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More "Ecstasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... surroundings of the author that we find the key to the creation. For, as Gray has pointed out in his "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," there are many in the dust and silence whose hands "the rod of Empire might have swayed, or waked to ecstasy the living lyre." ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... listened, and lo! there sounded in his ears a murmur resembling that of the sea, mixed with faint strains of music, and echoes of indistinguishable singing voices coming as it were from the ends of the earth. And a shudder ran through him, as she turned, and looked at him as if in ecstasy, with eyes that saw nothing, murmuring in an eager voice that chanted and charmed his ear like the rushing of a stream: Dost thou hear the voices, calling thee over to the other shore? For the sea is the sea of separation, ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... that the Dean was a singularly simple-minded man. Reverence for the aristocracy had become with him almost a religion. When he was brought—or believed himself to be brought—in contact with the aristocracy, his intellectual vision closed in a swoon of ecstasy. Snob? Oh, dear, no! Of course not. What can have made you think that? It was simply that the aristocracy appealed to him very much as romance did—he was outside it, but liked to get ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... conduct before the supreme council of the nation. To avert the penalty that awaited him, he brought his judges to the smouldering ruins, and discovering the secret, invited them to eat; which having done, with tears of gratitude, the august synod embraced him, and, with an overflowing feeling of ecstasy, dedicated a statue to the memory of the man who first instituted ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... between the different classes of subjects as they were handled by Watts. A courtier like Rubens could, after painting with gusto a rout of Satyrs, put on a cloak of decorum to suit the pageantry of a court, or even simulate fervour to portray the ecstasy of a saint. He is clearly acting a part, but in Watts the character of the man is always seen. Whether his subjects are drawn from the Bible or from pagan myths, they are all treated in the same temper ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... three-quarter minutes which it is necessary to wait, while the time lock is opening, are to me golden moments. From the instant I set the combination to the moment when I grasp the knobs and swing back the solid steel doors, I live in an ecstasy of expectation. Those moments must be like moments passed in Paradise. I know what I am to find at the end of the time limit. I know what the massive safe holds secure for me, for me alone, and the exquisite pleasure of waiting is hardly enhanced when the safe opens and I lift, from ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... shall end in tears. The very converse, thine, of Orpheus' tongue: He roused and led in ecstasy of joy All things that heard his voice melodious; But thou as with the futile cry of curs Wilt draw men wrathfully upon thee. Peace! Or strong subjection ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... nearest inn, and chose with care As much as his thin purse could bear. As rapt-souled monks watch over the baking Of the sacred wafer, and through the making Of the holy wine whisper secret prayers That God will bless this labour of theirs; So Paul, in a sober ecstasy, Purchased the best which he could buy. Returning, he brushed his tools aside, And laid across the table a wide Napkin. He put a glass and plate On either side, in duplicate. Over the lady's, excellent With loveliness, the laurels bent. In the centre the white-flaked ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... and her niece are welcome," and Lady Warner made a deep curtsy, not like one of Lady Fareham's sinking curtseys, as of one near swooning in an ecstasy of politeness, but dignified and inflexible, straight down ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... looking to the right or to the left, as if she had too great thoughts on her mind to give any heed to the people. Day after day she repeated her visits, kneeling in her accustomed place and giving herself up to a state of ecstasy. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... for a moment, for as the evening sun swept its veil of rainbow radiance over the scene, the bird began to sing. Its little throat swelled, it chirruped, it trilled, it called, it soared, it lost itself in a flood of ecstasy. In the applausive silence, the emotional recess of the sale, as it were, the man to whom the bird and the song meant most, pushed his way up to the stand where M. Manotel stood. When the people saw who it was, they fell back, for there was that in his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and hear the notes repeated once again His ear has caught when listening to the mocking-bird's refrain, And interwoven with the sense a mystic something rings That fills the soul with ecstasy when gifted ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... some conversation in the course of which Palma declared that she had often seen Louise Lateau while in ecstasy, the doctor directed the conversation towards the subject of hallucination. While thus engaged and seated close to Palma, he felt her strike him gently on the arm, and at the same time saw the abbe, who had come with him, fall on his knees. He turned toward Palma; ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... charms Monsieur Jean-Jacques Rousseau had extolled so eloquently at one of Baron d'Holbach's evening parties. The young sculptor's senses were lubricated, so to speak, by Jomelli's harmonious strains. The languorous peculiarities of those skilfully blended Italian voices plunged him in an ecstasy of delight. He sat there, mute and motionless, not even conscious of the crowding of the two priests. His soul poured out through his ears and his eyes. He seemed to be listening with every one of his pores. Suddenly a whirlwind ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... that I felt my eyes grow moist and then half close in a dreamy ecstasy, so delicious was that silence, only broken by the cries ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... pleasant place Where all is ecstasy and grace, Where a light has risen that cannot wane, Do John ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... they stirred the hanging blossoms, keeping them in almost continual rhythmic motion. The effect was wonderfully charming, but I observed that Ala was especially influenced by it. She sat with her maid beside her, and fixed her eyes, with an expression of ecstasy, upon the swinging flowers. I whispered to Edmund to regard her singular absorption. But he had already noticed it, and seemed to be puzzling his brain with thoughts that it suggested ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... Jesuit could see this, he would be in ecstasy," I exclaimed. "Yes, replacing books with wines and liquors! What a business for the ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... long. She had almost forgotten what a tragedy losing her voice had been. And to find it again, to hear it ring like a trumpet. It did! It was too big for the room. She felt herself caught up in a triumphant ecstasy as she sang. She found herself blinking as the last note died away. Her brother twisted about on the piano stool, fumbling for ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... warrior o'er the ocean wave Through realms that rove not, clouds that cannot save, Sinks in the sunshine; dazzles o'er the tomb And mocks the mutiny of Memory's gloom. Oh! who can feel the crimson ecstasy That soothes with bickering jar the Glorious Tree? O'er the high rock the foam of gladness throws, While star-beams lull Vesuvius to repose: Girds the white spray, and in the blue lagoon, Weeps like a walrus o'er ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... phrase, "Love as long as life and stronger." It seemed to clarify and state so much of her lately confused being. Hodie, artfully drawn into the consideration of earthly affection, was far less satisfactory than Gerrit Ammidon. She dwelt on the treasure beyond moth or rust, lost in an ecstasy of contemplation expressed in her customary explosive amens. At the same time she admitted that lower unions were blessed of God, and recommended Sidsall to think on "a man who has seen the light and by no means a sea captain." Sidsall replied cuttingly, "I think ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Lingard looked in unconscious ecstasy at this vision, so amazing that it seemed to have strayed into his existence from beyond the limits of the conceivable. It was impossible to guess her thoughts, to know her feelings, to understand her grief or her joy. But she knew all that was at the bottom of his heart. He had told ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... will remember each fond aspiration In secret milled with thy cherished name, Till from thy lips, in wildering modulation, Those words of ecstasy ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... leaves, by the apple bloom, by the passion of joy and love that thrills through nature at this season. An hour or two before, we had seen the bobolinks in the meadow beating the air with the same excited wing and overflowing with the same ecstasy of song, but their demure, retiring, and indifferent mates were nowhere to be seen. It would seem as if the male bird sang, not to win his mate, but to celebrate the winning, to invoke the young ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... did; more one cannot but feel he might have done had he been properly helped. Besides, the world would have been free from the reproach of accepting the fruits of his bright genius while condemning the worker to a life of misery, relieved only by the beauty of his own thoughts and the ecstasy awakened in him by the harmony ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... good, Discomfort could hardly be greater, For home-staying fogies of mollyish mood, But think of the joy of the Skater! Gr-r-r-r-! Nose-nipped antiquity squirms in the street, When the North-Easter sounds its fierce slogan; But oh, the warm flush and the ecstasy fleet Of the fellow who rides a toboggan! FISH SMART's on the job in the ice-covered fens, And at Hampstead and Highgate they're "sleighing." There is plenty of stuff for pictorial pens, And boyhood at snowballs is playing. To sit by the fire and to grumble and croak At ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... several young ladies were spending the spring in garrison and taking their first taste of military life; hops and dances came off almost every night, a "german" every week; rides, drives, hunts, and picnic-parties were of daily occurrence; the young officers were in clover, the young ladies in ecstasy, the young matrons—perhaps not quite so well pleased as when they had the field to themselves in Arizona, where young ladies had been few and far between, and all promised delightfully for the coming summer,—all but the war-cloud rising in the ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... baffled for an explanation; but with the tarag gone I lost no time in hastening to Dian's side. With a little cry of delight she threw herself into my arms. So lost were we in the ecstasy of reunion that neither of us—to this day—can tell what became ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... minutes since, exercising his canary-birds at their tricks:—"Come out on my little finger, my pret-pret-pretties! Come out, and hop upstairs! One, two, three—and up! Three, two, one—and down! One, two, three—twit-twit-twit-tweet!" The birds burst into their usual ecstasy of singing, and the Count chirruped and whistled at them in return, as if he was a bird himself. My room door is open, and I can hear the shrill singing and whistling at this very moment. If I am really to slip out without being observed, now ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... be present when you perform the ceremony! Cilla in the heroics! Whom is she expecting?' said a voice outside the door, ever ajar, a voice that made Lucilla clasp her hands in ecstasy. ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... performance was repeated, and pussy was induced to dance after a string dangled before her, to roll over and play in apparent ecstasy with a flake of wool, as if it were a mouse, and Watch joined in the game in full amity. Mother Dolly, busy with her distaff, looked on, not displeased, except when she had to guard her spindle from the kitten's pranks, ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... your account, solely on your account, blessed be the Virgin!" broke in her father with strange ecstasy. She could not account for the unhappy ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... in filmy white, had stolen from her place behind the piano for one last glimpse of the festive decorations, while she waited impatiently for the chimes of the distant court-house to strike the hour. "O, but it's lovely," she breathed in ecstasy, as her eyes wandered from floor to ceiling. "How everyone loves ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... door in the man's face, and opened the letter. At the first line, he began to vault around the room like a rope-dancer and thundered out, at the top of his voice, this romantic ditty, which indicated with him the highest pitch of ecstasy: ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... time. Chanters are found in various churches, he says, who with inflated cheeks imitate the noise of thunder, and then murmur, whisper, allow their voice to expire, keeping their mouth open, and think that they give thus an idea of the death or ecstasy of martyrs. Now you would think you hear the neighing of horses, now the voice of a woman. With this "all their body is agitated by histrionic movements"; their lips, their shoulders, their fingers are twisted, shrugged, or spread out as they think ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... very fervent with his second bottle, and the song of "God save the King" puts him into a perfect ecstasy. He is amazingly well contented with the present state of things, and apt to get a little impatient at any talk about national ruin and agricultural distress. He says he has travelled about the country as ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... ecstasy, Within her depths where revels never tire, The olden Beauty shines; each thought of me Is veined through ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... mistake about it—it was real enough, and, as the Christmas bells came chiming through the frosty air, we turned out bags of gold, piles of silver and priceless jewels warranted to redeem Dacrepool Grange twice over if necessary, and sending Jack into a very ecstasy of joy. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... desert lute had not seen that some one stood in the tent door. With half-shut eyes he continued playing and singing, lost in a sickly ecstasy. The woman on the gaudy rug sat quite still and stared at Mrs. Armine. She showed no surprise, no anger, no curiosity. Her expression did not change. Her motionless, painted mouth was set like a mouth carved in some hard ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. It affirms, with no little sublimity, something that is not merely the singleness but rather the solitude of God. There is the same extreme simplification in the solitary figure of ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... from that tiny throat, Songster of night! Flows such a wealth of note, Full of delight; Trembling with resonance, Rapid and racy, Sinking in soft cadence, Gushing with ecstasy, Dying away, All in their turns; Plaintive and gay, Thrilling with tones aglow, Melting in murmurs low, Till ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... teaches them to despise life! But it isn't all religious fervour or the apathy of people who're too poor to mind whether they live or die. Marsh and Galway and Mineely are moved by a sort of nationalistic ecstasy ... Marsh and Galway more than Mineely, I think, because there's a bitterness in him that isn't in them. They think of Ireland first, and he thinks of starving workmen first. They're Ireland mad. They really don't value their lives a happorth. They'd love to be martyrised for Ireland. ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... points out: "The Eleusinian Mysteries in common with all Greek religion, differentiated clearly between gods and men, eins ist der Menschen, ein andres der Gotter-Geschlecht—en andron, en theon genos." The attainment of union with the god, by way of ecstasy, as in other Mystery cults, is foreign to the Eleusinian idea. As Cumont puts it "The Greco-Roman deities rejoice in the perpetual calm and youth of Olympus, the Eastern deities die to live again."[6] ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... a chicken. He describes the city as a vast beehive, St. Paul's and other churches standing out prominently; the streets shrunk to lines, and all humanity apparently transfixed and watching him. A little later he is equally struck with the view of the open country, and his ecstasy is pardonable in a novice. The verdant pastures eclipsed the visions of his own lands. The precision of boundaries impressed him with a sense of law and order, and of good administration in the country where he ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... power and wisdom at will.... The divine presence is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi-conscious experience. It is not an ecstasy, it is not a trance. It is not super-consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self-hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational, common-sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense-perception to the phenomena of seership, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... misunderstood. If I can create out of my own brain something that is pure and beautiful, that gives happiness, that draws coarse natures away from their coarseness, to feelings more elevated, that can bring to some an ecstasy of delight, to others a sweet calm. If I follow a pursuit which injures no human being, no living creature, why am I to endure displeasure? Is it more manly, more noble to hunt the poor, panting deer ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... the college swimming bath. He had great endurance in the water, but lacked speed, and much to his disappointment failed to get his swimming colours. His love of swimming never waned, and in the sea he would swim long distances. Swimming brought him an ecstasy of physical and moral exhilaration. He could ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... said, and stood dumb with parted lips. She looked and felt as if she had been standing there in silent ecstasy ...
— Harper's Young People, December 9, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... in the midst of his interminable pacing, in order to watch her in her maddest antics. The sight is very pleasant to him, for his eyes glisten and a faint glow seems to irradiate his face and impart to it a hint of ecstasy. The Elsinore has a snug place in his heart, I am confident. He calls her behaviour admirable, and at such times will repeat to me that it was he who ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... of the fallen knight run across to where their master lay, he saw the ladies waving their kerchiefs and veils, and the castle people swinging their hats and shouting in an ecstasy of delight. Then he rode slowly back to where the squires were now aiding the fallen knight to arise. The senior squire drew his dagger, cut the leather points, and drew off the helm, disclosing the knight's face—a face white as death, and convulsed with rage, mortification, ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... Lazarus was to be restored. He could not surely weep so bitterly, possessing, as He then did, the confident assurance that death was about to give back its captive, and light up every tear-dimmed eye with an ecstasy of joy. Whence, then, we again ask, this strange and mysterious grief? Come and let us surround the grave of Bethany, and as we behold the chief mourner at that grave, let us inquire why it was ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... Virgin and Child) so divine in its expression, so pure and yet so warm and rich in its tone, so fresh in its touch, at once so glowing in its colour and so statuesque in its repose, that our bore cried out in ecstasy, 'That's the finest picture in Italy!' And so it is, sir. There is no doubt of it. It is astonishing that that picture is so little known. Even the painter is uncertain. He afterwards took Blumb, of the Royal Academy ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... repose. It sometimes happened that a young man, incapable of sustaining these consuming vigils, reeled and fainted; they removed the apparently lifeless body without suspending the discussion. M. Caseaux was in an ecstasy for an hour, and began to prophesy. Another day, M. Olinde Rodrigues was struck as if by apoplexy; because, asking each of the members in turn whether it was not true that the Holy Spirit was in him, (M. Olinde Rodrigues,) ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... noticed till now, so absorbed had I been in her tale, that the storm had risen to a very ecstasy of fury. ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... and with trembling, shaking hands handed the bag to Tom, who, in an ecstasy of wonder and dizzy with delight, poured out with swimming sight upon the coat spread on the ground a cataract of shining silver money that rang and twinkled and jingled as it fell in a shining heap upon ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... high-wrought feeling, Ecstasy but in revealing; Paint to thee the deep sensation, Rapture in participation; Yet but torture, if comprest ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... bandboxes, portmanteaus, packing-cases, and travelling trunks. I scarcely ever knew a mind so sluggish as not to feel a certain degree of rapture, at the thoughts of travelling. It should seem as if the imagination frequently journeyed so fast as to enjoy a species of ecstasy, when there are any hopes of dragging the cumbrous ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... pebble-paven shore, Under the quick, faint kisses of the Sea, Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy.[56] ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... the peals of music, and all the gods sing and laugh and jest and shout. And the Bacchantes swing to and fro their ivy-wreathed staves, and their mouths with ecstasy pour forth their stammering songs of mirth! Venus has soared away! But no one observes it. Each is his own deity, here in the Media Nocte. Oh, blessed night of the gods! Forget that the wretched day of man will return in the morning! Louder ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... my boots, I stole gently down to the scullery and applied the spectroscope to the keyhole. To my mingled amazement and ecstasy, I perceived a large dome-shaped fabric blocking up the entire back garden. Roughly speaking, it seemed to be about the size of a full-grown sperm whale. A faint heaving was perceptible in the mass, and further evidences of vitality were forthcoming in ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... he said, in a mock ecstasy. "With others," he added. "I like to follow money in—and to contribute taste ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... came in, they found the soothsayer leaning her forehead on her hand, as though absorbed in thought. Fearing to rouse her from her ecstasy, they waited in silence until it should please her to change her position. At the end of ten minutes she raised her head, and seemed only now to become aware that two persons were standing ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... their nuptial dance above the birch tree without a thought of the thousands of young ones which their ecstasy would call into being; the carp laid their eggs in the reed grass, careless of the millions of their kind to which they gave birth; the swallow made love in broad daylight, not in the least afraid of the consequences ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... of science, art and philosophy shot their stray gleams into my startled mind, and I found time to ponder on what leisure might do for the mob. What did it not do for me, and what has it not done for me since? And I in the very ecstasy of my being ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... pursue thy rapturous flight, Mingling with her thou lov'st in fields of light; And, where the flowers of paradise unfold, Quaff fragrant nectar from their cups of gold. There shall thy wings, rich as an evening-sky, Expand and shut with silent ecstasy! —Yet wert thou once a worm, a thing that crept On the bare earth, then wrought a tomb and slept! And such is man; soon from his cell of clay To burst a seraph in ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... I still believe; I pray and recite the Lord's Prayer with ecstasy. I am very fond of being in church, where the pure and simple piety moves me deeply in the lucid moments when I inhale the odour of God. I even have devotional fits, and I believe that they will last, for piety is of value even when it is ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... that some of the compartments were wholly in darkness; in others where lamps were glowing he could see a table and chairs. In one corner, under a sign lettered ESSAYS, an elderly gentleman was reading, with a face of fanatical ecstasy illumined by the sharp glare of electricity; but there was no wreath of smoke about him so the newcomer concluded he ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... words for three miles) that I thought them beautiful before I saw them so near HER. But I couldn't manage it. She was too bewildering. To see her lay the flowers against her little dimpled chin, was to lose all presence of mind and power of language in a feeble ecstasy. I wonder I didn't say, 'Kill me, if you have a heart, Miss Mills. Let me ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... movement of each actor, attending to the way each thing was said or done as if it were the most important thing, and emitting from time to time applausive or restrictive sounds. It was a charming show of the critical spirit in ecstasy. Sherringham had his wonder about it, as a part of the attraction exerted by this young lady was that she caused him to have his wonder about everything she did. Was it in fact a conscious show, a line taken for effect, so that ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... tame you had but to dip in your fingers and take your pick, while allusion and simile crowded so thickly about me that I should have needed an epic rather than my legal fourteen lines to make use of the half of them. I tell you I was in the very ecstasy of composition that lasted me for the better part of a fortnight. But by the time that I had come to this point the pretty Ippolita, whose name I had intended to place there, was no longer the moment's idol of my soul, and between the two dainty girls that had succeeded her I sat for a long ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... two lovers in the midst of their ecstasy it would have been less cruel than the sensation caused by this horrible noise. Clemence trembled and fell back in her chair, frozen with horror. Gerfaut rose, almost as frightened as she; Mademoiselle de Corandeuil, aroused ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... him to go farther than other men into the secrets of the Immortal labor. His yearnings, his sorrows were the links that united him to the unseen world; he went there, armed with his love, to seek his mother; realizing thus, with the sublime harmonies of ecstasy, the ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... the ecstasy of the mountains still shining in her starry eyes. "Yes—yes! If I am allowed!" And then, with a sudden memory of her promise to the Colonel, "But I don't suppose I shall be. And I haven't anything to wear except ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... is the very special character of the mysticism of the East? It is the calmness of faith, love feeding on itself, ecstasy without ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... she had been mainly grave; not melancholy, but given to thought, abstraction, dreams. She was carrying France upon her heart, and she found the burden not light. I knew that this was her trouble, but others attributed her abstraction to religious ecstasy, for she did not share her thinkings with the village at large, yet gave me glimpses of them, and so I knew, better than the rest, what was absorbing her interest. Many a time the idea crossed my mind that she had a secret—a secret which she was keeping wholly to herself, as well from me as from ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... seat. His shoulder was tingling from the accolade bestowed by royalty. A hundred eyes were now turned upon him in envy and new admiration. Mrs. William Darragh McMahan trembled with ecstasy, so that her diamonds smote the eye almost with pain. And now it was apparent that at many tables there were those who suddenly remembered that they enjoyed Mr. McMahan's acquaintance. He saw smiles and bows about him. He became enveloped in the aura of dizzy greatness. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... knew Ammalat; and forgetting all but her joy, she threw herself on his neck, embraced it with her arms, and long, long, gazed fixedly on the much-loved face; and the fire of confidence, the fire of ecstasy, glimmered through the still falling tears. Could then the impassioned Ammalat contain his rapture? He clung like a bee to the rosy lips of Seltanetta; he had heard enough for his happiness; he was now at the summit of bliss; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... bystanders to give them a particular account of what she saw, she answered, "You shall know hereafter:" and so in an ecstasy of joy and triumph, she went to God when she was ...
— Stories of Boys and Girls Who Loved the Saviour - A Token for Children • John Wesley
... we see in them all that is to be seen by the finest senses? How can we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits, for habit is relation to a stereotyped world:... while all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge, that seems, by a lifted horizon, ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... only the man that forged with clenched teeth after Atalanta, tenderly hungry for all her uncaptured whiteness, brutally driving the pace till her heart burst in her side if need be, tasted the supremest ecstasy of the fighting that lifts us that one tantalising step above the savage—the fight for joy. I am convinced that it is after some one of those red glimpses that a certain proportion of us every year of the world's life throws his chest weights out of window, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... their tree, to which they invited me. In the centre of the schoolroom stood a beautiful tree ablaze and shimmering in the soft light, its branches loaded with strange, wonderful fruit. It was a moment of supreme happiness. I danced and capered round the tree in an ecstasy. When I learned that there was a gift for each child, I was delighted, and the kind people who had prepared the tree permitted me to hand the presents to the children. In the pleasure of doing this, I did not stop to look at my own gifts; but when I was ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... and five-and-twenty respectively, belonging to good families of immense fortune, and educated regardless of expense. No homely Boston phrase defiled their anglicized lips, their great collars stood up under their chins in an ecstasy of stiffness, and their shirt- fronts bore two buttons, avoiding the antiquity of three and the vulgarity of one. Well-bred Anglo-maniacs both, but gentlemen withal, and courteous to the ladies. Mr. Topeka was a ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... soul in an ecstasy of giggles, and crossed to Lady Hannah. She welcomed him with a glitter of eyes and teeth and discovered the reserve-chair that had been covered by her somewhat fatigued and wilted draperies of maize Liberty-silk, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... happy that it frightens me," said Dorothy in ecstasy. "Trouble will come, I am sure. One extreme always follows another. The pendulum always swings as far back as it goes forward. But we are happy now, aren't we, Madge? I intend to remain so while I can. The pendulum may swing ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... quizzical little smile and said, 'Oh, I guess I'd run it; it can't hurt anything.' The light that came into Adrian's eyes was positively beatific, and he shook Bob by the hand, and twirled his cane, and waved his gloves in a sort of canine ecstasy, and trotted to the cashier's window with the check like a dog with a bone. It is the largest piece of real money he has had in six months, the boys say, and he has spent it for clothes. To-morrow he will hurry off to the first convention in the city like a comet two centuries ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... as no one in that assembly looked for. Just as the awful ecstasy of the dance was at its height, just as the dreaded crisis approached, and they saw with a gasping horror the inevitable final clutch of the unseen enemy upon his vanquished victim; just as she lifted her face in the ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... might have some noble flights of fancy, even in Bedlam; and it is reported of him, that while he was writing one of his scenes by moon-light, a cloud intervening, he cried out in ecstasy, "Jove snuff the Moon;" but as this is only related upon common report, we desire no more credit may be given to it, than its own nature demands. We do not pretend notwithstanding our high opinion of Lee, to defend all his rants and extravagancies; some of them are ridiculous, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... There also he pours into the ears of his sober little gray wife the sweetest love song of the birds. It is a flood of soft warbling notes, tinkling like a brook deep under the ice, tumbling over each other in a quiet ecstasy of harmony; mellow as the song of the hermit-thrush, but much softer, as if he feared lest any should hear but her to whom he sang. Those who know the music of the rose-breasted grosbeak (not his robin-like song of spring, ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... being entirely unstudied. At all events, there was nothing in the ordinary sense "professional" about it. One would say—not knowing the supreme art of supreme grace—that a joyous child, born to the heritage of natural grace, might dance thus by sheer inspiration, in ecstasy of life and worship of the newly felt beauty of earth. Stephen did know something of art, and the need of devotion to its study; yet he found it hard to realize that this awakened marble loveliness had gone through the same performance ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... gazed out through the windows across the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs, the cracking of the driver's ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... seemed to ravish her with delight. She lifted her eyes, as in ecstasy, to the paper spirals of the ceiling, and, clasping ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... on the shoulder and grabbed his hand in ecstasy at the overflow of generosity on the part ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... glass-screened well, or conning-tower, was limited by the great waves of greenish-white water which curved upwards from either bow, and rolled astern in a welter of foam. There was an awe-inspiring fury in the thunder of the 700 h.p. engines revolving at 1350 per minute, and a feeling of ecstasy in the stiff breeze of passage and the atomised spray. When waves came the slap-slap-slap of the water as the sharp bows cleft through the crest and the little vessel was for a brief moment poised dizzily on the bosom of the swell caused tremors to pass through the thin grey ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... ... said in an ecstasy to himself, "He had to think of it till he got it—and he got it. The ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... could be noiseless. Ah, you do not know Judith! That strange, unsophisticated, sometimes awkward woman you saw bore no more resemblance to my mountain woman than I to Hercules. How strong and beautiful she looked standing there wrapped in an ecstasy! It was my primitive woman back in her primeval world. How the blood leaped in me! All my old romance, so different from the common love-histories of most men, was there again within my reach! All the mystery, the poignant happiness were mine again. Do not hold me in contempt ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... but a few miles distant, the old mountain, Rainier, loomed up into the clouds fully ten thousand feet higher than where I stood, a grand scene to behold, worthy of all the effort expended to reach this point. But I was not attuned to view with ecstasy the grandeur of what lay before me; rather I scanned the horizon to ascertain, if I could, what ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... a headland of hoary aspect Gnawed by the tide, Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood there Guilelessly glad - Wherefore they knew not—touched by the fringe of an ecstasy Scantly descried. ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... music rose and fell and swelled again into ecstasy as he held her white young lightness in his arm and they swayed and darted and swooped like things of the air—while the old Duchess and Lord Coombe looked on almost unseeing and talked ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in his arms, was radiant in the sunshine, its rosebud mouth parting over pearly teeth in dimpling glee, the breeze lifting the light rings of hair that caressed his soft, round throat, the hands waving in childish ecstasy and grace. As they stood, just over the beautiful bust of the "Marconino" which Vittorio had carved upon the prow, child and father were an embodiment of the play of the crested foam over the deep ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... poising, floated from the arches. Then the organ intoned the massive Gregorian, and the chant of the mass moved amid the opulence of gold vestments; the Latin responses filled the ear; and at the end of long abstinences the holy oil came like a bliss that never dies. In the ecstasy of ordination it seemed to him that the very savour and spirit of ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... feast, the Southern wanderer, "with heart bowed down," was passing through the shadows, and suffering in silence the keenest pangs of affliction. Around him the votaries of fashion and wealth were flushed with gayety. Paris was in the ecstasy of Christmastide. But the depths of his soul were starless and chill, and in the midst of all this mirth one heart was tuned to melancholy. He writes ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... said Jean-Jacques, leaning on Flore's arm to reach the place were Joseph was standing in ecstasy before an Albano, "—it seems that you are ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... shivered. He thought that some vibration of his highly wrought feeling had surely reached his beloved; that the heart-rending cry, drawn from him by hope, the utmost effort of a love that must last for ever, of passion in its ecstasy, striving to reach the soul of the woman ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... twinkling of an eye, all the repressed youth within her awoke with a sweet and terrible joy.... They danced madly, perfectly, the rhythm entering into them like something at once fluid and flaming. Her ecstasy awoke a vague response in her partner, who bent forward as he ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... screamed the mandarin, in an ecstasy of delight. "Those are the ones who torment me the most! Change every newboy you ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... OR MAID OF ORLEANS, a French heroine, born at Domremy, of poor parents, but nursed in an atmosphere of religious enthusiasm, and subject, in consequence, to fits of religious ecstasy, in one of which she seemed to hear voices calling to her from heaven to devote herself to the deliverance of France, which was then being laid desolate by an English invasion, occupied at the time in besieging Orleans; inspired with the passion thus awakened she ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the age of puberty and onward, I had three or four love affairs, devoid of any algolagnic tendency, and considerably more developed on the psychic and emotional, than on the physical, side. In fact, my experience has been that when deeply in love, when the mind is full of the love ecstasy, the physical element of sexuality is kept—doubtless only ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... their contest with the Pierides, the Muses played and sang on the summit of Mount Helicon with such extraordinary power and sweetness, that heaven and earth stood still to listen, whilst the mountain raised itself in joyous ecstasy towards the abode of the celestial gods. Poseidon, seeing his special function thus interfered with, sent Pegasus to check the boldness of the mountain, in daring to move without his permission. When ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... was about to go to the rescue when both perceived that the dog was licking the stranger's face in an ecstasy of joy, and heard the man say as he hugged the ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... murder of Agamemnon would no doubt have been "subjected to our faithful eyes" like the blinding of Gloucester or the suffocation of Edward II; but who shall say that there is less "specifically dramatic effect" in Aeschylus's method of mirroring the scene in the clairvoyant ecstasy of Cassandra? I am much inclined to think that the dramatic effect of highly emotional narrative is ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... irritably. It did not matter if Earthlings chose to waste their time in artificial ecstasy, but it was different to see a good Belt ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... and her own seemed to grow bigger, glistening and tender, appealing and promising. With that look she drew the man's soul away from him through his immobile pupils, and from Willems' features the spark of reason vanished under her gaze and was replaced by an appearance of physical well-being, an ecstasy of the senses which had taken possession of his rigid body; an ecstasy that drove out regrets, hesitation and doubt, and proclaimed its terrible work by an appalling aspect of idiotic beatitude. He never stirred a limb, hardly breathed, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... transshipment point for opiates and cannabis from Central and Southwest Asia to Western Europe and Scandinavia and Latin American cocaine and some synthetics from Western Europe to CIS; limited production of illicit amphetamines, ephedrine, and ecstasy for export ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of Aristophanes, the hero, Dicaeopolis, makes a separate peace on his individual account with the Peloponnesians and drives a brisk trade with the different cantons, the enthusiasm reaching its height when the Boeotian appears with his ducks and his eels. This ecstasy can best be understood by those who have seen the capture of a sutler's wagon by hungry Confederates; and the fantastic vision of a separate peace became a sober reality at many points on the lines of the contending parties. The Federal outposts twitted ours with their lack of coffee and sugar; ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... And the hazy orange moon grew up And slowly changed to yellow gold While the hills were darkened, fold on fold To a deeper blue than a flower could hold. Down the hill I went, and then I forgot the ways of men, For night-scents, heady, and damp and cool Wakened ecstasy in me On the brink of ...
— Flame and Shadow • Sara Teasdale
... bowed in the silent ecstasy of prayer—they were Ester's and Dr. Van Anden's. As for Sadie, she sat straight and still as if petrified with amazement, as she well-nigh felt herself to be, for the strong, firm ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... is what they call ecstasy, but there is no word that can tell out very plain what it means. That freeing of the mind from its thoughts. Those wonders we know; when we put them into words, the words seem as little like them as blackberries are ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... Of gossamer shapes"—and the rest. Good gracious, how scenery changes! They too have a cold on their chest. At "delicate lungs," dear, and so on No more for this climate I'll play, But homeward in ecstasy ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... existence, apart from what they do or gain, is their chief happiness. Their "ealo," or the height of felicity, is a passive rather than an active state. It is (if I am not mistaken) a kind of serene rapture or tranquil ecstasy of the soul, which is born doubtless from a perfect harmony between the person and his environment. In it, they say, the illusion of the world is complete, and life is another name ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... hands on hips, thin lips screwed up, and regarded the possible purchaser through narrowed eyes of simulated ecstasy. ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... She ate very little. And as time went on she seemed to draw away from the two men into a kind of secret ecstasy of enjoyment like some fierce animal scenting freedom. The sentences she dropped were shallow, impatient, even stupid. And yet there was Rufus Cosgrave with his hungry eyes fixed on her, trapped by the nameless force that lay behind her ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... into the easy chair placed for her accommodation, and lifting up her hands in a tragic ecstasy—"Is it true—true, that you are going to leave us? I cannot believe it; it is so absurd—so ridiculous—the idea of your going to Canada. Do tell me that I am misinformed; that it is one of old Kitson's ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... where we expect to see Our wives and sweethearts, we'll go! Let wildest revel lead us up to ecstasy! Quickly let the ...
— Zanetto and Cavalleria Rusticana • Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, Guido Menasci, and Pietro Mascagni
... and dipper, and Samuel drank. The taste of the water was a kind of ecstasy to him—he drank until he could drink ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... loud clapping of hands by the men was followed by several half-suppressed screams by a woman. They were quite eldritch, as if she could not get them out. Then succeeded a lot of utterances as if she were in ecstasy, to which a man responded, "Moio, moio." The utterances, so far as I could catch, were in five-syllable snatches—abrupt and laboured. I wonder if this "bubbling or boiling over" has been preserved as the form in which the true prophets of old gave forth their "burdens"? One ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... those distressing examples seemed to indicate that, while theoretically the man was in an ideal state of blissful ecstasy, he was, practically, in a condition bordering on madness. At the very moment he was supposed to be happy, he was about half the time most miserable. Even at its best, it did not make for comfort. Poor Chic ran the gamut every week from hell to heaven. It was with a sigh of ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... the Scottish Sea, the great water with its islands, the coast of Fife with its dotted line of little fishing towns, the two green Lomonds standing softly distinct against the misty line of more distant hills. It was the same view that moved Fitz-Eustace to ecstasy, still but little changed in the eighteenth century from what it had been in the sixteenth. And picturesque as Edinburgh still continues to be in spite of many modern disadvantages, it was no doubt infinitely more picturesque then, crowning ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... health, in hope, and in enthusiasm. And for him it was joy enough to look upon her full bright cheek, to see her compact little figure before him; but to touch her dimpled shoulder, to feel one tress of her hair against his face, was ecstasy; and her voice,—the tenderest trill of the wood-dove was not half so delicious! But who shall define the mystery of love? They were lovers; and when we have said that, is there anything more to be said? Their love had not, however, up to the time of which we write, found ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... sight of sin, and of a Saviour upon the heart at one time. Now it weeps not for fear and through torment, but by virtue of constraining grace and mercy, and is at this very time, so far off of disquietness of heart, by reason of the sight of its wickedness, that it is driven into an ecstasy, by reason of the love and mercy that is mingled with the sense of sin in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... dissolution had its own consumptive refinements, and even brought, as to the 'Beautiful Soul' in Wilhelm Meister, a faint religious ecstasy—that 'singing in the sails' which is not of the breeze. Here, again, is a ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... satisfied, and Fatty in an ecstasy of delight radiated good cheer everywhere. Throughout the various contests the interest continued to deepen, the secretary, with able generalship, reserving the hammer-throwing as the most thrilling event to the last ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... with ecstasy; deeply, this enlightenment had delighted him. Oh, was not all suffering time, were not all forms of tormenting oneself and being afraid time, was not everything hard, everything hostile in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, as soon as time would ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... the companion, as though in ecstasy at her employer's generosity. "A whole month ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... intoxication; the one represents for us the world of appearances, the other is, as it were, the voice of things in themselves. The chorus, then, which arose out of the hymns to Dionysus, is the "lyric cry," the vital ecstasy; the drama is the projection into vision, into a picture, of the exterior, temporary world of forms. "We now see that the stage and the action are conceived only as vision: that the sole 'reality' is precisely the chorus, which itself produces ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... composition; for though it contains these and many {189} sensuous and perceptual values besides, it conveys through them with surpassing truth and delicacy ideas as evasive as they are subtle and profound. There is an ecstasy of mind in the discernment of these ideas, and a blend of emotion that follows in their train, both of which are conditioned by insight; that is, by a process that is neither sensuous, perceptual, nor emotional merely, but, in an ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... learned from my Bible, I seem to feel some strange brightness all above and around me; and it's so real to me that it's just like seeing with these eyes. Miss Mason says 'it's my soul that sees.' Whatever it is, it's very beautiful, Maddie." And Alice clasped her hands in a sort of ecstasy, and drew near to the window to look up once more into the heavens, whither her eyes and her ...
— Little Alice's Palace - or, The Sunny Heart • Anonymous
... the note of a wind instrument—an oboe adding its slow note to the boom of the kettle-drum, the clang of gold-colored cymbals, and the singing ecstasy of violins. ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... strains of the unfortunate Fergusson revived in the city, if not in the field, the memory of him who sang the "Monk and the Miller's wife." But notwithstanding these and other productions of equal merit, Scottish poesie, it must be owned, had lost much of its original ecstasy and fervour, and that the boldest efforts of the muse no more equalled the songs of Dunbar, of Douglas, of Lyndsay, and of James the Fifth, than the sound of an artificial cascade resembles the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... purest light, what ecstasy, Will in the Saviour's garden be! How will it sound when 'fore Thee, All with united heart and voice, Ten thousand seraphins rejoice ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... himself a brief period of ecstasy as he remembers that his mother crossed this threshold only recently, and in his eyes this renders ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... themselves Into a language I could understand; I felt my frame pervaded by a glow That seemed to thaw my marble into flesh; Its cold, hard substance throbbed with active life, My limbs grew supple, and I moved—I lived! Lived in the ecstasy of a new-born life! Lived in the love of him that fashioned me! Lived in a thousand tangled thoughts ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... From this ecstasy I was suddenly aroused by hearing once more the sound of a footstep upon the road behind me. So distinct and unmistakable was it that I turned sharp about, and, though the road seemed as deserted as ever, I walked back, looking into every patch of shadow, and even thrust ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... to see every one thunderstruck at it, and come crowding round me and thanking me for something or another, I hardly knew what. My third sentiment was the expectation of some extraordinary, glorious happiness that was impending—some happiness so strong and assured as to verge upon ecstasy. Indeed, so firmly persuaded was I that very, very soon some unexpected chance would suddenly make me the richest and most famous man in the world that I lived in constant, tremulous expectation of this magic good fortune ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... I thought I knew; and, sure enough, I found the dear old Dominie Sampson close at my elbow—his large, gray eyes rolling in ecstasy—his mouth open, and grasping in his hands a huge folio, while Davie Gellatly, with cap and bells, stood mincing and grimacing behind him—now rolling up the whites of his eyes—now pulling the skirts of the unconscious pedagogue—and finally, surmounting ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... all this November day, all this desolate day, under a sky dirty and white, Gloria had been thinking that perhaps she had been wrong. To preserve the integrity of her first gift she had looked no more for love. When the first flame and ecstasy had grown dim, sunk down, departed, she had begun preserving—what? It puzzled her that she no longer knew just what she was preserving—a sentimental memory or some profound and fundamental concept of ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... seductive a language, that notwithstanding the preternatural caution, we would almost say dissimulation of his character, of which we have tried to give an idea, he could not restrain his emotion, and breathed a sigh of ecstasy. Then, by degrees, he raised his aching head and inhaled the softly scented air, as it was wafted in gentle gusts to his uplifted face. Crossing his arms on his chest, as if to control this new sensation of delight, he drank in delicious draughts of that ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... amusement; in fact, during the carnival, parties, balls, and concerts succeed one another without cessation. The Hungarians dance as though it were an exercise of patriotism; with them it is no languid movement half deprecated by the utilitarian soul—it is a passion whirling them into ecstasy. But dancing was not the only diversion. The winter I was at Buda-Pest a long spell of enduring frost gave us some capital skating. The fashionable society meet for this amusement in the park, where ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... this moment of stupefaction to let herself fall into the ecstasy of that infinite adoration which seizes the heart of a woman, when she truly loves and finds herself in the presence of an idol for whom she has vainly longed. Her eyes were all joy, all happiness, and sparks flew from them. ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... seen the contemplative life; a woman praying, holding a closed book, opening it, reading it; she shuts it to meditate on it, teaches others, and falls into an ecstasy. ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the performance: "Thank God, as I do, beloved wife, for the glorious success of 'Euryanthe.' Weary as I am, I must still say a sweet good night to my beloved Lina, and cry Victory! All the company seemed in a state of ecstasy; singers, chorus, orchestra;—all were drunk, as ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... You know me!" she gasped, and she flung herself into his arms. Straining herself to him in half frantic ecstasy, she murmured in a broken whisper: "Yes! I am—am Belle! It is wicked and selfish to tell you; but to have you go down there without first—I could not bear it! Yet I—I shall not drag you down—disgrace you. Never that! I'll go ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... think of it? My thoughts have left no track, and I cannot find the path again. What was it that I was thinking of? It was a very hazy day. I will just try these three sentences of Confutsee; they may fetch that state about again. I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. Mem. There never is but one opportunity of ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... no inquiry. Here again the story-books which had informed him of romantic life in his very young days had been at fault; they made such an idealised picture of all that had just taken place, and they told about the joy in the heart of a man and the ecstasy in the heart of a woman. Osborn looked down upon a tiny, red and ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... patter of tiny feet sounded on the stairs. One by one, out of the shadows, old joys and old loves came toward her; forgotten hopes and lost dreams. Hands long since mingled with the dust clasped hers once more with perfect understanding—warm lips were crushed upon hers with the old ecstasy and the old thrill. Even the sorrows, from which the bitterness had strangely vanished, came back out of the darkness, not with hesitancy, but with assurance, as though already welcomed by ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... at his feet, freely to be partaken of did he choose, it is true that his face showed lines of restraint, a serene restraint, like unto that which the great old painters limned so beautifully upon the face of the martyr. But the martyrs of old in their ecstasy were not more resolute than Potts. It is probable that he looked forward to a period of post-election refreshment; but pending the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, his determination was such that it stamped his face with something akin to ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... thousand small outcries contributing to the awful energy of the world—faint chimings and whistlings in the grass, and endless flutter, rustle, and whirr. His own body, on which hair and nails grew daily like vegetation, startled and appalled him. Consciousness of self, that miserable ecstasy, was heavy ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... with hisses when she appeared, and discharged with hisses and laughter when she had finished—then instantly encored and insulted again! And how the high-born knaves enjoyed it! White-kidded gentlemen and ladies laughed till the tears came, and clapped their hands in very ecstasy when that unhappy old woman would come meekly out for the sixth time, with uncomplaining patience, to meet a storm of hisses! It was the cruellest exhibition—the most wanton, the most unfeeling. The ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... woman's instinct warned her to be wary. The shutters were flung open, and the young soldier stepped flamboyantly into the room. "I am here, cara, cara mia!" he cried. "I, Vibrato Adagio!" With a sibilant cry she fell into his out-stretched arms. "Mio, mio," she echoed in ecstasy, "I am yours and you are mine!" So lightly was the first stepping-stone passed on her reckless path of immorality and vice. Her fickle heart soon tired of the debonair Vibrato, and in a fit of satiated pique ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... removing her hands from his eyes, and clapping them in ecstasy. "Look at him! See where he stands before you, healthy and strong! Your own dear son. Your own dear living, loving ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... the streamers of their Highland bonnets waving, their arms glistening in the sun, and the bagpipes playing "The March of the Cameron Men." The pipers themselves were mercifully hidden from us on that first occasion, and it was well, for we could never have borne another feather's weight of ecstasy. ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... school, when she learned that Miss Smith, her Algebra teacher, received a letter every day from an army officer. An army officer!—and a letter every day! And she knew Miss Smith very well, indeed! Ecstasy! Miss Smith, who looked too pretty to know so much about Algebra, made an adorable heroine ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... richness?" exclaimed Polly, gazing all about her in an ecstasy. "Oh, Jasper, what pictures we'll take—and do see that woman's cap! and those pot-hooks of hair over her eyes, and that ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... visionary. For whereas some moralists would have us amend nature, and others bid us follow her, there is apt to be something impracticable in the first maxim, and something vague in the second. Asceticism, quietism, enthusiasm, ecstasy—all systems which imply an unnatural repression or an unnatural excitation of our faculties—are ill-suited for the mass of mankind. And on the other hand, if we are told to follow nature, to develope our original character, we are too ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... man. Like myself he was waiting for his ship to sail, but not to England—to France. He was a returning French reservist. Across the many miles of ocean the hand of duty had stretched and touched him; he was ecstatically glad that he was wanted. In those first days this ecstasy of gladness was a little hard to understand. Thank God we all share it instinctively now. He was speaking excitedly, addressing the crowd. They cheered him; they were in a mood to cheer anybody. His face was thin with earnestness; he was a spirit-man. He ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... to flow in and mix with the reading, I cannot tell, no more than I can number them; the whirr of a bird's wing, the liquid note of a wood thrush, the stir and movement of a thousand leaves, the gurgle of rippling water, the crow's call, and the song-sparrow's ecstasy. Once or twice the notes of a bugle found their way down the hill, and reminded me that I was in a place of delightful novelty. It was just a fillip to my enjoyment, as I looked on ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... spirit of Christianity finds a bright comment and illustration in the Madonnas and Cherubim of Raffaelle, it seems to shine out in still more truthful vividness from the brow of a young person rapt in religious ecstasy. The hands clasped in prayer,—the upturned eyes,—the expression of humble confidence and seraphic hope, (displayed, let me suggest, on a beautiful face,) constitute a picture of which, having witnessed it, I can never forget ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... she asked dreamily, her eyes gazing out on the calm ecstasy of colour, which seemed to have broken the bonds of law, and ushered in a new chaos, fit matrix of new heavens and ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... covered his body with his shield. The other danced round him triumphantly, and with one blow pretended to cut off his head; then, head in hand, he capered with the wildest gestures, expressive of the very ecstasy of savage delight But, on looking at his trophy closely, he recognized the features of a friend, and, smitten with remorse, he replaced the head with much solicitude. Then, moving with a slow, measured tread, he wept, and with many sighs of grief adjusted the ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... when at the window, listening in the stillness then reigning over the city, a distant but strangely familiar sound fell faintly upon my ear—very faintly; but never did the finest harmony born of Wagner's genius so fill a human soul with ecstasy. There was no mistaking it: it was a French bugle. The French were entering Mexico. We were safe, and now might go ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... lay in bed, the winds had carried to him the clangoring of the church bell as some enthusiast jerked the rope frantically to tell the twisted news of a great battle. This voice of the people rejoicing in the night had made him shiver in a prolonged ecstasy of excitement. Later, he had gone down to his mother's room and had spoken thus: "Ma, ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... brought his gun down for an instant's aim, and then unerringly hit the mark; and then, when some unwary youth fired his piece into the ground at half-cock such guffawing and delight, such rolling over and over on the grass, such dances of ecstasy, as made the "Ethiopian minstrelsy" of the ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... to his seat. His shoulder was tingling from the accolade bestowed by royalty. A hundred eyes were now turned upon him in envy and new admiration. Mrs. William Darragh McMahan trembled with ecstasy, so that her diamonds smote the eye almost with pain. And now it was apparent that at many tables there were those who suddenly remembered that they enjoyed Mr. McMahan's acquaintance. He saw smiles and bows ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... it and rose, once again, with the lyre in his hand, And smote out the cry that his white-lipped sorrow denied: And the grief's mad ecstasy swept o'er the summer-sweet land, And gathered the tears of all Time in ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... charity. But Mrs. Strangeways uttered the name without misgiving, and behaved as though nothing conceivable could have afforded her more delight than to meet Alma again. It was her habit to speak in superlatives, and to wear a countenance of corresponding ecstasy. Any casual remark from either of the ladies she received with a sort of rapture; her nerves seemed to be in a perpetual thrill. If she referred to herself, it was always with depreciation, and not at ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... track that led to the hut. This was difficult, for the snow was already thick enough to efface all trace of a path. We scrambled through the bushes, and after crossing a ditch, we managed at last to reach the hut and get inside. The dogs, in ecstasy, rolled over and over on the dry ground, barking. Our satisfaction was ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... would be when mine. Those lips with the mark of mine upon them; those delicate nerves stung to frenzy; that form tense, and the limbs strung with passion; those eyes terror-stricken between anguish and ecstasy. ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... Besides, the world would have been free from the reproach of accepting the fruits of his bright genius while condemning the worker to a life of misery, relieved only by the beauty of his own thoughts and the ecstasy awakened in him by the ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the room, Heaven knows how, and found myself running towards Long's at the top of my speed. Within that same hour I was rattling along towards Bristol as fast as four posters could burn the pavement, thinking with ecstasy over the pleasures of my reception in England; but far more than all, of the kindness evinced towards me by him who, in every feeling of his nature, and in every feature of his deportment was "every ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... we suddenly came on the gun we had been sent to capture; it was perched high on a long, loopholed barricade, and stood quite silent and alone. We gave a shout and pitched forward in a momentary ecstasy of delight, but like a flash the scene around us changed. Dozens of soldiers jumped up around us, looking every bit like startled pheasants in their bright uniforms, and retired, firing rapidly. This, as if ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... to suppose Harry in an ecstasy of meek devotion. He was quite sure that she had behaved to him very badly. He admitted no excuse for her eagerness to hurt him as soon as she was tired of him. She might hate him; but after all there were obligations of courtesy, of decency, of womanhood, and her venomous temper had ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... (misprinted amusement). Windham's Diary, p. 20. In her Memoirs of Dr. Burney (ii. 82), Mme. D'Arblay says that Johnson 'at times, when in gay spirits, would take off Dr. Warton with the strongest humour; describing, almost convulsively, the ecstasy with which he would seize upon the person nearest to him, to hug in his arms, lest his grasp should be eluded, while he displayed some picture or some prospect.' In that humourous piece, Probationary Odes for the Laureateship (p. xliii), Dr. Joseph is made to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... together, and it was delicious to be propelled by her strong arms. We halted, on our way to Kensington Gardens, to listen to a German band. The voluptuous waltz-music affected me strangely, and I was sorry that, owing to my position in the vehicle, her face was hidden from me. In the midst of my ecstasy, a square object on wheels came round the street corner. It was painted a bright vermilion and bore the initials of K.V.—"Kytherea Victrix!" I cried in my heart; but as it passed, at a slow pace, it rained a flood of tears ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... takes a mystical turn; and Dante's ghostly friends, after propounding their aristocratic philosophy, to justify God in other men's eyes, are themselves on the point of quitting the lower sphere to which God had assigned them and plunging into the "sea" of his absolute ecstasy. For, if the word God stands for man's spiritual ideal, heaven can consist only in apotheosis. This the Greeks knew very well. They instinctively ignored or feared any immortality which fell short ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... pulls him in," cried Jack, in a most unfeeling ecstasy, for Miss Tremaine was no pocket Venus—rather answered the Irishman's description of "an ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... Geoffrey! dear good Uncle Geoffrey," cried Henrietta, in an ecstasy; "you were as delightful as a knight of old, only as you could not fight tournaments for her, you were obliged to read for her; and pining away all the time ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the king in ecstasy. "Give them to me at once." And Louis broke the seal of a little letter, inclosing the verses which history has preserved entire for us, and which are more meritorious in invention than in execution. Such as they were, however, the king was ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of small drawers and pigeonholes at the back of it, and a suspicion of alluring and unattainable treasures in every separate receptacle. To ransack all of these was Keith's most audacious dream, but when the dream came true at last, it was fraught with no ecstasy of realization, for he was a middle-aged man, and in the room behind him his mother ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... spurted in their eyes. In a nest of orange velvet lay like three eggs, three white and vivid diamonds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them. Fischer stood beaming benevolently and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of the girl, the grim admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... breathed the life-giving breath of the sea, when she could distinguish the green line of ocean beyond the trees, she clapped her hands with ecstasy. She became a guide for Genevieve, explaining to her the conformation of Carnac, and recounting with pretty fancy the legends of the country ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... delight at times to be dragged by the hair. So strangely can the mind of a man be warped. He can be dragged by the hair over hill and dale, and if asked what is happening, can answer in ecstasy: 'I am being dragged by the hair!' And if anyone asks: 'But shall I not help you, release you?' he answers: 'No.' And if they ask: 'But how can you endure it?' he answers: 'I can endure it, for I love the hand that drags me.' Eva, do you know what ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... in a deck-chair, examined the caravan in a kind of ecstasy. "What a lovely place it is!" she said. "Do you really live ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... religion he had lost the intimate life which the priesthood had once given him. The Mass was a mere Latin formula, and the vestments and the chalice, the Host itself, a sort of fetishism—that is to say, a symbolism from which life had departed, shells retaining hardly a murmur of the ancient ecstasy. It was therefore his fate to go in quest of—what? Not of adventure. He liked better to think that his quest was the personal life—that intimate exaltation that comes to him who has striven to be himself, and nothing but himself. The life he was going to might lead him even to a new ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... probably the Chleuh boys with sidelong eyes and clean caftans would come instead of the singing-girls, and weave the arabesque of their dance in place of the runic pattern of the singing. But the result would always be the same: a prolonged state of obese ecstasy culminating in the collapse of huge heaps of snoring muslin on the divans against the wall. Finally at the week's end the wool-merchant and his friends would all ride back with dignity ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... these noises, I heard a voice which sent the blood ebbing and flowing in my heart and caused the back of my neck to quiver with ecstasy. ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... had experienced once when given chloroform for a slight operation. Directly the idea of repeating that blissful sensation seized upon him he was mad for it. To go out of life like that, to take that way of opening the window into eternity, into another phase of existence or into oblivion, what ecstasy! He remembered that when under the chloroform, a wonderful certainty, a comprehension, seemingly, of the true import of life and death and of the hereafter, had seized him. He remembered a tremendous assurance which he had received under the influence of the drug, of the ultimate joy ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... A box!" cried Daria, seizing one of the old man's hands, and dancing round him in an ecstasy of delight. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... liberty, and devoutly attached to the doctrines of Calvin. They abominated all pleasures and pursuits which diverted their minds from the contemplation of God, or the reality of a future state. Cromwell himself lived in the ecstasy of religious excitement. His language was the language of the Bible, and its solemn truths were not dogmas, but convictions to his ardent mind. In the ardor of his zeal and the frenzy of his hopes, he fondly fancied that the people of England were to rise in simultaneous confederation, shake ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Rome; and in contradiction to the multiplied superstitions with which that communion was loaded, they adopted an enthusiastic strain of devotion, which admitted of no observances, rites, or ceremonies, but placed all merit in a mysterious species of faith in inward vision, rapture, and ecstasy. The new sectaries seized with this spirit, were indefatigable in the propagation of their doctrine, and set at defiance all the anathemas and punishments with which the Roman ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... the vision, the hour of exultation; that is but the setting of the task. Now you will take that ecstasy, and hold on to it, hold on with soul and body; you will keep yourself at that height, you will hold that flaming glory before your eyes, and you will hammer it into words. Yes, that is the terror—into words—into words that leap the hilltops, that bring ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... of thought, and audacity, which were very extraordinary. These articles were amongst the ablest specimens of newspaper writing which had ever been known in Ireland. Their effect was electric; they maddened the young men of the movement with a fierce spirit of nationality. The clubs read them with ecstasy, and John Mitchell was the idol and hero of all men of extreme opinions. His defiance of government, his incitements to rebellion, were so open and intrepid, that they seized upon the imagination of the people, and much disturbed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... one another, and their merits and their failures are alike identical. We have to form what broken impression we can of their early habits. Joseph is presented to us as wandering in the woodlands, lost in a melancholy fit, or waking out of it to note with ecstasy all the effects of light and colour around him, the flight of birds, the flutter of foliage, the panorama of cloudland. He and Thomas were alike in their "extreme thirst after ancient things." They avoided, with a certain disdain, the affectation of vague and conventional ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... grace of Heaven that restoreth thee, dear Mother," quoth the angel. "Presently thou shalt be filled with the new life, and thou shalt be young again; and thou shalt sing with rapture, and thy soul shall know the endless ecstasy of Heaven." ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... few yards of narrow path, a steep precipice at one side. With a whispered "may I?" his arm is around her in guiding her steps; no word is spoken and we all know the silent ecstasy of such moments. A turn in the path and they come upon Lady Esmondet, seated on a rocky seat (she having taken a safer way) and listening to ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... a whole world full of evidence denying, of such maunderers as you! See here; he was the most sensible of men; balanced; keeping his head always;—a mind no mood or circumstances could deflect from rational self-control, either towards passion or ecstasy. One explanation remains—as in the case of Joan, or of H.P. Blavatsky;—he was neither deceiving nor deceived, but what he claimed to hear, he did hear; and it was the voice of One that stood behind him, and might not appear in history at all, or in the outer world at all: ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Dicaeopolis, makes a separate peace on his individual account with the Peloponnesians and drives a brisk trade with the different cantons, the enthusiasm reaching its height when the Boeotian appears with his ducks and his eels. This ecstasy can best be understood by those who have seen the capture of a sutler's wagon by hungry Confederates; and the fantastic vision of a separate peace became a sober reality at many points on the lines of the contending ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... exclaimed, looking up at him with an ecstasy of joy, and yet with a great terror upon her face; "but what will happen— what will happen to you? What will ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... lacks humor. In their search for happiness his characters suffer a great deal and know only temporary ecstasy. They are ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... very sorry for it. Unanimity is everything in the direction of such an undertaking as this. With unanimity we can do—everything.' Mr Melmotte in the ecstasy of his enthusiasm lifted up both his hands over his head. 'Without unanimity we can do—nothing.' And the two hands fell. 'Unanimity should be printed everywhere about a Board-room. It ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... to menace me, and even though Zara's brother Ivan, and others of his kind, fanatics all, in their nihilistic tendencies, wild beasts in their blood lusts, fiends in their methods, as they were—whatever they might threaten, seemed small indeed to me, in that moment of ecstasy. For it was a moment of ecstasy; the word "moment" being measured by the rule of ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... greet me, as he always does when he sees me return after an absence, he fought a little longer, then pretended to be whipped, and ran around the saw-mill, followed by the other dog. The other dog came back, but Lion didn't. I was quite surprised, when I got home, to see him rush out to meet me in an ecstasy of delight, as if he then saw me for the first time. His whole manner seemed to say, 'I am tickled to see you, Jack! and if you think you saw me fighting the sawyer's dog just now, you're much mistaken.' I don't know but ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... thrilled with her ecstasy, agony, woe— Hath she a mood that I do not know? The winds of her music tumultuous have seized me and swayed me, Have lifted, have swung me around In their whorls as of cyclonic sound; Her passions have torn me and tossed me and brayed me; ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... This conception was abhorrent to Shelley, both because poetry ought not to do what can be done better by prose, and also because, for him, the pleasure and the lesson were indistinguishably one. The poet is to improve us, not by insinuating a moral, but by communicating to others something of that ecstasy with which he himself burns in contemplating eternal truth ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... it me.—Gods! How it glides to my heart by the sweetest of roads! Oh, how it kisses me, tickles me, bites me! Oh, how my eyes loosen sweetly in tears! I'm ravished! I'm rapt! Heaven finds me admissible! Lost in an ecstasy! blinded! invisible!— Hearken all earth! We, Bacchus, in the might of our great mirth, To all who reverence us, are right thinkers; Hear, all ye drinkers! Give ear and give faith to the edict divine; Montepulciano's the King of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... 'Who after all is right, thou, or the crucified Galilean about whom these men are so enthusiastic?' And when he had got as far as this, the result, with his bodily and mental characteristics, naturally followed in an ecstasy in which the very same Christ whom up to this time he had so passionately persecuted, appeared to him in all the glory of which his adherents spoke so much, shewed him the perversity and folly of his conduct, and called him to come over to ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... scene, which was coming. In that scene the wonderful variety of his acting completed his triumph. Trembling with excitement, he resumed his half-dried clothes, and, glad to escape, rushed home. He was in too great a state of ecstasy at first to speak, but his face told his wife that he had realized his dream—that he had appeared on the stage of Drury Lane, and that his great powers had been instantly acknowledged. With not a shadow of doubt as to his future, he exclaimed, "Mary, you shall ride in your ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... from the lights, which there appear'd to me, Gather'd along the cross a melody, That, indistinctly heard, with ravishment Possess'd me. Yet I mark'd it was a hymn Of lofty praises; for there came to me "Arise and conquer," as to one who hears And comprehends not. Me such ecstasy O'ercame, that never till that hour was thing That held ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... had fallen when my uncle and I fired together, for I believe I missed; but as Ebo and I picked up the result of our expedition here the sun rose, and in the bright light that came between the trees we stood gazing in ecstasy at the lovely creatures. ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... Barchester, and Mr Arabin went over with his budget of news to the archdeacon. As Dr Grantly was not there, he could only satisfy himself by telling Mrs Grantly how that he intended himself the honour of becoming her brother-in-law. In the ecstasy of her joy at hearing such tidings, Mrs Grantly vouchsafed him a warmer welcome than any he had yet received ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Chiloes for each interpreter, and two pieces for the canoes. I should have given four fathoms for each man and the same for each boat. The final scene was most gratifying to the African mind: I solemnly invested old Nessala with the grand cloak which covered his other finery; grinning in the ecstasy of vanity, he allowed his subjects to turn him round and round, as one would a lay figure, yet with profound respect, and, lastly, he retired to charm ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... and beauty on their wing; In his every syllable Lurketh Nature veritable; And though he speak in midnight dark,— In heaven no star, on earth no spark,— Yet before the listener's eye Swims the world in ecstasy, The forest waves, the morning breaks, The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes, Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be, And life pulsates in rock or tree. Saadi, so far thy words shall reach: Suns rise ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the conclusion of such an impassioned if verbally conventional an harangue; but these Asiatics who heard Paul Boriskoff, who watched the tears stream down his hollowed cheeks and beheld the face uplifted as in ecstasy, had no applause to give him. Had not they also suffered as he had suffered? What wrong of his had not been, in some phase or other, a wrong of theirs? How many of them had lost children well beloved, had known starvation ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... she first conceived the romance of girlhood, which had led her to confer with him, unknown—there had she first confessed to herself that fancy had begotten love—there had she gone through love's short and exhausting process of lone emotion;—the doubt, the hope, the ecstasy; the reverse, the terror; the inanimate despondency, the agonised despair! And there now, sadly and patiently, she awaited the gradual march of inevitable decay. And books and pictures, and musical instruments, and marble busts, half shadowed by ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... One of their number now called aloud, in words that were far from appalling, tho not more intelligible to those for whose ears they were intended than their expressive yells. It would be difficult to convey a suitable idea of the savage ecstasy with which the news thus imparted was received. The whole encampment in a moment became a scene of the most violent bustle and commotion. The warriors drew their knives, and flourishing them, they arranged themselves in two lines, forming a lane that extended from the war-party to the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... everything was destroyed except the mantel over the fireplace in the drawing-room. On this stood a terra-cotta statuette of Harlequin. It is one you have often seen. The legs are wide apart, the arms folded, the head thrown back in an ecstasy of laughter. It looked exactly as though it were laughing at the wreckage with which it was surrounded. No one could have placed it where it was after the house fell, for the approach to it was still on fire. Of all ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... to three funerals and a revival meeting—" ecstasy made her voice tremble—"but I've never been to a wedding. Gladys went to one and she said it was grand. Her grandmother cried all the time and her grandfather blew his nose six times. Gladys counted. Oh, Mrs. Schuneman, will Miss Lottie really invite me? It would be something," and she ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... the mamma, restraining the impetuosity of the darling, whose little fat legs were kicking, and stamping, and twining themselves into the most complicated forms, in an ecstasy of impatience. 'Be quiet, dear, that's ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... it is, Miss Slopham, it is always at your service;" and Mr. Blagg closed his eyes in a faint ecstasy. Unlike literary persons as a class, he was not reluctant to be openly appreciated. "As for the facts," he continued, "they were easily secured. I had occasion to write another article on the Indian question, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... slave; he must have met many of the best and kindest Northern friends of the negro; and he went to Lincoln distressed at some points in his policy, particularly at his failure to make reprisals for murders of negro prisoners by Southern troops. When he came away he was in a state little short of ecstasy. It was not because he now understood, as he did, Lincoln's policy. Lincoln had indeed won his warm approval when he told him "with a quiver in his voice" of his horror of killing men in cold blood for what had been done by others, and ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... landlord, instead of denying or resenting it, says, "Ah, that fellow hides his meaning so cleverly that one can never make out what he means, it is all so fine spun and fantastical." G. B. S. calls a statesman a liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of ecstasy, "Ah, what quaint, intricate and half-tangled trains of thought! Ah, what elusive and many-coloured mysteries of half-meaning!" I think it is always quite plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is joking, and it ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... to conduct business through offshore entities and various intermediaries; transit country for and consumer of South American cocaine, Southwest Asian heroin, and Western European synthetics; domestic cannabis cultivation and limited ecstasy production ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... though he could spell and always got the right answer to a sum in school. Elizabeth knew exactly what it meant, though she could not have explained. It was just what she was doing now, as she leaped from pool to pool with her skirts and her pinafore in a string about her waist—fleeing in ecstasy away, away, to that far-off undiscovered country ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... of life was summed in one expression - tenderness. In her view of the universe, which was all lighted up with a glow out of the doors of hell, good people must walk there in a kind of ecstasy of tenderness. The beasts and plants had no souls; they were here but for a day, and let their day pass gently! And as for the immortal men, on what black, downward path were many of them wending, and to what a ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... attuned musical instrument that God has created. It is capable of a cultivation beyond the dreams of those who have given it no thought. It maybe made to express every emotion in the gamut of human sensation, from abject misery to boundless ecstasy. It marks the man without his consent; it makes the man if he ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... he spoke of—all this together, threw me into such an ecstasy, that suddenly I interrupted him ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... was "yes." Was he not a baronet? Was she not a well-trained English girl? And the ecstasy of pride, of joy, of that city soap-boiler's family, who shall paint? "Awake my muse" and—but, no! it passeth all telling. They bowed down before him (figuratively), this good British tradesman and his fat wife, and worshipped ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... passed out with a murmured word. He knew so little of women and yet some wonderful instinct kept him always in the right path. Perhaps, too, he feared speech himself, lest the ecstasy of those ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... devotion, extravagance, inspiration, vehemence, eagerness, fanaticism, intensity, warmth, earnestness, fervency, passion, zeal. ecstasy, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Hopkins, in an ecstasy of admiration. "To think that I had all that evidence in my hand and never knew it! I had intended, however, to go the round ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... had heard of carpets to be had, of bold pattern and primary colouring; he had heard of bridal crowns of silver-gilt worthy of any collector's cabinet. He also bought boots and tried his elegant leg in a flame-coloured sock. And to crown the rocking edifice, Lancelot came home in a kind of still ecstasy which only uttered itself in convulsions of the limbs, and sudden and ear-piercing whistles through the fingers. From him above all she gained assurance. "Oh, Mr. Urquhart, he'll put all that straight, I bet you—in two ticks!..." and once it was, "I say, Mamma, I wonder ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Yes, sweet it is, heavenly sweet, to be lulled into the sleep of death by the song of the beloved. Perhaps our dreams continue in the grave—a long, eternal, never-ending dream of Charles—till the trumpet of resurrection sounds—(rising in ecstasy) —and thenceforth and forever in his arms! (A pause; she goes to the piano ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... lady's bower, Sing her a song; Tell her that every hour, All the day long, Thoughts of her come to me, Filling my brain With the warm ecstasy Of ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... or Wiesbaden. They could not, of course, be seen "punting" at the play-table at Ems; but here is a legitimate game which all may join in, and where, certainly, the anxiety that is said to impart the chief ecstasy to the gamester's passion rises to the very highest It is heads and tails for a smashing stake, and ought to interest ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... there is a young general, whose glory is filling the whole world, who has attached victory to his colors, and who intoxicates the nations by his republican phrases of liberty and fraternity, so that, in their mad joy, they overturn thrones, expel their sovereigns, and awake them from their ecstasy under the republican yoke of France. Your majesty, I believe it to be the duty of every prince to preserve his people from such errors, and, jointly with his people, to raise a bulwark against the evil designs of France. Austria and Russia have already ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... and fired, and as I was quite close to them he dropped in his tracks stone-dead. When I stood over the handsome creature I was positively sorry for having killed him. Not so Moota, however, who rushed up in ecstasy, and before I could stop him had cut his throat. This was done, as he remarked, "to make the meat lawful," for Moota was a devout follower of the Prophet, and no true Mohammedan will eat the flesh of any animal unless the throat has been cut at ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... were in an ecstasy of delight over the orange orchard with its wealth of golden fruit, glossy leaves, and delicate blossoms, the velvety lawn with its magnificent shade trees, the variety and profusion of beautiful flowers, and the ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... a minute or so, during which She appeared, if one might judge from the almost angelic rapture of her face—for she looked angelic sometimes—to be plunged into a happy ecstasy. Suddenly, however, a new thought struck her, and her expression became the ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... the showroom floor in an ecstasy of imaginary hunger, and as he was making the hundredth trip the elevator door opened and Max Linkheimer stepped out. His low-cut waistcoat disclosed that his shirtfront, ordinarily of a glossy white perfection, had fallen victim to a profuse perspiration. Even his collar had not ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... heaven what the gutter had yielded him. He held up his find in the radiance and regarded it admiringly. It was a little earring of amethyst-coloured glass, and in the sun looked lovely. The boy was in an ecstasy over it. He rubbed it on his sleeve, sucked it to clear it from the last of the gutter, and held it up once more in the sun, where, for a few blissful moments, he contemplated it speechless. He then caused it to disappear somewhere about ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... among them sobbing with ecstasy, and her tears splashed their hands like holy water. It was all outrageously illegal, and sentimental, and harmful to the sanctity of the law. And yet, is it entirely desirable that men should ever grow unmindful of ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... was that Kate discovered the motor attachment of the new machine and was divided between ecstasy and ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... Bosom, the fairest Observation; while she, you must think, knew nothing of the Concern she gave others, any other than as an Example of Devotion, that threw her self out, without regard to Dress or Garment, all Contrition, and loose of all Worldly Regards, in Ecstasy of Devotion. Well, now the Organ was to play a Voluntary, and she was so skilful in Musick, and so touched with it, that she kept time not only with some Motion of her Head, but also with a different Air in her Countenance. When the Musick was strong ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... lo, the seed Of blessed dreams, sown in his heart, takes roots; He is like mind entranced in ecstasy, Born upon wings! ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... Christendom. He it was who with pitying gesture as of a kind father, his eyes suffused with tender joy, received Dante from the hands of Beatrice in the highest of celestial spheres, and after singing the beautiful hymn to the Virgin, led him to the heaven of heavens, to the very ecstasy and culmination of beatitude in the contemplation and comprehension of the triune God Himself. But religious no less than seculars are subdued by what they work in. Already in the tenth century Richer complained that the monks of his time were beginning to wear rich ornaments ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... sweetened it was the sin'; to a tender human affection: 'And now he lives in Abraham's bosom: whatever that be which is signified by that bosom, there lives my Nebridius, my sweet friend'; and from that to the saint's rare, last ecstasy: 'And sometimes Thou admittedst me to an affection, very unusual, in my inmost soul, rising to a strange sweetness, which if it were perfected in me, I know not what in it would not belong to the life to come.' And even self-analysis, of which there is so ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and had repeated some words of them; when, as though against and contrary to my design, I was carried away by such rapturous effusions that, to this hour, when I reflect thereon, I cannot believe but I was moved to them by a much more than human impulse. However, this ecstasy did not last above a quarter of an hour; but it was considerably longer before my spirits subsided to their usual frame. When I had a little composed myself, how was I altered! how did I condemn myself for all my past disquiet! what calm thanks did I return for the ease and satisfaction of mind ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... representing each, and a description annexed. It would be impossible for me to convey to the reader my astonishment and delight. I had never seen a picture or drawing in my life. I did not know that such things existed. I was in an ecstasy of delight as I turned over the pages, hardly taking sufficient time to see one object before I hastened on to another. For two or three hours did I thus turn over leaves, without settling upon any one animal; at last my pulse beat more ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... the door, advanced a few steps towards the stairs, and after listening half a minute, returned into the room in all the agitation which a conviction of having heard him would naturally produce; in the ecstasy of her feelings at that instant she could not help exclaiming, "Oh, Elinor, it is Willoughby, indeed it is!" and seemed almost ready to throw herself into his arms, when Colonel ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... their stews, Whether bull-frogs, old gloves, or old wigs, or old shoes Notwithstanding, when offer'd I rarely refuse, Any more than poor Blogg did, when seeing the reeky Repast placed before him, scarce able to speak, he In ecstasy mutter'd, "By Jove, Cocky-leeky!" In an instant, as soon As they gave him ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... short ejaculatory expressions of rapture. This condition, occasioned by excessive emotion, as in praying, singing, exhortations, and sympathetic appeals, is contagious, often spreading with mysterious rapidity. Its culmination, ecstasy, is popularly termed "the power." When gradually induced, it is called trance, and each state is regarded by many as supernatural, caused by the immediate influence of the Holy Spirit. The explanation is this: when the emotive faculties are suddenly and powerfully excited, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... expressionless, save that his mouth dropped and that his arms were tightly folded as if he were hugging himself in a sheer ecstasy of pain. From the street outside came the roar and rumble of London's traffic, the dull murmur of countless voices and the shrill high-pitched ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... strength in his arms, the taste of meat and wine, the cunning of horsemanship, of boat-sailing, of mountain-climbing, the breathless joy of the diver, the languid joy of the dancer, the feel of the canoe-paddle shaken in the rapid, the delicious lassitude of sleep in wayside-inns, and lastly the ecstasy of love and fatherhood—all these he relinquished for a tombstone that should be handsomer than Jenkins's. Jenkins, meanwhile, was articled to his father, and, having passed the necessary examinations with credit, ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... manorial outbuildings, and of the glittering pinnacles of the church, and felt his heart beating, and knew, without being told by any one, whither he had at length arrived—well, then the feeling which had been growing within his soul burst forth, and he cried in ecstasy: ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... are desperate: their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after, 105 Now 'gins to bite the spirits. I do beseech you, That are of suppler joints, follow them swiftly, And hinder them from what this ecstasy May now ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... reached Mrs. Brownlow's house, and the old lady was delighted to receive them. Of course she began to discuss at once the great news. Sir Thomas had had his arm broken, and was now again a member of Parliament. Mrs. Brownlow was a thorough-going Tory, and was in an ecstasy of delight that her old friend should have been successful. The success seemed to be so much the greater in that the hero had suffered a broken bone. And then there were many questions to be asked? Would Sir Thomas again ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... words like one fascinated; and she fell into a sort of ecstasy in her passionate desire to see this strange ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... She was perfectly untamable, fighting everybody in school, the despair of her teacher, till on Thanksgiving, reluctantly included in the general amnesty and mince-pie, she was caught cramming the pie into her pocket, after eying it with a look of pure ecstasy, but refusing to touch it. "For mother" was her explanation, delivered with a defiant look before which the class quailed. It is recorded, but not in the minutes, that the board of managers wept over Fighting ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... to his note-book, balanced on the window-sill, but his hand shook. Huneefa, in some sort of drugged ecstasy, wrenched herself to and fro as she sat cross-legged by Kim's still head, and called upon devil after devil, in the ancient order of the ritual, binding them to avoid the ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... at once, with some noise, an officer walked in very jauntily, with a peculiar swing of his shoulders at each step. He tossed his cockaded cap on the table and sat down in an easy-chair. The small lady positively skipped from her seat on seeing him, and fell to curtsying in a sort of ecstasy; but the officer took not the smallest notice of her, and she did not venture to sit down again in his presence. He was the assistant superintendent. He had a reddish moustache that stood out horizontally on each side of his face, and extremely small features, expressive of nothing ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... they were intended to represent and of such brilliancy that Rosalie was completely dazzled by them. But scarcely had she seen this rare and unparalleled tree, when a noise louder than the first drew her from her ecstasy. She felt herself lifted up and transported to a vast plain, from which she saw the palace of the king falling in ruins and heard the most frightful cries of terror and suffering issue from its walls. Soon Rosalie saw the prince himself creep from the ruins bleeding and his clothing almost ...
— Old French Fairy Tales • Comtesse de Segur
... up a steep hill? Latin, French, English, German, failed to make me understand the situation. At last I took in the Pfarrer's meaning. I was to send it by the milkman after leaving it at a certain hotel. "Ja," I cried in an ecstasy of joy, at last grasping his meaning, "Ja, ich mittam der Gepaeck von der milkman." I arrived the next day. I found the Pfarrer knew Latin, Greek (but he pronounces both quite differently from me), German, French, Russian, Syriac, Hebrew, and a little English. His ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... time when the ground on which it stands was an uncultivated waste. A miracle is said to have happened in one of the side chapels in 1842, which received the sanction of the Pope. A young French Jew of the name of Alfonse Ratisbonne was discovered in an ecstasy before the altar; which he accounted for by saying, when he revived, that the Virgin Mary had actually appeared to him, and saluted him in this place, while he was wandering aimlessly, and with a smile of incredulity, through the church. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... soul lives, thinks, invents. Philosophy is a precipitation of its electric spirit, and the need that philosophy feels of basing everything on an ultimate principle is in turn relieved by music. Although the spirit is not master of what it creates through the mediation of music, yet it experiences ecstasy in this creation. In this way every genuine creation of art is independent, mightier than the artist himself, and through its expression it returns to its divine source; it is concerned with man only insomuch as it bears witness to divine ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... plumage in life's budding spring, We rarely note the flutter of his wing. The untutored heart, from pain and sadness free, Beats high with hope and joy and ecstasy; And the fond bosoms of confiding youth Believe their fairy world a world of truth. The thorn is young upon the rose's stem; They heed it not, it has no wound ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... to toss and quaff, made life a jubilee And changed the children's song and laugh to shrieks of ecstasy. ...
— An Old Sweetheart of Mine • James Whitcomb Riley
... delicately attuned musical instrument that God has created. It is capable of a cultivation beyond the dreams of those who have given it no thought. It maybe made to express every emotion in the gamut of human sensation, from abject misery to boundless ecstasy. It marks the man without his consent; it makes the man if he ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... contortions like she was taking an exercise and said she had heard so much about me and how interesting it was to meet one who did things. I said I was merely in the cattle business. She said "How perfect!" and clasped her hands in ecstasy over the very idea. She said I was by way of being the ideal type for it. And did I employ real cowboys; and they, too, must be fascinating, because they did things. I said they did if watched; otherwise ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... days and a night of screaming winds and cataracts of water, through the delays where we rode at anchor below the Chain and Dobbs Ferry, under a vertical sun that started the pitch in every seam—Elsin Grey, radiant, transfigured, drenched to the skin, faced storm and calm in an ecstasy of reckless happiness. ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... Bassett departed on the last little adventure that was to cap the total adventure, for him, of living. With a body of which he was scarcely aware, for even the pain had been exhausted out of it, and with a bright clear brain that accommodated him to a quiet ecstasy of sheer lucidness of thought, he lay back on the lurching litter and watched the fading of the passing world, beholding for the last time the breadfruit tree before the devil- devil house, the dim day beneath the matted jungle roof, the gloomy gorge between the shouldering mountains, the saddle ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... books, which had been prepared for Lizzie immediately on her marriage. It looked out upon the sea, and she had almost taught herself to think that here she had sat with her adored Florian, gazing in mutual ecstasy upon the "wide expanse of glittering waves." She was lying back in a low arm-chair as her cousin entered, and she did not rise to receive him. Of course she was alone, Miss Macnulty having received a suggestion that it would be well that she should do a little gardening in the moat. ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... would have to desert? . . . I daresay, though, that I shall not comprehend your answer when it comes. I am, you know, utterly deficient in that sixth sense of the angelic or supralunar beautiful, which fills your soul with ecstasy. You, I know, expect and long to become an angel after death: I am under the strange hallucination that my body is part of me, and in spite of old Plotinus, look with horror at a disembodiment till ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... out Blanche, in an ecstasy. But he withdrew his hand, which was upon her side, and turned from her with a quivering lip. "That's different," ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... us so much to be useful that it is folly to do without it. It is not gained by narrow selfishness. Those who forget themselves most and are kind and considerate find it. By giving it to others we get it for ourselves. Ecstasy and rapture are emotions of short duration. They are so exhilarating that they soon ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... the violence he spoke of—all this together, threw me into such an ecstasy, that suddenly I interrupted him ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... intensely. John was alive. Mary Hutchinson was at Sockburn. Coleridge was still Coleridge, not the bemused and futile mystic he was to become. As for Dorothy, she lives a thing enskied, floating from ecstasy to ecstasy. It is the third of March, and William is to go to London. "Before we had quite finished breakfast Calvert's man brought the horses for Wm. We had a deal to do, pens to make, poems to be put in order for writing, to settle for the press, pack up.... Since he left me at half-past ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... companion of her thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent, imaginative, starved Soul had come to love with a consuming passion, was a living reality near at hand, to be seen in the flesh by the eyes of her body. It was a thought that set her in an ecstasy of terror, so that she dared not ask Frey Miguel to bring Don Sebastian to her. But she plied him with questions, and so elicited from him a ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... the rejoicing world, and it was like penetrating at last into the heart of that "land a great way off" which holds captive the wistful thought of the children of earth, and reveals itself as elusively as ecstasy. If one can remember some journey that he has taken long ago—Long Ago and Far Away are the great touchstones—and can remember the glamourie of the hour and forget the substructure of events, if he can recall the pattern and ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Beth shrieked in ecstasy as they rushed forward to smother "Toodlums," as they irreverently called the Cherub, with kisses. Inez, a handsome, dark-eyed girl, relinquished her burden cheerfully to the two adoring "aunties," while Uncle John kissed Louise and warmly ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... seen some vision. Often he saw in the mountain what was happening in Egypt, and told it to Serapion the bishop, who saw him occupied with a vision. Once, for instance, as he sat, he fell as it were into an ecstasy, and groaned much at what he saw. Then, after an hour, turning to those who were with him, he groaned and fell into a trembling, and rose up and prayed, and bending his knees, remained so a long while; and then the old man rose up and wept. The bystanders, therefore, trembling and altogether terrified, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... she rises on the last movement of the dance toward ecstasy, the excitement rises with her, expressing itself in short, irrepressible yelps, at the highest point of which a scream from BRIGHT WATER ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... was in such an ecstasy of excitement that dinner went poorly; but finally it was cleared away, and the cots moved to make room for those were coming. Everybody helped that could walk—even those that had to hobble on crutches, ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... fringes of the northward slope of the mountain. Here his reception was benign. On the banks of a tiny brook, rosy-gold in the flooding afternoon light, he found a bed of wild catnip. Here for a few minutes he rolled in ecstasy, chewing and clawing at the aromatic leaves, all four paws in air, and hoarsely purring his delight. When, at last, he went on up the slope, he carried with him through the gathering shadows the pungent, sweet aroma of the herb. In a fierce gaiety of spirit he would now and then leap into the air ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... she's always there, Beside my aunt's old walnut chair; Her big green eyes are bright with glee, Her chin sinks in a creamy sea, And her ecstasy is complete. ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... to repress its mental activity, the fond parents, misled by the early promise of genius too often excite it still further, by unceasing cultivation, and the never-failing stimulus of praise. Finding its progress for a time equal to their warmest wishes, they look forward with ecstasy to the day when its talents will break forth and shed ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... desirable than the being a king, for those who shall be kings; then, the true Ideal of the State will become a possibility; but not otherwise. And if the life of Beatific Vision be indeed possible, if philosophy really "concludes in an ecstasy," affording full fruition to the entire nature of man; then, for certain elect souls at least, a mode of life will have been [58] discovered more desirable than to be a king. By love or fear you might induce such persons to forgo their privilege; to take upon ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... sight, and, since he made no effort to avoid it, presently again into the street of a mud-built village. Few people were astir. A man slept in an angle of a wall, flies about his head; a dog in an entry scratched himself with ecstasy; a woman at a doorway was combing her child's hair, and looked ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... the steps, charged into him. By great good fortune, no damage was done except to a nicely-bound Sophocles. John, however, felt assured that Scaife had deliberately intended to knock him down, seized, possibly, by an ecstasy of blind rage not uncommon with him. Scaife ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Levin in ecstasy, hearing unceasingly the sound of that voice saying, "Good-bye till this evening," and seeing the smile with which it ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... bottle out of his pocket and gave me a dram of cordial, which he had brought on purpose for me. After I had drunk it, I sat down upon the ground; and, though it brought me to myself, yet it was a good while before I could speak a word to him. All this time the poor man was in as great an ecstasy as I, only not under any surprise as I was, and he said a thousand kind and tender things to me, to compose and bring me to myself; but such was the flood of joy in my breast that it put all my spirits ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... excuses (we Irish are good at that, if we are good at nothing else), and declined to read the medical reports. One morning, when she opened the letter of that day, there passed over her a change which is likely to remain in my memory as long as I live. Never have I seen such an ecstasy of happiness in any woman's face, as I saw when she read the lines which informed her that the fever was mastered. Iris is sweet and delicate and bright—essentially fascinating, in a word. But she was never a beautiful woman, until she knew that Mountjoy's ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... became so keen that our hearts were beating as if with a sense of fear. In spite of the heat of the day, and the fatigue caused by toiling through the sand, our souls were still surrendered to the softness unspeakable of our exquisite ecstasy. They were filled with that pure pleasure which cannot be described unless we liken it to the joy of listening to enchanting music, Mozart's "Audiamo mio ben," for instance. When two pure sentiments blend together, what ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... fantasies he imagines. There is no trace of make-believe in his designs. On the contrary, he makes the old legends become vital, not because of the personalities he bestows on his heroes and fairy princesses—his people move often in a rapt ecstasy—but because the adjuncts of his mise-en-scenes are realised intimately. His prince is much more the typical hero than any particular person; his fair ladies might exchange places, and few would notice the difference; but when it comes to the environment, the real incidents of the ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... hoped she wouldn't give up—at least not before she, Verena, had had a chance to see. She felt, however, that for the present there would be no answer for her save in the mere pressure of Miss Chancellor's eager nature, that intensity of emotion which made her suddenly exclaim, as if in a nervous ecstasy of anticipation, "But we must wait! Why do we talk of this? We must wait! All will be right," she added ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... the sun, and as warmth emanates from the beam when it touches material bodies, so from the Father the Son emanates, and thence the Holy Ghost. From these views Plotinus derived a practical religious system, teaching the devout how to pass into a condition of ecstasy, a foretaste of absorption into the universal mundane soul. In that condition the soul loses its individual consciousness. In like manner Porphyry sought absorption in or union with God. He was a Tyrian by birth, established a school at Rome, and wrote against Christianity; ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... sighed mournfully through the rusty coats of mail, and waved the tattered banners which were the tapestry of the feudal hall. At once the footstep of a person was heard ascending the stairs in haste and trepidation; the door of the hall was thrown violently open, and, terrified to a degree of ecstasy, Caspar, the head of the baron's stable, or his master of horse, stumbled up almost to the foot of the table at which his lord was seated, with the exclamation in his mouth—'My lord, my lord, a fiend is in the stable!' 'What means this folly?' said the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XIII, No. 370, Saturday, May 16, 1829. • Various
... the piano and her slim, nervous hands wandered soundlessly a moment above the keys. Then a wailing minor melody grew beneath them—unsatisfied, asking, with now and then an ecstasy of joyous chords that only died again into the querying despair of the original theme. She broke off abruptly, humming the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... folk for ever I abide; Life and the days pass by, yet ne'er my wishes I attain), "Knoweth my loved one when I see her at the lattice high Shine as the sun that flameth forth in heaven's blue demesne?" Her eye is sharper than a sword; the soul with ecstasy It takes and longing leaves behind, that nothing may assain. As at the casement high she sat, her charms I might espy, For from her cheeks the envious veil that hid them she had ta'en. She shot at me a shaft ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... those of the body, whose development some may assist and others retard. Into the elysian fields of thought enters no satisfaction but brings with it youth, and strength, and ardour; nor is there a thing in this world on which the mind thrives more readily than the ecstasy, nay, the debauch, of eagerness, ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... said next, "I couldn't have given them the relief and pleasure of seeing me this evening. And what ecstasy it will be to them, to be sure! I shouldn't be surprised if it broke up the whole thing. They'll faint so—for joy, you know—just at first—that is, the ladies will. The men won't like it at all; and I don't blame 'em. I suppose I shouldn't like it—to see another fellow sweep all ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dreadful boy shot right into his mouth,' said Val, while Fergus went into an ecstasy of laughter. 'Wasn't it a ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... For she had never known—nor ever could know now—the ecstasy of Love. Truly, it conquered; but it left its prisoners to perish of starvation ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... that, Jacky attempted to explore out-of-the-way corners of the farm-yard, and stepped suddenly up to the knees in a mud-hole, out of which he emerged with a pair of tight-fitting Wellington boots, which filled him with ecstasy and ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... archway of an ancient temple. He took in the wonderful proportions and drank of the exquisite detail in an ecstasy ...
— Fables For The Times • H. W. Phillips
... longer be any question of prolonging the situation indefinitely. The only problem that occupied his mind was, when and how to say that word to Leonetta which was to bind her for ever to him, before she receded one hundredth of an inch from the summit of ecstasy to which he imagined she too must have climbed ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... of ecstasy the invalid set to work to obey. There was a hideous trick of legerdemain in the last generation, by which an encoffined skeleton was made to struggle to its feet. Something like this took place as Mina's feeble arms were brought into the ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... And oh! the indescribable ecstasy of it, the joy of it, just to lie there, trembling with weakness, and drink in great drafts of that life-giving air, thinking of nothing, caring for nothing but that they were alive there in their great out-of-doors. One never comes really to appreciate life until ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... it seemed, a command, congratulation, to judge by the ecstasy of the figure below. The warrior turned once to throw himself before the image of the sun; he repeated this again and yet again before he crept back to his fellows. The group arose and rushed ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... ballroom the music rose and fell and swelled again into ecstasy as he held her white young lightness in his arm and they swayed and darted and swooped like things of the air—while the old Duchess and Lord Coombe looked on almost unseeing and talked ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... who boards at the Graham House." He said,—"You can sleep near the railroad, and never be disturbed: Nature knows very well what sounds are worth attending to, and has made up her mind not to hear the railroad-whistle. But things respect the devout mind, and a mental ecstasy was never interrupted." He noted, what repeatedly befell him, that, after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would presently find the same in his own haunts. And those pieces of luck which happen only to good players ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... lay in the grass Sun-baked and tired, looking through a maze Of tiny stems into a new green world; Once more knew eves of perfume, days ablaze With clear, dry heat on the brown, rolling fields; Shuddered with fearful ecstasy in bed Over a book of knights and bloody shields... The ship slowed, jarred and stopped. There, straight ahead, Were dock and fellows. Stumbling, he was whirled Out and away to meet them — and his back Slumped to the old half-cringe, ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... scorning all control, Winging his arrowy flight rapid and strong, As if in search of his evanished soul, Lost in the gushing ecstasy of song; And as I wandered on, and upward gazed, Half lost in admiration, half in fear, I left the brothers wondering and amazed, Thinking that all the choir ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... tell how long a time I lay, Dreaming the ecstasy of joys Elysian, Within my marble shrine. It fled away— The rapture of that calm ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... delicate and charming terms, the gratitude of his soul, his ecstasy of mad tenderness, his offer of a devotion that should be eternal; but in order to intimate all these passionate and high-souled thoughts he could find only set phrases, commonplace expressions, ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... some cave, to remain in a hypnotic or mesmeric state until the moon was full. Then, returning to the tribe quite emaciated, he excited himself, as others do who pretend to the prophetic AFFLATUS, until he was in a state of ecstasy. These pretended prophets commence their operations by violent action of the voluntary muscles. Stamping, leaping, and shouting in a peculiarly violent manner, or beating the ground with a club, they induce a kind of fit, and while in it pretend that their utterances ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... rebuke you every time you sin, the judgment day that is here and praises you and bids you be of good courage, when you do a thing that men disown and despise, is Christ. Therefore it is no figure of speech, it is no mere ecstasy of the imagination of the preacher, when we say that in the midst of these streets of ours, more real than the men that walk in them, more real than the sidewalks that are under our feet, and the buildings that tower over us, there walks ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... endearment one hears at prayer-meetings, "Blessed Jesus," "Dear Jesus," "Loving Jesus," "Elder Brother," "Patient, gentle Jesus," etc., were first used by women in an ecstasy of religious transport. And the thought of Jesus as a loving, "personal Savior," would die from the face of the earth did not women keep it alive. The religious nature and the sex nature are closely akin: no ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... love. Earth was never so green, nor air so sweet, nor skies so bright and azure, as those of Caroline's wooing, on the shores of the beautiful Bay of Minas. She loved this man with a passion that filled with ecstasy her whole being. She trusted his promises as she would have trusted God's. She loved him better than she loved herself—better than she loved God, or God's law; and counted as a gain every loss she suffered for his sake, and for the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... succeeded a new surprise, which was overwhelming. For just as she started, in obedience to her impulse, she saw Lord Chetwynde hurry forward. She saw Mrs. Hart's eyes fixed on him in a kind of ecstasy. She saw her totter forward, with all her face overspread with a joy that is but seldom known—-known only in rare moments, when some lost one, loved and lost—some one more precious than life itself—is suddenly ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... augury of divine indwelling. The romances glow with delight in the startling effect of personal beauty upon the beholder—a beauty seldom described in detail save occasionally by similes from nature. In the Laieikawai the sight of the heroine's beauty creates such an ecstasy in the heart of a mere countryman that he leaves his business to run all about the island heralding his discovery. Dreaming of the beauty of Laieikawai, the young chief feels his heart glow with passion for this "red blossom of Puna" as the fiery volcano scorches ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... that she turned her head in delight toward the group about the piano, fixing her gaze on Nathan. The old man's eyes were riveted on the score, his figure bent forward in the intensity of his absorption, his whole face illumined with the ecstasy that possessed him. Then she looked at Richard, standing. with his back to her, his violin tucked under his chin, his body swaying in rhythm with the music. Unger sat next to him, his instrument between his knees, his stolid, shiny face unruffled by ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... had always been grateful, as people who understood him knew. But this evening his gratitude seemed a gift of small account. The ear was deaf, and what thanks of his could reach it? The body was dust, and in what ecstasy of his could it share? The spirit had fled, in agony and loneliness, never to know that it ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... brain, and the vast number of phenomena which lie along the border line between the physical and spiritual, and which are conspicuous in the phenomena of somnambulism, sleep, dreaming, hypnotism, spiritualism, clairvoyance, trance, ecstasy, and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... walking by the river; Olive had not allowed him to come to the house with her, for his face was so radiant with the ecstasy of not having been discarded by her that she did not wish him to be seen. From her window Mrs. Easterfield saw this young man on his return from his promenade, and she knew it would not be many minutes before he would reach ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... poor, ineffectual; but her look, her breathless voice made up for their lack of originality. Once she said: "I never saw it so lovely before; it is an enchanted land!" with no suspicion that the larger part of her ecstasy arose from the presence of her young and sympathetic companion. He, too, responded to the beauty of the day, of the golden forest as one who had taken new hold ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... for? Why don't they move? Hark! A clatter and a cloud of dust by the market place, an ecstasy of cheers running in waves the length of the crowd. Make way for the dragoons! Here they come at last, four and four, the horses prancing and dancing and pointing quivering ears at the tossing sea of hats and parasols and ribbons. Maude Catherwood ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... domestic life is too intimate, too constant, is an important question. For the majority of people, after the first ecstasy of the bridal year, separate rooms might be better than a single chamber occupied together. There are people to whom one bed and one room is symbolic of their close unity, of their joined lives, who find comfort and companionship in the knowledge that their life partner sleeps beside them. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... Sometimes in lucid moments he thought he was like a place where there had once been a spring. 'There used to be a feeble spring of living water which flowed quietly from me and through me. That was true life, the time when she tempted me!' (He always thought with ecstasy of that night and of her who was now Mother Agnes.) She had tasted of that pure water, but since then there had not been time for it to collect before thirsty people came crowding in and pushing one another aside. And they ...
— Father Sergius • Leo Tolstoy
... row of golden tulips is nodding. They flutter their golden wings In a sudden ecstasy and say: Something comes to us from beyond, Out of the sky, beyond the hill We give it ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... as our zephyrs sing That they bring us in the Spring, Even as our bird grows musical in ecstasy of flight— We see the serpent crawl, With his slimy coat o'er all, And blended with the song is ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... put a small ring-case into the Antiquary's hands, which, when opened, was found to contain an antique ring of massive gold, with a cameo, most beautifully executed, bearing a head of Cleopatra. The Antiquary broke forth into unrepressed ecstasy, shook his nephew cordially by the hand, thanked him an hundred times, and showed the ring to his sister and niece, the latter of whom had the tact to give it sufficient admiration; but Miss Griselda (though she had the same affection for her nephew) had not ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Christopher's presence was still with her—his arm still enveloped her, his voice still spoke in her ears; and so rapt was the ecstasy in which she moved that it was with a positive shock that she found herself presently before the little area which led into the brick kitchen in the basement of the Hall. Here from the darkness her name ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... memories, he had been, in the hay-making time, delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an immense pile "(of haycock)," by his countrymen the victorious British "(boy next door and his two cousins)," and had been recognized with ecstasy by his affianced one "(Miss Green)," who had come all the way from England "(second house in the terrace)" to ransom and marry him. It was in this playing-field, too, as he has himself recorded, he first heard in confidence from one whose father was greatly connected, "being under government," ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... across the lawn; till, as if suddenly aware of being on holy ground, he paused, and stood with reverential aspect and clasped hands, eagerly bending towards her as if in adoration. Thus engaged, as stands in ecstasy some newly arrived pilgrim before a shrine, he stood enrapt; whilst she remained as moveless as a carved angel leaning over a cathedral aisle, and, with her eyes fixed on vacancy, at length mournfully exclaimed: "Sad, sad, so sad!—yet why am I so sad? No denser grows the ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... was pervaded with a sense of ecstasy that seemed to make all past pain and regret sink into utter insignificance. To stand there by her side, to drink in that wonderful beauty of face and form, was a joy that brought absolute forgetfulness of everything outside and apart from its new and magical ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... heiau, the service of the hula was not marred by the presence of groaning victims and bloody sacrifices. Instead we find the offerings to have been mostly rustic tokens, things entirely consistent with light-heartedness, joy, and ecstasy of devotion, as if to celebrate the fact that heaven had come down to earth and Pan, with all the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... the disturbance had now become terrible. Both sides were hard at it, and the Irishmen on the roof, rewarded at last for their long vigil, were yelling encouragement promiscuously and whooping with the unfettered ecstasy of men who are getting the treat of their lives without having paid a ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... an hour every thing was in readiness; and then Mary Anne, who had been sent up-stairs to announce the fact, came down in a most remarkable state of delighted agitation, suppressed ecstasy and amazement ...
— A Fair Barbarian • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thousand forms of opinions for each of which the same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant crawling with bare knees over the splintered rocks on Croagh Patrick, the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary, the Methodist in the spasmodic ecstasy of a revival, alike are conscious of emotions in themselves which correspond to their creed: the more passionate, or—as some would say—the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and more clear is the voice within. But these varieties are no embarrassment to the theologian. He finds no fault ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... not, like the Pistis Sophia, the product of declining Gnosticism, but dates from a period when Gnostic genius, like a mighty eagle, left the world behind it and soared in wide and ever wider circles towards pure light, towards pure knowledge, in which it lost itself in ecstasy. ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... and know nothing about a maiden's heart! In your ecstasy for this Ganymede, who is probably an old crippled monster, you make rare confusion. You force the young girl to play the part of the ardent lover, and give to your monster the character of a cool, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... for the flower-seller was wizened and unsteady of foot, and she had sent him spinning about in a dizzy fashion. She put out a steadying hand. "Oh . . . !" This time it was in ecstasy; she had spied the primroses in the basket just as the sunshine splashed over the edge of the corner building straight down upon them. Margaret MacLean dropped to one knee and laid her cheek against them. "The happy things—you can hear them laugh! I want all—all I can carry." She looked up ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... breaking In fancy's eyes o'er a poet's dream, Clad in the sunlight the waters glisten, And dazzling bright in the radiance gleam. Far and wide o'er the scene of grandeur My glad eyes wander, my heart beats high; Lost in a maze of light and wonder, I faint in a dream of ecstasy; And the spirit of beauty thou seem'st to me In that flood ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... into the vale whose giant domes and battlements had months before thrown their photographic shadow through Watkins's camera across the mysterious wide continent, causing exclamations of awe at Goupil's window, and ecstasy in Dr. Holmes's study. At Goupil's counter and in Starr King's drawing-room we had gazed on them by the hour already,—I, let me confess it, half a Thomas-a-Didymus to Nature, unwilling to believe the utmost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... thought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam. This little isthmus that we are now standing on is the point to which martyrs in their triumphant pain, prophets in their fervor, and poets in their ecstasy, looked forward as the golden future, as the land too good for them to behold with mortal eyes; it is the point toward which the faint-hearted and desponding hereafter will look back as the priceless ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... away in the grate—the cloth was already spread for supper—(remember it was in Germany)—the newspapers of the day were placed before me—and, in a word, every attention showed that I had found the true avenue to Antoine's good graces, who now stood bowing before me, in apparent ecstasy ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... growth of young birches and oak near the church. The Hills dwelt intermediate between the Bull's Head and the ecclesiastical establishment. The school and schoolmaster's house were behind the Bull. The show was surrounded by the children of the place, who looked on silent with ecstasy, while a burly showman piped his pipes and beat his drum. A couple of ostlers, with their shirt-sleeves rolled up to their shoulders, and one of them with a pail in his hand, stood arrested in their work. And in the front of the spectators was Alick Hudson, a sleepy-looking youth of twenty, who ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... discovered in the marble house the pleasing figures on a ten-pound note, Harry Hardwicke, striding up and down his room, in all the ecstasy of a happy lover, had kissed a hundred times a little silver card case—a mere school girl's poor treasure, but priceless now—for within it was a hastily severed tress of gold-brown hair, tied with a bit of blue ribbon. A scrap of paper ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... tragedy she has written in five acts and in verse. You will meet a good many of our celebrated literary men there. You must remember that the watchword at that house is, Admiration, more admiration, still more admiration. You must excite enthusiasm to ecstasy, compliments to lyrical poetry, and carry flattery to apotheosis. But before we go there I beg you to allow me to return your aristocratic breakfast by a poor literary man's dinner, which we will eat, not in Bignon's sumptuous private room, but outside the walls of Paris, at 'Uncle' Moulinon's, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... things set every one in a new place? We worked hard and we made it look lovely, if the things were old; and every now and then we stopped in the midst of a busy rush, at door or window, to see joyfully and exclaim with ecstasy how grandly and exquisitely Nature was furbishing up her beautiful old things also,—a million for one sweet touches outside, ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... hills, or rushing down the streets, to the horror of timid watchers, towards the cool spaces by the river. A shrill music, a laughter at all things, was everywhere. And the new spirit repaired even to church to take part in the novel offices of the Feast of Fools. Heads flung back in ecstasy—the morning sleep among the vines, when the fatigue of the night was over—dew-drenched garments—the serf lying at his ease at last: the artists, then so numerous at the place, caught what they could, something, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... shock of the water the blood whipped her skin; fatigue vanished through the crystal magic; shoulder-deep she waded, crimson-cheeked, then let herself drift, afloat, stretching out in ecstasy until every aching muscle thrilled ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... considered among the number of his early patrons. Mr. (afterwards Sir John) Dick, then the British Consul at Leghorn, and his lady, also treated him with great partiality, and procured for him the use of the Imperial baths. His mind being thus relieved from the restless ecstasy which he had suffered in Rome, and the intensity of interest being diminished by the circumscribed nature of the society of Leghorn, together with the bracing effects of sea-bathing, he was soon again in a condition to resume his study in the capital. But the same overpowering ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. When, on a summer evening, the resounding sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the 'Meseglise way' that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise of falling rain, the odour of ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... she handed them to Douglass, "I felt the full ecstasy of power when that picture was taken. In this I wore a new gown and a new hat, and I was earning fifty dollars at each reading. My success fairly bewildered me; but oh, wasn't it glorious! I took mother out of a tenement and put her in a lovely little home. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... wandering bark upon whose pathway shone All stars of heaven except the guiding one! Again she smiled, nay, much and brightly smiled, But 'twas a lustre, strange, unreal, wild; And when she sung to her lute's touching strain, 'Twas like the notes, half ecstasy, half pain, The bulbul[44] utters ere her soul depart, When, vanquisht by some minstrel's powerful art, She dies upon the lute whose sweetness ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Soliloquy on Life and Destiny, which each repetition invested with new meaning and beauty. What player has ever surpassed his poetic conception of Schumann's Papillons, or the Chopin Nocturnes, which he made veritable dream poems of love and ecstasy. What listener has ever forgotten the tremendous power and titanic effect of the Liszt Rhapsodies, especially No. 2? When Paderewski first came to us, in the flush of his young manhood, he taught us what a noble instrument the piano really is in the hands of a consummate master. He ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... that; when Kitty's head is on my shoulder, I am not capable of any consecutive train of thought. When she puts it there I see stars, then myriads of stars, then, oh! I can't begin to enumerate the steps by which ecstasy mounts to delirium; but, at all events, any operation which demands exclusive use of the intellect is beyond me at these times. Still, I gathered my stray wits ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... procession. Perhaps it may have penetrated, even, to the group upon the float; for, at that moment, the great chief, Red Bull—kinsman to the sitting variety—turned and shook his tomahawk in the direction of the group of boys. Little Tim squealed in an ecstasy of ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... exultant. The professor's linen duster had acquired several of those triangular rents which have the merit of being beyond masculine repair, and may therefore be conscientiously endured. He sat on the camp-chair at Palmerston's tent door, his finger-tips together and his head thrown back in an ecstasy of content. ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... is twin-born with true love. Breathless from our kisses, when presently we released each other, she stood in a glorious rapture, like a white spirit in the moonlight, and as her lovely, starlit eyes seemed to devour me, she spoke in a languorous ecstasy: ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... is never at a loss for a smooth lie or delicious sophism to justify inaction, and, in our day, has rationalized it into a philosophy of the mind, and idealized it into a school of poetry, and organized it into a "hospital of incapables." It promises you the still ecstasy of a divine repose, while it lures you surely down into the vacant dulness of inglorious sloth. It provides a primrose path to stagnant pools, to an Arcadia of thistles, and a Paradise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... be conveyed the five miles from the nearest town up a steep hill? Latin, French, English, German, failed to make me understand the situation. At last I took in the Pfarrer's meaning. I was to send it by the milkman after leaving it at a certain hotel. "Ja," I cried in an ecstasy of joy, at last grasping his meaning, "Ja, ich mittam der Gepaeck von der milkman." I arrived the next day. I found the Pfarrer knew Latin, Greek (but he pronounces both quite differently from me), German, French, ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... still believe; I pray and recite the Lord's Prayer with ecstasy. I am very fond of being in church, where the pure and simple piety moves me deeply in the lucid moments when I inhale the odour of God. I even have devotional fits, and I believe that they will last, for piety is of value even when it is merely psychological. It has a moralising effect ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... in a perfect ecstasy of madness. It was delightful to be alone. He could give his soul full vent. He knew he was mad. He knew he ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... master of my destiny. Beyond meadow and cornfield to right and left gloomed woods, remote and full of mystery, in whose enchanted twilight elves and fairies might have danced or slender dryads peeped and sported. Thus walked I in an ecstasy, scanning with eager eyes the novel beauties around me, my mind full of the poetic imaginations conjured up by the magic of this midsummer night, so that I yearned to paint it, or set it to music, or write it into adequate words; and knowing this beyond me, I fell ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... whom he mentions in one of his writings. The Indians made their appearance in grand costume, hideously painted and besmeared. In the course of the visit Goldsmith made one of the chiefs a present, who, in the ecstasy of his gratitude, gave him an embrace that left his face well bedaubed ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... way, very probable, very probable. For habits like those must set themselves deep in the very core of the system, don't you think, Colonel? If this woman, now, was descended from a whole line of ancestresses, who had all been trained for their work into a sort of ecstatic fervour, the ecstasy and all that went with it must have ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... and to his own satisfaction, fixed the child's attention on the morbid and over-sensitive workings of her own heart, the good and truly kind-hearted man dismissed her with a fatherly benediction. But where was the joyous ecstasy of that beautiful Sabbath morning of a year ago? Where was that heavenly friend? Yet was not this as it should be, and might not God leave her "to make herself as miserable as she had ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... a choice among these. Her aunt's favorites, beside "China," already mentioned, were "Bangor," which the worthy old New England clergyman so admired that he actually had the down-east city called after it, and "Windsor," and "Funeral Hymn." But Myrtle was in no mood for these. She let off her ecstasy in "Balerma," and "Arlington," and "Silver Street," and at last in that most riotous of devotional hymns, which sounds as if it had been composed by a saint who had a cellar under his chapel,—"Jordan." So she let her wild spirits run loose; and then a tenderer feeling ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... lily-like grace, so pure, so exquisite, that they did indeed seem to be the very essence and spirit of the flower. And now began another of those fantastic movements which Phil had before witnessed. Now in wreaths, now apart, and again in couples, they swayed about in an ecstasy of mirth, and the wind harp gave out strains of wild and melodious sound. They nodded to each other in their glee, and Phil could hardly tell whether they really were fairies or flowers, for they looked just as the flowers might when blown ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... of his existence to save the life of that other, stronger than he. And was not this his lucky day? He felt in him the strength of a giant. Yes, he would stop those terrible hoofs until his friend could get free. And in an ecstasy of confidence he threw himself like a shield ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... king Mithradates had once come forward as the liberator of the Hellenes, if he had introduced his rule with the recognition of civic independence and with remission of taxes, they had after this brief ecstasy been but too rapidly and too bitterly undeceived. He had very soon emerged in his true character, and had begun to exercise a despotism far surpassing the tyranny of the Roman governors—a despotism which drove even the patient inhabitants of Asia ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of the world," he added in a kind of ecstasy, to which I made no response, for this was too preposterous. Nearing the place our train passed an immense hoarding erected by the roadway, a score of feet high, I should say, and at least a dozen times as long, upon which was emblazoned in ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Juliana, clasping her hands in ecstasy. "I will give a party for the sole purpose of drinking tea out of this machine; and I will have the whole room fitted up like an Indian temple. Oh! it will be so new! I die to send out my cards. The Duchess of B——- told me the other day, with such ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... in his life before, lifted Billy to his shoulder and trotted up and down the room. "Nice little boy!" he laughed, Billy's damp fists hitting at him in ecstasy. "I'll just take him to the sitting-room while you finish your dinner." He did his best to pretend that the situation was not unusual, to act as if, in his own home, a man could be nothing but at home. All these ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... crossed upon his breast, the King of Naples looked like one of those aged anchorites who spend their lives in mortifying the flesh, and whose souls, absorbed in heavenly contemplation, glide insensibly from out their last ecstasy into eternal bliss. Some time he lay thus with closed eyes, putting up a silent prayer to God; then he bade them light the spacious room as for a great solemnity, and gave a sign to the two persons who stood, one at the head, the other at the foot of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... alone, lost in a magic garden, but she forgot all in this new revelation of her companion's strange belief. She turned and ran across the lawn, crying as she went, "Follow me, follow me!" and Gilian, all the ecstasy of that lingering moment on the edge of fancy gone, ran after her, feeling himself a child of dream, and her ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... ridges; none the less he and Patsey plunged together over the stony rampart of the field in time to see Negress and Lily springing through the furze in kangaroo leaps, while they uttered long squeals of ecstasy. The rest of the pack, with a confidence gained in many a successful riot, got to them as promptly as if six Whips were behind them, and the whole faction plunged into a little wood on the top of what ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... she must be at the theatre by seven o'clock. Yet she had returned to gaze at the unconscious poet, lulled to sleep in bliss; she could not drink too deeply of this love that rose to rapture, drawing close the bond between the heart and the senses, to steep both in ecstasy. For in that apotheosis of human passion, which of those that were twain on earth that they might know bliss to the full creates one soul to rise to love in heaven, lay Coralie's justification. Who, moreover, would not have found excuse in Lucien's more than human ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... that led him past woods in whose green twilight thrushes and blackbirds piped, by sunny meadows where larks mounted heavenward in an ecstasy of song, and so, eventually he found himself in a road where stood a weather-beaten finger-post, with its two arms wide-spread ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... enforced it; and we know that only the man that forged with clenched teeth after Atalanta, tenderly hungry for all her uncaptured whiteness, brutally driving the pace till her heart burst in her side if need be, tasted the supremest ecstasy of the fighting that lifts us that one tantalising step above the savage—the fight for joy. I am convinced that it is after some one of those red glimpses that a certain proportion of us every year of the world's ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... convent at Paris, she was misled by the poetry of Catholicism, and abandoned herself to the highest transports of religious fervor. She passed whole hours in ecstasy at the foot of the altar. This shows the susceptibility of her imagination. About this time her grandmother died, and she left the convent to close the eyes of her much-loved grandparent. She returned, with the full determination of becoming religious. All the ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... though I had spoken softly, she dropped the pen, rose and, clasping hands to bosom, uttered a scream, though sweetly modulated and extremely ladylike. Then we were in each other's arms and she was weeping and laughing over me in a very ecstasy of welcome. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... The outdoor pair may not look so sentimental as the artistic couple; but their hearts may be as tender and their love as true, though their hands meet over the mending of a tyre or the finding of a tennis ball instead of being clasped in the ecstasy born of sweet sounds. ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... than did the savages lay open the treasures of the caches. Blankets and robes, brass trinkets and blue beads were drawn forth with chuckling exultation, and long strips of scarlet cloth produced yells of ecstasy. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... in a black satin box, a splendid diamond necklace, and her heart began to beat with boundless desire. Her hands trembled as she took it. She fastened it around her throat, over her high-necked dress, and stood lost in ecstasy as ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... city. The senate thought them both extravagant, and not well in their safe senses; for the design of Metellus seemed to be mere rage and frenzy, out of excess of mischief bringing all things to ruin and confusion, and Cato's virtue looked like a kind of ecstasy of contention in the cause of what was good ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... producer of synthetic drugs; transit point for US-bound ecstasy; source of precursor chemicals for South American cocaine processors; transshipment point for cocaine, heroin, hashish, and marijuana entering ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
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