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More "Mystic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dead and the dying. He walked on—slowly and mechanically back to the scene of the overwhelming cataclysm where all his hopes lay irretrievably buried. He walked on—majestic as he had never been before, in the brilliant throne-room of the Tuileries or the mystic vastness of Notre Dame when the Imperial crown sat so ill upon his plebeian head. . . . He walked on—silent, exalted and great—great through the ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... do not mean that St. John does not trouble about historical accuracy. His history is often more minute than that of the Synoptists. But his purpose is to bring his readers into deeper life through union with the God who is in Christ and is Christ. The true mystic ever desires to maintain the knowledge of this inward union in life with God. It is a knowledge which is made possible by obedience, made perfect by love, and causes not new ecstasies, but a new character. St. John adjusts all his material to this one ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... if you plan it, he Changes organity With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity - Driving your foes to the verge of insanity. Barring tautology, In demonology, 'Lectro biology, Mystic nosology, Spirit philology, High class astrology, Such is his knowledge, he Isn't the man to require an apology Oh! My name is JOHN WELLINGTON WELLS, I'm a dealer in magic and spells, In blessings and curses, And ever-filled purses - In prophecies, witches, and knells. ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... soil for tribal instincts and passions. The passionate loves and hatreds of the clans, their pride of race, their deathless lealty; and more than all, and better than all, their religious instincts, faiths and prejudices; these, with the mystic, wild loveliness of heather-clad hill and rock-rimmed loch, of roaring torrent and jagged crags, of lonely muir and sunny pasture nuiks; all these, and ten thousand nameless and unnamable things united ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... perhaps, unwilling in his own person to attest at once the rival powers of a sham prophecy and a real American bullet, he prudently took a position on an adjacent eminence; and, when the action began, he entered upon the performance of certain mystic rites, at the same time singing a war-song. In the course of the engagement, he was informed that his men were falling: he told them to fight on,—it would soon be as he had predicted; and then, in louder and wilder strains, his inspiring battle-song was heard commingling ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... foolishest love of Ornament, what have they not become! Increased Security and pleasurable Heat soon followed: but what of these? Shame, divine Shame (Schaam, Modesty), as yet a stranger to the Anthropophagous bosom, arose there mysteriously under Clothes; a mystic grove-encircled shrine for the Holy in man. Clothes gave us individuality, distinctions, social polity; Clothes have made Men of us; they are threatening to make Clothes-screens ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... sudden "Haw" and a fresh basin of magnificent primeval forest would open before the travellers. And so the unending ocean of mountain rollers and forest troughs continued. No variation, save from the dead white of the open snowfields to the heavy shadows of the forest. Always the strange, mystic grey twilight; the dazzling sparkle of glinting snow; the biting air which stung the flesh like the sear of a red-hot iron; the steady run of dogs and men. On, on, with no thought of time to harass the mind, only ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... was inspired, and from him came, As from the Pythian's mystic cave of yore, Those oracles which set the world in flame, Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more: Did he not this for France, which lay before Bowed to the inborn tyranny of years? Broken and trembling to the yoke she bore, Till by the voice of him and his compeers Roused up ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... Viking's raven Made that mystic spot his rest; Year by year within the eyot Brooded he as on a nest; And no man would ever venture To invade the lone domain Where in solitary scheming The grim ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... reference to 'something well known' thus suits the highest Self very well; and also the clause which denotes immediate perception ('is seen') appears quite suitable, since the highest Self is directly intuited by persons practising mystic concentration of ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... the wisdom that is eternal, the wisdom in instinct, than themselves. There is always something sacred about children. And he had never lost the sense of it amid the dust of his worldly knowledge. But about these children, about them or within them, there floated, perhaps, something that was mystic, something that was awful and must not be disturbed. Hermione did not feel it. How could she? He himself had withheld from her for many years the only knowledge that could have made her share his present feeling. He could tell her nothing. Yet he could not ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Osiris, King of Egypt, was credited with the invention of writing and hieroglyphics, the drawing up of the laws of the Egyptians, and the origination of many sciences and arts. The Alexandrian school ascribed to him the mystic learning which it amplified; and the scholars of the Middle Ages regarded with enthusiasm and reverence the works attributed to him — notably a treatise on the ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... major already in the hands of an inspector, who was passing all his pieces after carelessly looking into one: the official who received the declarations on board had noted a Grand Army button like his own in the major's lapel, and had marked his fellow-veteran's paper with the mystic sign which procures for the bearer the honor of being promptly treated as a smuggler, while the less favored have to wait longer for this indignity at the hands of their government. When March's own inspector came he was as civil and lenient ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... artistic, Talk a jargon new and strange? Will this feeling, subtle, mystic, Even reach the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 25, 1893 • Various
... secluded cove, in which the sea-maids once had played, no doubt, Marjory and Coleman sat in silence. He was below her, and if he looked at her he had to turn his glance obliquely upward. She was staring at the sea with woman's mystic gaze, a gaze which men at once reverence and fear since it seems to look into the deep, simple heart of nature, and men begin to feel that their petty wisdoms are futile to control these strange spirits, as wayward as ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... Indians were afraid to lay hands upon these dealers in death. Awe held them back from wreaking their sinister designs upon the fearless men who went as ever into the pestilential tepees, that through the mystic drop and sign they might rescue the poor victims from an ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... let Madame de Rambouliet p-ss on.- -And, ye fair mystic nymphs! go each one PLUCK YOUR ROSE, and scatter them in your path,—for Madame de Rambouliet did no more.— I handed Madame de Rambouliet out of the coach; and had I been the priest of the chaste Castalia, I could not have served at her fountain ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... as elsewhere, positively profess themselves to be, a small association of talismanic characters, fraught with such magical and potential influence, in favour of the possessor, that the slightest glance of this mystic charm no sooner saluted the eye of a Sicilian or Neapolitan governor, than he was incapable of regarding any other object except what the bearer presented to his dazzled view, or of hearing any other injunction ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... involuntarily leaned forward; an audible gasp of awe and shrinking, as all instinctively drew back before the sight that confronted them. Across the Prophet's breast, in marks of a cruel laceration, ran the symbolic octagonal figure of the Mystic sect. ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... that life which your love had taught me to prize, I had recourse to means which I trembled at employing. You remember that night which I past in St. Clare's Sepulchre? Then was it that, surrounded by mouldering bodies, I dared to perform those mystic rites which summoned to my aid a fallen Angel. Judge what must have been my joy at discovering that my terrors were imaginary: I saw the Daemon obedient to my orders, I saw him trembling at my frown, and found that, instead of selling my soul to a Master, my courage had purchased ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the mystic regulation Of our dark Association, Ere you open conversation With another kindred soul, You must eat a ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... and imagined herself back in her cruel times. He learned a few things about that mystic period she would never disclose. And he was glad that she had never told him more. He fled from her, for eavesdropping on a delirium has something of the contemptible quality of ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... again, and not visible from the garden below, stood a temple of the "Shingon" sect, the most mystic of the old esoteric Buddhist forms. To the rear of this the broad, low, rectangular buildings of a nunnery, gray and old as the temple itself brooded among high hedges of the sacred mochi tree. This retreat had been famous for centuries throughout Japan. More than ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt, as you first caught sight of that coy, retired place,—surely nothing could happen there, without its full accompaniment of thought or reverie. White-nights! so you might interpret its old Latin name.* "The red rose came first," says a quaint German mystic, speaking of "the mystery of so-called white things," as being "ever an after-thought—the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material—the white queen, the white witch, the white mass, which, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... the two together, and we discoursed on the mystic ways of women, omitting all reference, as men do, to the exceptional paragon of femininity who reigned in our respective hearts. Perhaps we did a foolish thing in thus abandoning saint and hungry convert to their sympathetic intercourse. The saint could hold her own; ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... hence the Hesperides, daughters of the Western Star, had the task of watching the golden apples planted by the goddess Hera in the garden of the gods, on the other side of the river Oceanus. One of the labors of Hercules was to fetch three of those mystic apples for the king of Mycenae. The poet Euripides thus refers to the Gardens of the West, when the Chorus wish to fly "over the ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... as the ghost of buried Denmark But you shall be satisfied. I swear by the mystic gridiron of the fraternity, and by the legs thereof, of which the images are Beelzebub, Mohammed, Johannes Secundus, and so forth—nay, by that memorable volume, so revered in the eyes of the club, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... discoveries of GALILEO was felt almost more in the moral than in the scientific world. The mystic number of the planets was broken up by the introduction of four satellites to Jupiter. That Venus emulated the phases of our moon, overthrew superstition and seated the Copernican theory firmly. The discovery of "an innumerable ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... their thrones were mystic characters engraved, symbol after symbol, line below line—the ancient wisdom of the Egyptians, wherein Moses the man of God was learned of old—why should not he know it too? What awful secrets might not be hidden there about the ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... one of these cutting-exhibitions, Emma was likely to be not quite her usual brisk self. A mystic glow replaced the alert brightness of her eye. Her wide-awake manner gave way to one of ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... fountain of the pre-Socratic philosophy, to whose ancient sages thought had still presented itself with sensuous vividness. The researches of physical science—which, suitably treated, afford even now so excellent a handle for mystic delusion and pious sleight of hand, and in antiquity with its more defective insight into physical laws lent themselves still more easily to such objects—played in this case, as may readily be conceived, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... day what he had seen a couple of Chinamen do in a Californian garden. They had a flower-bed to plant, about forty feet long; and each a basket of seedlings to plant it with, and a slip of wood for a model, with mystic unintelligible signs inscribed thereon: WELCOME HOME in English capitals. One went to one end of the bed and the other to the other, and they began their planting. They made no measurements or calculations; used no rod or line; but just worked ahead till they met in the middle. When that ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... more;—the heart is torn By views of woe we cannot heal; Long shall I see these things forlorn, And oft again their griefs shall feel, As each upon the mind shall steal; That wan projector's mystic style, That lumpish idiot leering by, That peevish idler's ceaseless wile, And that poor maiden's half-form'd smile, While struggling for the full-drawn sigh! - ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... their unknown God by the sacrifice of every moral virtue. There were many who pretended to confess or to relate the ceremonies of this abhorred society. It was asserted, "that a new-born infant, entirely covered over with flour, was presented, like some mystic symbol of initiation, to the knife of the proselyte, who unknowingly inflicted many a secret and mortal wound on the innocent victim of his error; that as soon as the cruel deed was perpetrated, the sectaries drank up the blood, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... was never more to see, While yet his heart was planning his return, Short, sharp and swift the message came, and he Passed to his long home o'er the mystic bourne. ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... the lamps are beginning to burn dimly. It is already twelve o'clock. Twelve strokes from the hall beneath fall upon Tita's ear as she goes hurriedly towards her own room. It is the midnight hour, the mystic hour, when ghosts ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... a Cambridge graduate and Catholic mystic, concludes his poem, The Flaming Heart, with this ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of New England the militia and volunteers poured in, and in three days after the fight, twenty thousand armed men were encamped between the rivers Mystic and Roxburgh, thus besieging Boston. They at once set to work throwing up formidable earthworks, the English troops remaining within their intrenchments across the neck of land ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... the expiration. Both seasons have their equinoxes, both their filmy, hazy air, their ruddy forest tints, their cold rains, their drenching fogs, their mystic moons; both have the same solar light and warmth, the same rays of the sun; yet, after all, how different the feelings which they inspire! One is the morning, the other the evening; one is ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... utility may compel the poor human being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his Babylon of abstractions. Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside. The mystic can live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and those of ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... from the section of one of the metropolitan journals which carries a host of such advertisements as "spirit medium," "psychic palmist," "yogi mediator," "magnetic influences," "crystal gazer," "astrologer," "trance medium," and the like. At once I thought of the sallow, somewhat mystic countenance of Dudley, and the idea flashed, half-formed, in my mind that somehow this clue, together with the purchase of the book on clairvoyance, might prove ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... and suited the gesture to the word. He seized the Eagle and advanced a step and those who watched him so keenly noticed how he trembled. It was to him as if the Emperor were there again. Some mystic aura of his mighty presence seemed to overhang the ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... adapted for the exposition of his thoughts contribute to the difficulty of obtaining a methodical view of Bruno's philosophy. It has, therefore, been disputed whether he was a pantheist or an atheist, a materialist or a spiritualist, a mystic or an agnostic. No one would have contended more earnestly than Bruno himself, that the sage can hold each and all of these apparent contradictions together, with the exception of atheism; which last is a simple impossibility. The fragmentary and impassioned exposition which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... walked through the park, she was conscious—for the first time perhaps—of a certain alloy mixed with her gladness. Yet she loved him—oh, yes! just, just as much as ever. The halo of romance with which she had framed in his mystic personality was in no way dimmed, but in a sense she almost feared him, for at times his muffled voice sounded singularly vehement, and his words betrayed the uncontrolled ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... ways, and all who are interested in it must see to it that their religion does not escape control and wreck fraternity. Even mystic prayer and contemplation, which is commonly regarded as the flower of religious life, may make ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... and sands, seen through the netting of tree branches, were like sweet bursts of laughter in the forests; and the glory of the heather was a wordless song in praise of Scotland. Yet in these flying Galloway landscapes there was an impression of the mystic and melancholy, which reminded Sir S. of "The Twilight of the Gods": strange purple rocks jutting out into water coldly bright as a sheet of mercury, and desolate islands remote and haunted as the place where Gunter and his sister lived in the opera. ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of heart; not so am I; For mine is tender, soft, compassionate, And its delight is doing good to all. In the dim caverns of the gloomy Dis, Where, tracing mystic lines and characters, My soul abideth now, there came to me The sorrow-laden plaint of her, the fair, The peerless Dulcinea del Toboso. I knew of her enchantment and her fate, From high-born dame to peasant ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... grant of land made by the company, after it had got fairly under way, was of six hundred acres to Governor Winthrop, on the 6th of September, 1631, "near his house at Mystic." The next was to the deputy-governor, Thomas Dudley, on the 5th of June, 1632, of two hundred acres "on the west side of Charles River, over against the new town," now Cambridge. The next, on the 3d of July, 1632, was three hundred acres to John Endicott. It is described, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... the task of building a splendid chapel (within the precincts of his palace), begun in 1245, and finished three years later, immediately after which the king set out on his Crusade. The monument breathes throughout the ecstatic piety of the mystic king; it was consecrated in 1248, in the name of the Holy Crown and the Holy Cross, by Eudes de Chateauroux, Bishop of Tusculum and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... will gain At last my triumph over thy disdain. This lofty mountain nigh, Raised to the star-lit palace of the sky, And this dark cavern's gloom, Of two that live, so long the dismal tomb, Are the rough school wherein From magic art its mystic lore I win, And such perfection reach That I can now my mighty master teach. Seeing, that on this day, since I came here The sun completes its course from sphere to sphere, I from my prison cell come forth to view What in the light ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... woman of distinguished manner, with a somewhat oval face and small, delicate features, overcast at times with a shade of melancholy. She had a somewhat distant manner which she redeemed by a gesture of charming welcome, or a gracious phrase. She was pious, but without bigotry, a mystic whose religion was that of St. John, all gentleness and impulse. She read Swedenborg, St. Martin, and Jacob Boehm. She had an ardent and untrammelled imagination, but her character was firm. Her decisions were promptly taken and she knew how ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... feels in the hallowed precincts of a mediaeval temple. The grandeur and mystery of the world throw him into a kind of enchantment: his own soul and that of the universe touch and commune with each other. In his rapt verses we feel some of that mystic thrill felt by a devotee in the open sanctuary of the Almighty. No man ever interpreted Nature in such inspired strains as William Wordsworth. What supremely delights the lover of scenery is that this poet's muse can overwrap the exact and detailed ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... geographical limitation was always important and was one cause of the spread of the decentralized and democratic Baptist faith among the slaves. At the same time, the visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their mystic temperament. To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in membership among Negroes, and has a million and a half communicants. Next in popularity came the churches organized in connection with the ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... should ask the Amulet about that. It's a dangerous thing, trying to live in a time that's not your own. You can't breathe an air that's thousands of centuries ahead of your lungs without feeling the effects of it, sooner or later. Prepare the mystic circle and consult ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... the same; And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame; Live here, great heart; and love, and die, and kill; And bleed, and wound, and yield, and conquer still. Let this immortal life where'er it comes Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms. Let mystic deaths wait on't; and wise souls be The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee. O sweet incendiary! show here thy art, Upon this carcase of a hard cold heart; Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... who read Rabelais and love him, one can offer no better wish than that the mystic wine of his Holy Bottle may fulfil their heart's desire. Happy, indeed, those who are not "unwillingly drawn" by the "Fate" we all must follow! "Go now, my friends," says the strange Priestess, "and may that Circle whose Centre is everywhere and its Circumference ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... like a jewel; Ten heads,—though I sometimes count more; Six mouths that are cubic and cruel; Of mixed arms and legs, twenty-four; Descending in Symbolic glories Of lissome triangles and squares; Oh, mystic and subtle Dolores, Our ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... compass and the opening-up of the Western hemisphere made it possible for the poor to escape from European masters whom they were unable to vanquish; and that the cheapness of books was linking the minds of the masses to the sources of learning and of religious tradition. It cannot but excite our mystic wonder that for nearly one hundred thousand years every new mastery of man over physical Nature was such that it inevitably played into the hands of rulers by strengthening their monopoly of initiative; and that then, at last, and ever since the fifteenth century after Christ, each new mechanical ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... souls who came here 40 years ago are fast passing away across the Mystic River, and those who trod on foot the hot and dusty trail are giving way to those who come in swiftly rolling palace cars, and who hardly seem to give a thought to the difference between then and now. Those who came early cleared the way and started the great stream ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... beckoned to the scarecrow, throwing so much magnetic potency into her gesture, that it seemed as if it must inevitably be obeyed, like the mystic call of the loadstone, when it summons ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... retreat during the beautiful Spring days. If it depended only on me, how soon should I be there beside you! But to the Six Campaigns there is a Seventh to be added, and will soon open; either because the Number 7 had once mystic qualities, or because in the Book of Fate from all eternity the"—... "Jesuits banished from France? Ah, yes:—hearing of that, I made my bit of plan for them [mean to have my pick of them as schoolmasters in Silesia here]; and am waiting ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that she was swayed by a pure and mystic passion. De Seze, on the other hand, believed this mystic passion to be genuine love. Coming to visit her at Nohant, he was revolted by the clownish husband with whom she lived. It gave him an esthetic shock to see that she had borne children to this boor. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... this delightful verification of travellers' tales; she could afford to hold all that in reserve. But just to-day, just at this moment, she only wanted to watch the slender prow, skimming the wonderful opaline waters, drawing ever nearer to those mystic islands floating over yonder like a dream within a dream. She wondered vaguely at May's vivid alertness; for her sister, claiming the privilege of youth, was enjoying the freedom of the gondola, perching here and there as her ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... Incorporated, it would not be Bonbright Foote VII who was master. It would be an automaton, a continuation of other automatons.... It is said the Dalai Lama is perpetual, always the same, never changing from age to age. A fiction maintained by a mystic priesthood supplying themselves secretly with fresh Dalai Lama material as needful—with a symbol to hold in awe the ignorance of their religionists.... Bonbright saw that he was expected to be ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... four years had wrought in him. He remembered only that Duggan had been his friend, that a hundred times they had sat together in the quiet glow of long evenings, telling tales of the great river they both loved. And always Duggan's stories had been of that mystic paradise hidden away in the western mountains—the river's end, the paradise of golden lure, where the Saskatchewan was born amid towering peaks, and where Duggan—a long time ago—had quested for the treasure which he knew was hidden somewhere there. ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... the speculations of human reason.[7] The biographer of Frederick apparently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will, tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is a vast difference between this and the absolutism of the mystic. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... eyes two spirits dwell, The sweetest and the purest That ever wove Love's mystic spell, Or plied his arts the surest: No smile of morn, Though heaven-born, Nor sunshine earthward straying, E'er charmed the sight With half the light That round thy ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... a mystic and lived in the ideal. This deeply religious quality in his nature led him into theology, and he became ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the light that shone On Mohammed's uplifted crescent, On many a royal gilded throne And deed forgotten in the present; He saw the age of sacred trees And Druid groves and mystic larches; And saw from forest domes like these The builder bring his ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... die like a lady! I will not feast like a vampire on her dead body, nor shall you. You have other vials in the casket of better hue and flavor. What is this?" continued Angelique, taking out a rose-tinted and curiously-twisted bottle sealed on the top with the mystic pentagon. "This looks prettier, and may be not less sure than the milk of mercy in its effect. What ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... as one of the household. Once or twice, the week after the funeral, he came in the evening, and asked for a cup of tea. Then Catherine sat by and dozed while Esther talked mysticism with Hazard, who was himself a mystic of the purest water. By this time Esther had learned to look on the physical life, the daily repetition of breakfast and dinner, as the unreal part of existence, and apologized to herself for conceding so much to habit, or put it down to Catherine's account. Her illusions were not ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... at the present day after escaping revolutions and earthquakes, is a true Bethel, one of those rare spots in the world on which rests the mystic ladder which joins heaven to earth; there were dreamed some of the noblest dreams which have soothed the pains of humanity. It is not to Assisi in its marvellous basilica that one must go to divine and comprehend St. Francis; he ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... for my priests—my priests in their linen robes, with great harps, carrying along a mystic skiff ornamented with paterae of silver. No more feasts on the lakes! no more illuminations in my Delta! no more cups of milk at Philae! For a long time Apis has ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... loved, whom she has never seen, than of any number of attractive rivals. In the blind adoration which he yields her, she takes no thought of immediate defection, for her smile always makes him happy—her voice never loses its mystic ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... thereby Unto the All draw nigh? Shall it avail to plumb the mystic deeps Of flowery beauty, scale the icy steeps Of perilous thought, thy hidden Face to find, Or tread the starry paths to the utmost verge of the sky? Nay, groping dull and blind Within the sheltering dimness of thy wings— ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... has been mistaken for the writing of Mr. Martineau; but (as clearly as reviews ever speak on such subjects) it is intimated in the opening that this new article is from a new hand, "at the risk of revealing division of persons and opinions within the limits of the mystic critical We." Who is the author, I do not know; nor can I make a likely guess at any one who was in more than ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... watered the stocks, and finally took up the crystal and looked into it with awe, wondering why the Cobbler could see so much, and she only the distorted reflection of her own face. So interested, however, for once, did she become in the inspection of this mystic globe, that she did not notice the dawn pass into broad daylight, nor hear a voice at the door below,—nor, in short, take into cognition the external world, till a heavy tread shook the floor, and then, starting, she beheld the Remorseless Baron, with a face black enough to have darkened the crystal ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... many things. It seemed to her as if all earth breathed of love; that she was the nucleus around which all flowers and perfume and everything beautiful revolved. And now she was about to open a mystic shrine, into which she would step and see and know and feel with youth's ecstasy a strange development of essential existence. And after wondering and speculating upon the affairs of love, she entered into prayerful thought ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... laid on the sand, and he knew that it was a hen bird, for he saw the male fly to the net, and tear the meshes one by one with its beak, until it had made an opening by which its mate could escape. The holy man watched this incident, and as, by virtue of his holiness, he easily comprehended the mystic sense of all occurrences, he knew that the captive bird was no other than Thais, caught in the snares of sin, and that—like the plover that had cut the hempen threads with its beak—he could, by pronouncing the word of power, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... huge chart on which all the eighty or so elements were arranged in eight groups or octaves and twelve series. Selecting one, he placed his finger on the letters "Au," Under which was written the number, 197.2. I wondered what the mystic letters and ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... a distance out into the floor of the desert there was bunch grass, mesquite, and greasewood, where the cattle might find grazing for the night. Beyond the stretch of grass spread the dead, gray dust, of the desert, desolate in the filmy, mystic haze ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... we sleep these spirits wander off for a brief space on their own mystic errands, and their doings are mirrored in our dreams. Hence the strong and abiding belief of the Manbo in dreams. These strange companions of man have no material wants yet they lead an insecure existence, exposed, as they are, to the insidious attacks of the common foes of mortals. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... the currents of the sea their round in the wonderful system of inter-oceanic circulation. There the aurora borealis is lighted up, and the trembling needle brought to rest, and there, too, in the mazes of that mystic circle, terrestrial forces of occult power, and vast influence upon the well-being of men, are continually at play.... Noble daring has made Arctic ice and waters classic ground. It is no feverish excitement nor vain ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... after all, once she remembered to take off her glasses. The worst quarter-hour when, though the roads were an amethyst rich to the artist, they were also a murkiness exasperating to the driver, yet still too light to be thrown into relief by the lamps. The mystic moment when night clicked tight, and the lamps made a fan of gold, and Claire and her father settled down to plodding content—and no longer had to take the trouble ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... Although Om, in its original sense as a word of solemn or emphatic assent, is, properly speaking, restricted to the Vedic literature, it deserves notice that it is now-a-days often used by the natives of India in the sense of "yes," without, of course, any allusion to the mystic properties which are ascribed to it in the religious works. Monier Williams gives the following account of the mystic syllable Om: "When by means of repeating the syllable Om, which originally seems ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Anti—with an i; and played ponderously on this quip. In Druidism, he observed—I am sure I cannot think why, but it was his hobby—you had a remarkable foreshadowing of Christianity; the idea of the human sacrifice, the Atonement, the Communion of Saints, the mystic Vine, which he clumsily identified with the mistletoe, and what not else. He read portions of his privately-published Tales of Taliessin. In short such happiness radiated from his pink-cheeked face and recovered eyes that ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... and restless circumstance which chanced to occur as its revelator. Then the day uprises as if conscious of his inner life and purpose. Then she gives him breadth after breadth of color, within which is traced her no longer mystic alphabet. How significant are the forms she gives him for the foreground, sweet monosyllables! There are pansies, and rue, and violets, and rosemary. Among these and their companions children walk and learn, and to the child-man, the artist to be, she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... either with his feet or his tongue. In the haze that lay between him and Bangs, the man of the robe seemed to tower and to take on a mystic dignity which had been lacking in the candid light of day. After the silence had continued for some time Bangs spoke again. His new manner showed that his eyes had been reprimanding his tongue. "Excuse me! I didn't mean ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... look from the holiest personages, that is, if we may assume that a monk is such as a matter of course. Certainly we have a right to take it for granted that the late Pope, Pius Ninth, was an eminently holy man, and yet he had the name of dispensing the mystic and dreaded jettatura as well as his blessing. If Maurice Kirkwood carried that destructive influence, so that his clear blue eyes were more to be feared than the fascinations of the deadliest serpent, it could easily be understood why he kept ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to do with this war? asks the practical man, who is the greatest mystic of all, contemptuously. Well, they have everything to do with it. For if we had understood some peace theories a little better a generation or two ago, if we had not allowed passion and error and prejudice instead of reason to dominate our policy, the sum of misery ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... ludicrous, that you forgot the classic griffin in the grotesque conception of the Italian artist. Here was a gibbering monkey, there a grinning pulcinello; now you viewed a chattering devil, which might have figured in the "Temptation of St. Anthony;" and now a mournful, mystic, bearded countenance, which might have flitted in the back scene ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... light that lingers in her eyes— The passing gleam that o'er the shadow flies; Then paint for me the secrets of her soul, That I may read as on some written scroll. If this you cannot do, then talk no more Of nature's wealth of deep and mystic lore— Of waving grass and azure skies; a face Is worth ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... up their credit, not for being just, but because they are laws; 'tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by fools, still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but always by men, vain and irresolute ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the most rational of our modern Platonists, abounds, however, with the most extravagant reveries, and was inflated with egotism and enthusiasm, as much as any of his mystic predecessors. He conceived that he communed with the Divinity itself! that he had been shot as a fiery dart into the world, and he hoped he had hit the mark. He carried his self-conceit to such extravagance, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... available this evening. An "old chum" had asked Miss Kirk out to supper, and Miss Child having snubbed her faithful lion man for reasons which had appeared good at the time, had no one to give her the key to those dozen mystic words which might as well have been written ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... When the mystic midnight passes, the bustle of Fleet Street slackens; but on each side of the thoroughfare hundreds of workers with hand and brain are toiling with eager intensity. In tall buildings here and there the lights glitter on every floor, and throw their long shafts through the gloom; not ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... trees or other marks of cultivation, and rendered almost totally unproductive by the barbarism of the government. In a narrow dell, formed by two lofty precipices, are the ruins of a monastery, being in the neighborhood of that mystic Bethel where Jacob enjoyed his vision of heavenly things, and had his stony couch made easy by the beautiful picture of ministering angels ascending and descending from the presence of ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... of these jugglers generally accompany the armies, when they take the field, feeding the commanders with promises of victory, making the camp the scene of their mummeries and impostures, and dealing in amulets, containing mystic words, written in characters, which none but the marabout who disposes of them can decipher. According to the price of these amulets, they have respectively the power of shielding the wearer from a poniard, a musket shot ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... his own, and in his Father's might, The Saviour comes! While as the Thousand Years Lead up their mystic dance, the Desert shouts! Old Ocean claps his hands! The mighty Dead Rise to new life, whoe'er from earliest time With conscious zeal had urged Love's wondrous plan, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... was word-master enough to make other people hark back to it also. As he writes you cannot help seeing through his eyes, and nothing which his eyes saw or his ear heard was ever dull or commonplace. It was all strange, mystic, with some deeper meaning struggling always to the light. If he chronicled his conversation with a washer-woman there was something arresting in the words he said, something singular in her reply. If he met a man in a public-house ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to peace," he said, "you would be happier. I see that I must take you out with me and teach you the hidden entrance to that mystic roadway." ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... coupling his name with Saturday articles. On the other hand, I distinctly recall having to wait one day in his chambers while Jimmy was shaving, and noticing accidentally a long, bulky envelope on his table, with the Saturday Review's mystic crest on it. It was addressed to Jimmy, and contained, I concluded, a bundle of proofs. That was so long ago as 1885. If further evidence is required, there is the undoubted fact, to which several of us could take oath, that, at Oxford, Jimmy was notorious for his sarcastic pen—nearly ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... spirit's power, So the searcher, bowed in reverence, Left untouched his evening fare As he listened to the voices Of the shadows gathering there. Here no lighted torch or camp fire With its weak and fitful ray, Could illume the mystic journey Of prayer's consecrated way. Here the silence brought its message Of forebodings, vague and deep, In its visions to the dreamer, Through ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... "beautified with comely ornament and girded about with a robe of glory," seemed a high priest fit for the whole world. Upon his head the mitre with a crown of gold engraved with holiness, upon his breast the mystic Urim and Thummim and the ephod with its twelve brilliant jewels, upon his tunic golden pomegranates and silver bells, which for the mystic ear pealed the harmony of the world as he moved. Little wonder that, inspired by the striking gathering ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... Nature-communion which we call physical science, there is the other, artistic phase. Day by day we find that the mystic influence of Nature on our human personality grows more intense and individual. Who can walk alone in your beautiful Druid Hill Park, among those dear and companionable oaks, without a certain sense of being in the ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the end of all science and poetry. Keats said that he sought the principle of beauty in all things, and poems are in a sense simply beautiful generalisations. They subject the unclassified and chaotic facts of life to the order of beauty. The mystic, meditating on the One and the Many, is also in pursuit of a generalisation—the perfect generalisation of the universe. And what is science but the attempt to arrange in a series of generalisations the facts of what we are vain enough ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... the solemn haze that soon will shine, For the beckoning hand I soon shall see, For the fitful glare of the mortal sign That bringeth surcease of agony, For the dreary glaze of the dying brain, For the mystic voice that soon will call, For the end of all this passion and pain, Wilmur is ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... you may not know it, age has no more to do with that statement than it had to do with the one when I hinted that man reached the ripe state of perfection at the mystic age of thirty-five. These are but approximate figures, and are only for use in general practice. They have no bearing on specific cases, when it is always best to ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... that one's ambitions were so limited by the Possible, for I am very much inclined to think that Mystic India is and must remain a sealed ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... concluding wonder of the altar, that then, with the windows suspended around like tablets of jewels, emanating their own glory, then he had arrived. Here the satisfaction he had yearned after came near, towards this, the porch of the great Unknown, all reality gathered, and there, the altar was the mystic door, through which all and everything must move ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... body of that love died, and left you its invulnerable soul? You see, I can give you a spirit love, I have given it you this long, long time; but not embodied passion. See, you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun—as a mystic monk to a mystic nun. Surely you esteem it best. Yet you regret—no, have regretted—the other. In all our relations no body enters. I do not talk to you through the senses—rather through the spirit. That is why we cannot love in the common sense. Ours is not an everyday affection. As yet we are ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... people went a-houseboating! What peace unutterable fell upon the worn and weary soul as it drifted lazily on, far from the noise and the toil and the reek of the world! All times were calm; all waters kind. The days rolled on in ever-changing scenes of beauty; the nights, star-gemmed and mystic, were filled with music and the ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... his race, passed from generation to generation, crowded upon him. Tododaho leaning down from his star surely heard his prayer. Tayoga shivered a little, not from cold or fear, but from emotion. The mystic spell was upon him. Far above him in the limitless void little wreaths of vapor united about a great shining star, taking the shape of a man, the shape of a great chief, wise beyond all other chiefs that had ever lived, and he distinctly saw the wise ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... the fertilizer, to God the ruler, to God the omnipotent over good and evil. Thus, you see, there is no mockery in our services, although to us they bear an inner meaning not understood by others. They worship a personality endowed with principle; we the principle itself. They see in the mystic figure the representation of a deity; we see in it the type of an attribute ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... one suppliant tear Should stay the ever-moving sphere? A sick man's lowly-breathed sigh, When from the world he turns away, And hides his weary eyes to pray, Should change your mystic dance, ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... both Hebrew and Hindu writings, which induced the Musulman to build that number of entrances to his hill-citadel? The coincidence merits passing thought. The second gateway originally bore on either side, at the level of the point of its arch, a mystic tiger, carved on the face of a stone slab, holding in its right forepaw some animal, which the Gazetteer declares is an elephant but which more closely resembles a dog. The tiger on the left of the arch alone abides in its place; the other ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... confess my sins, I am not absolved from them, and my burdened conscience seeks in vain for the helping hand which will ease the too heavy load; if I cannot perform my Easter duties, my spiritual life is a failure; the supreme and sublime act by which it perfects itself through the mystic union of my body and soul with the body, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ, is wanting.—Now, none of these sacraments are valid if they have not been conferred by a priest, one who bears the stamp of a superior, unique, ineffaceable character, through a final sacrament consisting of ordination ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Toorop, is a decided mystic, and there is a vein of mysticism in all his paintings. He is famous for his light effects in glass and pottery, and has especially a wonderful knack of painting choirs in churches ail in ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... so mystic, you cannot guess The strange tales of Ocean it tries to confess. So lady, thine eyelids, as skies shut the sea, Or shells try to whisper, are whisp'ring ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that she knew some mystic arts by means of which she could hold communion with him every night. Every morning when he came out of his room he used to say that his wife had been to him during the night and told him—this—that—and ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... true, that there is no moral excellence in it; but none the less do we admire it. God has made us so that we cannot help loving it; our souls go forth to it with an infinite longing, nor can that longing be condemned. That mystic quality that exists in these souls is a glimpse and intimation of what exists in Him in full perfection. If we remember this we shall not lose ourselves in admiration of worldly genius, but be led by it to a better understanding of what He is, of whom all the glories of poetry and ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... the biblical-critical movement was in progress. The controversy was conducted upon both sides in practically total ignorance of these facts. There are traces upon both sides of that insight which makes the mystic a discoverer in religion, before the logic known to him will sustain the conclusion which he draws. There will always be interest in the literature of a discussion conducted by reverent and, in their ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... then o'er his anointed head, With mystic words, the sacred opium shed. And, lo! her bird (a monster of a fowl, Something betwixt a Heidegger[282] and owl,) 290 Perch'd on his crown. 'All hail! and hail again, My son! the promised land expects thy reign. Know, Eusden thirsts no more for sack ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... creative force—the real productive agent of novelty in the world. The strange thing is that the soul creates not the world only, but itself. Whence comes this mystic power? What is the origin of the soul? Bergson does not say. But in one passage he suggests that {120} possibly the world of matter and consciousness have the same origin—the principle of life which is the great prius ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... homesickness had passed into resignation. The whole world began now and ended for Skavinski on his island. He had grown accustomed to the thought that he would not leave the tower till his death, and he simply forgot that there was anything else besides it. Moreover, he had become a mystic; his mild blue eyes began to stare like the eyes of a child, and were as if fixed on something at a distance. In presence of a surrounding uncommonly simple and great, the old man was losing the feeling of personality; he was ceasing to exist as an individual, was becoming merged more ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... them in houses that to all appearances are the least likely to be haunted—houses full of sunshine and the gladness of human voices. In the midst of merriment, they have darkened the wall opposite me like the mystic writing in Nebuchadnezzar's palace. They have suddenly appeared by my side, as I have been standing on rich, new carpeting or sun-kissed swards. They have floated into my presence with both sunbeams and moonbeams, through windows, doors, and curtains, ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... the great Goddess personally resided. Himself too he bade me reverence, as the consecrated minister of her rites. Awestruck by the name of Religion, I bowed before the priest, and humbly and earnestly intreated him to conduct me into her presence. 90 He assented. Offerings he took from me, with mystic sprinklings of water and with salt he purified, and with strange sufflations he exorcised me; and then led me through many a dark and winding alley, the dew-damps of which chilled my flesh, and the hollow echoes under ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... silently absorbing the mysterious glamour of the place, the petty annoyances of the day, the fret of Lady Gertrude's unwelcoming reception of her, seemed to dwindle into insignificance. They were only external things, after all. They could not mar the loveliness of this mystic, legend-haunted corner of ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... four dirks, had got two pieces of rusty old iron and placed them cross-wise on the extemporised floor. With what skill and nimbleness he proceeded to execute this sword-dance,—which is no doubt the survival of some ancient mystic rite,—with what elegance he pointed his toes and held his arms akimbo; with what amazing dexterity, in all the evolutions of the dance, he avoided touching the bits of iron; nay, with what intrepidity, ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... somewhat startled when he expressed his belief, that the performer of this mystic strain was one of the company then present, who exerted, for this end, a faculty not commonly possessed. Who this person was he did not venture to guess, and could not discover, by the tokens which he suffered to appear, that his ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... have I seen the day Break o'er thy roofs and towers like a dream In mystic silver, mirrored by the Bay, Bedecked with shadow craft ... and then a gleam Of golden sunlight cleaving swiftly sure Some narrow cloud-rift—limning hill or plain With flecks of gypsy-radiance that endure But for the moment ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... banker, grown artistic, Talk a jargon new and strange? Will this feeling, subtle, mystic, Even reach ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 25, 1893 • Various
... be destroyed, because the believers of it, invariably, believe it to be established on such mysterious supernatural principles; and I expect but very few, comparatively, will ever have sufficient strength of mind to throw off the mystic veil. ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... met by the unanalyzing instinct of reverence. The old church calls back its frightened truants. Some who have lost their hereditary religious belief find a resource in the revelations of Spiritualism. By a parallel movement, some of those who have become medical infidels pass over to the mystic band of believers in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his task has been, Day after day, more weary; For Heav'n design'd his guilty mind Should dwell on prospects dreary. Bound by a strong and mystic chain, He has not pow'r to stray; But, destin'd mis'ry to sustain, He wastes, in solitude and pain, A ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... met with a very unemotional reception. Its style was peculiar,—almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the opposite sex, that gentle hope of pleasing man, that secret emotion of being pleased by him, that tremor at the idea of being desired, and that flush at the thought of being desirable, which, I suppose, may animate the mystic sensibilities of spinsterhood. She was anything but aggressive and confident, yet there was a modest, puny poise about her; she was like a plant that has always lived in a narrow, city flower-pot, at a window too seldom visited by the sun, which ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... fragments and then held fast to their ruins, indeed even went so far as to find these caricatures and ruins more beautiful than the original. The Rococo is violent in chains, insolent in constraint, drunken in sobriety. It is the art of a rich, voluptuous, mystic, restless age. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... emancipate himself from metempsychosis through contemplation and ecstasy to be attained by the calm of the senses, by corporeal penance, suspension of breath, and immobility of position. The followers of this school pass their lives in solitude, absorbed in this mystic contemplation. The forests, the deserts, and the environs of the temples are filled with these mystics, who, thus separated from external life, believe themselves the subjects of supernatural illumination and power. The Bhagavad-Gita, already spoken of, is the best exposition ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... by Justin Martyr and others, who have written of the power and miraculous gifts of the early Church. But when the pure doctrine became corrupted, and the Christian Church (like the Jewish of former times) gave itself up to idolatry, masses, image-worship, and the like, the knowledge of the mystic name was withdrawn, and all miracles have ceased in the Church from that up ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... seasoning, such as the interweaving of subjects relating to love with murder or incest. The delineations of Polyxena willing to die and of Phaedra pining away under the grief of secret love, above all the splendid picture of the mystic ecstasies of the Bacchae, are of the greatest beauty in their kind; but they are neither artistically nor morally pure, and the reproach of Aristophanes, that the poet was unable to paint a Penelope, was thoroughly well founded. Of a kindred character is ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... mysterious, and, therefore, stimulating. Those varying spray wreaths, rising like Ossian's ghosts from its abyss; those shimmering rainbows, through whose veil you look; those dizzying falls of water that seem like clouds poured from the hollow of God's hand; and that mystic undertone of sound that seems to pervade the whole being as the voice of the Almighty,—all these bewilder and enchant the discriminative and prosaic part of us, and bring us into that cloudy region of ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... without losing aught of its religious significance, a statue henceforward became a work of art, admired and prized for the manner in which the sculptor faithfully represented his model, as well as for its mystic utility. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... this goes to show that he, a man wise beyond his fellows, had not yet learned the unwisdom of striving to lift the veil of tomorrow, behind whose mystic curtain what is to be ever jostles out of place what ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... is a very grand thing. At five or half-past five the barristers and students in their gowns follow the benchers in procession to the dais; the steward strikes the table solemnly a mystic three times; grace is said by the treasurer or senior bencher present, and the men of law fall to. In former times it was the custom to blow a horn in every court to announce the meal. The benchers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... way in Europe. The debate continued until long after the biblical-critical movement was in progress. The controversy was conducted upon both sides in practically total ignorance of these facts. There are traces upon both sides of that insight which makes the mystic a discoverer in religion, before the logic known to him will sustain the conclusion which he draws. There will always be interest in the literature of a discussion conducted by reverent and, in their own way, learned and ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... knew the gods so well, To you I burn my sacrificial fire! Again reveal the mystic hidden rune Whereby to find the slopes of asphodel— Ah, then to hear Apollo charm his lyre And see Diana 'neath the ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... three mystic significations; it denotes providence; it is the expression of law; and thirdly, of power; it restores the courage of the faithful and strikes terror to the hearts of ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... mystic journey as the tortured glass sphere floated over the bottom, following the slow drift of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... to his reputation for wonder-working, the mystic had an AEolian harp in each of the windows of his house, so arranged that Ariel-like voices would float through the ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Blasphemer, cease! I have seen the Cross, the holy symbol of His mystic love, standing in the heart of the eternal city, Rome; the ruins of a power far greater than thine were crumbling into dust around It; hundreds of gods such as those you trust in, were lying prostrate on the ground, trampled ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... land made by the company, after it had got fairly under way, was of six hundred acres to Governor Winthrop, on the 6th of September, 1631, "near his house at Mystic." The next was to the deputy-governor, Thomas Dudley, on the 5th of June, 1632, of two hundred acres "on the west side of Charles River, over against the new town," now Cambridge. The next, on the 3d of July, 1632, was three hundred acres to John Endicott. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... upon one of these mystic lodges that Baptiste had accidentally stumbled, and strange thoughts flashed through his mind; for within the sacred place were articles, doubtless, of value more than sufficient to purchase the necessary horse with which he could win the fair Unami. Baptiste was sorely tempted, ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... Llewellyn Leigh, however, the place had no such mystic significance. On the afternoon following the visit of Miss Wycliffe to the tower, he had walked hither from the college, down the long, winding street on whose well-worn pavements the yellowing leaves of the elms threw a sheen like gold. He had noted many a colonial house built ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Lord's Supper as narrated in the Gospels, and then goes on to say: "Which the wicked devils have IMITATED in the mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done. For, that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated you either know or can learn." Tertullian also says (2) that "the devil by the mysteries of his idols imitates even the main part of the divine mysteries."... "He baptizes his worshippers in water and makes them believe that this purifies them from their ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... most curious of these was a necklace composed of amulets, or charms, which, it will be observed, are all attributes of Isis and her attendant, Anubis, or of her husband Osiris, here considered as Bacchus. The mystic articles kept in the Isiac coffer were, says Eusebius, a ball, dice, (turbo) wheel, mirror, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... which is the retro-choir, or so-called Lady Chapel. The nave and choir have aisles, but the transepts have not. While strict orientation has been secured in the main building, it will be noticed that the chancel is slightly deflected towards the south, in supposed mystic allusion to the drooping head of the Saviour upon the Cross, a piece of symbolism very frequent in Gothic churches, and here rendered peculiarly ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... century. The dissenter's view is symbolized by a scene in a very humble chapel in England, the Catholic view by a vision of high mass at St. Peter's and the Agnostic view by a vision of a lecture by a learned German professor,—while the view of the modern mystic who remains religious in the face of all destructive criticism is shown in the speaker of the poem. The intuitional, aspiring side of his nature is symbolized by the vision of Christ that appears to him, while the intensity of its power fluctuates as he either holds ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... sire the sabbath heeds, And so they worship naught but clouds and sky. They deem swine's flesh, from which their father kept, No different from a man's. And soon indeed Are circumcised; affecting to despise The laws of Rome, they study, keep and fear The Jewish law, whate'er in mystic book Moses has handed down,—to show the way To none but he who the same rites observes, And those athirst to lead unto the spring Only if circumcised. Whereof the cause Was he, their sire, to whom each seventh day Was one of sloth, whereon he took in hand No ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... concerned, is also one which may profoundly affect the individual soul. But in these cases it is the exceptional soul which is alone affected—the seer of visions, the prophet. And it is not necessarily in connection with the ordinary worship, or customary sacrifice, that such instances of mystic communion with the gods are manifested. For the development of the mystical tendency of worship and sacrifice, we must look, not to the lowest, or to the earliest, stages of religious evolution, but to a later stage in the evolution of the sacrificial meal. It is where, as in ancient ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... the Atlantic. Not a breath of wind passed over land or sea. To the northward Chun Castle stood darkly on the summit of the neighbouring hill, and the cromlech loomed huge and mysterious; southward were traces of mystic circles and upright stones, and other of those inexplicable pieces of antiquity which are usually saddled on the overladen shoulders of the Druids. Everything, in fact—in the scene, the season, and the weather—contributed to fill the mind of the old man with romantic musings as he wended ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... unconscious of the storm. Thy temple, NATURE, rears it's mystic form; From earth to heav'n, unwrought by mortal toil, Towers the vast fabric on the desert soil; O'er many a league the ponderous domes extend. And deep in earth the ribbed vaults descend; 70 A thousand jasper steps with circling sweep Lead the slow votary up the winding steep; Ten thousand piers, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... Todcaster used to begin his famous story of the exciseman (I shall not tell it here, for very good reasons), my poor mother used to turn to Lady Dawdley, and give that mystic signal at which all females rise from their chairs. Tufthunt, the curate, would spring from his seat, and be sure to be the first to open the door for the retreating ladies; and my brother Tom and I, though remaining stoutly in our places, were speedily ejected from them by the ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Church expectant," for the Resurrection and their "perfect consummation and bliss", that the "Church expectant" and the "Church militant" are not two Churches, but the one Church of Christ in two places and in two states, on earth and in Paradise, fighting and waiting; that they have still "mystic sweet communion" in praise and worship and prayer—the Church in Paradise leading our worship as the choir leads the worship ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester
... look at her. She was to him, in that moment, mystic, holy, a thing apart. He dropped on his knees beside a silvery white apron, his eyes on the ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... the afternoon of August 9, 1911, when I first saw this remarkable shrine. Densely wooded hills rose on every side. There was not a hut to be seen; scarcely a sound to be heard. It was an ideal place for practicing the mystic ceremonies of an ancient cult. The remarkable aspect of this great boulder and the dark pool beneath its shadow had caused this to become a place of worship. Here, without doubt, was "the principal mochadero of those forested mountains." It is still venerated ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... expected of him, until he appears to agree with his compeers or followers, and begins to be as eccentric as he likes. Commencing with long hair touching his shoulders, and with an absence of the use of Someone's soap, he passes on through mystic moonlight glances to a still more artistic appreciation of the charms of Nature at her simplest, until Mrs. Grundy looks askance, and duchesses and other leaders of Society squabble over him, and try one against the other for the honour and pleasure of his society. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the time. Who is so devout a believer in free speech and free trade and the let-alone policy in government, and the coming of the Millennium by steam? Who prostrates himself with such unfeigned adoration before the great god, "State-of-Society," or so mutters, for a mystic O'm, the word "Law"? Then how delightful it is, when he traces the whole ill of the world to just those things which we now all agree to detest,—to theological persecution, bigotry, superstition, and infidelity to Isaac Newton! In fine, the recent lessons of that great schoolboy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... frontier politics. James Russell Lowell used dialect for dynamite to blow the front off hypocrisy or to shatter the cotton commercialism in which the New England conscience was encysted. Robert H. Newell, mirth-maker and mystic, satirized military ignorance and pinchbeck bluster to an immortality of contempt. Bret Harte in verse and story touched the parallels of tragedy and of comedy, of pathos, of bathos, and of humor, which love of life and lust of gold opened up amid the unapprehended grandeurs ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... of devils, and gave unto them grace through the very thing that had been disclosed to his own sight as a sign of victory against the onrush of foes; and how on the third day the Glory 185 of men and Lord of all mankind rose from the tomb and from death, and ascended into heaven. Men wise in the mystic things of the Spirit thus said unto the victory-inspired monarch as they had 190 learned from Silvester. And at their hands the prince of the people received baptism, and held to the faith according to the will of the Lord from ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... musical world remembered with respect and admiration the Camilla Urso of her brilliant girlhood. The wonderful child-life had ended. The new artist-life now begins. Once more the swift fingers might fly over the mystic strings. Again the bow arm ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... makes. Hard by, two trenches scoops from out the ground; Smites with her weapon in the sable throat, A sheep presented; in the open ditch Empties the blood; then bowls of wine she pours, And bowls of smoking milk; with mystic words Invokes the powers terrestrial; begs the king Of shades, and begs his ravish'd spouse to aid, Nor of his soul the aged king defraud. These when with lengthen'd prayers, and murmurings long, Appeas'd; ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... She and he were wandering alone together along that fairy shore where every sea-shell gleamed like pearl and every wave broke iridescent at their feet. The sun shone in the sky for them alone, and the caves were mystic palaces of delight that awaited their coming. And once it seemed to her that he drew her close, and she felt ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... intoxication, a holy happiness, takes possession of those for whom has been reserved the supreme joy of braving death for their country. Death is everywhere, but they do not believe in it any more. And when, on certain mornings, to the sound of cannon that mix their rumblings with mystic voices of bells, in the devastated church which cries to the heavens through every breach opened in its walls, the Chaplain blesses the regiment that he will accompany the next minute to the firing line, every head will be bent at the same time and all will feel ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... his book, a mystic seer, The soul of Behmen teaches, And England's priestcraft shakes to ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... snowstorm, with great flakes falling loosely, and the contact produced this strange luminosity. The sea rose so suddenly and tumbled about so wildly that the Paracuta was several times in danger of being swallowed up by the waves, but we got through the mystic-seeming tempest all safe ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... Mystic. Disc. Proem. art. iv. p. 6: "Cum ipsa [S. Teresa] scire vellet, quid in illa mystica unione operaretur intellectus, respondit [Christus] illi, cum non possit comprehendere quod intelligit, est non intelligere intelligendo: tum quia prae claritate nimia ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... glances of the other girls, who from behind the bars of their cage noted the brilliant plumage of this bird who was at liberty. She crossed the courtyard, and, followed by Modeste, entered the chapel, where she sank upon her knees. The mystic half-light of the place, tinged purple by its passage through the stained windows, seemed to enlarge the little chancel, parted in two by a double grille, behind which the nuns could hear the service ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... thin-edged sweetness of the Singing Mouse's voice pierced keenly through the air. I was right glad when the little creature came and sat on my knee, and in its affectionate way began to nibble at my finger-tips. It sat erect, its thin paws waving with a tiny, measured swing, and in its mystic voice, so infinitely small, so sweet and yet so majestically strong, began a song which no pen can transcribe. Knowing that the awakening must come, but unwilling to lose a moment of the dream, I, who with one finger could have crushed the ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... revisit their native land. The number, indeed, was so considerable, that the priest who officiated was obliged to make use of the mop, or hyssop, with which the Roman Catholic missionaries were wont to scatter the holy drops, whose mystic virtue could cleanse the soul in a moment from the foulest stains of infidelity. "Thus," says a Castilian historian, "the calamities of these poor blind creatures proved in the end an excellent remedy, that God made use of to unseal their eyes, which they now opened to ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... living Head, their Intercessor, their Guide. His resurrection is the warrant of their future life. He has gone before and will come again to receive His own. Christianity is Christ: all believers are members of His mystic body: the Church is His bride. He is the Alpha and the Omega of the world's history. In the contemplation of His personality as the chief among ten thousand His people are changed into His image as from ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... over, gambling and speculation are joined in many ways to superstition; and the Eastern diver is superstitious to the hour of his death. At Marichchikkaddi he devotedly resorts to the mystic ceremony of the shark-charmer, whose exorcism for generations has been an indispensable preliminary to the opening of a fishery. The shark-charmer's power is believed to be hereditary. If one of them can be enlisted on a diver's boat, success is assured to all ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... the torrent forms a small subterranean cascade.* (* We find the phenomenon of a subterranean cascade, but on a much larger scale, in England, at Yordas Cave, near Kingsdale in Yorkshire.) The natives connect mystic ideas with this cave, inhabited by nocturnal birds; they believe that the souls of their ancestors sojourn in the deep recesses of the cavern. "Man," say they, "should avoid places which are enlightened neither ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... coordination of muscular effort. In the light of knowledge gained in later years, I can now see in that long, slouching, shuffling figure, in that tallow-colored face with the bloodless, loose lips and the wandering, mystic eyes of periwinkle blue—I can see in that girl-face framed by a trashy picture-hat, and in that girl-form wrapped in the old golf-cape, one of the earth's unfortunates; a congenital failure; a female creature doomed from her mother's ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... throat where it joined the shoulders. From the aspect of the young girl's face, at once ethereal and intelligent, where the delicacy of a Greek nose with its rosy nostrils and firm modelling marked something positive and defined; where the poetry enthroned upon an almost mystic brow seemed belied at times by the pleasure-loving expression of the mouth; where candor claimed the depths profound and varied of the eye, and disputed them with a spirit of irony that was trained and educated,—from all these signs an observer would have felt that this ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... The mystic merging of Beatrice into ideal beauty is, of course, mentioned often in nineteenth century poetry, most sympathetically, perhaps, by Rossetti. [Footnote: See On the Vita Nuova of Dante; also Dante at Verona.] Much the same ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... as so many dismal castaways have found, that there is a mystic companionship in that weed which has come out of the vegetable world, as the dog from among the animals, to make fellowship with man. Rudd and his pipe were Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday on the desert island of loneliness. They stared ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... tradition of Eden. Some have caught glimpses of these isles, and some more favoured mortals have even landed, and returned again with senses dazzled at the ravishing sights they have seen. But in every case after these rare favours, these mystic lands have remained invisible as before, and the way to them has been sought for in vain. Such are the tales told with reverent earnestness, and listened to with breathless interest, not only by the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans of old, but by the Irishman, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 182, April 23, 1853 • Various
... their convent, and they first erected an altar and celebrated Mass. Pere Dolbeau was the officiating priest. The people, most of whom came from curiosity, knelt around on the earth, while cannon from the ramparts announced the mystic services. The Giffards joined in them reverentially, but Rose was full of wonderment. Indeed, her joy was so great at seeing Destournier again that she could ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... age when, if the manlier traits are ready to be developed, the worthless ones are equally sure to unfold themselves. Few of us that have not found the first draught of life intoxicate! Few of us that have not then run wild, as colts that have slipped their bridle! Experience—that mystic word—is wanting; the retrospect of past years wakes no sigh; expectant youth looks forward to future ones without a shade of distrust. The mind is elastic—the body vigorous and free from pain; and it is then youth ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... Ages, had their heads full, as the "Arabian Nights" prove, of enchanters, genii, peris, and what not? The Jewish rabbis had their Cabala, which sprang up in Alexandria, a system of philosophy founded on the mystic meaning of the words and the actual letters of the text of Scripture, which some said was given by the angel Ragiel to Adam in Paradise, by which Adam talked with angels, the sun and moon, summoned spirits, interpreted dreams, healed and destroyed; and by that book ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... constellation of gold and silver coins. "Wants a little more spending," he said. "Two-pence halfpenny is the mystic sum which turns to millions. So Lisle has swindled you, has ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Ethelney, where there was a religious establishment and priests to perform the necessary rites. The new convert was clothed in white garments—the symbol of purity, then customarily worn by candidates for baptism—and was covered with a mystic veil. They gave Guthrum a new name—a Christian, that is, a Saxon name. Converted pagans received always a new name, in those days, when baptized; and our common phrase, the Christian name, has arisen from the circumstance. Guthrum's Christian name was Ethelstan. ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... hundred and sixty-five times, without variation. From the indistinct utterance, elevated voice, and rapid manner in which it is pronounced, it certainly has a wild effect, and is more strongly impressed with the character of a mystic rite, or incantation, than with any other religious ceremony with which we could ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... no subject more profoundly mysterious than those mystic intercommunings between the first and second persons in the adorable Trinity before the world was. Scripture gives us only some dim and shadowy revelations regarding them—distant gleams of light, and ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... at last that he would practise his "short" awhile; that would be doing something, at any rate. He sat down at the big writing- table and began to dash off mystic signs at furious speed. But the speed did not keep up. The silence of the great room, of the immense house, of all the scores of rooms and galleries and corridors, closed in about him. He had practised his "short" in the night school, with the "L" thundering past at intervals of five ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... praise In thy eternal course, both when thou climb'st, And when high noon hast gained, and when thou fall'st. Moon, that now meet'st the orient Sun, now fliest With the fixed stars, fixed in their orb that flies; And ye five other wandering Fires, that move In mystic dance, not without song, resound His praise, who out of ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... O mystic Nile! Thy secret yields Before us; thy most ancient dreams Are mixed with far Canadian fields And murmur ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... superstitious thought of appeasing the fancied wrath of God, or of giving Him pleasure (base thought) by any pain of hers; for her spirit had been trained in the freest and loftiest doctrines of Luther's school; and that little mystic "Alt-Deutsch Theologie" (to which the great Reformer said that he owed more than to any book, save the Bible, and St. Augustine) was her counsellor and comforter ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... somewhat mystic personage, who foresees every misfortune, {492} prophetically sees her son in the fearful monster's jaws; she veils herself shuddering and withdraws into ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young; And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware, So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair, And a voice said in mastery while I strove, 'Guess now who holds thee?' 'Death,' I said. But, there, The silver answer rang, 'Not ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... "Let me see; it was a sort of historical, half prophetic discourse, very learned and hard for a hunting man to understand, about the past and the future, and the safety of my throne, and its depending upon the recovery of a certain mystic stone carried off—carried off—let me see, Leoni, who did you say carried ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... and sincere, it was, no doubt, an impressive sight to see rank succeeding rank, of the old and the young, all calm and all devout, seated before the tent of the preacher, in the sunny hours of June, listening to his eloquence, or partaking of the mystic bread and wine; but in these our latter days, when discipline is relaxed, along with the sedate and the pious come swarms of the idle and the profligate, whom no eloquence can edify and no solemn rite affect. On these, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... to see the stupendous granite walls separated in a gigantic split that must have been made by a terrible seismic disturbance; and from this gap poured the dark, turgid, mystic flood. ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... confirmed Balzacian?—to employ a former expression of Gautier in Jeune France on the morrow following the appearance of that mystic Rabelaisian epic, The Magic Skin. Have you experienced, while reading at school or clandestinely some stray volume of the Comedie Humaine, a sort of exaltation such as no other book had aroused hitherto, and few have caused since? Have you dreamed ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the caldron The weird passions dance, And the only god they worship Is the mystic ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... coin. Into these gorgeous altar-cloths, or these delicate wrappings for chalice and paten, she stitched her heart. To work at them was prayer. Jesus, and His Mother, and the Saints; it was with them she communed as her stitches flowed. She sat in a mystic, a heavenly world. And the silence and solitude of her work made one of its chief charms. And now to be asked to share it with a strange girl, who could not love it as she did, who would take it as hard business—never ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his full height. "Yes, we belong to the Ancient Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine of North America." Pet rolled off the lengthy title so rapidly the old fellow was astounded. Resting his hands on the cell bars, he gazed admiringly at Clayton fully a half minute, ere he asked: "Are yez Pope of it?" Later ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... heart: how like a child's in its simplicity, like a man's in its earnest solemnity and depth! Heaven lies over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the Earth; making all the Earth a mystic Temple to him, the Earth's business all a kind of worship. Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common sunlight; angels yet hover doing God's messages among men: that rainbow was set in the clouds by the hand of God! Wonder, miracle encompass the man; he lives in an element of ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Peaches.' It takes place on the borders of the Yao Ch'ih, Lake of Gems, and is attended by both male and female Immortals. Besides several superfine meats, they are served with bears' paws, monkeys' lips, dragons' liver, phoenix marrow, and peaches gathered in the orchard, endowed with the mystic virtue of conferring longevity on all who have the good luck to taste them. It was by these peaches that the date of the banquet was fixed. The tree put forth leaves once every three thousand years, and it required three thousand years after that for the fruit to ripen. These were Hsi Wang Mu's ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... Royal Rosicrucian Lodge at Bungay, Suffolk, to spy the proceedings of the Society, of which her husband was a member, and being frightened by the sudden whirring and striking eleven of the clock (just as the Deputy-Grand-Master was bringing in the mystic gridiron for the reception of a neophyte), rushed out into the midst of the lodge assembled; and was elected, by a desperate unanimity, Deputy-Grand-Mistress for life. Though that admirable and ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... emblem of the spiritual oneness of the believer's soul with Christ. We may be led through circumstances, as you have been, to love one with whom we should not form such a union. Indeed, in the true and mystic meaning of the rite, you could not marry Christine Ludolph. The Bible declares that man and wife shall be one. Unless she changes, unless you change (and that God forbid), this could not be. You would be divided, separated in the deepest essentials of your life ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... costume of such ancient and honorable orders as Knights of Adam; Visionaries of Detectable Bosh; the Ancient Order of Modern Troglodytes; the League of Holy Humbug; the Golden Phalanx of Phalangers; the Genteel Society of Expurgated Hoodlums; the Mystic Alliances of Georgeous Regalians; Knights and Ladies of the Yellow Dog; the Oriental Order of Sons of the West; the Blatherhood of Insufferable Stuff; Warriors of the Long Bow; Guardians of the Great Horn Spoon; the Band of Brutes; the Impenitent Order of ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... unhappily reserved for the cruel destruction accomplished by Alexander, a few centuries later. The prophecies of Isaiah were still resounding in the ears of an ungrateful people. He had spoken of the coming Christ and His all-peaceful mission in mystic imagery, and had given miraculous evidences of his predictions. But suffering should be the precursor of that marvellous advent. The Assyrian dashed in resistless torrent upon the fold. Israel was led captive. Hosea was in chains. Samaria and the kingdom of Israel were added to the conquests ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... understand, In apathy of heart and will, I took the woman from the hand Of him who stood for God, and heard Of Christ, and of the Church his Bride; The Feast, by presence of the Lord And his first Wonder, beautified; The mystic sense to Christian men; The bonds in innocency made, And gravely to be enter'd then, For children, godliness, and, aid, And honour'd, and kept free from smirch; And how a man must love his wife No less ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... before thy King, My soul! Earth's kings, before Him bow ye down; Before Him monarchs humbly roll,— Height, might, and splendor, throne and crown. He in the mystic Land divine The sceptre wields with valiant hand. In vain dark, evil powers combine,— He, victor, rules the better Land." —Ingleman.—Trans. ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... lintel of the door represented on Plate V., enlarged. I intended, in the Lecture on Marble Couchant, to have insisted, at some length, on the decoration of the lintel and side- posts, as one of the most important phases of mystic ecclesiastical sculpture. But I find the materials furnished by Lucca, Pisa, and Florence, for such an essay are far too rich to be examined cursorily; the treatment even of this single lintel could scarcely be enough explained in the close of the Lecture. I must dwell on ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... evening as the two men gazed in moody silence at the approaching night. The sky had taken on that deep blue velvet softness of Italian beauty, and the low, red west of the dying day might have been reflected from some funeral pyre in distant, mystic India. A murmur of drowsy birds came from the darkening trees—a few hushed, plaintive notes, wistfully calling in tones ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... as done to Him. That is most blessedly true. Nor is it true only because He lovingly reckons the deed as done to Him, though it really is not; but, by reason of the derived life which all His children possess from Him, they are really parts of Himself; and in that most real though mystic unity, what is done to them is, in fact, done to Him. Further, if the service be done in His name, then, on whomsoever it may be done, it is done to Him. This great saying unveils the true sacredness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... elder chivalry, that were spread out on it, over the dead letter of the past, the brave Atlantic breeze came in, the breath of the great future blew, when the turn came for this knight's adventure; whether opened in the prose of its statistics, or set to its native music in the mystic melodies of the bard who was there to sing it. The Round Table grew spheral, as he sat talking by it; the Round Table dissolved, as he brought forth his lore, and unrolled his maps upon it; and instead of it,—with ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... it will be the happy discoverer's constant companion all his earthly and penitential days. As the English reader is carried on through the fourth tract, The Supersensual Life, he experiences a new and an increasing sense of ease and pleasure, combined with a mystic height and depth and inwardness all but new to him even in Behmen's books. The new height and depth and inwardness are all Jacob Behmen's own; but the freedom and the ease and the movement and the melody are all William Law's. In his preparations for a new ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... rights of his fellows; when no woman will be made forlorn, no little child wretched by bigotry or greed, Masonry has ever been a prophet. Nor will she ever be content until all the threads of human fellowship are woven into one mystic cord of friendship, encircling the earth and holding the race in unity of spirit and the bonds of peace, as in the will of God it is one in the origin and end. Having outlived empires and philosophies, having seen generations appear and vanish, it will yet live to ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... of the church. Behind the high altar, in the gloom of a double row of pillars, is the chapel of the Blessed Virgin, damp and dark and silent. The dim stained windows only show the flowing crimson and violet robes of saints, which blaze like flames of mystic love in the solemn, silent adoration of the darkness. It is a weird, mysterious spot, like some crepuscular nook of paradise solely illumined by the gleaming stars of two tapers. The four brass lamps hanging from the ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... chanted to the Islands, and to the sea, and the dwellers in the sea. It was not that she left her stand, nor came nearer, but the Sacred Island itself was steering straight, like a magical barque, drawn by the wonderful song, to the mystic shore of Samoa. Now Queen Mab, where she stood among her court, with the strange brown fairies of the Southern Ocean, could behold the Sacred Island, with all its fairy crew. Beautiful things they seemed, as the sailing isle drew nearer, beautiful ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... with, what softness the scepticism of Jarno, the commercial spirit of Werner, the reposing polished manhood of Lothario and the Uncle, the unearthly enthusiasm of the Harper, the gay animal vivacity of Philina, the mystic, ethereal, almost spiritual nature of Mignon, are blended together in this work; how justice is done to each, how each lives freely in his proper element, in his proper form; and how, as Wilhelm himself, the mild-hearted, all-hoping, all-believing Wilhelm, struggles ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... home for a time he had quite, like Ulysses, Forgotten; but now o'er the troubled abysses Of the spirit within him, aeolian, forth leapt To their freedom new-found, and resistlessly swept All his heart into tumult, the thoughts which had been Long pent up in their mystic recesses unseen. ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... neared the Palace entrance, a female fortune-teller ran forward, thrusting towards her a gazelle's skin, filled with the instruments of her mystic craft, and crying out: "I divine-I reveal! What is present I manifest! What is absent I declare! What is future I show! Beautiful one, hear me. It is all written. To thee is greatness, and thy heart's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... at the western entrance, shall spread themselves over the mosaic floor, and throng each chapel, altar, gallery, and transept—when anthems of praise shall peal from the double doors of the painted organ, and holy rites give a mystic language to the sacred ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... the canyon beneath the white, steady stars, through scrub oak and chaparral, the air sweet scented with wild spice, through slopes set with sleeping folded poppies and Mariposa lilies, past cactus groves, columnar, stately, mystic; the mesa slopes receding, its great bulk dim mass, the twin notches that marked the Pass of the Goats hardly discernible against the sky. They crossed a white road, unfenced but evidently a main source of ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... I think, of what we call folklore or anthropology, which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull. It may become the most attractive and serious of the sciences; certainly it is rich in strange curiosities, like those mystic stones which were fingered and arrayed by the pupils in that allegory of Novalis. I am not likely to regret the accident which brought me up on fairy tales, and the inquisitiveness which led me to examine the other fragments of antiquity. ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... of Osiris, King of Egypt, was credited with the invention of writing and hieroglyphics, the drawing up of the laws of the Egyptians, and the origination of many sciences and arts. The Alexandrian school ascribed to him the mystic learning which it amplified; and the scholars of the Middle Ages regarded with enthusiasm and reverence the works attributed to him — notably a treatise on ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... lives yet, there are more worlds waiting, For the way climbs up to the eldest sun, Where the white ones go to their mystic mating, And the holy will is done. I'll find you there where our love life heightens— Where the door of the wonder again unbars, Where the old love lures and the old fire whitens, In ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... word. When the Boiset family, especially Madame, cross-examined him as to the details of his visit to Miss Ogilvy, he merely described the splendours of that opulent establishment and the intellectual character of its guests. Of their mystic attributes he said nothing at all, only adding that Miss Ogilvy proposed to do herself the honour of calling at the Maison Blanche, as ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... sweet hours, even as bitter ones, do not loiter in their passing or come again. Soon enough Robert saw himself very far gone from the undissembled sternness of his old resolutions. If he could but be rid of that altogether! He thought he had obtained a mystic recognition of the terrorless but uncommunicating Joy of life which while men live they pursue, desiring it with the one human craving which survives every misfortune, every thwarted hope, all enslavement of the heart's small freedom—the ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... child or the scream of a trapped animal. Assuming it to be the latter, Will again hesitated. Often enough he had laughed at the folk-tales of witch hares as among the most fantastic fables of the old; yet at this present moment mystic legends won point from the circumstances in which he found himself. He hurried forward to the edge of a circle from which the sound proceeded. Then, looking before him, he started violently, sank to his knees behind a rock, and so remained, glaring ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... but foreshadowed the greater things to come. And these minute decisions shaped the policies and precedents of what would become mighty affairs. Whether Brown should be allowed to save his paltry three dollars and a half or not determined larger things. To Bob's half-mystic mood, up there under the mottled shadows, every tiny move of this game became portentous with fate. A return of the old exultation lifted him. He saw the shadows of these affairs cast dim and gigantic against the mists of the future. These men ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... which was adorned with sculptured figures; at one end was a recess, with a roof of timber richly carved and gilt, and here stood a colossal image of Huitzilopochtli, the war-god. His countenance was hideous; in his right hand he held a bow, and in his left a bunch of golden arrows, which a mystic legend connected with the victories of his people. A huge serpent of pearls and precious stones was coiled about his waist, and costly jewels were profusely sprinkled over his person. On his left foot were the delicate feathers of the humming-bird, from ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... Thee, amid the mystic shadows, The solemn hush of nature newly born; Alone with Thee, in breathless adoration, In the calm dew ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... several personages of the Nativity. In the centre is the Christ-Child, either in a cradle or lying on a truss of straw; seated beside him is the Virgin; Saint Joseph stands near, holding in his hand the mystic lily; with their heads bent down over the Child are the ox and the ass—for those good animals helped with their breath through that cold night to keep him warm. In the foreground are the two ravi—a man and a woman in awed ecstasy, with upraised arms—and the adoring ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... on a white Christmas Eve, Thor's priests held their winter rites beneath the Thunder Oak. Through the deep snow of the dense forest hastened throngs of heathen folk, all intent on keeping the mystic feast of the mighty Thor. In the hush of the night the folk gathered in the glade where stood the tree. Closely they pressed around the great altar-stone under the overhanging boughs where stood the white-robed priests. Clearly shone the moonlight ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... libertine, you must understand; things happened to me and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected and complicating one. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and of them all only two were sustained relationships. Besides these ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... 'Camp Fire Game.' You play it like Stage Coach, or Fruit Basket, only instead of taking parts of a coach or names of fruits you take articles that belong to the Camp Fire, like bead band, ring, moccasin, bracelet, fire, honor beads, symbol, fringe, Wohelo, hand sign, bow and drill, Mystic Fire, etc. Then somebody tells a story about Camp Fire Girls, and every time one of those articles is mentioned every one must get up and turn around. But if the words 'Ceremonial Meeting' or 'Council Fire' are mentioned, then all must change seats and the story teller ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... asked if I would go with him to bring in the body. I shook my head. Life out here breeds a higher understanding of the mystic division between soul and body; one learns to contemplate the disfigured dead with a calmness that is not callousness. But this was different. How real a part he had played in my life these last two years! I wanted always to be able to recall him as I had known ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... to her ability"; she "was a woman of profound veneration rather than of a warm loving nature. Therefore her prayer was invariably a prayer of deep yearning reverence. I remember well the impression which it made on me. There was a mystic influence about it. A sort of sympathetic hold it had on me, but still I always felt when I went to prayer, as though I were going into a crypt, where the sun was not allowed to come; and I shrunk from it." To complete the portrait of this conscientious lady who was to have the supervision ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... laymen who had turned from the vanities of youth—fabliau or romance—and now aimed at edification or instruction. Science in the hands of the clergy must needs be spiritualised and moralised; there were sermons to be found in stones, pious allegories in beast and bird; mystic meanings in the alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney, in the game of chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to religious uses. The earliest versified Bestiary, which is also a Volucrary, a Herbary, and a Lapidary, that of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... not lost its power. To modern ears it is, of course, done to death since the "Castle of Otranto"; though as a minor element it can still be gently used by the poet and novelist in a moated grange, a house in a marsh or a maze. Another point of wonder, so well known in later times, is the large and mystic number of windows, like the 365 windows attributed to great buildings of the present age. It would not be difficult from these papyrus tales to start an historical dictionary of the elements of fiction: a kind of analysis that should be the death ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... enjoying, in looking out for artistic promise, in welcoming and praising any performance of a kind that Rossetti recognised as "stunning." They were sure of their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its mystic initials, was all a gigantic game; and they held together because they were revolutionary in this, that they wished to slay, as one stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and sentimental art of the day. They did not effect ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the lad who first became an archer in the wilderness. Unconsciously confirming prophecy, and still attesting the truth of a revelation which they contemn and deny,—thus strangely dwelling so different from all other nations,—preserving the initiatory rites and the mystic symbols of the faith of Abraham, the customs and traditions of the age of the patriarch,—these nations dwell distinct, separate from each other and from all other nations, awaiting the day when ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... their credit, not for being just, but because they are laws; 'tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by fools, still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but always by men, vain and irresolute authors. There is nothing so ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... was in the sky as he neared Gloucester. When he entered, its roofs and towers were precipices of gold and fire, straining up to the New Jerusalem which floated in the clouds. The streets of the ancient city had a mystic look, white and hushed and tenantless. But already the cheeky sparrows were about, scandal-mongering beneath the eaves with an unholy disregard for the awe by ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... be the only puppy in a litter," answered the Mistress, refusing to part with her enthusiasm over the miracle, "then this one ought to bring us luck. Let's call him 'Bruce.' You remember, the original Bruce won because of the mystic number, seven. This Bruce has got to make up to us for the seven puppies that weren't born. See how proud she is of him! Isn't she ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... Fate's mystic dower, ZAMIEL, ZAMIEL, work thy power! Spirit of the evil dead (At Madrid), bless, bless the lead! May they be as featly sped As the one that pierced his head. I am sick of shilly-shally, May they—metaphorically, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... a remarkable work, enclosing a mystic and profound idea, although the musical element predominates, entrancing the soul by the unfamiliar magic of its melody, which envelopes the thoughts that shine out like a glister of gold and diamonds through a limpid stream. Certain lines pursue me incessantly and will continue ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... different sorts of wood, and the spectators cast into the flames a kind of toad-stool (Bran) in order to counteract the power of the Trolls and other evil spirits, who are believed to be abroad that night; for at that mystic season the mountains open and from their cavernous depths the uncanny crew pours forth to dance and disport themselves for a time. The peasants believe that should any of the Trolls be in the vicinity they ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... demand for certain comfortable little nostrums (delicately sweet and pungent to the taste, cheering to the spirits, and fragrant in the breath), the proper distillation of which was the airiest secret that the mystic Swinnerton had left behind him. And, besides, these old ladies had always liked the manners of Dr. Dolliver, and used to speak of his gentle courtesy behind the counter as having positively been something to admire; though of later years, an unrefined, and almost rustic ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... knowledge bore the same relation to the soul of the people as light does to darkness. But innocent happiness dwells in that darkness, and the Mystics were of opinion that that happiness should not be sacrilegiously interfered with. For what would have happened in the first place if the Mystic had betrayed his secret? He would have uttered words and only words. The feelings and emotions which would have evoked the spirit from the words would have been absent. To do this preparation, exercises, tests, and a complete change in the life ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... for the middle hour of night, Now swiftly coming, to convene her court. Set in an ocean of perpetual calm Was the fair island honoured by her reign; Slowly around her rolled the Frigid Zone, Dim in the mystic moonlight far away,— A silvery ring, circling her nearer realm With the pale lustre of its snowy walls, Defending from all storm and sudden change The sea which bathed the island's level shores. She ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... secrets are going on here? Is it a Freemason's Lodge and those the mystic signs?" asked a gay voice at the door; and there stood Rose, full of smiling wonder at the sight of her two uncles hand in hand, whispering and nodding ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... other in a scamper through the vale on the box of the coach. But any lover of poetry who will submit himself with leisure and meditation to the impressions of the story, the pity of it, the naturalness of it, the glory and the mystic splendours of the indifferent heavens, will feel that here indeed is the true strength which out of the trivial raises expression for the ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... What one is in when hacking, of course. 2. More specifically, a Zen-like state of total focus on The Problem that may be achieved when one is hacking (this is why every good hacker is part mystic). Ability to enter such concentration at will correlates strongly with wizardliness; it is one of the most important skills learned during {larval stage}. Sometimes amplified as ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... a far different grade, running parallel and contemporary with all—a curious, quiet yet busy life centred in a little country village on Long Island, and within sound on still nights of the mystic surf-beat of the sea. About this life, this Personality—neither soldier, nor scientist, nor litterateur—I propose to occupy a few minutes in fragmentary talk, to give some few melanges, disconnected impressions, statistics, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... sense, we can only succeed in saying that they participate in such and such ideas, which, therefore, constitute all their character. Hence it is easy to pass on into a mysticism. We may hope, in a mystic illumination, to see the ideas as we see objects of sense; and we may imagine that the ideas exist in heaven. These mystical developments are very natural, but the basis of the theory is in logic, and it is as based in logic that ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... Perhaps your mystic correspondents will kindly furnish lists of other publications and MSS. of {14} "the Teutonick Theosopher." There are sixteen more of his works, of which fifteen are now extant in High Dutch. As old Behmen is but little known in this country, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... the old world forlorn A mystic child is set in these still hours. I keep this time, even before the flowers, Sacred to all ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... the right. We are now following the coast-line towards Ostend. How beautiful the sand dunes looked from above. The heavy billows of sea-mist gave it a somewhat mystic appearance. How cold it was. I huddled down close into my seat, my head only above the fuselage. Keeping my eye upon the wonderful panorama unfolding itself out beneath me, I glanced at my camera and tested the socket. Yes, it was ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... brains With chains, And gibberings grim and ghastly. Then, if you plan it, he Changes organity With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity - Driving your foes to the verge of insanity. Barring tautology, In demonology, 'Lectro biology, Mystic nosology, Spirit philology, High class astrology, Such is his knowledge, he Isn't the man to require an apology Oh! My name is JOHN WELLINGTON WELLS, I'm a dealer in magic and spells, In blessings and curses, And ever-filled ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... in silence, gazing out across the dark and restless water, touched here and there with white, as a wave combed and broke. Then Dan's gaze wandered to her face. Seen thus, in the dim light, framed by her dark hair, it, too, seemed wonderful to him; there was about it a mystic allusiveness, a subtle charm, far more compelling than mere beauty ever is; her eyes had depths ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... very still and undisturbed, if she could empty her consciousness of all else, bend her whole will to an act at once of determination and of reception, perhaps, it would be given her clearly to see and understand. The idealist, the mystic, were very present in Honoria just then. She fixed her eyes upon the shining surface of the water. A conviction grew upon her that, could she maintain a certain mental and emotional equilibrium, something of permanent and very ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... chair and wore the vulture cap on which traces of colour remained. Her arms were held forward as though to support a child, which perhaps she was suckling as one of the breasts was bare. But if so, the child had gone. The execution of the statue was exquisite and its tender and mystic face extraordinarily beautiful, so life-like also that I think it must have been copied from a living model. Oh! my friend, when I looked upon it, which we did by the light of the candles, for the sun was sinking and shadows gathered in that excavated hole, I felt—never ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... sex, that gentle hope of pleasing man, that secret emotion of being pleased by him, that tremor at the idea of being desired, and that flush at the thought of being desirable, which, I suppose, may animate the mystic sensibilities of spinsterhood. She was anything but aggressive and confident, yet there was a modest, puny poise about her; she was like a plant that has always lived in a narrow, city flower-pot, at a window too seldom visited by the sun, which has never known the freedom of the rain, but ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Litanies the Virgin is denominated "the Mother of God, the Queen of Angels, the Refuge of Sinners, the Mother of Mercy, the Gate of Heaven, the Mystic Rose, the Virgin of ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... emotional feeling was a patriotic nationalistic devotion to Russia and a mystic devotion to the Emperor and the Russian Orthodox Church. Then her next emotional feelings embraced the devotion and loyalty for her family and ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... to admit, with the liberal opinion of the time, that ancient mythology 'was a system of nature concealed under the veil of allegory', a system in which 'a thousand fanciful fables contained a secret and mystic meaning': [Footnote: Edinb. Rev., July 1808.] he was prepared to go a considerable step farther, and claim that there was no essential difference between ancient mythology and the theology of the Christians, that both were ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... Tunbridge. Why did he stay behind, unless he was in love with either of the young ladies (and we say he wasn't)? Could it be that he did not want to go? Hath the gracious reader understood the meaning of the mystic S with which the last chapter commences, and in which the designer has feebly endeavoured to depict the notorious Sinbad the Sailor, surmounted by that odious old man of the sea? What if Harry Warrington should be that sailor, and his fate ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... light of the tangled lawn made him suddenly feel tremendously apparent, and he wondered if there could be some mystic thing in the house which was regarding this approach. His men trudged silently at his back. They stared at the windows and lost themselves in deep speculations as to the probability of there being, perhaps, eyes behind the blinds—malignant ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... lesson, I think, of what we call folklore or anthropology, which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull. It may become the most attractive and serious of the sciences; certainly it is rich in strange curiosities, like those mystic stones which were fingered and arrayed by the pupils in that allegory of Novalis. I am not likely to regret the accident which brought me up on fairy tales, and the inquisitiveness which led me to examine the other fragments of antiquity. But the poetry ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... bitter to thee, pardon, If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live; And to give thanks is good, and to forgive. Out of the mystic and the mournful garden Where all day through thine hands in barren braid Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade, Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants grey, Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted, ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... bruised on the shadow trail? What wonder the gauzy northern lights are bands of marshaling warriors and the stars torches lighting those who ride the plains of heaven? Indeed, I defy a white man with all the discipline of science and reason to restrain the wanderings of mystic fancy during the hours ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... Egypt kneel adown Before the vine-wreath crown! 260 I saw parch'd Abyssinia rouse and sing To the silver cymbals' ring! I saw the whelming vintage hotly pierce Old Tartary the fierce! The kings of Inde their jewel-sceptres vail, And from their treasures scatter pearled hail; Great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans, And all his priesthood moans; Before young Bacchus' eye-wink turning pale.— Into these regions came I following him, 270 Sick hearted, weary—so I took a whim To stray away into these forests drear Alone, without ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his lips, and cried that "the gospel of the Father was past, the gospel of the Son was passing, the gospel of the Spirit was to be." These three men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting signs, especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were ready to resume their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... makes responsibility. We shall have to give account to God for all that he sends to us by the mystic hands of the passing hours, and which we refuse or neglect to receive. "They are wasted and are added to ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... than ten years and in actual existence for about four years. During the period of development the revolutionists denounced the monarch in most extravagant terms and compared him to the devil. Their aim was to kill the mystic belief of the people in the Emperor; for only by diminishing the dignity of the monarch could the revolutionary cause make headway. And during and after the change all the official documents, school text-books, press views and social gossip ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... the island of Hvar, a great linguist, was a man who made you think that a very distinguished mind had entered the body of the late Cardinal Vaughan. To him the most noticeable features of the President were the clear brow, the mystic eyes and the mouth which showed that he stood ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... appear to those who know not what it means to wear the Oneida clan-mark of nobility, I, clean-blooded and white-skinned, was as fiercely proud of this Iroquois honor as any peer of England newly invested with the garter. And it was strange, too, for I was but a lad when chosen for the mystic rite; but never except once—the day before I left the north to serve his Excellency's purpose in New York—had I been present when that most solemn rite was held, and the long roll of dead heroes called in honor of ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... over the two windows. Then, candle in hand, she went lightly across the big living room to a stern and businesslike safe that stands against the farther wall. Kneeling before this she rapidly twirled the lock to a series of mystic numbers and opened ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... family, feigned sickness; Glendower and Mortimer were kept away; the Archbishop dallied; and failure was the result. This situation gave Shakespeare an opportunity to paint a number of remarkable portraits; but the scheming, crafty Worcester, the vacillating Northumberland, the mystic Glendower, are all overshadowed by the figure of Hotspur, wrong-headed, impulsive, yet so aflame with young life and enthusiasm, so ready to dare all for honor's sake, that he is almost more attractive than the Prince himself. Over against the older leaders ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... novel fashions and unknown garbs, were to them earnest and absorbing realities. The aspect of cities and havens, and leagues of forest and solitary plains, were to them "as a banner broad unfurled," and inscribed with mystic signs and legends. They were not whirled about from place to place: they had leisure to mark the forms and the colours of objects. They were in perils often: if they escaped shipwreck they were in danger of slavery; they journeyed ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... passed busy days and brisk evenings, and filled up whatever spare moments he could find or manufacture, with treasury papers, books on taxation, consolidated annuities, and public accounts, alternating with dips into Lamennais—the bold and passionate French mystic, fallen angel of his church, most moving of all the spiritual tragedies of that day of ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair; it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none but the life Kate had left—the sense of which, for that matter, by mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor—the very impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... thoughts and emotions into nature. In a few eminent examples the two types of mind to which I refer seem more or less blended. Sir Oliver Lodge is a case in point. Sir Oliver is an eminent physicist who in his conception of the totality of things is yet a thoroughgoing idealist and mystic. His solution of the problem of living things is extra-scientific. He sees in life a distinct transcendental principle, not involved in the constitution of matter, but independent of it, entering into it and using it ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... stretched a vast prospect of woodland and tufted heath, bounded far off by a range of chalk-hills speckled with farm-houses and villages, and melting towards the west into a distance faint and far, and mystic as ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... slipped out: what is meant is that Behmen "derived his doctrine from Robert Fludd,[595] for whom see Wood's etc. etc." Even this is absurd enough: for Behmen began to publish in 1610, and Fludd in 1616. Fludd was a Rosicrucian, and a mystic of a different type from Behmen. I have some of his works, and could produce out of them paradoxes enough, according to our ways of thinking, to fit out a host. But the Rosicrucian system was a recognized school of its day, and Fludd, a man of great learning, had abettors enough ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... overnight, by the help of a cigar and a moonlight contemplation on deck, for sensations on landing in Egypt. I was ready to yield myself up with solemnity to the mystic grandeur of the scene of initiation. Pompey's Pillar must stand like a mountain, in a yellow plain, surrounded by a grove of obelisks as tall as palm-trees. Placid sphinxes brooding o'er the Nile—mighty Memnonian countenances ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... herself that there must be at the root of all this suffering some great sin she herself was ignorant of. Morning and evening she knelt long before the sacred images, imploring God to deliver her from her pain; and feeling herself soothed by this effusion of mystic tenderness, she kept her sadness to herself, still refusing to fathom it. But she was visibly wasting away: the smoky atmosphere of her home had now the same painful influence upon her that the want of fresh air had formerly when she first left her village. She passed the winter suffering, uncomplaining, ...
— The Little Russian Servant • Henri Greville
... two battles—the one on earth, the other in the air, according to the legend that warriors, after their death, continue fighting incessantly as spirits. In the middle of the picture appears the Cross and its mystic light; on this my "Symphonic Poem" is founded. The chorale "Crux fidelis," which is gradually developed, illustrates the idea of the final victory of Christianity in its effectual love to ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... covenant, to be His people.... "Whosoever (says Christ) shall receive this child in my name, receiveth me;" but such an identity of Christ with His disciples stands wholly upon their relation to Him as members of His "mystic body, the Church." It is in this respect only that they are "one with Him;" and there can be no identity of Christ with "little children" but by virtue of the same relation, that is, as they are members of His mystical body, the Church; of which ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... in a dream, as the patriarchs were of old; but to use mystic or unholy charms to procure a vision, is making a compact with ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... and went back down Carl Johann. It was now about eleven. The streets were fairly dark, and the people roamed about in all directions, quiet pairs and noisy groups mixed with one another. The great hour had commenced, the pairing time when the mystic traffic is in full swing—and the hour of merry adventures sets in. Rustling petticoats, one or two still short, sensual laughter, heaving bosoms, passionate, panting breaths, and far down near the Grand Hotel, a voice calling "Emma!" The whole ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... palace building, in the exquisite confections of costly feminine adornment, in the luxurious binding of books, in the cooking of larks, in the distinguished portraiture of undistinguished persons, in the various refinements of prostitution, in the subtle accommodations of mystic theology, in jewellery. It is quite conceivable that in such departments Socialism will discourage and limit aesthetic and intellectual effort. But no mercantile plutocracy could ever have produced a Gothic cathedral, a folk-lore, a gracious natural type of cottage or beautiful ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... went down to the river to embark; he had provided a boat, victims, hydromel, and all necessaries for our mystic enterprise. We ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... him? All the years I had known him I had known but little of him. God only knows the hearts of these men who rove or drift, who, anchorless and rudderless, beat upon the ragged reels of life till the breath leaves them and they pass through the mystic channel into the serene harbor of eternity. A sudden wave of dissatisfaction swept over me. What had I done in the world to merit attention? What had I done that I, and not he, should know the love of woman? ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... haled us to the Princess where she sat High in the hall: above her drooped a lamp, And made the single jewel on her brow Burn like the mystic fire on a mast-head, Prophet of storm: a handmaid on each side Bowed toward her, combing out her long black hair Damp from the river; and close behind her stood Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men, Huge women blowzed with health, and wind, and rain, And labour. ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... overstrained nerves produces a sense of the most exquisite relief and repose; and so when mind and body are harrowed, harassed to the very outer verge of endurance, come wild throbbings and transports, and strange celestial clairvoyance, which the mystic hails as the descent of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... stood before me, whom I'd sought, With dying hope, through life's decaying years— A form, a spirit, human yet divine. Love gave her eyes the light of heav'n, and taught Her lips the mystic music of the spheres. Our beings met,—I felt her soul ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... amid the mimic rout A mystic shape intrude! A formless thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes! it squirms!—with mortal pangs, Mocked at by laughter rude; There's no more snap in its sharp fangs, Which once ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 26, 1891 • Various
... There was no mystic sign to be seen about her. The only mystery was in her absolutely blooming health and naturalness and in the gentle and clear happiness of her voice and eyes. She was not tired; she was not dragged or anxious looking ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... trees in the strange dead night, Under the vast dead sky, Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell, And ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... of axioms, advocated by modern axiomatics, purges mathematics of all extraneous elements, and thus dispels the mystic obscurity which formerly surrounded the principles ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... revivalist preachers of to-day. In other respects he was a true child of the Middle Ages. An ascetic, he fasted, wore a hair-cloth shirt, mixed ashes with his food to make it disagreeable, wept daily, so that his eyesight was nearly destroyed, and every night flogged himself with iron chains. A mystic, he lived so close to God and nature that he could include within the bonds of his love not only men and women, but also animals, trees, and flowers. He preached a sermon to the birds and once wrote a hymn to praise God ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the beginning by his native disposition; they remain plastic until the hour of his death, and whatever touches his circumference, influences them for better or worse. The power of decision develops only out of practice. There is nothing mystic about it. It comes of a clear-eyed willingness to accept life's risks, recognizing that only the enfeebled are comforted by thoughts of ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... not grow smaller under the care of Donald; and as each of the three was married in succession out of his family, he added to all his other kindnesses the gift of a gold ring. They had been brought up under his eye sound in the faith; and Donald's ring had, in each case, a mystic meaning;—they were to regard it, he told them, as the wedding ring of their other Husband, the Head of the Church, and to be faithful spouses to Him in their several households. Nor did the injunction, nor the significant ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... artistic ideas was rich in helmeted Minervas, vine-wreathed Bacchuses, winged Apollos and nameless classic nymphs, all staring downward from the spandrels of pointed arches with quite as much at-homeness as Olympian heroes would feel amid the mystic shades of the Scandinavian Walhalla. This room was magnificent with crimson upholstery, upon which rested a multitude of scarlet-embroidered cushions that seemed to the color-loving eye like a dream of plum-pudding after a nightmare of mince-pie. Through this magnificence ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... and significance were known unto men. The sounds of harps and cymbals and lyres and timbrels blended with those of conch-shells and antelope horns. Sighs and laughter and curses and weeping mingled with the wild strains of Homeric song and mystic rites of Chaldea and Babylon, and the sacred chant of Isis. The Voodoo danced to the rattle of shells and antelope hoofs before the shrines of Ethiopia's dark woman, crowned with the sickle moon, and vast multitudes knelt and lay prostrate before the car ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... them in her basket of wickerwork, walked out of the market, and passed up the way which led to the home of her mistress. But the splendour to which she hastened was a prison to her. She so full of young life, she who felt within her the rising for supremacy (an unquenchable spirit), she with a mystic flame burning up her soul, felt it was not a home but a waiting-place until the Fates passed by and led ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... battlefield a holy intoxication, a holy happiness, takes possession of those for whom has been reserved the supreme joy of braving death for their country. Death is everywhere, but they do not believe in it any more. And when, on certain mornings, to the sound of cannon that mix their rumblings with mystic voices of bells, in the devastated church which cries to the heavens through every breach opened in its walls, the Chaplain blesses the regiment that he will accompany the next minute to the firing line, every head will ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... autumn is not bare, Nor winter's rattling boughs lack lusty green: Our summer hearts make summer's fullness where No leaf or bud or blossom may be seen: For nature's life in love's deep life doth lie, Love,—whose forgetfulness is beauty's death, Whose mystic key these cells of Thou and I Into the infinite freedom openeth, And makes the body's dark and narrow grate The wide-flung ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... duller being at her side. She was not subdued under her falling veil, like so many brides, but saw everything, them among the rest, as she passed, and showed by a half smile her recognition of their presence. There was no mystic veil of sentiment about her; no consciousness of any mystery. She walked forth bravely, smiling, to meet life and the world. What was there in that beautiful, beaming creature to suggest a thought of future necessity, trouble, or the most distant occasion for help or succour? Perhaps it is ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... not in accordance with modern Christian sentiment to dwell very much on the physical sufferings of Christ. Once the feeling on this subject was very different: in old writers, like the mystic Tauler, for example, every detail is enlarged upon and even exaggerated, till the page seems to reek with blood and the mind of the reader grows sick with horror. We rather incline to throw a veil over the ghastly details, or ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... of jewels, emanating their own glory, then he had arrived. Here the satisfaction he had yearned after came near, towards this, the porch of the great Unknown, all reality gathered, and there, the altar was the mystic door, through which all and everything ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... wondered at that men, endowed with such powers of blessing or banning, possessed of such mystic communion with the then utterly unknown powers of nature, should have exercised an all but unlimited influence over the minds of their countrymen, especially at a time when the powers of evil were still supposed ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... forest, And they gave it the name of their ship Mayflower. Beauty was at their feet, and their eyes beheld it; The earth cried out for labor, and they gave it. But ever as they saw the budding spring, Ever as they cleared the stubborn field, Ever as they piled the heavy stones, In mystic vision they saw, the eternal spring; They raised their hardened hands above the earth, And beheld the walls that are not built of stone, The portals opened by angels whose garments are of light; And beyond the radiant walls of living stones They dreamed vast meadows ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... Pisistratus, and this name already passed from mouth to mouth. A circumstance, insignificant enough at any other time, gave them an opportunity of attacking him indirectly. An old woman, called Catherine Theot, played the prophetess in an obscure habitation, surrounded by a few mystic sectaries: they styled her the Mother of God, and she announced the immediate coming of a Messiah. Among her followers there was on old associate of Robespierre in the constituent assembly, the Chartreux Dom Gerle, who had a civic certificate from Robespierre ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... so flimsy a device and entered unbidden. Even the death of a grave-digger did not stay the dread disease, although it had been prophesied that such an event would end the trouble. The cabalistic books were ransacked for charms and mystic signs with which to resist the power of the conqueror, but ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... for. But the pines—the grim silence of their slender frames and gently swaying summits—fascinated me. They spoke of possibilities few could see or appreciate as I could; possibilities of a sylvan phantasmagoria enhanced by the soft and mystic radiance of the moon. An owl hooted, and the rustling of brushwood told me of the near proximity of some fur-coated burrower in the ground. High above this animal life, remoter even than the tops of my beloved trees or the mountain-ranges, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... nothing interested her so much as a low cottage, something like her own, which lay away in the distance. She could not guess how far it might be, because distances are deceiving out there, where the altitude is high and the air is as clear as one of those mystic balls of glass in which the sallow mystics of India see the ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... artistic merits of the work, but invests it with a corresponding proportion of interest as a revealer of some of the deepest secrets and hidden phases of the human soul, if one only has the courage to wade through it. The dreamy mystifications and the wild insanity and mystic passion of Brother Medardus are not unrelieved by scenes and characters which bear the stamp of bright poetic beauty and rich comic humour (e.g., the character of the Abbess of the Cistercian convent, the jaeger, the ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... unreal was in the air about them. The rugged mountain-side with its chaos of riven boulders, its forest of splintered rocky spires, silver cold in the twilight, its impassive bulk looming so large, yet a mere segment in the circling range, was as a day-dream of some ancient Valhalla, clothed in the mystic glory of ever-changing light, ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... used among the old races of Northern Europe, contains in its true signification something mystic and religious. The female patriarch of the household was regarded with superstitious veneration. Her sayings were wise and good, and the warrior sat at her feet on the eve of battle and gathered from her as from an oracle, the confidence and courage which nerved him for ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... nevertheless left him benumbed in his baseness, cowardliness and weakness. Now he understood that love, in order to triumph, must first humble its own power, still its own movement and soften its brutal will. Now he comprehended that he must carve mystic runes of passion upon his own heart as upon a glowing rose and fling it into the mighty sea of feeling, praying it to bring the maiden Gro ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... on the other hand, the Christian believer who avoids seeing God in nature, and who finds him only in his Bible, loses the sense of law or order, of harmonious growth, and becomes literal, dogmatic, and narrow. And so, too, the mystic, believing only in God's revelation through the soul, and not going to nature or to Christ, becomes withdrawn from life, and has a morbid and ghastly religion, and, having no test by which to judge his inward revelations, may become the prey of all fantasies and all evil spirits, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... especial worth, which has a similarity to the Socratic "maieutike," the "obstetric." From this state of affairs one can only expect that psychoanalysis for many people who have taken a certain pose, in which they firmly believe, is a real torture, because according to the ancient mystic saying: "Give what you have, then shall you receive!" They must of their own free will offer as a price their beloved illusions if they wish to allow something deeper, more beautiful and more vast to enrich them. Only through the mystery ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... attention to your magic cap and die, and in order to exhibit their mystic powers, you request the loan of half a dozen cents (the number must, of course, correspond with that of your own pile). While they are being collected, you take the opportunity to slip the little cap over your prepared pile, which should ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... at night interfered with by consideration of the question—"What should the 100 pound rate be by Wells Fargo & Co. from New York to San Francisco?" And at night often I am aroused from sleep, feeling confident in my dreams that the mystic figure of "a just and reasonable rate," under Section One, on 100-pound shipments to San Francisco, had been determined, and awaken with a joyous cry upon my lips, to discover that life has been made still more ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... and neglected by other tribes. The Haytian word tabaco, which designated the pipe from which they sucked the smoke into their nostrils, and also the roll of leaves,—for they employed both methods,—has passed over to the weed. The pipe was a hollow tube in the shape of a Y, the mystic letter of Pythagoras: the two branches were applied to the nose, and the stem was held over the burning leaves. The weed itself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... shown in all the previous conversation. His face quite changed. "I admit it's an unpardonable weakness, but I can't help it. I am afraid of death and I dislike its being talked of. Do you know that I am to a certain extent a mystic?" ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... only by those who, like myself, were brought up in the school of the old teleological morphology, and whose eyes were suddenly opened by the theory of selection to a comprehension of that greatest of all biological riddles, the creation of specific forms. The dogma of creation, the mystic and dualistic doctrine of the isolated creation of each separate variety, was annihilated at one blow; the belief in transmutation has now for ever taken its place—the mechanistic and monistic doctrine of the metamorphosis of organic forms, of the descent ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... you ask if I will be true? Have I any will left then? Have I power to be untrue to you, even if I would?—you came by night; you knocked upon my door;—and I opened to you. You spoke to me. What was it you said? You gazed in my eyes. What was the mystic might that turned my brain and lured me, as it were, within a magic net? (Hides her face on his shoulder.) Oh, look not on me, Nils Lykke! You must not look upon me after this—— True, say you ? Do you not own me? I am yours;—I must ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... raised upon it, and therefore a desire for forbidden knowledge is made to account for the woman's sin and the sorrows of all her female progeny. To me this merely sensual sin, the sin of a child, seems much more picturesque, a good deal fitter for the purposes of art, without the mystic and mythical addition of an intellectual desire for knowledge and the agency of the Satanic serpent. Alas! the mere flesh is devil enough, and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... And these mystic shadows, flitting about in the thick grayness, were unbodied souls; not like visitants from the bright summer land, nor yet beings resembling the dark, undeveloped "dwellers on the threshold," whom earthly crimes held bound near their former homes, but they seemed as if they were misty ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... he snatched up a broom handle. He waved it menacingly over the dog. Chum gave back not an inch. Under the threat of a beating he stood his ground, his brave eyes steadfast, and, lurking in their mystic depths, that same glint of sorrowful ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... recognition of her merit as an artist, apart from her novel subject, perhaps went further to remove her uneasiness than any serious conviction of the professor's theory. Nevertheless, it appealed to her poetic and mystic imagination, and although other subjects from her brush met with equally phenomenal success, and she was able in a year to return to America with a reputation assured beyond criticism, she never entirely forgot the strange incident connected with ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... the most interesting relates to amulets and protective charms, which represent an important stage in the gradual development of Medicine as a science. And especially noteworthy among medical amulets are those inscribed with mystic sentences, words, or characters, for by their examination and study we may acquire some definite knowledge of the mental condition of the people ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... bedroom window above their heads Bathsheba's head and shoulders, robed in mystic white, were dimly seen ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... SIGMA}. T was taken as a picture of a cross. For the Tau or Egyptian cross, see DCA, art. "Cross." The method of allegorical interpretation here used is that species known as gematria, in which the numerical equivalence of letters composing a word is employed as a key to mystic meaning. This differs somewhat from the ordinary gematria, for which see Farrar, History of Interpretation, 1886, pp. 98 ff., 445 f. Barnabas is by no means singular among early Christians in resorting to ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... (especially the middle parts, second tenor and first bass)—and then, above all, religious absorption, meditation, expansion, ecstasy, shadow, light, soaring—in a word, Catholic devotion and inspiration. The "Credo," as if built on a rock, should sound as steadfast as the dogma itself; a mystic and ecstatic joy should pervade the "Sanctus;" the "Agnus Dei" (as well as the "Miserere" in the "Gloria") should be accentuated, in a tender and deeply elegiac manner, by the most fervent sympathy with the Passion of Christ; and the "Dona nobis pacem," expressive ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... While the mystic twist is spinning, And the infant's life beginning, Dimly seen through twilight bending, Lo, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... a spiritual, a mystic rose. The rose therefore is a fitting symbol of the virtuous life of the mother of God. As mystical rose she deserves our admiration and veneration, and she must be our example and model in all Christian virtues, the model of a ...
— The Excellence of the Rosary - Conferences for Devotions in Honor of the Blessed Virgin • M. J. Frings
... enters with words the interior of his house,(496) 2 When he willeth he goeth forth from his mystic fane. 3 Thy wrath is destruction of fishes.(497) 4 Then(498) men implore thee for the waters of the season. 5 "That the Thebaid may be seen like the Delta. 6 That every man be seen bearing his tools, 7 No man ...
— Egyptian Literature
... warning and awaken, In hushed processional issuing from the night, Like Druid priests with mystic white robes shaken, Communing in some immemorial rite: Round their old brows burns what pale augury, What benison, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... little Ted Fairfax listened with his mouth open, seeming to see the great arm that rose out of the water to take back the king's sword into the sea, from which it had been given him. An arm like a giant's, "clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, that caught the sword by the hilt, flourished it three times, and drew it ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... a certain degree melancholy—like the tune of a long ballad; and its harmony grave and gentle, sad and tender: it would be unendurable else. The loneliness of women in the country makes them of necessity soft and sentimental. Leading a life of calm duty, constant routine, mystic reverie,—a sort of nuns at large—too much gaiety or laughter would jar upon their almost sacred quiet, and would be as out of place ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of Scotland! Nicol, failing a couple of broadswords or four dirks, had got two pieces of rusty old iron and placed them cross-wise on the extemporised floor. With what skill and nimbleness he proceeded to execute this sword-dance,—which is no doubt the survival of some ancient mystic rite,—with what elegance he pointed his toes and held his arms akimbo; with what amazing dexterity, in all the evolutions of the dance, he avoided touching the bits of iron; nay, with what intrepidity, at the ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... towards him, her hands outheld, her mouth still touched with that little, mystic smile. "Please—tell me all over again now ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... the Lady of the Lake, Who knows a subtler magic than his own— Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful. She gave the King his huge cross-hilted sword, Whereby to drive the heathen out: a mist Of incense curl'd about her, and her face Well-nigh was hidden in the minster gloom; But there was heard among the holy hymns A ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... by unsuccessful searching pained, Weary he fainted thro' the toilsome hours; And then his mystic nature he sustained On steam ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... of Alo[e]us I you have chosen a worship that admits not a divided heart. But your faith, like the Mystic's, shall also make your strength; and though Aspiro stoops not to your stature, yet she reigns, and she rewards. Be true. Be firm. Even if it be upon the wreck of some frail, temporal heart-hopes, you must reach higher, till, in the sheen of the approving smile, you read the world-lesson: ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... the Wise One, smiling. He stepped to an ancient chest, deeply carved with mystic signs, that stood quite by itself in a corner of the hut. From out that chest many magic gifts had come, when need was great. Filled to the brim with treasures as it always was, none saw aught within but those gifts which ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... their calabashes. They were trying to appease the dread deity of Thunder, as did their Inca ancestors. The voice of the old priest led the worship, and for four hours there was no cessation of the monotonous song, except when he performed some mystic ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... already said. Paul and Peter had a great quarrel about circumcision and related subjects. The Apostolic writings are wondrously diverse from one another. Peter is far less constructive and profound than Paul. Paul and Peter are both untouched with the mystic wisdom of the Apostle John. But, in regard to the facts that I have signalised, the divinity, the person of Jesus Christ, His death and Resurrection, and the significance to be attached to that death, they are absolutely one. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... for the perfumer Ciano, an eccentric man, but respected after his kind, a sign for his shop, containing a gipsy woman telling the fortune of a lady in a very graceful manner, which was the idea of Ciano, and not without mystic meaning. Another who learnt to paint from the same master was Antonio di Donnino Mazzieri, who was a bold draughtsman, and showed much invention in making horses and landscapes. He painted in chiaroscuro the cloister of S. Agostino at Monte Sansovino, executing therein scenes ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... and spoke again in her sleep. She uttered the following deep and mystic words: "Gustel, bring in the shark, please; mother can't ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... lapis-lazuli—that belongs alone to the basements of Italian mountains. Higher, the roseate whiteness of ridged snow on Alps or Apennines. Highest, the blue of the sky, ascending from pale turquoise to transparent sapphire filled with light. A mediaeval mystic might have likened this chord to the spiritual world. For the lowest region is that of natural life, of plant and bird and beast, and unregenerate man; it is the place of faun and nymph and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and cities built, and work is done. Thence we climb to purified ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... broncho, and by the same token, a broncho is not much smaller. The craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high. The manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and, moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white water, the foam racing down from the summit of each wave, requiring a new leap, and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully bumping a crest, she would slide, ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... was squeezed from Marufa by the chance mystic phrase which was interpreted by him as referring ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... not Spanish for nothing. He is a mystic; which, of course, does not prevent him being a remarkably gay and competent man of the world. Amateurs who knew him in old days are sometimes surprised to find Picasso now in a comfortable flat or staying at the Savoy. I should not be surprised to hear of him in a Kaffir ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... the chase he led, By his loved huntsman's arrow bled - Ytene's oaks have heard again Renewed such legendary strain; For thou hast sung how he of Gaul, That Amadis so famed in hall, For Oriana foiled in fight The necromancer's felon might; And well in modern verse hast wove Partenopex's mystic love: Hear, then, attentive to my lay, A knightly ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... she didn't doubt it. She did not deem it necessary to add that she knew that one of Mr. Henson's mystic telegrams had been addressed to one James Merritt at an address in Moreton Wells, a town some fifteen miles away. That the scoundrel was up to no good she ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... where o'er the pavement cold The glimmering moonbeams lay. May Ellen gazed with wide, scared eyes, Nor could she turn away, For, as in mystic dreams we see A spirit, ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... boys, Every man a brother! That's where honor lies, Nay, but greatness rather: One's the mystic whole, Lordly flesh won't know it; But the kingly soul, Sees but ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... possibly that this was the most palatable seasoning for the latter which they could possibly supply. His wife furnished out an entertainment present for him of all her hair and rags, with which, together with his arms, his provisions, his ornaments, and his mystic medicine bag, he was wrapped up in the skin which had been his last covering when alive. He was then tied round with the bark of some particular trees which they use for making cords, and bonds of a very firm texture and hold (the only ones indeed which they have), and ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... of vines, or what will be vines when the summer comes, but are now black, knotted and gnarled clubs, without a sign of life in the seemingly dead stick. One who sees that sight may find a new beauty and meaning in the mystic words, "I am the Vine, ye are the branches." It is not merely the connection between branch and stem common to all trees; not merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the grape, which made the very heathen look ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... He was magnanimous. He harbored no grudge, nursed no grievance; was quick to forgive, and was anxious for reconciliation. Hear him appealing to the South: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every loving heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... thought, when the mind grows faster and the heart more slowly; then wakes the storm in the forest of human relation, tempest and lightning abroad, the soul enlarging by great bursts of vision and leaps of understanding and resolve; then floats up the mystic twilight eagerness, not unmingled with the dismay of compelled progress, when, bidding farewell to that which is behind, the soul is driven toward that which is before, grasping at it with all the hunger of the ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... of the time. It is in stories like these that we find the keen sense of what is beautiful in nature, the sense of "man's brotherhood with bird and beast, star and flower," which has become the mark of "Celtic" literature. We cannot put it into words, perhaps, for it is something mystic and strange, something that takes us nearer fairyland and makes us see that land of dreams with ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... bethought her of the old shrine back near the woods. It was many a day since she had been there—not since the autumn before—and she felt old and different, but still she had a sudden desire to return to it and try again the mystic rite she had practised when she was a little girl. It was like going back to play, to be sure; all the sacredness was gone, but the interest remained, and her yearning spurred her to her ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... death and hell The mystic power we prove; And conquerors of the world, we dwell In Heaven, ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... recess. Seated, oriental fashion, upon an improvised divan near the grand piano and propped up by a number of garish cushions, Rita beheld Mrs. Sin. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers. Her face wore an expression of mystic rapture like that characterizing the ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... realities, and in pursuing its splendid visions. The essential element in the Celt's poetic life is the adventure—that is to say, the pursuit of the unknown, an endless quest after an object ever flying from desire. It was of this that St. Brandan dreamed, that Peredur sought with his mystic chivalry, that Knight Owen asked of his subterranean journeyings. This race desires the infinite, it thirsts for it, and pursues it at all costs, beyond the tomb, beyond hell itself. The characteristic ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... teaching of Wishart, raised him from a mundane life. Then he awoke to a passionate horror and hatred of his old routine of "mumbled masses," of "rites of human invention," whereof he had never known the poetry and the mystic charm. Had he known them, he could not have so denied and detested them. On the other hand, when once he had embraced the new ideas, Knox's faith in them, or in his own form of them, was firm as the round world, made so fast that it cannot be moved. He had ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... they talk in flowers, And they tell in a garland their loves and cares: Each blossom that blooms in their garden bowers On its leaves a mystic language bears. —PERCIVAL. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... of unmistakable anger. The woman rejoined, in the same melancholy music of voice. And Margrave then, leaning his arm upon her shoulder, as he had leaned it on mine, drew her away from the group into a neighboring copse of the flowering eucalypti—mystic trees, never changing the hues of their pale-green leaves, ever shifting the tints of their ash-gray, shedding bark. For some moments I gazed on the two human forms, dimly seen by the glinting moonlight through ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... of night, with the hum of the great city rising below her—at times even in theatres or crowded assemblies of men and women—she forgot herself, and again stood in the weird brilliancy of that moonlight night in mute worship at the foot of that slowly-rising mystic altar of piled terraces, hanging forests, and lifted plateaus that climbed forever to the lonely skies. Again she felt before her the expanding and opening arms of the protecting woods. Had they really closed upon her in some pantheistic embrace that made ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... answered the requirements of spirits that were pious and earnest without enthusiasm: less ardent in faith and less absolute in religious practice than M. de St. Cyran and Port-Royal, less exacting in his demands than Father Bourdaloue, susceptible now and then of mystic ideas, as is proved by his letters to Sister Cornuau, he did not let himself be won by the vague ecstasies of absolute (pure) love; he had a mind large enough to say, like Mother Angelica Arnauld, "I am of all saints' order, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... meditation; though of the latter I could not see that I could make much, if any, more than confirming myself against all preternaturals as agents on earth, however certain their existence may be beyond the mystic veil that divides the two worlds. I had known Graeme's crime and Gourlay's self-murder; but the crime was a trick among blacklegs, and the suicide was the madness of a gambler, who had risked his money and was ruined at the moment he wanted to ruin another. Surely ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... true Corsicans are. He took his hat, hardly paused to blow the dust off it, and hurried out into the sunlit Place. He went rather slowly up the church steps, however, for he was afraid of Denise. Her youth, and something spring-like and mystic in her being, disturbed him, made him uneasy and shy; which was perhaps his reason for drawing aside the heavy leather curtain and going into the church, instead of waiting for her outside. He preferred to meet her on his own ground—in the chill air, heavy with the odour ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... church. At one end of an aisle, Against a wall where mystic sunbeams smile Through painted windows, orange, blue, and gold, The Christ's unutterable charm behold. Upon the cross, adorned with gold and green, Long fluted golden tongues of sombre sheen, Like four flames joined in one, around the head And by the outstretched arms, ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... By dusk, when his majesty withdrew, the town was founded and complete, a new and ruder Amphion having called it from nothing with three cracks of a rifle. And the next morning the same conjurer obliged us with a further miracle: a mystic rampart fencing us, so that the path which ran by our doors became suddenly impassable, the inhabitants who had business across the isle must fetch a wide circuit, and we sat in the midst in a transparent privacy, seeing, seen, but unapproachable, like bees in a ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sleeping, she dreamed a strange dream. She found herself again in Westleydale, walking in green aisles of the holy, mystic, cathedral woods. The tall beech-stems were the pillars of the temple. A still light came through them, guiding her to the beech-tree that she knew. And she saw an angel lying under the beech-tree. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... frontier everywhere overlap, and in a cleft of the wooded hills that conceal the German batteries we saw a dark grey blur on the grey horizon. It was Metz, the Promised City, lying there with its fair steeples and towers, like the mystic banner that Constantine saw upon ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... laboured hard upon a thousand schemes for human improvement, some admirable, others mere frenzy, while mobs filed in and danced mad carmagnoles before them—all this is a magnificent masterpiece of accurate, full, and vivid description. To the philosophy of it we venture to demur. The mystic, supernatural view of the French Revolution, which is so popular among French writers who object to the supernatural and the mystical everywhere else, is to us a thing most incredible, most puerile, most mischievous. People talk of '93, as a Greek tragedian treats the Tale of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... fool has trodden The summits of that range, Nor walked those mystic valleys Whose colors ever change; Yet we possess their beauty, And visit them in dreams, While the ruddy gold of sunset From cliff ...
— The Red Flower - Poems Written in War Time • Henry Van Dyke
... tones (the so-called "third" or Tartini's tone). This discovery, a lasting and valuable acquisition to all later investigations into acoustics, led him further and further, but apart from the exact road of natural science into the nebulous regions of mystic philosophy. Tartini taught that with the problem of harmony would also be solved the mystery of creation, that divinity itself would be revealed in the mystical symbols of the tone relations. In these mystical investigations, the ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... good dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club of Queer Trades has one very curious thing about it. The most curious thing about it is that it was not discovered by me; it was discovered by my friend Basil Grant, a star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... chronicle of future time, The mystic mirror of events sublime Where deeds of virtue gild each pregnant page And some grand epoch makes each coming age, Where germs of future history strike the eye And empires' rise and fall in embryo lie, Though statesmen, heroes, sages, chiefs abound Yet none of worth ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... for the "it" of a fictitious aspiration, the approach to a Living Friend? Sanctity is in character and not in moods; Divinity in our own plain calm humanity, and in no mystic rapture of the soul. ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... (looking east), the mystic pillar, and the ram, surely bear some evidence in favour of the Ram Feast being a sacrifice ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... person to test the rival powers of a sham prophecy and a real American bullet, he prudently took a position on an adjacent eminence; and, when the action began, he entered upon the performance of certain mystic rites, at the same time singing a war song. Soon after the engagement commenced, he was informed that his men were falling. He told them to fight on, it would soon be as he predicted; and then in, wilder and louder strains, his inspiring battle song was heard ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... that that foreshadowed.... Truly, he had served his apprenticeship, and was meet for his opportunity. For eight long months he had stood in line, doing his duty quietly and well, asking no favor of anybody. And now at last Warwick had beckoned him and set the mystic ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... poet was a member, was noted for its socialities. Masonic lyrics are all of a dark and mystic order; and those of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... by the admiring glances of the other girls, who from behind the bars of their cage noted the brilliant plumage of this bird who was at liberty. She crossed the courtyard, and, followed by Modeste, entered the chapel, where she sank upon her knees. The mystic half-light of the place, tinged purple by its passage through the stained windows, seemed to enlarge the little chancel, parted in two by a double grille, behind which the nuns could hear the ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... forced operatic business of sending out or bringing in characters as seems advisable there is not a sign. The story is on the whole simpler than that of Tannhaeuser. Lohengrin is son of Parsifal, head of the mystic Montsalvat monastery where the Holy Grail is kept; where the monks never seem precisely to die; and where, without marriage and even without women, children are somehow born to the favoured ones. He comes in ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... find that my childish thoughts and dreams Lie strewn on the sands by the cruel blast That scattered my hopes on the restless streams That flow through the mystic ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... centre of the world, And waited for the middle hour of night, Now swiftly coming, to convene her court. Set in an ocean of perpetual calm Was the fair island honoured by her reign; Slowly around her rolled the Frigid Zone, Dim in the mystic moonlight far away,— A silvery ring, circling her nearer realm With the pale lustre of its snowy walls, Defending from all storm and sudden change The sea which bathed the island's level shores. She sat upon her ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
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