor altar-piece beyond, and is wrapped in a sort of waking sleep that is blindness. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... be provided," returned the Wise One, smiling. He stepped to an ancient chest, deeply carved with mystic signs, that stood quite by itself in a corner of the hut. From out that chest many magic gifts had come, when need was great. Filled to the brim with treasures as it always was, none saw aught within but those gifts which were ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... lives of ours, as germs find the culture soil they love; so it follows that to the commonplace comes a life of dull routine, foolish happenings seek out the sentimentalist, sordid events seek the sordid and on the mystic dawns the mysterious. Calamities wait there, too, until Fate points out a weak spot in character on which they may pounce relentless with the temptation that pierces it. As there are certain things that would scarcely dare to happen to certain people, so other greater events would hardly condescend ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... term for the harmony that binds the different parts of a story into one whole. In the present case there are three 'motives' underlying the plot. (1) What has been called the 'oracular action': the interest of mystic dream oracles gradually becoming clear as the oracles are fulfilled. (2) The development of an ironic situation—Joseph recognising his brethren but not recognised by them: once developed this situation is prolonged to the utmost by the hero's conflict ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... he left her and came and sat down by the new-comer, who let him play with the fringe of her scarf. Was she in a manner playing him with it? A thoroughly equipped society fiction, such as the English now lack, would have instructed me, and taught me the mystic meaning of the young girls who fluttered up and down the paths by twos and threes, exquisite complexions, exquisite shapes, exquisite profiles, exquisite costumes, in a glad momentary freedom from chaperonage. It would fix even the exact social value of that companion of a lady ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair; it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none but the life Kate had left—the sense of which, for that matter, by mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor—the very impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but again: ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... at work; your belief in him is his only power." Whereupon Nathanael, quite angry because Clara would only grant the existence of the demon in his own mind, began to dilate at large upon the whole mystic doctrine of devils and awful powers, but Clara abruptly broke off the theme by making, to Nathanael's very great disgust, some quite commonplace remark. Such deep mysteries are sealed books to cold, unsusceptible characters, he thought, without being clearly ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... feet and a candle. Here Lord Kew separated from the prince's party. His name does not occur in the last part of the Footprints; which, in truth, are filled full of strange rhapsodies, adventures which nobody was but the princess, and mystic disquisitions. She hesitates at nothing, like other poets of her nation: not profoundly learned, she invents where she has not acquired: mingles together religion and the opera; and performs Parisian pas-de-ballet before the gates of monasteries and the cells of anchorites. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... consonance with his feelings. Innumerable twinklings of stars faintly illuminated a cloudless, serene heaven, and a foaming, plunging ocean. The slender, dark outlines of the sailless upper masts were leaning sharply over to leeward, and describing what seemed like mystic circles and figures against the lighter sky. The crests of seas showed with ghostly whiteness as they howled themselves to death near by, or dashed with a jar and a hoarse whistle over the bulwarks, slapping against the sails ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... detained, if not by friends, by the beauty of the gardens or the river. Never did the old dining-hall and the staircases, balustraded—on whose gray stone a leaf, the first of many, rustles—seem more intense and pregnant with that mystic mournfulness which is the Thames, and which is London. The dull sphinx-like water rolling through multitude of bricks, seemed to mark on this wistful autumn day a more melancholy enchantment, and looking ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... answered, they both forgot; for their faces were turned toward the wonder of the swamp. The golden sun was pouring floods of glory through the slim black trees, and the mystic sombre pools caught and tossed back the glow in darker, duller crimson. Long echoing cries leapt to and fro; silent footsteps crept hither and yonder; and the girl's eyes gleamed ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... tells us, "the high Dutch language, on purpose to know the original words of the blessed Jacob."' Overton's Life of Law, p. 181. Behmen, or Bhme, the mystic shoemaker of Gorlitz, was born in 1575, and died in 1624. 'His books may not hold at all honourable places in libraries; his name may be ridiculous. But he was a generative thinker. What he knew he knew for himself. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... the snow increasing in thickness as we increased our elevation, the march commenced with undulations, but soon passed off into an excessively steep ascent, in some parts indeed precipitous. We crossed at twelve and a half P.M. the Pass of Rodoola, on which are some slabs, with mystic characters, but even here the ascent did not terminate, but continued, although very gradually for perhaps two miles more. Before coming to the summit, a small hut is passed. The descent was at first very rapid, then we proceeded along the side of the mountain for a long way, at nearly the ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... East and South, with never a lake nor a forest to catch the light, with not a cloud in the sky to cast a shadow. Yet over the broad, undulating expanse were lines and patches of varying color, changing and wavering from moment to moment, like mystic currents and eddies upon a heaving, tide-swept sea. Amy watched her companion furtively, ready to take umbrage at any lack of proper appreciation on his part; for this was what she liked best in all Colorado, this vast, mysterious ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... of fairy land, that hidden pocket in the hills, always covered by a mystic haze, for which the Mexicans give it the name Humada. Its steep canyon comes down from the breast of the most easterly of the Four Peaks, impassable except by the one trail; it passes through the box and there widens ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... the mind grows faster and the heart more slowly; then wakes the storm in the forest of human relation, tempest and lightning abroad, the soul enlarging by great bursts of vision and leaps of understanding and resolve; then floats up the mystic twilight eagerness, not unmingled with the dismay of compelled progress, when, bidding farewell to that which is behind, the soul is driven toward that which is before, grasping at it with all the hunger of the new birth. The story ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... calm brow, where not a wrinkle marred the serene expression of intellect, although I had been told that more than a hundred years had touched with increasing wisdom its broad surface. The smile that dwelt in her eyes, like the mystic sprite in the fountain, had not a suspicion of sadness in them. A nature so lofty as hers, where every feeling had a generous and noble existence and aim, could not have known without anguish the race of people ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... eating the cold food which was served to him, sank into a state which was neither sleep nor stupor. It was a mystic region between the conscious and the unconscious, in which all things were out of proportion, ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... new tided of life and strength to the surface, thus materially tending to insure good health to persons who indulge therein. The blood moves more rapidly, and conveys a different impression to all the organs of the body, as it visits them on that particular mystic journey when the man is laughing, from what it does at other times. For this reason every good, hearty laugh in which a person indulges lengthens his life, conveying as it does a new and distinct stimulus to ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... which, outside the Church, only serves to perpetuate the curse and bring fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made holy by his presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to represent his own mystic union with his Church. Even saints cannot live without at times some spot adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe and move is soiled, and Christ has anticipated our wants. Christ did penance forty days in the wilderness, not to subdue his ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... be remembered, a sort of Delphic oracle of the marine genus, who invariably keeps his mystic intentions locked within the secret recesses of his own breast and only gives them utterance, when the occasion arrives for him to speak, through the lips of ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... released. These excursions led us often to the Devil's Den, an excavation in an abandoned ledge of limestone, in a solitary situation at some distance from the town, and guarded, now as then, by three rather spectral-looking Lombardy poplars, which to us boys had a sort of mystic and undefined significance. Here we procured bits of serpentine, interspersed with veins of rag-stone, as we denominated asbestos, which, strangely enough, we used to chew. I suppose that no boy ever went to that place alone, and a sort of solemn ceremony attended his first visit ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... from his fingers, and in another moment he clasped a warm and clinging figure in his arms. Without a word their lips met in one long kiss. To Paul it was as if he had been transported to some distant sphere, and in some mystic fashion transcending time and space, he held his ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... flourished torches, and were shouting a song with unbridled vehemence; the women, wearing garlands, kept up with them. What they carried in the baskets on their heads could not be seen, nor did Alexander know; for so many religious brotherhoods and mystic societies existed here that it was impossible to guess to which this noisy ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and a considerable sum advanced for a philter, compounded of strange Eastern plants and mystic jewels; and then Diane, with a shudder of relief, passed into the full light of the hall, bade her father good night, and was handed by him into the litter that had long been awaiting her at ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fancy all wild heads bowed in adoration. Certainly the wood thrush's call touches that chord in the human breast. To listen to it with open heart is to know all things are for good and that a peace from mystic spaces far above the woodland is descending upon it. Heard through this song the tone of the brook's voice changes and instead of swift-syllabled gossip I seem to hear it softly ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... third-dimensional things were one. Perhaps that particular portion of the third dimension called the Earth had sprung from, or degenerated from, one single unit of a dissolving, worn-out fourth dimension. The third dimension, warped back to a higher plane, was automatically obeying the mystic laws of evolution by reforming in the shape of that old ancestor, unimaginably removed in time from the race he had begot. He was no longer Henry Woods, newspaperman; he was an entity that had ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... daughter King Dushyanta's glory, As in the sacred tree the mystic fire [62]; Let worlds rejoice to hear the welcome story, And may the son immortalize ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... mason, from yon tavern led, In mystic words doth to the moon complain That unsound port distracts his aching head, And o'er the waiter ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... Mystic, who, together with the Sophist Priscus, always accompanied the Emperor, in order to give him opportunities for philosophising, immediately objected: "There are no 'coincidences,' Caesar, everything is reckoned and numbered; everything is created with a conscious purpose, and in harmonious ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... great religious ages: nor is the name ill-chosen. For, more often than not, religion is the whetstone on which men sharpen the spiritual sense. Religion, like art, is concerned with the world of emotional reality, and with material things only in so far as they are emotionally significant. For the mystic, as for the artist, the physical universe is a means to ecstasy. The mystic feels things as "ends" instead of seeing them as "means." He seeks within all things that ultimate reality which provokes emotional exaltation; and, if he does not ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... girl of a mystic temperament, credulous, it is true, and somewhat superstitious like all the other people of her time, and yet filled with a deep yearning for a greater knowledge of the secrets of the universe. Her ideal of authority was formed by intercourse with the various members of her own ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... friend Don Diego was saying, "we live from the belly and loins, or else from the head and heart: between Don Quixote the mystic and Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground. The lowest ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... words, which it is not possible for a man to utter," and the throne of God, with all the seraphim and cherubim, archangels and angels, became visible and their conversation intelligible to the enraptured and transported mystic, in a fit of hallucination, when the bewildered imagination sees objectively its own subjective phantasma, and hears from without, in supposed articulate sounds, its own silent thoughts. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to form a correct idea ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... nervous sensibility and a vivid imagination; and besides, he has, as I suspect, been superstitiously brought up as a child. It would be probably useless to argue rationally with him on certain spiritual subjects, even if his mind was in perfect health. He has a good deal of the mystic and the dreamer in his composition; and science and logic are but broken reeds to depend upon with ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... wilderness. Unconsciously confirming prophecy, and still attesting the truth of a revelation which they contemn and deny,—thus strangely dwelling so different from all other nations,—preserving the initiatory rites and the mystic symbols of the faith of Abraham, the customs and traditions of the age of the patriarch,—these nations dwell distinct, separate from each other and from all other nations, awaiting the day when blindness shall be ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... to or correct my first impressions, desirable as it might be to have had such a revision for the sake of this book. I duly drank of the water of Trevi the night before I left; but the spell has been in abeyance all these years. I live, however, in the hope that it has not altogether lost its mystic power; and that some day, not too far off, I may be privileged to go over the old scenes with other and larger eyes than those with which I first reverently gazed upon them. It needs two visits at least to form any true conception of Rome: a first visit to acquire ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... from her some old words of her own were respoken in his ears: "Faith and doubt are mere empty forms until we pour out the heart's blood that vivifies them." It was her heart's blood that she had put into her dreams, and it was this, he told himself, that gave her mystic visions their illusive appearance of reality. Beauty enveloped her as an atmosphere; it softened her sternest sacrifice, it coloured her barest outlook, it transformed daily the common road in which she walked, and hourly ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... wood. Towards the close of the XVIIIth dynasty it was the fashion for wealthy persons to have two coffins, one fitting inside the other, painted black or white. From the XXth dynasty onwards they were coated with a yellowish varnish, and so covered with inscriptions and mystic signs that each coffin was a tomb in miniature, and could well have done duty as such, and thus meet all the needs ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... motionless, exposed to the elements and forces of His arming, for a night and a day to two days and nights, but rarely longer. Sometimes he would chant a hymn without words, or offer the ceremonial "filled pipe." In this holy trance or ecstasy the Indian mystic found his highest happiness and the motive power ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... Moreale, impressed him with a vague belief of some ancient wrong to himself or his race, perpetrated by the Provencal, which he was not ill-pleased to have the occasion to avenge. In truth, the words of Ursula, mystic and dark as they were in their denunciation, had left upon Villani's boyish impressions an unaccountable feeling of antipathy and hatred to the man it was now his object to betray. For the rest, every device seemed to him decorous and justifiable, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... hall, having at one end a doorway before which hung a curtain. Following their Captain, the robbers approached this curtain, and pushing it aside, entered the room beyond. There, behind a large table, sat the great magician, Alfrarmedj, busy over his mystic studies, which he generally pursued in the dead hours of the night. Drawing their swords, the robbers rushed ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton
... their credit, not for being just, but because they are laws; 'tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by fools, still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but always by men, vain and irresolute authors. There is nothing so much, nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... about to put himself into the hands of justice, that he might atone in a striking way for the crimes with which he was polluted. This man, endowed as he was with conspicuous abilities, had acquired a mystic eloquence in the cloister. He spoke with so much grace and persuasiveness that I was fascinated no less than the abbe. It was in vain that the latter attempted to combat a resolution which appeared to him insane; John Mauprat showed the most unflinching devotion to his religious ideas. ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... was coming to consult her, and she had no lead. There was a border of lead, however, over the attic window outside. All she had to do was to steal upstairs, climb out of the window on to the roof, and cut a piece of the lead off. It was now the mystic moment to obtain lead, but she must be wary. She strolled through the kitchen in a casual way. Harriet was busy about the grate, and paid no attention to her; so she secured the carving-knife without difficulty, went up to ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... me to treat life in the spirit of a mystic or a dreamer, with unshared and secret experiences, withdrawing into his own ecstasy, half afraid of life, rapt away into interior visions. Though he had a deep curiosity about mystical experiences, he was never a mystic in the sense that he had, ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... within the mystic circumference of the glen-ader; and that she derived a growing measure of mental satisfaction from its ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... sprang, While weak and ineffective fell The archer's shafts though pointed well. The Rakshas saw that naught might kill The wondrous foe who mocked his skill, And launched a magic shaft to throw A binding spell about his foe. Forth flew the shaft: the mystic charm Stayed his swift feet and numbed his arm, Through all his frame he felt the spell, And motionless to earth he fell. Nor would the reverent Vanar loose The bonds that bound him as a noose. He knew that Brahma's self had charmed The weapon that ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... tedious walk, we arrived at an open plain, on which the grass was trodden down in every direction, in some places worn quite away by the feet of the natives—for this was the great "bora ground" of the coast tribes, where the mystic ceremonies mentioned in a former chapter took place. Traversing the sacred plain, our thoughts busy in conjecturing the weird scenes that the posts had witnessed, we came to a little creek whose clear stream babbled ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... sense, the Pygmies of Societas "captured" me, and showed me about to their fellow denizens of this Land of Lilliput. They "discharged their arrows" (which they called "In-Vites", and each of which was branded with the mystic letters, R.S.V.P.) at me in swarms, and though they rather tickled than hurt, yet after a time their minute but multiplied prickings became no end ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... led Madame in the dancing. The grandmother herself sometimes took her stick and stepped through a measure to please the young people. Laughter and the joy of life filled the house every waking hour of the twenty-four. Funerals were never horrible there. Instead, they seemed the mystic ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... watchmaker and a petit bourgeois, should experience what many a saint has died without realizing! I salute you, mystic, descendent ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... inspiration, fall the expiration. Both seasons have their equinoxes, both their filmy, hazy air, their ruddy forest tints, their cold rains, their drenching fogs, their mystic moons; both have the same solar light and warmth, the same rays of the sun; yet, after all, how different the feelings which they inspire! One is the morning, the other the evening; one is youth, ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... afternoon, more even than the ponies. Before they brought him in, the Ring Master came in and said: "Now ladies and gentlemen, I am about to introduce to you the oldest and most wonderful astrologer now living. He will read to you, from a mystic book, the fate of the world and whether it is to be destroyed ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... I borrow, sometimes for private study, sometimes (you understand?) for professional purposes. It contains a Book of Common Prayer as well as the Apocrypha. P. (a Cornishman, something of a mystic, two years my senior and full of mining experiences in Nevada and S. America) always finds a difficulty in parting with this, his one book. He is deep in it, this moment, at the far ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... filled with an emotion hitherto unknown, an emotion which pointed direct to heaven. The soul, the core of profound Christian consciousness, had received a new, glad content, rousing a feeling of such intensity that it could only be compared to the religious ecstasy of the mystic; man divined that it was the mother of new and great things—was it not fitting to regard it as divine and proclaim it the supreme value? The troubadours had known it. Bernart ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... most rational of our modern Platonists, abounds, however, with the most extravagant reveries, and was inflated with egotism and enthusiasm, as much as any of his mystic predecessors. He conceived that he communed with the Divinity itself! that he had been shot as a fiery dart into the world, and he hoped he had hit the mark. He carried his self-conceit to such extravagance, that he thought his urine smelt like violets, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the mystic Eastern night With purple shadow filled the air, Behind her window framed in light, She sat with jasmin in ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... the tumult, rising like a strange incense from the smear of bodies, tables and waiters, will come the curious thing that is never contained in the vice reports. The gleam of the devil himself—the echo of some mystic ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... wonderful to see with, what softness the scepticism of Jarno, the commercial spirit of Werner, the reposing polished manhood of Lothario and the Uncle, the unearthly enthusiasm of the Harper, the gay animal vivacity of Philina, the mystic, ethereal, almost spiritual nature of Mignon, are blended together in this work; how justice is done to each, how each lives freely in his proper element, in his proper form; and how, as Wilhelm himself, the mild-hearted, all-hoping, all-believing Wilhelm, struggles forward towards ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... to fragments and then held fast to their ruins, indeed even went so far as to find these caricatures and ruins more beautiful than the original. The Rococo is violent in chains, insolent in constraint, drunken in sobriety. It is the art of a rich, voluptuous, mystic, restless age. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... barber, no doubt, bled his patients and customers on the public streets of Persian towns, for the benefit of their healths, when we pinned our pagan faith on Druidical incantations and mystic rites and ceremonies; his Mussulman descendants were doing the same thing when we at length arrived at the same stage of enlightenment, and the Persian wielder of razor and tweezers to-day performs the same ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... denies himself more than two shirts and never travels with ice machines. But the thirteen pairs impressed me considerably. Why thirteen, more than fifteen, or any other number? I came to the conclusion that my colleague must certainly be a member of that mystic body the "Thirteen Club," and as he had to bring in the odd number somewhere to keep the club fresh in his memory, he ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... scepticism of those who found fault with his aims, and the sincere dislike of humble and reverent men, who doubted whether the cause of religion could be advanced by such riotous methods. Not only was The General of The Salvation Army a saint and a mystic, who lived in this world and yet was not of this world, but he also was possessed of much practical ability and common sense, without which the great work of his life could never have been accomplished. We need only refer to that remarkable book which he published ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... counted Hassib. Harry peeped, and saw that mystic number of grey crocodiles lying on the island where he ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... sense, he will make no change in anything which the oracle of Delphi, or Dodona, or the God Ammon, or any ancient tradition has sanctioned in whatever manner, whether by apparitions or reputed inspiration of Heaven, in obedience to which mankind have established sacrifices in connexion with mystic rites, either originating on the spot, or derived from Tyrrhenia or Cyprus or some other place, and on the strength of which traditions they have consecrated oracles and images, and altars and temples, and portioned out a sacred domain for each of them. ...
— Laws • Plato
... church," said Helen, her little soul exquisitely sensitive to the mystic, fragrant silences and glooms that ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... saw nothing. My throat was suddenly parched, I could not utter a word. A fragrance of myrrh and aromatic perfumes which emanated from her seemed to intoxicate me with languor and longing, as if at once all the odours of the mystic East had penetrated my quivering nostrils. No, this was certainly not a natural woman, for nothing human seemed to emanate from her. Her face expressed no emotion, either good or bad, beyond a voluptuousness at once sensual and divine. She doubtless noticed my suffering, for she ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... far-away, mystic look in her eyes: "It was your mother, dear—she told me we must go to Lourdes, she said it quite distinctly, she said we must sail that very week, or it would be too ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... indulged in a little autobiography. "Not me. I 'filiates wid de Pullman company a long time back, conveyin' a westbound carload of Potent Nobles ob de Mystic Mecca wid blue Fezants. Us got divo'ced somewhere. Dey an' mah mascot goat gits drug to San F'mcisco. I gits penned up wid a rag-head Hindoo boy an' some crazy folks in anotheh train. I jines me in a ruckus ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... in thought and dialectical power, the Philebus falls very far short of the Republic in fancy and feeling. The development of the reason undisturbed by the emotions seems to be the ideal at which Plato aims in his later dialogues. There is no mystic enthusiasm or rapturous contemplation of ideas. Whether we attribute this change to the greater feebleness of age, or to the development of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry in Plato's own mind, or perhaps, in some degree, to a carelessness ...
— Philebus • Plato
... of the Sawtooth Mountains, like frosted spires against an amber sky. Soon the amber would change to amethyst and deepen to purple—fading at last to a shadowy gray; and all the world seemed steeped in the mystic calm of those twilight hours before the early ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... these conquering leaves: live all the same; And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame; Live here, great heart; and love, and die, and kill; And bleed, and wound, and yield, and conquer still. Let this immortal life where'er it comes Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms. Let mystic deaths wait on't; and wise souls be The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee. O sweet incendiary! show here thy art, Upon this carcase of a hard cold heart; Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light, that play Among the leaves of thy large ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... genius. I saw only the change; he left me a youth, naive, ignorant, but filled with a divine enthusiasm, inspired as it were by the very spirit of God. In those four years he became instructed, absorbing all that was best from ancient and modern art, but still a mystic, a young archangel in ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... the lintel of the door represented on Plate V., enlarged. I intended, in the Lecture on Marble Couchant, to have insisted, at some length, on the decoration of the lintel and side- posts, as one of the most important phases of mystic ecclesiastical sculpture. But I find the materials furnished by Lucca, Pisa, and Florence, for such an essay are far too rich to be examined cursorily; the treatment even of this single lintel could scarcely be enough explained in the close of the ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... of Osteolepis; and here the occipital plates of Cheirolepis Cummingiae; and here the spine of the anterior dorsal of Diplacanthus striatus." My reading of the fossils was at once recognized, like the mystic sign of the freemason, as establishing for me a place among the geologic brotherhood; and the stout gentleman producing a spirit-flask and a glass, I pledged him and his companion in a bumper. "Was I not sure?" he said, addressing his friend: "I ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the study of these characters, especially in the very human figure of Pepet, homely, rough, and unscrupulous, who resembles in many ways Jean Giraud of Dumas' La Question d'argent. The theme, the conquest of a rude man by a Christian and mystic girl, is also the theme of Galds' novel ngel Guerra. The first two acts are the best; the third borders on melodrama, and the last, though containing some excellent comedy, is flat. The real flaw lies in the extensive use of financial transactions to express a psychological contest; ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... and the trap,— As we follow the lines By the rays of the mystic light That flames in the north with banners so bright, As we list to its swish, swish, swish, through the air all night, Hurrah for the gun and ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... of land made by the company, after it had got fairly under way, was of six hundred acres to Governor Winthrop, on the 6th of September, 1631, "near his house at Mystic." The next was to the deputy-governor, Thomas Dudley, on the 5th of June, 1632, of two hundred acres "on the west side of Charles River, over against the new town," now Cambridge. The next, on the 3d of July, 1632, was three hundred acres to John Endicott. It is described, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... reference to the population of the kingdom. These returns were annually forwarded to the capital, where they were submitted to the inspection of officers acquainted with the art of deciphering these mystic records. The government was thus provided with a valuable mass of statistical information, and the skeins of many-colored threads, collected and carefully preserved, constituted what might be called ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... joy. The One awakens out of quiescence as we come forth, and knows itself in us; as we return we enter it in gladness, knowing ourselves. After long cycles the world you live in will become like ours; it will be poured forth and withdrawn; a mystic breath, a mirror to glass ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... his sister, Moa, were the ringleaders. With them were, as passengers, Sir Arthur Coniston and Ob Hahn, a Venus mystic. The whole ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... Where it is explained that Adam meaning Man; Seth, placed; and Enosh, Misery: the mystic inference is that ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... religion of early Japan. The inner or secret shrine: its esoteric and its exoteric office. The Mystic Brotherhoods. Why the esoteric meanings have always been veiled. The great teachers and the uniformity of their instructions. Philosophy as taught by Vivekananda. The fundamental doctrine of Buddhism. Have the present-day Buddhists lost the key? Is religion ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... of religion, argues that our inner experience makes us cognizant of a spiritual world. The advance of psychological research does not deal kindly with this contention, and such works as Leuba's "Psychology of Religious Mysticism" give a rational explanation of the mystic state. Moreover, James did not give his support to monotheism. "That vast literature of proofs of God's existence," he stated, "drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, today does little more than gather dust in the libraries, for the simple reason ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... craftsmen, metal workers, and youthful painters, among whom was Botticelli, at that moment of his development a jovial habitue of the Poetical Supper Club, who had not yet given any premonitions of becoming the poet, mystic, and visionary of later times. There also Leonardo came into contact with that unoriginal painter Lorenzo di Credi, his junior by seven years. He also, no doubt, met Perugino, whom Michelangelo called "that blockhead in art." The genius and versatility of the Vincian painter was, however, ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... sits in long array a reverend troop Teaching the mystic truths of law divine: 'Mid these by right takes Agapetus place Who built to guard his books this fair abode. All toil alike, all equal grace enjoy— Their words are different, but their ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... nature with fruitless toil to find the spring of living water: he only raises his wand, and, obedient to the hidden power, it bends at once to your secret. Your friendship, though independent of language, gives to it life and light. The mystic spirit stirs even in commonplaces, and the merest question is an endearment. You are quiet because your heart is over-full. You talk because it is pleasant, not because you have anything to say. You weary of terms that are already love-laden, and you go out into the highways and hedges, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... know that radical cures were difficult of performance, and he ended by lamenting his ignorance of English or some European language, and that he had not learned our Ilm (science) also. Then we plunged into sympathies, mystic numbers, and the occult virtues of stones, etc., and I swallowed my mixture (consisting of liquorice, cummin and soda) just as the sun entered a particular house, and the moon was in some favourable aspect. He praised to me his ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... it not fine? It is a subject, however, for a mystic. I have an idea myself for a picture, if I can get the tent-cloth to paint it on, and if some brushes and tubes I sent for ever ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston |
