"Mesmerical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... casket. Even Nassim Farhi has risen. I must go and talk to him: he has impulses, that man, at least compared with his brother; Mourad is a stone, a precious stone though, and you cannot magnetise him through his wife, for she has not an idea; but Madame Nassim is immensely mesmeric. ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... power ascribed to certain persons in a mesmeric state of seeing and describing events at a distance or ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... where delirium drove Beryl's consciousness to and fro like a rudderless wreck, did some mysterious communion of spirits survive? Did some subtle mesmeric current telegraph her soul, that her foul wrongs were at last avenged? Whatever the cause, certainly a strangely clear, musical laugh broke suddenly from her lovely lips, mingled with a triumphant "Che ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Roxy, when not otherwise engaged, constantly patted with a gentle tattoo, in tune to the steady trot of her knee. All babies knew Miss Roxy's tattoo on their backs, and never thought of taking it in ill part. On the contrary, it had a vital and mesmeric effect of sovereign force against colic, and all other disturbers of the nursery; and never was infant known so pressed with those internal troubles which infants cry about, as not speedily to give over and sink to slumber at this ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... paid to come in and see her performances complained loudly that they were being swindled. Barnum saw here a great opportunity to squelch a rival and increase his own fame at a single stroke. He engaged a bright little girl who was exceedingly susceptible to such mesmeric influences as he could induce. That is, she learned her lesson thoroughly, and when he had apparently put her to sleep with a few passes and stood behind her, she seemed to be duly "impressed," as he desired; raised her ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... trying to hush her crying infant, would ever fear that he would be annoyed or wish her and her child in Jericho. On the contrary, she would, if necessary, ask him to hold her baby for a moment, and the child would go to him unhesitatingly, so great was the mesmeric power he exercised over his fellow-creatures. This influence or power was inborn, and he could no more have helped it than he could have helped his heartbeats. But, added to this, was a constant effort on his part to make those with whom he came in contact ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... that of Madame Plantin. She was sixty-four years of age, and laboured under scirrhus of the breast. She was prepared for the operation by M. Chapelain, who on several successive days threw her into trance by the ordinary mesmeric manipulations. She was then like an ordinary sleep-walker, and would converse with indifference about the contemplated operation, the idea of which, when she was in her natural state, filled her with terror. The operation of removing the diseased ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... 1, 1882, I was at Southall. At half-past nine I sat down to endeavor to fix my mind so strongly upon the interior of a house at Kew, where Miss V. and her sister lived, that I seemed to be actually in the house. I was conscious, but was in a kind of mesmeric sleep. When I went to bed that night, I willed to be in the front bedroom of that house at Kew at twelve; and to make my presence felt by the inmates. Next day I went to Kew. Miss V.'s married sister told me, without any prompting from me, that she had seen me ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... artistic sense. He was almost beyond belief incapable of intercourse in private conversation. He could tell you his adventures provided you didn't interrupt him (which you were mostly afraid to do, as the man was a mesmeric terror); but as to exchanging ideas, or expressing the universal part of his soul, you might as well have been reading the letters of Charles Dickens to his family—those tragic monuments of dumbness of soul and noisiness of pen. Lord help you if you ever ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and eyes, the clerk thought; a sort of creamy skin; and a—well, a mesmeric kind of glance that seemed to go right ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... with you. Have you not something of that mesmeric power which draws one back into health under ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... is not material to what sublimated sphere they may have ascended; it is merely a mesmeric influence which they exert over their disciples, and this influence can penetrate through all degrees ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... on two brawny arms. His feet followed the mesmeric influence of their movement. Was he going into the clouds, he wondered? They stopped to open a gate, the gate leading to the gardens of Mainsail Haul. How did he get there? He had no idea. More movements of his feet, and then unexpected warmth. He looked around ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... razor and swept the Boches back over the Marne, he swept them through Senlis, he swept them across the Aisne. His intensity was inspiring. The smouldering fires of bygone battles leapt into his eyes. But it was not the mesmeric shave of 1914. He apologised humbly and applied small ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... a subtle something in the stranger's voice that throbbed through the child's pulses like leaping fire—a strange, mysterious influence that bound her, heart and soul, like the mesmeric influence a serpent exerts over a fascinated dove. Slowly, hesitatingly, this child, whose fiery will had never bowed before human power, came timidly forward, step by step, close to the iron gate against which the woman's face was pressed. She stretched out her ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... powers and laws of nature do exist, and that man's five senses are not the only means by which he gains a knowledge of what is going on in other minds than his own. The facts of thought-transference, of mesmeric control, of apparitions of the living, and the like, as critically tested by the members of this society, seem to indicate clearly that mind can affect, influence, and control mind through some other channel than that of the senses, usually over short ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... it had not yet occurred that it was a tactical error to leave me between the door and himself. I supposed he relied too implicitly on the mesmeric pistol. He was not even ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... tried in this city, we understand, but with very infrequent success. Pulling teeth while the patient is asleep is not 'practised to a very great extent in this community;' for no sooner is the glittering instrument of torture 'placed in communication' with the jaw, than it is found to 'disturb the Mesmeric function' to an ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... address to intimate that the mesmeric crises manifested themselves only in persons endowed with a certain sensitiveness. From that moment, in order not to be ranged among the insensible, both men and women, when near the rod, ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... broken away from the mesmeric influence of the fire-watchers, he ran quickly with Alec to the knoll where a metal hoop and hammer were kept for the purpose of alarm in case of fire. Almost before the two reached the spot, Alec caught the hammer and was striking the metal at regular intervals. The ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... has just been placed on our table; we know its reputation of old; it is an admirable discourse on the subject of supernaturalisms, such as mental illusions, dreams, ghosts, mesmeric phenomena, &c. If any one will but read the first half dozen pages, we will vouch for it he will not neglect the rest of the volume: it is one of the best written books on one of the most curious range of topics that could engage the pen of a writer, or the ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... of them are cold and tiresome. These old Greeks made such beautiful things, because they did not imitate. That mysterious vitality which still imbues their remains, and which seems to enchant even the fragments of their marbles, is the mesmeric vitality of fresh, original conception. Art, built upon this, is just like what the shadow of a beautiful woman is to the woman. One gets tired in these galleries of the classic band, and the classic headdress, and the classic attitude, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Doctor, but I mostly sleeps very little." And to my no small astonishment she now shut up like an umbrella, and at once recommenced her mesmeric monotone. ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... he could object, Dick made a mesmeric pass or two across young Jack's face, and immediately it ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... absently dwelling upon the space between the slightly parted doors that gave into the next room. But even as he spoke, the last line faltered and halted. His glance slowly stiffened out of widening eyes to the face it had caught there—a face new, strange, mesmeric, that all at once enchained him soul and body. With a splendid, reckless might it assailed him—left him dazed, ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... longing for his lost Jeannie made him beat at the iron gates of the "Undiscovered Country" with a yearning cry; but he could get no answer from reason, and would not seek it in any form of superstition, least of all the latest, that of stealing into heaven "by way of mesmeric and spiritualistic trances." His question ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... butter grieve others. They cannot attend to conversation because of the annoyance occasioned by the habit which some people have of invariably taking more butter than they want. Have you not seen the anxious look (almost mesmeric) which such persons fix on the article? They would feel it a relief if they might bury it out of their sight by popping it into their own mouths and swallowing it down; and they are really made happy if the person on whose plate it lies unused suddenly breaks off a piece of ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... (i. 412): the belief is not wholly extinct in England, and I have often heard of it in the Brazil and upon the African Gaboon. It appears to me that there may be a basis of fact to tints fancy, the abnormal effect of precious stones upon mesmeric "sensitives." ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... body being flabby and pliable as in natural sleep; third, Somnambulism, so called from its analogies to the ordinary sleep-walking condition to which many persons are subject. This last covers the phenomena of ordinary mesmeric exhibitions at which travelling mesmerists "control" persons before audiences and make them obey their commands. While other scientists properly deny that these three stages are really distinct, they may yet be taken as ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... hen-run yesterday morning and killed six out of seven pullets, first mesmerising them with its eyes and then biting them as they stood helpless. The seventh pullet was one of that French sort, with feathers all over its eyes, so it escaped the mesmeric snare, and just flew at what it could see of the snake and ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... sat up in his chair and by what mesmeric magic it happened I know not, but before my eyes grew the living image of the gross, shapeless creature who had put me to bed ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... influence of the same mesmeric sleep of amazement, went up the large oaken stairs after the respectful attendant. He entered a splendid suite of apartments that seemed to be designed specially for him. He walked up to a long mirror with the ordinary instinct of his class, to pull ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... graceful in form and moulding, with that indescribable air of high breeding which marks the polished man of the world. His beautifully-formed head, delicate profile, fascinating sweetness of smile, and, above all, an eye which seemed to have an almost mesmeric power of attraction, were traits which distinguished one of the most celebrated men of the time, and one whose peculiar history yet lives not only in our national records, but in the private annals of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... desired effect. Henry Warner would have borne almost death itself for the sake of being nursed by the young girl beside him, and he signified his willingness to proceed, while at the same time his hand involuntarily grasped that of Maggie, as if in the touch of her snowy fingers there were a mesmeric power to soothe his pain. In the meantime a hurried consultation had been held between Mrs. Jeffrey and Theo as to the room suitable for the stranger ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... will work," whispered Bickley. Then he lifted the syringe and looked inquiringly at the man, who shook his head, and went on with his mesmeric passes. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... satisfactory; but it only illustrated the powers and relations of the soul in its present state of existence; it threw no light upon that future which I was not willing to take upon faith alone. Though sensible to mesmeric influences, I was not willing that my spiritual nature should be the instrument of another's will,—that a human being, like myself, should become possessed of all my secrets and sanctities, touching ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... avowal by the robber: but the conclusion was so far varied, that the jewel having been judiciously hidden, the poet made use of his voice and his guitar to throw the Lady Fiordespina into a mesmeric sleep before the court, and then to cause a table to rap out the letters, which she interpreted so as to lead to ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... life and death, before I was able to get clear knowledge of any body or any thing. No one, in my wakeful hours, came into my little bedroom except this careful Indian nurse, who hushed me off to sleep whenever I wanted to ask questions. Suan Isco, as she was called, possessed a more than mesmeric power of soothing a weary frame to rest; and this was seconded, where I lay, by the soft, incessant cadence and abundant roar of water. Thus every day I recovered strength and ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... the very last. Some draughtsmen are never happy until they have an eye to adjust the head round, treating it as the centre of interest and drawing the parts relatively to it. While others say, with some truth, that there is a mesmeric effect produced when the eye is drawn that blinds one to the cold-blooded technical consideration of a head as line and tone in certain relationships; that it is as well to postpone until the last that moment when the shapes and tones that represent form in your drawing shall be lit up by the ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... prescribed for herself nettle-broth; at the third, catnip. The crises became mitigated, then disappeared. It was truly a miracle. The nasal addigitation did not succeed with the others, and, in order to bring on somnambulism, they projected the construction of a mesmeric tub. Pecuchet already had even collected the filings and cleaned a score of bottles, when ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... to the English mind—to surround their wearisome and perilous errand in this country with a certain halo of the marvellous and the supernatural. Their boy is unquestionably a sensitive subject to the mesmeric influence—and, under that influence, he has no doubt reflected what was already in the mind of the person mesmerising him. I have tested the theory of clairvoyance—and I have never found the manifestations get beyond that point. The Indians don't investigate ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... appropriate interior effort, he is capable of bringing them again, when he requires them, within the area of some interior sense which reflects its perception on the physical brain. We are not all of us able to make this effort equally well, so that memory is sometimes dim, but even in the experience of mesmeric research, the occasional super-excitation of memory under mesmerism is a familiar fact. The circumstances plainly show that the record of Nature is accessible if we know how to recover it, or even if our own capacity to make an effort for its recovery is somehow improved without our having ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... but the fact is 'Tis a cell of magic practice, So disguised by common daylight, By its disenchanting grey light, Only spirit-eyes, mesmeric, See its glories esoteric. There, that case against the wall, Glowingly purpureal! A piano to the prosy— Not to us in twilight rosy: 'Tis a cave where Nereids lie. Naiads, Dryads, Oreads sigh, Dreaming of the time when they Danced in forest and in bay. In that chest before ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... nerves or ribs of the leaf. Days pass. The ants are there all the time, examining the leaf and communicating with each other whensoever they meet. Imperceptibly the leaf begins to curl. The ants continue to make mesmeric passes over ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... (1791-1868), the foremost physician of his day, was the leader of the mesmeric movement in England. In 1837, after seeing Dupotet's work, he commenced to experiment at University College Hospital, and continued, with remarkable success, until ordered to desist by the council of the college. Elliotson felt the insult keenly, indignantly resigned his appointments, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... I was at Southall. At half-past nine I sat down to endeavour to fix my mind so strongly upon the interior of a house at Kew, where Miss V. and her sister lived, that I seemed to be actually in the house. I was conscious, but I was in a kind of mesmeric sleep. When I went to bed that night I willed to be in the front bedroom of that house at Kew at twelve, and make my presence felt by the inmates. Next day I went to Kew. Miss V.'s married sister told me, without any prompting from me, that she had seen me in the passage going ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... the company of clear-headed financiers was extremely remarkable. The unknown metal appeared to exercise a kind of mesmeric influence, its soft hues blending together in a chromatic harmony which captivated the sense of vision as the ears are charmed by a perfectly rendered song. Gradually all gathered in an eager group around the ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... Galveston or Commission form of government and of its modification, the City Manager plan, the aim of which is to centralize governmental authority and to entice able men into municipal office. And there are many other manifestations of the new civic spirit. The mesmeric influence of national party names in civic politics is waning; the rise of home rule for the city is severing the unholy alliance between the legislature and the local Ring; the power to grant franchises is being taken away from legislative ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... awake—tell you what money you had in your pocket—nay, describe your very thoughts—it is not necessarily an imposture, any more than it is necessarily supernatural. I should be, unconsciously to myself, under a mesmeric influence, conveyed to me from a distance by a human being who had acquired power ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... acquired the gift of prophecy; their vision extended over all the surface of the globe; they could hear and see with their toes and fingers, and read unknown languages, and understand them too, by merely having the book placed on their stomachs. Ignorant peasants, when once entranced by the grand mesmeric fluid, could spout philosophy diviner than Plato ever wrote, descant upon the mysteries of the mind with more eloquence and truth than the profoundest metaphysicians the world ever saw, and solve ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... feel might be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so marvellously uttered in Mesmerism. Here, in these breathless stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we should find the terrifying glory true . . . here ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... a few passes, the Fairy sank into a mesmeric trance. Then, CINDERELLA desired that her Godmother should imagine that she had been the heroine ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... to their chant until he began to recognize the strain on the eye-muscles that precedes the mesmeric spell. Then he wrote and read what he had written and wrote again. And after that, for the sake of mental exercise, he switched his thoughts into another channel altogether. He reverted to ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... prisoners were there to tell on him. He had nothing to depend upon but the audacity and address which never failed him, and a quality even higher than courage—I can describe it only as the faculty of subjecting every one to his will, whom he tried to influence; it was almost mesmeric. The prisoners fifty or sixty in number, were paroled in the course of the day and started back to Kentucky by a route which would enable them to avoid meeting detachments of their own army. Our party encamped that night about seven ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... better than we do the mesmeric effects of sights and sounds. It was to give her time to assimilate her surroundings that Asako was left alone for half an hour or so, while Sadako and her mother were combing their hair and putting their kimonos straight. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... you?" He was liable like most paralytics to mechanical jerks and convulsions which drove him mad with impatience. Laura drew down the helplessly twitching knee, and ran one firm hand over him from thigh to ankle. Her touch had a mesmeric effect on his nerves when he could endure it, but nine times out of ten he struck it away. He did so now. "Go to the devil! How often have I told you not to paw me about? I wish you'd do as you're told. What do you call him ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... history spotless until closed in death; alike in that commanding presence which seems to be the signature of Heaven sometimes placed on a great soul when to that soul is given a fit dwelling-place; alike in that noble carriage and commanding dignity, exercising a mesmeric influence and a hidden power which could not be repressed, upon all who came within its charm; alike in the remarkable combination and symmetry of their intellectual attributes, all brought up to the same equal ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... self-discipline and culture, and the other through the efforts of another person called a healer. Often there is a combination of both. The power does not lie in the personality of the healer, nor in the exercise of his will-power. Neither hypnotism nor mesmeric control are elements in true mind-healing. The healer, in reality, is but an interpreter and teacher. The divine recuperative forces which exist, but are latent, are awakened and called into action. The patient ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... me, or that he did so at all. Of course, when Edith became my wife I should have to tell her my secrets. I had not hitherto told her this, because there was unquestionably a slight risk in the mesmeric sleep, and I knew she would set her face against my practice. The risk, of course, was that it might become too profound and pass into a trance beyond the mesmerizer's power to break, ending in death. Repeated ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... shrinking, from him at a hundred points, is drawn into the gulf of his omnivorous egotism. The portion of the story that strikes me as least felicitous is that which deals with Priscilla and with her mysterious relation to Zenobia—with her mesmeric gifts, her clairvoyance, her identity with the Veiled Lady, her divided subjection to Hollingsworth and Westervelt, and her numerous other graceful but fantastic properties—her Sibylline attributes, as the author calls them. Hawthorne ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... saw such mesmeric eyes, and yet they are soft, though powerful. I should say that man must have broken many a heart with ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... subject of which the future has partly revealed the secret." Says another French writer (Courmelles): "They sought the fluid, not by the study of the cures affected, which was considered too complicated a task, but in the phases of mesmeric sleep. These were considered indispensable and easily regulated by the experimentalist. When submitted to close investigation, it was, however, found that they could only be induced when the subjects knew they were being magnetized, and that they differed according ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... exposition. We shall not be expected to encounter Mr Poe's metaphysics; our notice must be here confined solely to the narrative or inventive portion of these papers. In one of these, entitled "Mesmeric Revelations," the reader may be a little startled to hear that he has adopted the mesmerised patient as a vehicle of his ideas on the nature of the soul and of its immortal life; the entranced subject having, in this case, an introspective power ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... Southern tiger, and any attempt against such overwhelming odds seemed madness, for Lowrie's dominion was largely legitimate. He was one of those who are born to command—of splendid physique and dignified bearing, superior intellect and mesmeric fascination. His natural advantages had been increased by a liberal education; he had been brought up among slaves, lived among Indians as agent and interpreter, felt his own superiority, and asserted it with the full force ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... only to smile at a man with those ripe, red, perfect lips, and give him one glance from those mesmeric eyes, and he was straightway her slave. And she ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... contradicted. Also, she had suggested that her life had been prolonged far beyond our mortal span, for hundreds and hundreds of years, indeed; which, as Euclid says, is absurd, and had pretended to supernatural powers, which is still more absurd. Moreover, by a clever use of some hypnotic or mesmeric power, she had feigned to transport me to some place beyond the earth and in the Halls of Hades to show me what is veiled from the eyes of man, and not only me, but the savage warrior Umhlopekazi, commonly called Umslopogaas of the Axe, who, with Hans, a Hottentot, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... occupancy of that long-deserted hall, had been wound and put in running order, struck twelve, with its deep-mouthed, melodramatic tones, and at the very moment I heard sounds indicative of the resurrection of the mesmeric sleeper. ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... due proportion, and he smiled at the contrast, reveling in his opportunity for the full exercise of his ability. But it is probable that neither Belding nor any others amongst the leading men who, in time, were gathered into the works, realized to what a degree they were animated by the mesmeric influence of Clark. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... degree leaves in his works, whatever their design, traces of his personal character: elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives the person. While we read the pages of the 'Fall of the House of Usher,' or of 'Mesmeric Revelations,' we see in the solemn and stately gloom which invests one, and in the subtle metaphysical analysis of both, indications of the idiosyncrasies of what was most remarkable and peculiar in the author's intellectual nature. But we see here only the better ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... given to a physical force recently surmised and believed to pervade all nature, and as manifesting itself chiefly in connection with mesmeric phenomena. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Under the mesmeric influence of Malkiel he began to feel as if architects were some strange race of sacred beings set apart, denizens of some holy isle or blessed nook of mediaeval legend. Would he ever meet them? Would he ever ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... to our page. But there was a story, for which it is difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest sorrow. The popular imagination, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a sore shock to Richard Gray. When Douglas found him on the trail and broke the news to him as gently as possible, he seemed at first hardly to comprehend it. He was stunned. He said little, but followed Douglas back to the cabin like one in a mesmeric sleep. A few days before he had gone away happy and buoyant, now he shuffled ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... eat." Like a man under a mesmeric spell, he went through the motions of eating. His mind was far away, his eyes eager, alert, forever ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... to the artificial sleep, the mesmeric state of earlier days, the hypnotism of our time. We have discussed its theory and recognized that an abnormally increased suggestibility is indeed its chief feature. We know hypnotism in most various degrees; the lowest can be reached practically by everyone, the ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... desert entirely understood him. "But it is always so," he added. "There is no animal that in a week does not perfectly comprehend me. Had I time and could give myself up to it, I have no doubt I could make them speak. Nature has endowed me, so far as dumb animals are concerned, with a peculiar mesmeric power." ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... your arrival in Egypt, for I suppose you did so in your own name, which is not exactly that of Smith or Brown. The third is your wife's sleep-walking propensities, which would have made it quite easy for her to be drawn ashore under some kind of mesmeric influence. The fourth is that you had seen Arabs mounted on camels upon the banks of the Nile. The fifth is the heavy sleep you say held everybody on board that particular night, which suggests to me that your food ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... weazen-faced warrior, and in his dotage. I had him for a fellow-passenger on board a steamboat. I had also a statistical colonel with me, outside the coach from Cincinnati to Columbus. A New England poet buzzed about me on the Ohio, like a gigantic bee. A mesmeric doctor, of an impossibly great age, gave me pamphlets at Louisville. I have ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... come in for which Grafton had been waiting—a picturesque body of fighting men and, perhaps, the most typical American regiment formed since Jackson fought at New Orleans. At the head of it rode two men—one with a quiet mesmeric power that bred perfect trust at sight, the other with a kindling power of enthusiasm, and a passionate energy, mental, physical, emotional, that was tireless; each a man among men, and both together an ideal leader for the thousand Americans at their heels. ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... responses ought to be ascribed to mere human contrivance or to the agency of evil spirits. The latter opinion has been most general in past ages. A third theory has been advanced since the phenomena of Mesmerism have attracted attention, that something like the mesmeric trance was induced in the Pythoness, and the faculty of ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... life, that it is all sound and fury and signifying nothing.... Thus far, and another interruption; and now it is to-morrow, and Lady Grey and Lady G—— have just gone out of the room, and Chauncy Hare Townsend has just come in, followed by his mesmeric German patient, who is going to perform his magnetic magic for us. I think I will let him try what sort of ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Some of our party, a very distinguished one, and known to each other, kept Mr. Vernon in conversation at a distance, while the child was reading our thoughts, or the actual words of print unknown to ourselves, quite independently of his manipulations; he having first comatised her into a mesmeric state of trance. The invited guests were told, as in the Alexis case, that we might bring our own tests; and I had put into my pocket a small volume of Milton, from which she might read on the nape of her neck, if she could. We had previously bandaged her eyes, even to plaistering ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Either his tailor had made his trousers too short or he had braced them too high so that he seemed to have grown out of them quite recently. Sir Richmond had been dreading an encounter with some dominating and mesmeric personality; this amiable presence dispelled ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... attempt to account for the extreme predilection which I, an old woman in comparison, immediately imbibed for you before we had been an hour in company. Some feelings are unaccountable and inexplicable, but I felt a sympathy, a mesmeric attraction, if I may use the term, which was uncontrollable at our first meeting, and which increased every day during our residence together. It was not the feeling of a mother towards a child—at least I think not, for it was mingled with a certain degree of awe and presentiment ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... which he had been specially interested before he quitted London, one or two may properly be named. He had always sympathized, almost as strongly as Archbishop Whately did, with Dr. Elliotson's mesmeric investigations; and, reinforced as these were in the present year by the displays of a Belgian youth whom another friend, Mr. Chauncy Hare Townshend, brought over to England, the subject, which to the last had an attraction for him, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... perceptivity such as theory would suggest? It is known to readers of the Society for Psychical Research Proceedings that we do find such indications, scattered at first, and appearing unsought-for amid the phenomena of mesmeric or somnambulic states; but now to some slight extent isolated into distinctness, and brought under ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... "I wish they were in Hades with their mesmeric stunts! I shan't tell Brass what happened, for it won't do any good; and the less notice there's taken of it the better. But carrying things before him as he was—it was hard luck to have that occur. Puts him in an undignified position, to ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... native barber's to-day. Gave him no instructions. Thought of course he was going to cut it; and so fell asleep. I almost always fall asleep when under the mesmeric influence of a capillary administrator. I should like him to keep on doing it; cut and comb again. So soothing! Woke up and found myself—like this. (See Hair Cut.) Herewith please ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... always kept champagne for his friends, paid for out of his collections for charity. In his inebriated state his wild-looking eyes glowed like coals, and as he looked at me I experienced once more the strange sensation of being enthralled. Truly, there was something mesmeric about that gaze of his, a mystery ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... this time. The whispering, shuffling, and clicking of the court typewriter ceases, the scene darkens, and the court is blotted out as a scene is blotted out from the sight of a man who has thrown himself into a mesmeric trance. And: ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... Colonel was moody. His speech was curt. He occupied himself mainly in listening to Guy and Cyril. A sort of mesmeric influence seemed to draw him towards ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... confident way, to see that his hasty words had not injured him with me. He used to meet one's eye as boldly as any man I ever saw; but it was not the simple gaze of honesty and innocence, but an imperious, searching look, as if defying scrutiny. His was a true mesmeric eye, if ever there was one. No wonder it ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... she said. I loved her blue eye, her golden hair, her delicious voice, that was true in song, though when she spoke, false as Eblis! You are aware that I possess in rather a remarkable degree what we have agreed to call the mesmeric power. I set the unhappy girl to sleep. THEN she was obliged to tell me all. It was as I had surmised. Goby de Mouchy, my wretched, besotted, miserable secretary, in his visits to the chateau of the Marquis de Bechamel, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Yes? All right, eh? All right!"—he had a strange mesmeric power over her, as if he possessed the sensual secrets, and she ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... to him as one in a mesmeric sleep. "'Tis a long way home, my child, and we shall not ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... rail until it touched hers. In her deep absorption she did not notice it, or pretended that she did not; but when he took a step nearer she drew her hand away gently. The star held her gaze as though it possessed some mesmeric power. A smile was upon her face as the situation at the soda-water counter took form, became a veritable ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... in childhood, he received religious impressions which might almost be described as mesmeric or hypnotic in their influence upon his nerves. These abode with him through manhood; and in later life morbid scruples and superstitious anxieties about his soul laid hold on his imagination. Yet religion did not penetrate Tasso's nature. As ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... parlor, and Mr. BUMSTEAD was at the piano, accompanying the Flowerpot while she sang. Executing without notes, and with his stony gaze fixed intently between the nose and chin of the singer, Mr. BUMSTEAD had a certain mesmeric appearance of controlling the words coming out of the rosy mouth. Standing beside Miss POTTS was MAGNOLIA PENDRAGON, seemingly fascinated, as it were, by the BUMSTEAD method of playing, in which the performer's ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... earnestly implored the Lord not to heal this invalid through her means if she employed mesmerism; but if not, to permit recovery. The woman was cured in a short time, though Dorothea had never entered her house, and had, therefore, no opportunity of placing herself in a mesmeric relation ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... or imagination, (as they termed it.) exhibited in persons of a peculiar organization, and diffusing radios salutares vel perniciosos. Though the terms employed by them, as well as their notions of its origin, are very unphilosophical and vague, it is plain that they considered it as a species of mesmeric or biologic power, operating by nervous impression. The fascinator generally endeavored to provoke in his victims an excited and pleased attention, for in this condition they were peculiarly predisposed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... valuable and interesting if we recollect that Cervantes' great-grandmother was a Saavedra, and that the soldier alluded to in the text was really himself. It is impossible to explain satisfactorily the sheathing of the tiger's claws on his account alone; did Cervantes exercise unconsciously a mesmeric influence over Azan? Did Azan ascribe his captive's defiance of death and worse than death to his bearing a charmed life? Or did he hold him to be a man of such consequence in his own country, that it was ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... his hands gently over the face above him, caressingly over the glorious mass of golden hair and round the columnar throat Bronzino would have left reluctantly alone. Said Irene, from the other end of the room:—"Are you trying Mesmeric ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... promotes moral and emotional expansion—for true catholicity of mind manufactures charity in the heart; and toleration is the real mesmeric current which brings the extremes of humanity en rapport,—is the veritable ubiquitous Samaritan always provided with wine and oil for the bruised and helpless, who are strewn along the highway of life; and ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... thought was there, Where our poor English, striped with foreign phrase, Looks like a zebra in a parson's chaise; Lectures that cut our dinners down to roots, Or prove (by monkeys) men should stick to fruits,— Delusive error, as at trifling charge Professor Gripes will certify at large; Mesmeric pamphlets, which to facts appeal, Each fact as slippery as a fresh-caught eel; And figured heads, whose hieroglyphs invite To wandering knaves that discount fools at sight: Such things as these, with heaps of unpaid ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... doubtless well known in your midst, though, I may say, an entire stranger to myself—I venture to disclose some characteristic trends and tendencies, as indicated by this phrenological depression and development of the skull-proper, as later we will show, through the mesmeric condition, the accuracy ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... cobra in a round, flat basket. The basket he places on the ground and raises the cover. Then he rouses and provokes the snake to make it lift up the upper part of its body and expand its hood with the spectacles. All the time he plays his flute with one hand. With the other he makes waving, mesmeric passes. The snake gradually becomes quiet and calm, and the charmer can press his lips against the scales of its forehead. Then the charmer throws it on one side with a sudden movement, for the snake may have waked up again and be just on the point ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... life in us. But here, we know accurately what the needs are; and any sort of wisdom that fails to provide us with the right way of dealing with one another is defective. Thus your Buddhism seems to me more mesmeric than satisfying. It is a way men have of murdering themselves, while continuing to live, into peace and oblivion. There is a surrender, a negation of life, a denial of total responsibilities, or human obligations, which to my mind ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... want to discover the secret of a great doctor's success," she pursued. "What is your charm? There is something mesmeric about you, I think, something inimical to disease at all events. There is healing in your touch, and your very manners make an impression ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the other bore with a grin of sympathetic comprehension, or, at long intervals, returned upon Crailey with devastating effect. Vanrevel was the one steadying thing in his life, and, at the same time, the only one of the young men upon whom he did not have an almost mesmeric influence. In good truth, Crailey was the ringleader in all the devilries of the town. Many a youth swore to avoid the roisterer's company for all time, and, within two hours of the vow, found himself, flagon ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... Science of the Soul. Considered Physiologically and Philosophically. With an Appendix containing Notes of Mesmeric and Psychical Experience. By Joseph ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... crowded together under any excitement, there is nothing which they will not make each other believe. They will make each other believe in spirit-rapping, table-turning, the mesmeric fluid, electro-biology; that they saw the lion on Northumberland House wagging his tail; {203} that witches have been seen riding in the air; that the Jews had poisoned the wells; that— but why go further into the sad catalogue of ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... repetition, darling, especially as I know it all quite well," murmured Mary Grey, with a smile, and still passing her hand with mesmeric gentleness ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the man who says, "I believe in God," and then explains himself to mean, by the name God, heat, steam, electricity, force, animal life, the soul of man, magnetism, mesmeric force, and, in one word, the sum of all the intelligences and forces in the universe, at the same time denying the proper currency of the term God by denying the existence of a personal God. All Christians should demand ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... forth, the fingers closed. Then opening his fingers, he drew back his arm suddenly, sharply, then jerked it forward again—it was the old mesmeric pass ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... his wings and whirling round his prey in concentric circles, he gradually descends in a spiral, until, at last, dashing down upon his victim, he seizes it with his pointed claws and brings it to his master. At other times the falcon is not flown, but only used to attract, with his mesmeric eyes, birds; these then, when within reach, being shot with old flint-lock guns. The other method is, however, the favourite form of this amusement, and large sums are often spent by the young nobles on well-trained birds. Entertainments are even given to witness the doings of these air-rovers, ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... they are buried in the night of art, like the brave who lived before the time of Agamemnon. Perhaps it is quite as well—"omne ignotum pro mirifico"—and who would lose the pleasure of wonder and conjecture, with all its imaginary phantasmagoria? We might have a mesmeric coma that might put us in possession of the past, if it can of the future—and gratify curiosity wofully at the expense of what is more valuable than that kind of truth. A mesmeric painter may take the portrait ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... at first, but afterwards more and more violently, till at last they got into a way of rocking themselves quite forward off their seat, and then on it again, the fat woman cuddling up the thin one more and more closely to her. There seemed a sort of mesmeric influence between the two, occasioning in both similar twistings and contortions of the body, shakings of the head, lookings upward, lookings downward, and louder words of exclamation and approbation. This was not continuous in its violence, though there was generally some movement ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... dry Englishwoman seemed to have a mesmeric effect on Amy, who was never quite so violent after she arrived. Katy was more thankful for this than can well be told; for her great underlying dread—a dread she dared not whisper plainly even to herself—was that "Polly dear" might break down before ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... start, as if awakened out of a kind of trance. The sheer vacuity of his mind might naturally slide into mesmeric sleep. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Science of the Soul, and the Phenomena of Nervation, as revealed by Mesmerism, considered Physiologically and Philosophically; including Notes of Mesmeric and Psychical Experience. By JOSEPH WILCOX HADDOCK, M.D. Second and enlarged Edition, illustrated by Engravings of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... was hot, and full of that musty mesmeric quality that changes everything into a waking dream. The maids threw dark veils over them to save their clothing from the dust kicked up by a crowd, and perhaps, too, as a concession to the none-so-ancient, but compelling ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... persuade him to yield himself to the therapeutic force constantly operative in Nature, is a means of healing. It may be an amulet, a cabalistic symbol, an incantation, a bread-pill, or even sudden fright. It may be a drug prescribed by a physician, imposition of hands, mesmeric passes, the touch of a relic, or ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... little conversation before they parted; nor did Sepia find any difficulty in getting him sufficiently within their range to make him feel the power of her eyes. She was too prudent, however, to bring to bear upon any man all at once the full play of her mesmeric battery; and things had got no further when she went to London—a week or two before the return of the Redmains, ostensibly to get things in some special readiness for Hesper; but that this may have been a pretense appears possible from the fact that ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... brother." (She almost choked with the word.) "Not before strangers—we are not strangers when alone. You read my nature, as I do yours, and we are not strangers when alone. It is not long acquaintance which makes familiar friends. The mesmeric spark will do more than years of intercommunication, where there is no congeniality—and do it in a little precious moment. The bloody arrow we held in common was an electric chain. I learned you at the plucking of that arrow from the cotton bale—in ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... purity. But often at the very commencement of the process some real physical result, unexpected and unthought of by the neophyte, occurs. Some lingering disease, hitherto deemed hopeless, may take a favourable turn; or he may develop healing mesmeric powers himself; or some hitherto unknown sharpening of his senses may delight him. The rationale of these things is, as we have said, neither miraculous nor difficult of comprehension. In the first place, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... profession. You needn't grin like that," he added, a little irritably. "There is a legitimate side, and a very wonderful side, only a brain like yours is not capable of assimilating it. You should have heard my paper to-night upon self-directed mesmeric waves." ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... may be admitted as possible, we find that the Dene Hareskins practise a form of healing under hypnotic or mesmeric treatment. {38} The physician (who is to be pitied) begins by a three days' fast. Then a 'magic lodge,' afterwards to be described, is built for him in the forest. Here he falls into the Sleep of the Shadow; the patient is then brought before him. In ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... few minutes, my dearest!" with no change in the mesmeric intentness of his gaze. "I want nothing more than to have you always near me. You have been a good, faithful wife, Mabel, better and nobler—a thousandfold nobler than I deserved. I have thought it all over while you were sleeping so tranquilly in my sight. I wish my conscience ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... lips; and her eyes, filled with wonderment, travelled from one countenance to the other, as if determined to drag the secret from them by mesmeric force. ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... much solicitude. Then, moving with a slow, measured tread, he wept, and with many sighs of grief adjusted the head with much care, caught rain in his shield and poured it over the body; then rubbed and shook the limbs, which by degrees became alive by his mesmeric-like passings and chafings from the feet upwards. Each limb as it revived beat time to the music, first faintly, then with more vigour, till it came to the head; and when that nodded satisfactorily, and the whole ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... was so sudden and unexpected in Hugo that all were vague about details. They saw him in a catapultic lunge, mesmeric in its swiftness, and they saw Pilzer go down, his leg twisted under him and his head banging the floor. Hugo stood, half ashamed, half frightened, yet ready for ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... an eagle fierceness and an unyielding aggressiveness. Now they were different, and as the guests who had brought the chair and its occupant up the stairs and into the room withdrew in silent respect, the daughter's gaze was held by them with a mesmeric force. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... shrilling of the crickets, the shu-shu of feet, the gentle clapping; and the wavering hovering measure proceeds in silence, with mesmeric lentor,—with a strange grace, which by its very naivete, seems as old as ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... great mesmeric powers, and this force, combined with rather clumsy juggling and ventriloquism, enabled them to perform a semblance of "miracles". The Iroquois offered much opposition to Christianity, thinking it would ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... couches; the cook, on a shady bench under the trellis, nodded as she seeded the raisins for the frozen pudding of the six-o'clock dinner; the waiter had succumbed in clearing the lunch-table and made mesmeric passes with the dish-rag in a fantasy of washing the plates; the stable-boy slumbered in the hay, high in the loft, while the fat old coachman, with a chamois-skin in his hand, dozed as he sat on the step of the surrey, between the fenders; the old dog snored on the veranda ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... deliberate deception had fretted and frayed beyond reason or forgiveness. He saw all there was to be said about it; he could imagine Baumgartner himself putting the case with irresistible logic, with characteristic plausibility, and all the mesmeric wisdom of a benevolent serpent; but for once, the boy felt, he would not be taken in. It was not coming to that, however, for he had quite decided not to betray his knowledge of the fraud—if only he had not ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... could not keep his hands steady in the violent spasms of shuddering, nor could he call his mind to think. He was one shuddering turmoil. Yet he performed his purpose methodically and exactly. In every particular he was thorough, as if he were the servant of some stern will. It was a mesmeric performance, in which the agent trembled ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... of fact, he revelled in it. When he offered a free box of the cure to the first lady who confessed the need thereof, and a blushing wench came forward, the rascal revelled in the opportunity for badinage which set the good-humoured crowd in a roar. He loved to exert his half-mesmeric power. He had not the soul of a mountebank, for Aristide's soul had its high and generous dwelling-place; but he had the puckish swiftness and mischief of which the successful mountebank is made. And he was a success because ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... long hours without a dream. It was four o'clock in the afternoon of Monday when I awoke, and only then, I believe, from the mesmeric influence of being gazed at. Eleanor! there is only one such pair of eyes in all the world! George Manners was kneeling by ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... can't do," said Howard, with a whimsical smile. "I am drawn, into the vortex; I am dragged at the chariot wheels of that wonderful father of yours. I am the victim of a peculiar kind of fascination which is as irresistible as the mesmeric influence or hypnotism. I feel towards Sir Stephen as I should feel towards Napoleon the Great, if he were alive. I follow and gaze at him, so to speak, with my mouth agape and a fatuous smile over a countenance which I once flattered myself was intelligent. I am dazed, bewildered ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... mesmerism explain the mythical nature of material sense. Sleep shows material sense as either 490:30 oblivion, nothingness, or an illusion or dream. Under the mesmeric illusion of belief, a man will think that he is freezing when he is warm, and that he 491:1 is swimming when he is on dry land. Needle-thrusts will not hurt him. A delicious perfume will seem intolerable. 491:3 Animal magnetism thus uncovers material sense, and shows it ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... not heard him enter, but presently some mesmeric rapport between them, told her he was near. She turned her head and saw him. Aunt Chatty caught sight of him, in her semi-sleeping ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... absorbed by appreciation of "beauty," abstract or concrete. If he saw a man with a humped back or a short leg he would have been prepared to make his portrait, assuming that the entity was not in conflict with the subject in hand. Hence the Zuccone. Its mesmeric ugliness is the effect of Donatello's gothic creed, and it well shows how Donatello, who from his earliest period was opposed to the conventions of the Pisan school, took the lead among those who founded their art upon the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... physical and psychological laws, which we do not at all understand, which account for the curious subjective effects which certain people have at close quarters; there is something hypnotic and mesmeric about the glance of certain eyes; and there is in all probability a curious blending of mental currents in an assembly of people, which is not a mere fancy, but a very real physical fact. Personalities radiate very real and unmistakable influences, and probably the undercurrent of thought which ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... fixed, direct look into your own. Even in the painted representation of that gaze, almost too calm in its absolute mastery to be called searching or scrutinising, yet seeming to look through the eyes into the soul, there was an almost mesmeric influence; as if, across the abyss of ten thousand years, the Master could still control the wills and draw forth the inner thoughts of the living, as he had dominated the spirits of their ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... would have seemed fantastic if it had not been for the sound of the machine guns and the rifles and the deeper-throated chorus of the heavy guns, which proved that this was no mesmeric, fantastic spectacle but a game with death, precise and ordered, with nothing that could be rehearsed left to chance any more than there was in the regulation of the traffic which was pressing forward, column after column, to supply the food ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... except green when once we passed the red-fringed curtain of rata-branches, only the white and shining fairy beach and the gleaming threads of water. As we sat there, perfectly still, and entranced, a sort of delicious mesmeric feeling stole over me; I thought of the lotus-eater's chant, "There is no joy but calm," with, for, the first time in my life, a dim perception of what they meant, perhaps; but it was over all too quickly: prosaic words of direction to back water called us ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... note that Swedenborg asserts that it is unlawful in Heaven for any person to look at the back of the head of another, as by so doing he interrupts the divine influx. The foundation of this idea is perhaps the desire to avoid mesmeric action ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... war-wolves on our trail, Their gaunt fangs sluiced with gouts of blood; Till the Past, in a dead, mesmeric veil, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... the shrilling of the crickets, the shu-shu of feet, the gentle clapping; and the wavering hovering measure proceeds in silence, with mesmeric lentor—with a strange grace, which, by its very navet, seems old as the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... authorized to announce that Miss Chandos, whose advertisement appears in another part of this paper, will give a mesmeric seance at the Spiritual Institution, 15, Southampton Row, on Wednesday evening, August 19th, at eight o'clock. Admission will be free by ticket, which may be obtained at the Institution. The object which Miss Chandos has in view ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... be no mistake that there is a specific action from something. It cannot be personal magnetism or mesmeric influence exerted by me, for such cases are rare, averaging about 10 per cent, only of all classes. Besides, in mesmeric influence the time has nothing to do with it; whereas, in my cases, it cannot last over a half minute or minute at most. It cannot ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... needle to be thrust deeply into his flesh without manifestations of a most unmesmeric sort. The conclusion seems warranted that he began by pretending, but that at times he was at least under semi-mesmeric control. At all events, he enjoyed a week of dazzling triumph, though in the end he concluded to stick to ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... most practical manner—and calling to mind how the poet Coleridge had improvised the delicious fragment of Kubla Khan in a dream, he began to see nothing so very remarkable in his own unconscious production of a complete poem while under mesmeric or ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... hypnotic treatment. Many people, as you are doubtless aware, are less responsive to hypnotic influence than others. An intensified course of the third degree and lack of sleep renders such refractory natures extraordinarily susceptible to mesmeric treatment. It prepares ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... if to shake off the effect of some oppressive, mesmeric influence; reluctantly he admitted, "All I can say is you have ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... of opinion about her looks. She was always striking in appearance, but dress, for one thing, altered her very much, and the state of her mind still more. People who met her on one occasion admired her exceedingly, and on the next wondered why they had thought her good-looking at all. She had the mesmeric quality which makes it impossible to escape observation, and her personality never failed to interest the intelligent whether it pleased them or not; but she was only at her best in mind, manner, and appearance when her ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... we hear the rumor that the seer has arrived, and his tale is told. But there is no beauty, no heaven: for angels, goblins. The sad muse loves night and death, and the pit. His Inferno is mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the same relation to the generosities and joys of truth, of which human souls have already made us cognizant, as a man's bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is indeed very ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... description of some mesmeric experiments by a M. Delafontaine, by which a boy was deprived of all sensation. We suspect that some one has been operating upon the Poor Law Commissioners, for their total want of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... sound, whether it was a movement, none of the group was accurately aware. It may have been merely that mesmeric influence of an intently concentrated gaze that caused them suddenly to turn. They beheld standing in the road—and they flinched at the sight—a witness to all the proceedings. A small, a simple, object to excite such abject terror as blanched the faces of the group—a little ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... dying strove to raise themselves on their arms from the reddened soil to gaze, and, gazing, fell back dead. Slowly, mechanically, silently, the living gave way, the weapons dropping from their nerveless grip. Step by step they drew back as if compelled by some strange mesmeric power. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... the real nature of these emotional experiences, no one doubted that they possessed a genuine reality of some kind or other, for it was a matter of history in this little community that David Corson had often exercised prophetic, mesmeric and therapeutic powers. ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss |
