"Druidical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the other side of the harbour, is Rostellan Castle, formerly the residence of the Lords of Thomond. Cloyne is only four miles' drive "on the long car" through a rich countryside, and on the way may be seen a Druidical cromlech, at Castlemartyr, in a very fair state of preservation. Cloyne Round Tower "points its long fingers to the sky" above the ancient church wherein there is a fine alabaster statue of the metaphysician, Dr. Berkeley, who was ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... with a husband and two children, a Roman Lothario, with an Irish friend, a Druidical temple, a gong, and an auto-da-fe, mix up charmingly with Bellini's quadrille-like music to form a pathetic opera; and sympathetic dilettanti weep over the woes of "Norma," because they are so exquisitely portrayed by Miss Kemble, in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... that sun-worship and Druidical customs form the original base of all our old national festivals, we will now direct attention to the ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... beneath a fine cedar, whose level roof-like branches spread nearly a dozen yards around, that she seated herself. Behind grew various quaint conifers; cypresses, with soft flat foliage that looked like heavy lace; spruce firs, erect and solemn, like ancient druidical pillars, still black with the blood of sacrificed victims; yews, whose dark robes were fringed with silver; evergreen trees of all kinds, with thick-set foliage, dark leathery verdure, splashed here and there with yellow and red. There was a weird-looking araucaria that stood ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... of Fire Bear and his followers were placed in a circle, in a grove somber enough for Druidical sacrifice. White cliffs stretched high above the camp, with pine-trees growing at all angles from the interstices of rock. At the foot of the cliffs, and on the green slope that stretched far below to the forest of lodgepole pines, ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... history of Moray, "that, in a consumptive disease, the Fairies steal away the soul, and put the soul of a Fairy in the room of it." This belief prevails chiefly along the eastern coast of Scotland, where a practice, apparently of druidical origin, is used to avert the danger. In the increase of the March moon, withies of oak and ivy are cut, and twisted into wreaths or circles, which they preserve till next March. After that period, when persons are consumptive, or children hectic, they cause them to pass thrice through these circles. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... well as civil commotions. Mary was a Catholic, and had a perfect abhorrence and disgust of the opinions and customs of the reformers, especially of John Knox, whose influence in Scotland was almost druidical. The Catholics resolved to punish with fire and sword, while the Protestants were equally intent on defending themselves with the sword. And it so happened that some of the most powerful of the nobility were arrayed on the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... ideas carries with it an old world, and gives its name to a new order of civilisation. The East. China, Egypt, Greece, Rome, have seen these ruins and these renewals. The West experienced them when the Druidical theocracy gave way to the gods and government of the Romans. Byzantium, Rome, and the Empire effected them rapidly, and as it were instinctively by themselves when, wearied with, and blushing at, polytheism, they rose at the voice of Constantine ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... convert the natives to Christianity; but, while the Anglo-Saxons embraced the new faith, the Britons rejected it, and, being persecuted by the Christians, retired to the fastnesses of the country known as Wales, where, for a long period, they maintained the observance of the Druidical form of worship; and although that country has long since become Christianized, the society of the Ancient Order of Druids has existed with an uninterrupted succession at Pout-y-prid, where the Arch-Druid resides, and from, whence emanated the charter of the Grand Lodge of the order in this country. ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... of his bugle, as sitting on a fragment of the druidical ruins of Dunipacis, he blew its melancholy blast to summon his chiefs around him. Its penetrating voice pierced the hills, but no answering note came upon his ear. A direful conviction seized upon his heart. But they might have fled far distant! he blushed as the thought crossed ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... front of her, and, resting her head in her hands, gazed at them with such a fixedness and rigidity that she might have been taken for an old Ouate, absorbed in the exercise of his legitimate calling. (The old Druidical order were divided into three classes, Druids, Bards, and Ouates. The Druids philosophized and theologized, the Bards harped and sang, and the Ouates divined and CONTEMPLATED THE NATURE OF THINGS. I thought I would tell you, as you might not know. I execrate the self-conceited ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... animals. It is often difficult to decide between these two different interpretations of the use of fire in agricultural rites. In any case the fire-festival of Auvergne on the first Sunday in Lent may date from Druidical times. ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... his residence in Iona, tradition says that he paid a visit to a great seminary of Druids, then in the vicinity, at a place called Camusnan Ceul, or Bay of Cells, in the district of Ardnamurchan. Several remains of Druidical circles are still to be seen there, and on that bay and the neighbourhood many places are still named after their rites and ceremonies; such as Ardintibert, the Mount of Sacrifice, and others. The fame of the Saint had been for some time well known to the ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... on its surface unattached, perhaps wrested from their bed by the waters of the deluge. Whilst toiling along these wild wastes, I observed, a little way to my left, a pile of stones of rather a singular appearance, and rode up to it. It was a druidical altar, and the most perfect and beautiful one of the kind which I had ever seen. It was circular, and consisted of stones immensely large and heavy at the bottom, which towards the top became thinner and thinner, having been fashioned by the hand of art to something of the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Roman culture extended itself much more slowly over the rural districts, the inhabitants of which, in addition to being much more conservative and passionately attached to their native institutions and language, lacked the incentive of ambition and of commercial and trade necessity. A powerful Druidical priesthood held the rural Celts together and set their faces against Roman culture and religion. But even in the rural districts Latin made its way slowly and in a mangled form, yet none the less surely. This was accomplished almost entirely through the natural pressure ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... wait!" growled the bedraggled customs officers. Ten o'clock! The good burghers of St. Heliers had given up their whist, and taken their last drop of "hot and hot." In St. Aubin's Bay, from Corbin's Light, from mansion in town, and cot among the Druidical rocks, anxious eyes now gazed out on the wild sea, where Andrew Fraser tried to ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the outer Druidical stones are now prostrate, having fallen at a remote but unknown period; and these have become buried to a moderate depth in the ground. They are surrounded by sloping borders of turf, on which recent castings were seen. Close to one of these fallen stones, which was 17 feet ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... farther end, which was almost buried in obscurity, there was a gleam seemingly occasioned by the reflection of the torchlight upon water. On the right hand stood a pile of huge stones, disposed somewhat in the form of a Druidical altar, on the top of which, as on a throne, sat the demon hunter, surrounded by his satellites—one of whom, horned and bearded like a satyr, had clambered the roughened sides of the central pillar, and held a torch over the ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of the Druids whom they called Bards, who delivered in songs (their only history) the exploits of their heroes, and who composed those verses which contained the secrets of Druidical discipline, their principles of natural and moral philosophy, their astronomy, and the mystical rites of their religion. These verses in all probability bore a near resemblance to the Golden Verses ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... him away into new regions, in spite of all his efforts at resistance; and when one morning, when returning from a visit to some sick folk, he came across Patience gathering his dinner of herbs from the rocks of Crevant, he sat down near him on one of the druidical stones and made, without knowing it, the profession of faith of the Savoyard vicar. Patience drank more willingly of this poetic religion than of the ancient orthodoxy. The pleasure with which he listened to a summary of the new ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... already frequently quoted, has recorded with great accuracy the peculiar tenets held by the Highlanders on this topic, in the vicinity of Loch Katrine. The learned author is inclined to deduce the whole mythology from the Druidical system—an opinion to which there ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... in Wiltshire, 6 m. W. of Marlborough, in the middle of a so-called Druidical structure consisting of 100 monoliths, surmised to have been erected and arranged in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the air shalt thou be until time shall cease!" said her foster-father. Thereupon he smote her with his druidical wand, and a creature too hideous for men's eyes to look upon, gave a great scream of anguish, and flapped its black wings as it flew away to join the other demons ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... under a heavy fire of eyes, sits down to her basin and a Druidical ruin of bread and butter. In the active superintendence of this young person, Judy Smallweed appears to attain a perfectly geological age and to date from the remotest periods. Her systematic manner of flying at her and pouncing on her, with or without ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... noble decoration. Decoration is one of the natural instincts of man, and from the earliest records of his existence we find him striving to give expression to it, we see it in the scratched pieces of bone and stone of the cave dwellers, in the designs of savage tribes, and in Druidical and Celtic remains, and in the great ruins of Yucatan. The meaning of these monuments may be lost to us, but we understand the spirit of trying to express the sense of beauty in the highest way possible, for it is the ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... embarrassed, half laughing, and signing to those around that he only complied with the old woman to soothe her humour. In the meantime, she traced around him, with wavering steps, the propitiation, which some have thought has been derived from the Druidical mythology. It consists, as is well known, in the person who makes the deasil, walking three times round the person who is the object of the ceremony, taking care to move according to the course of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... some remarkable views of the Wye, particularly one called Simmons Yat or Rock, which is very beautiful (and must be much more so when the river is clear and transparent); and a curious rock called the Buck-stone, which was probably a Druidical place of worship, but of which nothing is positively known, though conjecture is busy. Goodrich Castle, which was partly battered down by the Cromwellians like Raglan, is more ancient, and was much stronger than the latter; but, though not so beautiful and splendid, it ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the principal evergreens used in this country for decorative purposes are the ivy, laurel, bay, arbor vitae, rosemary, and holly; mistletoe, on account of its connection with Druidic rites, having been excluded from churches. Speaking of the holly, Mr. Conway remarks that, "it was to the ancient races of the north a sign of the life which preserved nature through the desolation of winter, and was gathered into pagan temples ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer |
