"Mirage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... filled with men who had fallen or been overtaken, and now in the last throes of a desperate snow battle. I dared not look behind, but kept bravely on. My breath grew fast and thick, and the camp seemed a perfect mirage, now near at hand then far in the distance. The men who had not yet fallen in the hands of the reckless Georgians had distanced me, and the only energy that kept me to the race was the hope that some mishap might befall the wild-eyed man in my rear, otherwise ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... towns. These white specks diminish swiftly,— dwindle to the dimensions of salt-grains,—finally vanish. Then the island grows uniformly bluish; it becomes cloudy, vague as a dream of mountains;—it turns at last gray as smoke, and then melts into the horizon-light like a mirage. ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... graphically depicted on the monumental tablets of the processional paths, while type and symbol point also to the infinite future intensely realised by Eastern mysticism. Mortal life was but a fleeting mirage besides this vision of the life beyond. For the words "Shadow, Unreality, Illusion," perpetually repeated by the yellow-robed monks on the beads of the Buddhist Rosary were inscribed on the inmost heart of the faithful disciple, who strove to attain ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... The king appeared at a distance, surrounded by ladies and horsemen. All the troop advanced in beautiful order, at a foot's pace, the horns of various sorts animating the dogs and horses. There was an animation in the scene, a mirage of light, of which nothing now can give an idea, unless it be the fictitious splendor of a theatric spectacle. D'Artagnan, with an eye a little, just a little, dimmed by age, distinguished behind the group three carriages. The first was intended for the queen; it was empty. D'Artagnan, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... immense pity for humanity, crucified upon the cross whose limbs are Time and Space. Those poor Russian pilgrims faring foot-sore across the great frozen plains, lured on by this mirage of blessedness, sleeping by the wayside, and sometimes never waking again! Poor humanity, like a blind Oriental beggar on the deserted roadway crying Bakhshish to vain skies, from whose hollow and futile ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... phrase, or touching things unexpectedly with that ideal light which softens and subdues like distance in the landscape. The stern outline of his system wavers and melts away before the eye of the reader in a mirage of imagination that lifts from beyond the sphere of vision and hangs in serener air images of infinite suggestion projected from worlds not realized, but substantial to faith, hope, and aspiration. Beyond the horizon of speculation floats, in the passionless splendor of the empyrean, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... solidified itself; then gradually broke up its mass into innumerable lofty white pillars of about one size, and ranged these across the firmament, in receding and fading perspective, in the similitude of a stupendous colonnade—a mirage without a doubt flung from the far Gates of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... binding her hair and falling on her shoulders, she made him think, in her inappropriateness and splendour, of her own Bouddha, who, in his glimmering shrine, lifted his hand as if in a gesture of bland exorcism before which the mirage of a vulgar and trivial age must presently fade away. The Bouddha looked permanent and the room looked transient; the only thing in it that could stand up against him, as it were, was Karen. To her husband's eye, newly aware of aesthetic discriminations, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... back and demanded, "What do you make of this? Are we seeing things?" Hopefully, he suggested, "A mirage or ...
— The Hohokam Dig • Theodore Pratt
... small snow-fields concealed in the valleys. Here and there too along the steep strand escarpments were to be seen, remains of the winter's snow-foot, which often, when the lower stratum of air was strongly heated by the sun, were magnified by a strong mirage, so that, when seen from a distance, they resembled immense glaciers terminating perpendicularly towards the sea. Coming farther south the clear weather gave us a good view of Vaygats Island. It appears, when seen ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... a series of huts, each like Burns' birthplace, grouped on the shelving side of a stony cliff. The bay itself is semi-circular, with a long cape jutting out to the south, the extremity of which almost always is floating in the air, owing to the mirage. In the bay were two rusty steamers—one the Benedetto, which had been promised to us by the Italian governor—several old wooden sailers, and a lot of smallish fishing smacks very brightly painted and with raised poop and prow. A group of Albanians were ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... change in the skies or a sunset across the ocean! To you, with boundless wealth, there will be depths of happiness which you will never probe, joys which, if you have the wit to see them at all, will be no more than a mirage to you." ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... speculators for the voice of your time, nor imagine that you precede your generation because you stand alone. He dreamed of far-away glory, and his flatterers told him his dreams were prophetic. He saw across the seas the mirage of a great Latin empire in the West, and beheld the Muse of history inscribing his name beside that of his great kinsman as the restorer of the political and commercial equilibrium of the world, as well as the benefactor who had thrown El Dorado open to civilization. With the faith of ignorance, ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... in their fascinating quest. For the hunting of birch bark is ever enticing and lures one on to further treasures like a mirage. ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... weeds Lifting thy golden filaments and seeds, Thy sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest! White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of palaces and strips of sky; I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting In air ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... whistle conveyed to my mind the idea of the exhaustion of air in a ship-compartment, and the opening and shutting of the elevator door completed the illusion of a ship fast going to pieces. But the ship my mind was on never reached any shore, nor did she sink. Like a mirage she vanished, and again I found myself safe in my bed at the hospital. "Safe," did I say? Scarcely that—for deliverance from one impending disaster simply meant immediate precipitation ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... snatching the image our soul has cast in it, What is the use of the Summers and Springs, The wave of the woods and the waft of the wings— Since all means nothing, and good things and ill Make madness,—a mirage tormenting us still? ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... associates. The existence of a rich Indian empire at the south, which, in their minds, dwelling long on the same idea and alive to all the arguments in its favor, had risen to the certainty of conviction, had been derided by the rest of their countrymen as a mere mirage of the fancy, which, on nearer approach, would melt into air; while the projectors, who staked their fortunes on the adventure, were denounced as madmen. But their hour of triumph, their slow and ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... the mirage, seen in the desert of Africa. M. Monge, a member of the National Institute, accompanied the French army into Egypt. In the desert, between Alexandria and Cairo, the mirage of the blue sky was inverted, and so mingled with the sand below, as to impart to the desolate ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... canoe appeared on the bosom of the lonely lake, I thought that I was looking upon a vision of a spectral nature. In spite of all my belief that I was alone on this remote beach, there sat the man in the boat, only a few rods off shore. He was as a mirage, as silent as the very lake itself. A few eerie moments passed; then the boat began to move slowly toward me, gently propelled by a skillful paddle. As it approached, the light of the full moon streaming upon it made it easy for me to study its occupants. Near the bow I could discern a hound ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... she cried; "a tenderfoot is sure funny. The chances are, Mr. Hanson, that if you started to walk around those dunes you'd never get back. Goodness! ain't that mirage pretty?" ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... illusions of the senses, which are believed to be real by primitive men, and by those ignorant of physical laws, have a similar origin. The objection of such phenomena as a mirage, or the tremulous effect produced in tropical regions by the refraction and reflection of light on trees, rocks, and mountains, so well described by Humboldt, is due to ignorance of the laws of ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... two-masted steamer and, cut off by the play of reflected light, floated like a mirage between sky and sea. After studying her for a minute, Dick ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... color and so hard that the track of an ox could not be seen on its glittering surface. At a distance those clay beds looked like water shining in the sun and were generally about three times as far as any one would judge, the air was so clear. This mirage, or resemblance to water was so perfect as often to deceive us, and almost to our ruin on ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... mirage become, that Honora did not answer. The desert and its journey fell away. Could such a thing, after all, be possible? Did fate deal twice to those whom she had made novices? The mirage, indeed, suddenly became reality—a mirage only because she had proclaimed it such. She had beheld in it, as he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "filled with pleasant noise of waters," was silent as death. It took me the whole day to reach the patch,—which I found indeed a forest—but not a rudiment of brook or runnel had I crossed! Yet through the glowing noon I seemed haunted by an aural mirage, hearing so plainly the voice of many waters that I could hardly believe the ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... like a woman, and one, it is plain, Whose sentiment hangs like a cloud o'er her brain. You gaze through a sort of traditional mist, And behold a mirage of God's laws which exist But in fancy. God made but one law—it is love. A law for the earth, and the kingdoms above, A law for the woman, a law for the man, The base and the spire of His intricate plan Of existence. All evils the world ever saw Had birth in man's breaking ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... felt sure that the ship he was going to look for would be gone. One morning, he had been off for game for the dogs unsuccessfully, and, when he came back to his men, learned that they had seen seventeen deer. After them goes Pim; finds them to be three hares, magnified by fog and mirage, and their long ears answering for horns. This same day they got upon the Bay of Mercy. No ship in sight! Right across it goes the Lieutenant to look for records; when, at two in the afternoon, Robert Hoile sees something black up the bay. Through the glass the Lieutenant ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... to determine the extent of the flat expanse of mud. On this occasion I witnessed the finest I have ever seen. The hot sun playing upon the damp breeze rising from the lake, transformed this desolate sea of salt and clay, into a charming picture. The horizon and the sky were joined by a mirage of beautiful clear water, from which islands and hills seemed to rise; even their shadows and those of the trees with which they were clothed were reflected in the unruffled surface of the lake. The long stretch ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... sails they spread them flat to catch the pouring rain, and then poured this precious fresh water—true water of life to them—into their calabashes. But when morning came no land could be seen anywhere. It was as though the island had been a land of enchantment and mirage, and now had faded away. Yet hope sprang in them erect and glad next day when land was sighted again; but the sea and the wind, as though driven by the spirits of contrariness, ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... Eulah with them, the brothers started on another quest for the Lynd, which, like the mirage of the desert, seemed to recede from them as they approached; setting out late in the day, they camped at night once more on the lagoon, at the end of their marked-tree line, a distance of about 18 miles. They took with them four days' rations of flour, tea, and sugar, trusting ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... excited by another mirage of riches as these thoughts went through it, and to settle the matter I stooped down and got a grip on the coffer—which was made of a tougher wood than the boxes and held together—and managed by a good deal of straining ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... remained there inert, staring, his brain refusing to work. If yonder stood a white object, between him and the mountain, a curious white something with wheels, might it not be a covered wagon? No, it was a mirage. But was it possible for a mirage to deceive him into the fancy that a wagon stood only a few hundred feet away? Perhaps it was really a wagon. He stared stupidly, not moving. There were no dream-horses to this ghost-wagon. There was no sign of life. If captured by the Indians, it would not ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... coast from cape to cape, The weird mirage crept tremulously on, In many a magic change and wondrous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... the celestial gate. They who might feed on rose-leaves of the True, And grow in loveliness of heart and soul, Catch at Deception's airy gossamers, As children clutch at stars. To some, the world Is a bleak desert, parched with blinding sand, With here and there a mirage, fair to view, But insubstantial as the visions born Of Folly and Despair. Could we but know How nigh we are to the true light of heaven; In what a world of love we live and breathe; On what a tide of truth ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... and so is our remaining where we are now in spite of the northerly ones. It would seem that new powers of some kind must be at work. "To-day another noteworthy thing happened, which was that about midday we saw the sun, or, to be more correct, an image of the sun, for it was only a mirage. A peculiar impression was produced by the sight of that glowing fire lit just above the outermost edge of the ice. According to the enthusiastic descriptions given by many Arctic travellers of the first appearance of this god of life after the long winter night, the impression ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... no further objection for fear of irritating the old man. At the same time he fervently hoped that General Sokolovitch and his family would fade away like a mirage in the desert, so that the visitors could escape, by merely returning downstairs. But to his horror he saw that General Ivolgin was quite familiar with the house, and really seemed to have friends there. At ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to float behind a veil of sparkling gauze, unreal as a mirage; but toward noon it brightened and sharpened in outline, until at last the tall trees took individual form, bunches of unripe dates beneath their spread fan of plumes hanging down like immense yellow fists at the end of limp, thin arms ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... he said, but his voice had no gentleness; the very question, the look, the gesture, all served to convince her that the events of this day belonged to a mirage of the soul which was fast disappearing ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... overcast, the air unusually mild, on account of the prevailing west wind, and the pavement of the Jungfernstieg damp and muddy. A thin veil of yellow fog lay over the Binnen Alster, giving the objects far and near the indefinite, wavering appearance of a mirage. Above the dark masses of houses to the right rose four sharp spires, from the points of which, smoke-wreaths seemed to rise and trail away. Far away in front the Lombardsbrucke was just distinguishable, its three arches apparently hung with gray draperies. ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... years he squanders an enormous fortune in giving pleasure to his friends. From this lack of self-poise, too, comes the tremendous reaction later, {194} when he learns that his imagined world of love and friendship and popular applause was a mirage of the desert, and finds himself poverty-stricken and alone, the dupe of sharpers, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... red glow, across which shadows appeared to move like phantoms. Like a picture from the ghost world, it flickered for a few minutes like heat lightning, then disappeared, leaving the night as dark as before. It was a night mirage, and something more than an optical illusion. It was a rare thing on the plain. The Kid knew that it meant something. That glow was the reflection in the sky of a camp fire! Those shadows were men! The ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... somehow lightened all her tints; this woman, albeit dark, had somehow about her a deep golden hue as of dusk in a deep wood beheld against a sunset. Her face had always had a boyish look and still, with years, was boyish. There was a mirage in her face. The stranger glanced and saw a mother—extraordinarily shielding and maternal and benignant things; and looked again and saw a boy—astonishingly reckless and impetuous and rather boyish, hard and mutinous things. ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... and dawns, mirage, the sea, Foreshadow Nature's fixed decree, While steady rolls the round of seasons,— The ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... two watched her, Louis recognizing the borderland of holy ecstasy, Mona hopeful that the vision was only a mirage. The boat floated close to the perpendicular rocks and reflected itself in the deep waters; far away the farmhouse lay against the green woods; to the north rose the highest point of the bluff, dark with pines; farther on ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... stately Dr. Pell, Toole was ceremonious and deliberate, and oppressively polite. On the other hand, when he had been shut up with brusque, half-savage, energetic Doctor Rogerson, Tom was laconic, decisive, and insupportably ill-bred, till, as we have said, the mirage melted away, and he gradually acquiesced in his identity. Then, little by little, the irrepressible gossip, jocularity, and ballad minstrelsy were heard again, his little eyes danced, and his waggish smiles glowed once ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... which caused me to stop so soon. I am almost afraid that I shall lose her. I shall see how she is in the morning, and, if she is no better, I will endeavour to get her on to some permanent water or creek running to the south. I think we have now made the dip of the country to the south, but the mirage is so powerful that little bushes appear like great gum-trees, which makes it very difficult to judge what is before us; it is almost as bad as travelling in the dark. I never saw it so bright nor so continuous as it is now; one would think that the whole country was under water. Camped without ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... tears he saw the mirage of his own fireside. Perhaps for the moment his homing spirit rested there, and it was only the body from which the soul had fled that was in the saddle here before us riding through a hostile land. Perhaps ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... the churches and convents it encloses. On another side, strange as the architecture of dreamland, stands the chimerical and impossible church of Vassili-Blagennoi, which makes your reason doubt the testimony of your eyes. Although it appears real enough, you ask yourself if it is not a fantastic mirage, a building made of clouds curiously coloured by the sunlight, and which the quivering air will change or cause to dissolve. Without any doubt, it is the most original building in the world; it recalls nothing that you have ever seen ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... of this school is pure nihilism, or the non-existence of both self and of matter. There is an utter absence of substantiality in all things. Life itself is a prolonged dream. The objects about us are mere delusive shadows or mirage, the product of the imagination alone. The past and the future are without reality, but the present state of things only stands as if it were real. That is to say: the true state of things is constantly changing, yet it seems as if the ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... last you are come to the ocean of happiness, do not go back thirsty. Wake, foolish man! for Death stalks you. Here is pure water before you; drink it at every breath. Do not follow the mirage on foot, but thirst for the nectar; Dhruva, Prahlad, and Shukadeva have drunk of it, and also Raidas has tasted it: The saints are drunk with love, their thirst is for love. Kabr says: "Listen to me, brother! The nest of fear is broken. Not for a moment have you ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... keeps me going is a mirage of Rose Ranch ahead of me," declared Nan's chum, shaking her head over the text books piled upon their study table. "Oh, dear me, Nan! if anything should happen to make it impossible for us to go with Rhoda, ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... answered the doctor, "and I have no reason for doubting the word of these sailors; a vain attempt has been made to explain their discovery as an effect of mirage; but they were so certain, it was impossible that they could have made ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... work of man. The shading is oftentimes very captivating, and on it the traveler can be entertained for hours, until a change in the rays of light or intervening clouds, or else by approaching the delusion itself, the magic scene fades away. A mirage and a prairie on fire, seen by night, the one a delusion, the other a fearful reality, are two of the grandest sights to be seen in the far West; we might add, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... the rest believe the influences which produced the megalithic monuments to have spread from east to west, i.e. from Asia to Europe, Salomon Reinach holds the contrary view, which he has supported in a remarkable paper called Le Mirage Oriental, published ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... too old to go over again. For a breath she waited to see her further way. She had not planned this as the issue, but the moment was obviously crucial, and offered what, in international politics already awry, would constitute a good technical opportunity. If her mirage of regeneration, her hope of an understanding, perhaps even her love, had flung up any last afterglow in this home-coming, it was over now. Indeed, now it seemed an old grief, the present but confirmation concerning a lover ten years lost at sea. She saw the whole ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... nothing in the shape and consistence of granite. We are now on the highway for Ghat, and it is said we shall arrive in fifteen days from the plateau. Saw on the plateau, for the first time of my life, the celebrated mirage, which our people call Watta, but the classic Arabic is Es-Sarab (‮السّرب‬). At first sight, I thought it was salt, for it flamed in the sun white, like a salt-pit, or lagoon. There appeared some low hills in the midst of the white lake. As we proceeded, I saw what appeared like white ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... such things before," he said. "The wise skippers all say it is a mirage, but the wiser sailormen say it is a message from another world. She's gone, our Huntress is, and there's no wind under heaven will ever blow her ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... brief ordeal may well mean reunion with his beloved and her rescue from the welter of Paris. The Pilgrim's soul hungers and thirsts for her. After the great Sahara of imprisoned loneliness, how near the Oasis of love and rapture! How beautiful the prospect, if not indeed Mirage! ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... air of a perfect morning. In the south there was a vast phantom lake, with duplicate cities here and there along the winding shores, which stretched from east to west. The grain-stacks stood around so thickly that they seemed like walls of a great, low-built town, the mirage bringing into vision countless hundreds of them commonly ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... promised. You have not made the best of the power into which you came, and you could not do so, because the spring from which all the enriching waters of married life flow was dry. Poor Jasmine—poor illusion of a wild young heart which reached out for the golden city of the mirage! ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... possible case for that religion was that it transmuted the individual subject of its adoration into the deathless splendor of a Madonna unique and yet divisible in a mirage of earthly loveliness. It was heaven come to Aquitaine, to the Courts of Love, in shapes of vivid fragrant beauty, with delectable hair lying gold on white samite worked in borders of blue petals. It chose not abstractions for its faith, but the most desirable of all actual—yes, worldly—incentives: ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... discovered an even more alarming condition of affairs. They were receiving only forty-five hundred a year from their investments. And though the suit over the will moved ahead of them like a persistent mirage and the financial danger-mark loomed up in the near distance they found, nevertheless, that living ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... facts sufficiently wonderful for the characters who were to deal with them, and characters high and noble enough to deal with the great and exalted facts. On one hand or the other his scheme was always giving out. The mirage of fancy which painted itself so alluringly before him faded on his advance and left him planted heavy-footed in the desert sands. In other words, he was always getting out of a subject. In the intervals between his last fiction and his next, when ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... trying to find out who his father was. It was a forty-years' wandering in the wilderness; he found this clue and that, and thought at last he had climbed Pisgah and could see the promised land. But he had to be content with the sight, or mirage I suppose it was, and died before he ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... all askew to-night, — As if the time were come, or almost come, For their untenanted mirage of me To lose itself and crumble out of sight, Like a tall ship that floats above the foam A little while, and ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... in this world since the Fall! It stands at the end of each sentence we learn; It flits in the vista of all we discern; It leads us, forever and ever, away To find in to-morrow what flies with to-day. 'Twas the same little fatal and mystical word That now, like a mirage, led my lady and lord To the waters of Ems from the waters of Marah; Drooping Pilgrims ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... and gradual. This child of circumstances, a born plainsman like the Indian, read in plain, forest, and mountain, things which were not visible to other eyes. The stars were his compass by night, the heat waves of the plain warned him of the tempting mirage, while the cloud on the mountain's peak or the wind in the pines which sheltered him alike spoke to him and ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... Church Militant, by a mere fighting soul without such straps and buttons as might compel recognition upon equal terms. It is impossible to know how far Stephen envisaged the visit as a duty—the priestly horizon is perhaps not wholly free from mirage—or to what extent he confessed it an indulgence. He was certainly aware of a stronger desire than he could altogether account for that Captain Filbert should not desert her post. The idea had an element of imitation oddly ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Words: marine, naval, maritime, nautical, Davy Jones, pelagic, pelagian, loom, looming, submarine, ultramarine, rote, frith, estuary, fiord, kraken, Triton, haliography, haliographer, hydrography, thalassography, marinorama, nereid, mirage, nautilus, thalassotherapy. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of Yes and No, She sees the Best that glimmers through the Worst, She feels the sun is hid but for a night, She spies the summer thro' the winter bud, She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, She hears the lark within the songless egg, She finds the fountain where they wail'd 'Mirage!'" ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... passionate intensity, and Nayland Smith hesitated. To my nostrils was wafted that faint, delightful perfume which, since one night, two years ago, it had come to disturb my senses, had taunted me many times as the mirage taunts the parched Sahara traveler. I took a ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... and we started up a fox. Otherwise we came across no sign of life. As we advanced mile upon mile the mysterious tower seemed to get further away, an illusion possible in flat countries. I have often observed a similar phenomenon in Holland. Perhaps in this case mirage had something ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... that earth is not continent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... civil, Porphyrius Petrovitch; I won't quite allow that yet! I'll make a stand and tell you some plain truths to your faces, and then you shall find out my real opinion about you!" He had some difficulty in breathing. "But supposing that all this is pure fancy?—a kind of mirage? Suppose I had misunderstood? Let me try and keep up my nasty part, and not commit myself, like the fool, by blind anger! Ought I to give them credit for intentions they have not? Their words are, in themselves, not very extraordinary ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... buffalo are standing in, what in the name of sense is it?" I told them that what they saw was nothing more than merely buffalo at a distance on the plain; that what they saw that resembled water was simply an optical illusion, called the "mirage." Webster describes the word as follows: "An optical illusion arising from an unequal refraction in the lower strata of the atmosphere and causing remote objects to be seen double, as if reflected in a mirror, or to appear as if suspended ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... a curiosity; big water-snakes raise their slimy heads a couple of feet above the sea; the tiny nautilus floats in myriads upon the undulating waves, and at times the ship is surrounded by a shoal of the indolent jelly-fish. Mirage plays us strange tricks in the way of optical delusion in these regions. We seem to be approaching land which we never reach, but which at the moment when we should fairly make it, fades into ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... fibre of northern men, diffidence as an obstacle to ease has its place among the causes of strong character; and those who appear at a first glance weak and ineffectual as Hamlet, will often in the light of knowledge be found guided by the most inflexible moral determination. They see, as in a mirage, peace supreme and adorable, but may not tread the hermit's path that leads to her dwelling. Only a religious vow might justify the abandonment of the human struggle, and even that appears desertion. The stern genius of the North grudges immurement, even ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... looked like one I had seen, but I dared not believe my eyes. Clyde, who was helping to draw water from the eighty-foot well without a pulley, thought I was bereft as I ran from the camp toward the advancing rider. But although I thought what I saw must be a mirage, still I ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... water-plants, we found ourselves on a glassy surface, extending away towards the west as far as the eye could see, and bordered on all sides by gorgeous mountains and ranges of snow. Around the edges of the lake a sunny mirage was playing tricks with the cattle and the objects on the banks, and as we glided lazily on with the stream, and the splashing paddles, and even the foiled mosquitoes, made music about us, we began to enter more ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... Two crucial tests were available. If it could be shown that the fantastic shapes suspended above the edge of the dark moon were seen under an identical aspect from two distant stations, that fact alone would annihilate the theory of optical illusion or "mirage"; while the certainty that they were progressively concealed by the advancing moon on one side, and uncovered on the other, would effectually detach them from dependence on our satellite, and establish them ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... mouth of the valley. After the solitary ramble of that afternoon, my eyes familiarized to nothing save the wild things of nature, this unexpected glimpse of complicated, civilized structures had all the improbability of a mirage. Longo-bucco, at that moment, arose before me like those dream-cities in the Arabian tale, conjured by enchantment out of the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... that a picture so precise in its outlines, and so coherent, so thinkable and possible even in its most gorgeous details, should have had behind it something, probably a great deal, of fact actually seen and known, than that it should have been the mere mirage of a poet's dream? 'The picture presented to us of the Homeric heroes and their surroundings,' says Father Browne, 'is not merely vivid and complete; it is grand, though with a grandeur which is homely and simple. Hence ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... of it, its infinite expansion, its air like wine to the senses, the floods of sunshine, the waves of color, the translucent atmosphere that aids the imagination to create in the distance all architectural splendors and realms of peace. It is all like a mirage and a dream. We pass swiftly, and make a moving panorama of beauty in hues, of strangeness in forms, of sublimity in extent, of overawing and savage antiquity. I would miss none of it. And when we pass to the accustomed again, to the fields of verdure and the ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... movement was caused by a spiral haze of smoke so vague that one could only tell of its existence from the mirage-like tremor of the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... a reminiscent ring as if it harked back to a time when three ample meals were a mirage of ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... ocean of unpleasantness and remembers only its sporadic islets—those moments of calm delight or fiercer joy which he would fain hold fast for ever. He does not come here on account of a certain fountain which ought never to be cleaned. [21] He comes for the sake of its mirage, that sunny phantom which will rise up later, out of some November fog in another land. Italy is a delightful place to remember, to think and talk about. And is it not the same with England? Let us go there as a tourist—only as a tourist. How attractive ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... The heat became terrific; not a breath of wind stirred. The face of the world lost its contours in wavering mirage. The travellers found lukewarm water in the station and breakfasted sparingly from their own stores of biscuit and tinned things. Then, in the shadow of the station, they settled down to wait, bored to extinction. Lulled ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... them to distinguish clearly objects at a great distance. To use M. Stroobant's own words, "My guide, who had for some time appeared to be walking in search of something, suddenly led me to an elevation whence I had the singular privilege of contemplating for a few instants the magnificent effect of mirage, which is termed the Spectre of the Brocken. The appearance is most striking. A thick mist, which seemed to emerge from the clouds like an immense curtain, suddenly rose to the west of the mountain, a rainbow was formed, then certain indistinct shapes were delineated. First, the large ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... and Icni' (Thunder) guarded his doorway. In the south was Teal' (Frog) in a house of blue fog, and Tiel'i[ng], who is afterward a water monster, lay at that doorway. Acihi Estsan (Salt-woman) was in the west, and her house was of the substance of a mirage; the youth Co'nen[)i]li (Water-sprinkler) danced before her door. In the north Cqaltlaqale[1] made a house of green duckweed, and S[)i]stel' (Tortoise) lay ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... more cynical and bitter he became. Pessimism set a cold, hard stamp upon his face, and marred his beauty. Cynicism lies like a black mark across his pages. At last, in his bitterness, the philosopher tells us the whole universe is a mirage, and that yonder summer-making sun is a bubble that repeats its iridescent tints in the colors of the rainbow. Despair ate out his heart. He became the most miserable of men, and knew no freedom from sorrow and pain. And lo, now the man's philosophy ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... with the sunshine on them," said the old man, with a sneer; "so is a mirage in the desert; so are the apples on the shores of the Dead Sea. But she is yours. You'll find no trouble in winning her, even at the sacrifice of her creed. She is of the earth earthy, and will willingly escape from such a miserable home ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... intangible than the rose-tinted clouds of a summer sunset,—one of those airy exhalations of the speculator's brain, which I am told are ever flitting in the form of towns and cities along those lines of railroad, built with Government subsidies, luring the unwary settlers as the mirage of the desert lures the famishing traveler on, and ever on, until it fades away in the darkening horizon,—or whether it is a real bona fide, substantial city, all "staked off," with the lots marked with their owners' names, like that proud commercial ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... the same path with you, you will seem to see a vast plain strewn with garlands where a happy throng of dancers trip the gladsome furandole standing in a circle, each a link in an endless chain; it is but a mirage; those who look down know that they are dancing on a silken thread stretched over an abyss that swallows up all who fall and shows not even a ripple on its surface. What foot is sure? Nature herself seems to deny you her divine consolation; trees and flowers are yours no more; you have ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... there to shoot at, but sand? The Arabs, warned by the death of the gaunt fellow in the burnous, had doffed their headgear. Their brown heads, peeping intermittently from the wady and the dunes, were evasive as a mirage. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... never-reached mirage Across the hot, white sand, And choke and die, while gazing on Its green ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... of Captain Grey, like the water-pools seen in the mirage of the desert, when approached, vanishes from ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... Franciscan-Moorish city the sun set with an incomparable glory one evening in May, eighteen thirty-five. The white, flat-roofed, terraced houses—each one in its flowery court—and the domes and spires of the Missions, with their gilded crosses, had a mirage-like beauty in the rare, soft atmosphere, as if a dream of Old Spain had been materialized in a wilderness ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... of the establishment. You would never find it if you went to Genoa. You and other tourists would be in the Bristol or the Savoy or the Miramare up on the heights above the railroad terminal. You would never find the Hotel Robinsons of Europe. They are like a mirage to the tourists, those quiet, clean, cheap hotels. You hear of them and perhaps catch a glimpse of them in the distance, and you press on, and find they have vanished. They have become dear, and noisy, and flashy, and are waiting for you at the station with a brand-new ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Retlow . . . where had he heard that name before? In vain he flogged his memory. There was an alien power in this brightness; a power as of a vampire that drained away his faculties, his vitality; a spirit of evil, exhaling from the sunny calm. It made a mock, a mirage, of the landscape which danced before his eyes; it distorted the realities of nature, the works of man. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... banishes him to the desert. The Queen seeks him there, and makes an avowal of her love; but Assad repulses her. As Sulamith comes upon the scene a simoom sweeps across the desert. They perish in each other's arms; while in a mirage the Queen and her attendants are seen journeying ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... lamentations and the intensity of her resentment against everything and everybody brought the inevitable reaction. Truth began to arise from the mirage. Much contemplation of self brought humility, and, try as she would, she could not stifle an aching desire to know what was happening to John since that awful night in the church. She had left him when he was ill, ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... that I perceived the contents of this glass case a sense of fantasy claimed me, and I ceased to know where reality ended and mirage began. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... mile of England, the emerald meadows sharply outlined by their hedges, cornfields pale patches of gold, roofs of farms deep specks of grateful red, and the roads blending the whole into an intricate pattern like that of some vast Persian carpet. Upon its lighter tones the heat created a mirage of running water. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... however, at the point where we struck it, was deep, level, and dry; but I believe there is water in it not far off, for there were some red-breasted cockatoos in the trees, and native parrots on each side. On the north side there is a part bearing off to the north-north-west. The mirage on the plain to the south of the creek was stronger than I have before seen it. There appear to be sheets of water within a few yards of one, and it looks sufficiently smooth and glassy to be used for an artificial horizon. To ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... the first fitful years of peace. The throb of the elementary forces already shook the soil of Christendom. The fantastic but most significant conflict in the territories of the dead Duke of Clove reflected the distant and gigantic war as in a mirage. It will be necessary to direct the reader's attention at the proper moment to that episode, for it was one in which the beneficent sagacity of Barneveld was conspicuously exerted in the cause of peace and conservation. Meantime ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... ft. forty or fifty miles inland. The accurate estimation of heights and distances in the Antarctic is always difficult, owing to the clear air, the confusing monotony of colouring, and the deceptive effect of mirage and refraction. The land appeared to increase in height to the southward, where we saw a line of land or barrier that must have been seventy miles, and possibly was even ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... drives, not in miles but hours, became the order of the day; from four in the morning to eight at night, even at an ox's pace, leaves every landmark of the day far in the rear at nightfall. Thus for the next few days we moved forward, the monotony of existence broken only by the great variety of mirage, the glare of heat-waves, and the silent signal in the sky of other voyageurs like ourselves. On reaching Pig Boggy, nothing but pools greeted us, while the regular crossing was dry and dusty and paved with cattle ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... restraint that had troubled them both slowly metamorphosed itself into a tender, dreamy content. Why ask anything of fate? Why crystallize with a word the cloudland perfection of the mirage in which they walked? They were content, happy with the vernal joy of young things in harmony with all the world of spring. They were silent now—unconscious, and one with the heart of life, as were Adam and Eve in the great garden of Eternal Spring—isolated, ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... he located the sound off to the east, but as yet he could see nothing, for it was not yet light enough, and a thin mist, like a mirage, hung over the surface of the sandy prairie ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... it through which Benjamin Rolfe, the minister, was shot by the Indians on the 29th of August, 1708. What a vision it was when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and spires of a great city!—for such was my fancy, and whether it was a mirage of youth or a fantastic natural effect I hate to ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... down? No, sir! It may be mirage of water miles away, carried by the rays of this twilight; but if you can see it and the horses can't smell it, you can bet on a ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... the light breeze. One moment the Frenchwoman would think there was nothing ahead but more and ever more of the bay glittering in the summer sunlight. The next moment she would see again that city—or was it a mirage of a city?—towers, mighty walls, domes rising mass above mass, summit above summit, into the very heavens from the water's edge where there was a fringe of green. Surely the vision must be real; yet how could tiny man out of ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... fuel to burn nor food to eat, and did not know where to get a morsel of food from one day to another, unless it was sent in to them." We can neither justify nor condemn their father. Imagine Columbus within sight of the new world, and his obstinate crew declaring it was only a mirage, and refusing to row him ashore! Never was mortal man surer that he had a fortune in his hand, than Charles Goodyear was when he would take a piece of scorched and dingy India-rubber from his pocket and expound its marvellous properties to a group of incredulous villagers. Sure also was he that ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... when the rock was wrapped in the soft amber haze which is a distinguishing characteristic of the incomparable Indian summer on the plains; or in the spring, when the mirage weaves its mysterious shapes, it loomed up in the landscape as if it were a huge mountain, and to the inexperienced eye appeared as if it were the abrupt ending of a well-defined range. But when the frost came, and the mists were dispelled; when the thin fringe of timber on the Walnut, a few ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... that are frequently observed at sea, such as the reflection of the sun, ripplings occasioned by the meeting of two opposite currents, whales asleep upon the surface of the water, shoals of fish, fog-banks, and the extraordinary effect of mirage, than which, as an optical illusion, nothing is more deceiving, have doubtless given birth to many of these non-existing shoals and islands. Were charts to be published (one does exist in manuscript, in the Hydrographical Office ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... Fairhaven mail-service was abominable, and that her letter had never reached me. But the young fellow who two years ago had wandered about the Green Chalybeate with her had become, now, as unreal as she. I glimpsed the couple, with immeasurable aloofness, as phantoms flickering about the mirage of a brook, throwing ghostly bread crumbs to ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... it," said Pennington, "but why can't a fellow create things with his mind, when things that don't exist jump right up before his eyes? I've often seen the mirage, generally about dark, far out on the western plains. I've seen a beautiful lake and green gardens where there was nothing but ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... natural beauty on the Sea Islands. We had a world of profuse and tangled vegetation around us, such as would have been a dream of delight to me, but for the constant sense of responsibility and care which came between. Amid this preoccupation, Nature seemed but a mirage, and not the close and intimate associate I had before known. I pressed no flowers, collected no insects or birds' eggs, made no notes on natural objects, reversing in these respects all previous habits. Yet now, in the retrospect, there seems to have been infused ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... unfortunate call, but said you bore the sulkiness very well. George Bradford was also very sorry; and it was bad that you should come so far, with the faces of friends for a hospitable city before you, and find a mirage only, or (begging ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... an artist into hysterics. He is always working at the end of his tether. There is nothing more tantalising than an eternal quest after the ideal; like the horizon, it recedes from the traveller; like the mirage, it vanishes before the claims of hunger and thirst. On the other hand, it has enjoyments all its own. The idealist is always face to face with a great expectation. Perhaps to-night he may realise it; certainly in the morning it ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in land of stony dearth Like barren rock thou sit, Round which the phantom-waters flit Of heart- and brain-mirage That can no thirst assuage, Yet be thou still, and wait, wait long; A right sea comes to drown the wrong; God's glory comes to fill the earth, And thou, no more a scathed rock, Shalt start alive with gladsome ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... her lips very tight, she walked on. In thought she was already standing close to him, her eyes shut, waiting, with her heart beating wildly, to know what she would feel when his lips had spoken, perhaps touched her face or hand. And she had a sort of mirage vision of herself, with eyelashes resting on her cheeks, lips a little parted, arms helpless at her sides. Yet, incomprehensibly, his figure was invisible. She discovered then that she was standing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... each the other and all the others, that are, that are not, that always flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as other appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of countless appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know is mirage. You know mirages of desire. These very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past, and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... fleeting weight of her body on his knees, the hug round his neck, the whisper in his ear, the kiss on his lips, might have been the unsubstantial sensations of a dream invading the reality of waking life; a sort of charming mirage in the barren aridity of his thoughts. He hesitated to speak till ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... sudden apparition, looming up, as it were, all by itself in the depths of my consciousness, that I hardly dared bring myself to think of trying to recall any other scenes of that dead and past existence. The picture rose like an exhalation, hanging unrelated in mid-air, a mere mental mirage: and it terrified me so much, that I shrank unutterably from the effort of calling up another of like sort ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... brain in a whirl. Love had come, late, but with tremendous fury. He gained no sleep that night. The star of his desire shone like a mocking mirage before his mind's eye. It was all impossible, hopeless, but to love and lose were better than to live in ignorance of life's strongest passion. To dally with the impossible were sheer madness, he knew that. But what was to be ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... woman you speak of is unworthy of your friendship and love. I can understand that to be an insurmountable obstacle. You stand so high, and have to think about your work, your aims, your people. And perhaps it is only a dream and a delusion, a mirage of the heart, that love lifts a woman up to the level of the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has told us, to 'perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods of the modern novel.' By the modern novel he means the novel as he had reconstructed it; he means Madame Bovary. That perfect book is perfect because Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the subject suited to his method, had made his method and ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... through the mirage of his vivid self-delusion, they came to his vision distorted through the lens of his diseased ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... upon it, he was buried near by, it stated by whom &c. I have never learned any more, but I hope the murderer may meet his reward, sooner or later. [May 24—41st day] The day being clear & still, as we passed over the 16 mile desert, to the head waters of the L. Blue[41]; we saw a mirage, at first we thought we were near a pond of water which we saw just over the ridge, & remarked that the guide had said there was no water here; but when we came near, it was gone, and then suspecting what it was, we looked around (for here ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... and hats and shoes, and furs and gloves and corsets. At numberless counters they studied and counselled, and lunching at Sherry's they shopped on. And the shimmer and sheen of pretty things made life a glamourous mirage, in which Ethel could feel herself rapidly becoming a New Yorker, gaining assurance day by day, feeling "her type" emerge in the glass where she ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... realize for a moment where she was. Instead of the plain white walls of her room, she saw the soft gray tints of silk and the sheen of silver, and her hands touched a silken-covered eiderdown quilt. She closed her eyes in sheer happiness, and then opened them again to be sure that it was not all a mirage. At last, not being used to lying in bed, she arose and, putting on the dressing-gown, went to one of the windows and raised the shade to look out. She stopped with her hand still on the shade, looking in wonder ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... the sky like an image in the midst of a mirage, expanding into superhuman dimensions—then rapidly losing its shapeliness, and covering the vault above ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... a vague idea of this almost Oriental fairyland penetrated eyes now heavy with wine, or crossed the delirium of intoxication. The fire and fragrance of the wines acted like potent philters and magical fumes, producing a kind of mirage in the brain, binding feet, and weighing down hands. The clamor increased. Words were no longer distinct, glasses flew in pieces, senseless peals of laughter broke out. Cursy snatched up a horn and struck up a flourish on it. It acted like a signal given by the devil. Yells, hisses, songs, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... eager artist-bands, pilgrims to the Old, the Stately, and the Fair; Europe, which reared above our dull horizon the towers of Oxford and of Notre Dame, sent up into our pale, empty sky the shimmering mirage of Venice, and cast across our workaday way the grave and noble shadow of Rome; Europe, which gave out through the varying voices of Correggio, Canova, Hugo, and Wagner the cry, so lofty and so piercing-sweet, of Art; ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... jogging along, apparently oblivious to everything but the blazing vision of sun and cloud above the lake, purpling shapes of mirage, reflecting the smooth surface of the glowing water. But as the young man's voice—fallen into a melodious murmur—ceased, she took up ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... power, opulence, all human happiness extending as far as eye could reach; a map of enjoyments spread out to the horizon; a sort of radiant geography of which he was the centre. A perilous mirage! ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... a shout which made the Bakwains think him mad. He fancied it was 'Ngami, and, indeed, it was a wonderful deception, caused by a large salt-pan gleaming in the light of the sun; in fact, the old, but ever new phenomenon of the mirage. The real 'Ngami was ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... Korosko had been taken, and the chances of rescue upon which they had reckoned—all those elaborate calculations of hours and distances—were as unsubstantial as the mirage which shimmered upon the horizon. There would be no alarm at Haifa until it was found that the steamer did not return in the evening. Even now, when the Nile was only a thin green band upon the farthest horizon, the pursuit had probably not begun. In a hundred miles or ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... part exert. They are the extension of the unreligious school into the homes of the people. When Father Hecker and Mrs. George V. Hecker and their associates began The Young Catholic, this vast mirage of the desert of life had but glimmered upon the distant horizon; they saw it coming and they did their best to point Catholic youth away from it and lead it to the real oasis of God, with its grateful shade, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... — and there's a third." We nearly had tears in our eyes to see how industrious they were. "Now they're gone. No; there they are again. Strange how they bob up and down, those fellows!" It proved to be a mirage; what we saw was Framheim with all its tents. Our lads, we were sure, were just taking a comfortable midday nap, and the tears we were nearly shedding were withdrawn. Now we could survey the situation calmly. There lay ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... pitiless rays under the broad brim of his sombrero. At times, with ears forward and extended nostrils, the horse gazes intently at the rippling blue waters of the mirage, that most tantalizingly deceptive phenomenon of nature. May it never be the lot of my reader to be misled by the illusive mirage as I have been. How could I mistake vapor for clear, gurgling water? Yet, how many times was I here deceived! Visions of great lakes and broad rivers rose up before me, lapping emerald green shores, where I could cool my parched tongue and lave ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... now nearly noon. The sun shone clear and hot; the heat shimmer rose in clouds from the brown surface of the hills. In all directions we could make out small gameherds resting motionless in the heat of the day, the mirage throwing them into fantastic shapes. While the final disposition was being made of the defunct rhinoceros I wandered over the edge of the hill to see what I could see, and fairly blundered on a herd of oryx at about a hundred and ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... a singular spot called the "barking sands"—a huge sand-hill, gliding down which you hear a dull rumble like distant thunder, probably the result of electricity. On the way you meet with a mirage, remarkable for this that it is a constant phenomenon—that is to say, it is to be seen daily at certain hours, and is the apparition of a great lake, having sometimes high waves which seem to submerge the cattle which stand ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... Magistrate, but a prospective one, looking to the chances of reelection, and mingling in all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an unhappy talent for making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the White House lures our public men away from present duties and obligations; and if matters go on as they have gone, we shall need a Committee of Congress to count the spoons in the public plate-closet, whenever a President goes out of office,—with a policeman to watch every member of the ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... told the Emperor that an enormous oyster vomited from the sea a mysterious substance which accumulated in the form of a tower, and was known as 'the market of the sea' (Chinese for 'mirage'). Every year, at a certain period, the breath from his mouth was like the rays of the sun. The Emperor expressed a wish to see it, and Po Shih said he would write a letter to the God of the Sea, and the next day the Emperor could behold ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... up. They are admirably docile, and have no personalities at all. I saw lately, in Paris, a performance by certain puppets of Shakespeare's Tempest, in M. Maurice Boucher's translation. Miranda was the mirage of Miranda, because an artist has so fashioned her; and Ariel was true Ariel, because so had she been made. Their gestures were quite sufficient, and the words that seemed to come from their little lips were spoken by poets who had beautiful voices. It ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... a rustic seat, and gave herself up to one of those delicious day-dreams which lure the spirit as the mirage lures ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... of geometry; anyone knows that to confuse fractions with whole numbers would wreck the science and art of arithmetic; everyone knows that to mistake vice for virtue would destroy the foundation of ethics; everyone knows that to mistake a desert mirage for a lake of fresh water does but lure the fainting traveler to dire disappointment or death. Now, it is perfectly clear that of all the things with which human beings have to deal, the most important by far is Man himself—humankind—men, women and children. It follows that for ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... amid this rich pasture-land are the kraals of a large Kafir location, and no one can say that these, the children of the soil, have not secured one of the most favored spots. To me it all looked like a fair mirage. I am already sick of beholding all this lovely country lying around, and yet of being told that food and fuel are almost at famine-prices. People say, "Oh, but you should see it in winter. Now it is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... the following evening they approached Venice. The long black train glided along above a sea flushed with purple and crimson and gold. Like a mirage the fair city—Longfellow's "white water-lily, cradled and caressed"—arose, lifting her spires—those "filaments of ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... she brushed out her hair before going to bed, to see that its electricity, which had departed for a while, was out in it again, so that it would snap and stand out horizontally from her head. The little spark of a smile was constantly over her face like a mirage before her lips and her eyes and seeming to hover on the very peak of her brows when ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... still. Red rays are longest. Roygbiv Vance taught us: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. A star I see. Venus? Can't tell yet. Two. When three it's night. Were those nightclouds there all the time? Looks like a phantom ship. No. Wait. Trees are they? An optical illusion. Mirage. Land of the setting sun this. Homerule sun setting in the southeast. My native ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... silhouetted Porno, sprawled inside its high, electric-wired fences, and the flood of fading light brushed the town with beauty. The rows of tin shacks which housed its dives, the clustered, nondescript hovels, the merchants' grim strongholds of steel—all merged into a glowing mirage, a scene far alien to the brooding swamp and savage jungle in whose breast it lay. Here and there several space-ships reared their sunset-gilded flanks, glittering high-lights in the final glorious ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... its most subtle charm from far away in the past. Beaked triremes have rubbed their girding cables against the wharves of the old Phocee; the sunshine of a thousand years has left some trace of its gold, a mirage in the air chilled by the mistral and perfumed ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... he had seen the slopes covered with forests of crosses marking the German dead, and his words were bitter, too, when he talked of his lost comrades. And then, the depressing feeling of returning from an army pursuing the mirage of victory to find his family and every other family struggling in the meshes of that terrible and ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... want is a little more reality and a little less rhetoric. We are most grateful to them that they have not as yet accepted any frigid formula, nor stereotyped themselves into a school, but we wish that they would talk less and think more. They lead us through a barren desert of verbiage to a mirage that they call life; we wander aimlessly through a very wilderness of words in search of one touch of nature. However, one should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only relaxation of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Whinney, usually so philosophical, had burst out petulantly with: "To hell with these islands. Give me a good mirage, any time." Swank and I had heartily agreed with him, and it was in that despondent spirit that we had begun ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... women, adulation and celebrity and the praise of the public might satisfy you. But you are not, and I have studied your nature too thoroughly to mistake the result of your ambitious career. My darling, ambition is the mirage of the literary desert you are anxious to traverse; it is the Bahr Sheitan, the Satan's water, which will ever recede and mock your thirsty, toil-spent soul. Dear little pilgrim, do not scorch your feet and wear out your life ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... wish you to understand," said Norman; and yet he seemed impelled to go on; for, after a hesitating silence, he added, "When the wanderer in the desert fears that the spring is but a mirage; or when all that is held dear is made hazy or distorted by some enchanter, what do you think ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... wandering there had been dark hours turbulent with pain, hours when his vision, his hope, his memory had not availed to uplift him, and he had known the terror of a doubt lest the whole of it should, after all, be but a creation of his yearnings, a mirage of his desires. Everywhere men had believed him mad. He had accepted that as he accepted toil, hunger and exile, as things to be redeemed by their end. But if it should be true! If this grossness and harshness ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... wings to the bird." The little fellow talks of many things and leads her to his home. From here the fisherman ferries her over the broad Rhone, and we accompany her over the Camargue, down to the sea. A mirage deceives her for a time, she sees the town and church, but it soon vanishes in air, and the maiden hurries on in ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... concerning the State. The State is an active philosophic concept that holds off the people from discussing and gossiping about Wilhelm. It does not exist apart from the ruling family and apart from the bureaucracy which is the ruling family in action. It takes on their character. The State is a mirage which the citizen is made to gawk at in the air, thinking he sees something besides the frowning German sky. It surrounds the Emperor with the divine halo, removes him up above the rumbling clouds where ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... proximity of a boat. There seemed to be a smudge there at the left, a black, lumping shadow, shapeless against the background of sea; yet he could not be sure. Even as he gazed at it doubtfully, the dim object disappeared, fading away like a mirage. No sound reached him to cause the vision to seem real—no voice, no creak of oars, no flap of a sail; yet something told him that mysterious shadow was a boat, a boat filled with men, creeping away silently ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... the distance, makes it look as if it sloped towards us, so as almost to produce a sensation of vertigo. The sun itself has deigned to remain on the scene a few seconds longer, held beyond its time by the effect of mirage; but it is so changed behind its thick veils that we would prefer that it should not be there. Of the colour of dying embers, it seems too near and too large; it has ceased to give any light, and is become a mere rose-coloured globe, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... may be tempted to publish a cheap edition of my work on Greek Philosophy and Logic. It is not in the least presumptuous to lay hands upon this venerable illusion, and show that it has not even the vitality of a ghost. It is but a simulacrum or mirage, and it is but necessary to approach it fearlessly, and walk through it, to ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various |
