|
|
|
More "Supernatural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are of very great consequence. They anticipate the sentiments, before merit can engage the understanding: they captivate the heart, and give rise, I believe, to the extravagant notions of charms and philtres. Their effects were so surprising, that they were reckoned supernatural. ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... most penetrating intelligence knows all things in and by itself, whose essence in itself is an abyss of pleasures and joys, and who is to Himself, and to all who shall enjoy Him in a future life, a supernatural, ineffable, and most sweet happiness. The maiden, when she heard this, looked up, and said: These things are sweet to tell and sweet to hear, for they rouse the heart, and lift the spirit up far beyond itself. Therefore, ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... full merit of this description, a judicious critic should have known both, and Henry Adams knew only one — at least in person — but he understood that to a Scotchman the likeness meant something quite portentous, beyond English experience, supernatural, and what the French call moyenageux, or mediaeval with a grotesque turn. That Stirling as well as Milnes should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who lost his balance of mind at first in trying to imagine that Swinburne ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... side of religion which interests George Eliot, its influence morally, its sympathetic impulse, its power to comfort and console. Its supernatural elements seem to have little influence over her mind, at least only so far as they serve the moral aims of life. It is humanity which attracts her mind, inspires her ideal hopes, kindles her enthusiasms. Religion, apart from human encouragement ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... of hoofs stampeded Dene's horses in a twinkling. But the outlaw paled to a ghastly white and seemed rooted to the trail. It was not fear of a man or a horse that held Dene fixed; in his starting eyes was the terror of the supernatural. ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... "inhaled through the nostrils by means of a bifurcated tube." "All writers unite in declaring that it induced a kind of intoxication or hypnotic state, accompanied by visions which were regarded by the natives as supernatural. While under its influence the necromancers, or priests, were supposed to hold communication with unseen powers, and their incoherent mutterings were regarded as prophecies or revelations of hidden ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... with toes pointing backwards, his mouth snarling horribly to display his great green fangs. It was distressing to have such fancies in this wild, solitary spot—hateful to feel their power over me when I knew that they were nothing but fancies and creations of the savage mind. But if these supernatural beings had no existence, there were other monsters, only too real, in these woods which it would be dreadful to encounter alone and unarmed, since against such adversaries a revolver would be as ineffectual as a popgun. Some huge camoodi, able to crush my bones like brittle twigs ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... life and death. What the father was to the family, the gods were to the whole people, the awful lords and rulers at whose pleasure they lived and breathed. Unlike the Greeks, the reverential Romans invented no idle legends about the supernatural world. The gods to them were the guardians of the State, whose will in all things they were bound to seek and to obey. The forms in which they endeavored to learn what that will might be were childish or childlike. They looked to signs in the sky, to thunder-storms and comets ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... at Chester-le-Street near Durham. For seven years they carried with them the body of St. Cuthbert; and it is said that the final choice of a resting place for the body of their beloved saint was indicated to them by supernatural means as they ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... Gregory of Tours (Hist. de Fr., i., 5) speak of this. However this may be, the marvelous art was lost at an early date, for it was at such a date that priests began to have recourse to tricks that were more or less ingenious for lighting their sacred fireplaces in an apparently supernatural manner.—A. De ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... fabric of evidence would you have such a people as ours turn tail like beaten hounds? Because, forsooth, you detect a peculiar vibration in the air, will you have it that we are to be invaded and destroyed forthwith by a race of supernatural ability? Bah! Your calamity-howling clan has delayed the Day of Conquest from year to year—I more than half believe that you yourself or some other treacherous poltroon of your ignominious breed prepared and sent that warning, in a weak and rat-brained attempt to frighten us into again postponing ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... fiery explosions of the rifles and their effect upon the whole body of scarlet cavalry. The entire scene, including the mounted possession of their horses by uncouthly attired strangers, previously invisible, must have appeared to these terror-stricken natives an achievement of supernatural beings. And when Mr. Huertis wheeled his obstreperously laughing party to recover his mules, he found most of the astounded men prostrated upon their faces, while others, more self-possessed, knelt upon the bended knee, and, with drooping heads, crossed their hands behind them to receive the ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... aspect, or relation, to the field which it concerns did the term religion originally come forward? The general field, overlooked by religion, is the ground which lies between the spirit of man and the supernatural world. At present, under the humblest conception of religion, the human spirit is supposed to be interested in such a field by the conscience and the nobler affections, But I suspect that originally these great faculties ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... persuasion which clung so long and so tenaciously to the human mind, of a divine influence underlying and supporting every relation of life, every social institution. In early law, and amid the rudiments of political thought, symptoms of this belief meet us on all sides. A supernatural presidency is supposed to consecrate and keep together all the cardinal institutions of those times, the State, the Race, and the Family. Men, grouped together in the different relations which those institutions imply, are bound to celebrate periodically ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... the Jews were considered either as the distant progeny of Adam or Eve, resulting from an improper intercourse with supernatural beings, or of Cain. As the doctrine, however, was extremely revolting to some few of the early Christians, they maintained that demons were the souls of departed human beings, who were still permitted to interfere in the ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... performed in the night, requires more than ordinary nerve, inasmuch as the interior of the great structure is literally alive with echoes and other suggestions of the supernatural. In the daytime, when the place is full of people and the noises of busy life, the professional guides make a point of showing persons how a whisper uttered when standing on a certain marble block is distinctly ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... these spooks, such as the man who searches for his hidden money, and the child with a snowy face that knocks on the panes, then stares fixedly in, with corpse eyes, at the windows. Best known among these supernatural citizens are two lovers who "spoon" on dark nights, and are faintly outlined on the landscape as figures of quivering, smoky blue. Their favorite haunt is their death-place, eight miles from Ponce, in a hollow among limestone hills, now ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... depths of qualities and things. Cleaving and circling here swells the soul of the poet: yet is president of itself always. The depths are fathomless, and therefore calm. The innocence and nakedness are resumed— they are neither modest nor immodest. The whole theory of the special and supernatural, and all that was twined with it or educed out of it, departs as a dream. What has ever happened, what happens, and whatever may or shall happen, the vital laws enclose all: they are sufficient for any case and for all cases—none to be hurried or retarded—any miracle of affairs ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... it can work unhampered by our consciousness of the humdrum actualities of our daily experience. It may always be asked whether a writer of Romance makes his world seem convincingly real as we read or whether he frankly abandons all plausibility. The presence or absence of a supernatural element generally makes an important difference. Entitled to special mention, also, is spiritual Romance, where attention is centered not on external events, which may here be treated in somewhat shadowy fashion, but on the deeper questions of life. Spiritual Romance, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... made up his mind to instant action, the vicar's brief discourse began to drag itself into supernatural length. Facing the preacher, and immediately beneath Reuben's feet, was a clock of old-fashioned and clumsy structure, and the measured tick, tick of its machinery communicated a faintly perceptible jar to a square foot or so of the gallery flooring. The mechanical ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... score of years and yet talk of piety as the product of evolution? In his case, instead of evolution, there was rather a revolution, as marked and complete as ever was found, perhaps, in the annals of salvation. If Lord George Lyttelton could account for the conversion of Saul of Tarsus only by supernatural power, what would he have thought of George Muller's transformation! Saul had in his favor a conscience, however misguided, and a morality, however pharisaic. George Muller was a flagrant sinner against common honesty and decency, and his whole early career was a revolt, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... suffering keenly. He fancied that all this was some supernatural temptation, and, unwilling to look at the markets any longer, turned towards Saint Eustache, a side view of which he obtained from the spot where he now stood. With its roses, and broad arched windows, its bell-turret, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... as those people! They pass so close to us; they see us, and we see them; but the distance between is infinity. They don't belong to the same world as we poor wretches. They see everything in a different light; they have powers which would seem supernatural if we ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... Kew smiled (in her supernatural way) almost as much as her portrait, by Harlowe, as you may see it at Kewbury to this very day. She is represented seated before an easel, painting a miniature of her son, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... born and reared among people who were believers in premonitions and supernatural appearances all his life, and he once declared to his friends that he ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... price of conversion) was refused to the "King of Micocco." Like the idols, these talismans avert ill luck, bachelorhood, childlessness, poverty, and ill health; they are equally powerful against the machinations of foes, natural or supernatural; against wild beasts, the crocodile, the snake, and the leopard; and against wounds of lead and steel. They can produce transformation; destroy enemies; cause rain or drought, fine or foul weather; ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... war graveyards in France, no religious dogma or supernatural hope intrudes upon the little wooden crosses. On these, for the most part, you can read only the bare conventional attributes of each little handful of dust, which has passed through its quivering agony into ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... is also possible that the German aeroplanes will cease to fly, and that General Bramble will take a dislike to the gramophone. I should not be surprised at any of these things; I should simply recognize that supernatural forces had come ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... Barnaby's sight coming back to him again in the darkness, he beheld that dark and motionless figure still standing exactly where it had stood before, and so knew either that he had missed it or else that it was of so supernatural a sort that a leaden bullet might do it no harm. Though if it was indeed an apparition that Barnaby beheld in that moment, there is this to say, that he saw it as plain as ever he saw a living man in all ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... call for assistance, known to, and respected by, every boy who loved the name of Columbia High School—a rallying cry in time of emergency, when the enemy had carried the ball down close to the home goal, and almost supernatural efforts were needed, in order to beat back the ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... opinion, a treatise denouncing the idea, that there was any God, who manifested any interest in the affairs of men, that there was any Particular Providence. Though Franklin did not accept the idea, that Jesus Christ was a divine messenger, and that the Bible was a supernatural revelation of God's will, he certainly did not, in his latter years, deny that there was a God, who superintended the affairs of this world, and whom it was proper to worship. It is generally supposed that Thomas Paine was the author of this treatise, and that it was a portion of his Age ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... extraordinary example of a human being converted into a money-making and accumulating machine. He was not especially irritable; indeed his physical powers were weak and dying of every species of starvation; but his coldness was supernatural. Fortunately for Katherine, his former housekeeper was greedy and extravagant, so that his niece's management seemed wise and economical, and she had an excellent backer-up in ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... place of bows and arrows and spears. This strange change in African savages came to be talked over among the people. It was so wonderful that the other tribes could account for it only as an instance of supernatural magic. There was nothing they knew of that would lead men like the Bechuanas to bring war to an end, and ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... no wonder. The mysterious giant forms of the mythological period, removed by divinity from the sympathy of men; the vast heroic figures of Cuchulain and his fellows and foes, their close relation to supernatural beings and their doings, are far apart from the more natural humanity of Cormac and Finn, of Dermot and Goll, of Oisin and Oscar, of Keelta, and last of Conan, the coward, boaster and venomous tongue, whom all the Fenians mocked and yet endured. They are a very human band of fighting men, and though ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... on upon the impetus of this last mood of almost supernatural exaltation until he reached a narrow street, at this hour empty of traffic and passengers. Here, whether it was the shops with their shuttered windows, the smooth and silvered curve of the wood pavement, or a natural ebb of feeling, his exaltation ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Bresl. Edit. "the place is full of Jinns and Marids." I have said that this supernatural agency, ever at hand and ever credible to Easterns, makes this the most satisfactory version of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... been impossible for them to have landed and reached the camp without having been seen by himself or some member of his company, was sufficient evidence to warrant him in attributing their presence to some supernatural ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... altogether. That he had been absolutely sincere in his story I had read in his dilating eye and the involuntary shiver that had passed over him while he spoke. Here indeed, though I scouted all idea of supernatural agency, there lay a mystery that piqued ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... pyramid was erected, it would seem, under the instructions of a certain Semitic king, probably no other than Melchizedek. By supernatural means, the architects were instructed to place the pyramid in latitude 30 deg. north; to select for its figure that of a square pyramid, carefully oriented; to employ for their unit of length the sacred cubit corresponding to the 20,000,000th part of the earth's polar axis; and ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... emotion of love, is the motive in the "Sakoontala" of Kalidasa, and different phases of feeling, rather than the struggles of energetic action, lead on to the denouement of the play. The introduction of supernatural agencies controlling the life of the personages, leaves very little room for the development and description of human character. As the fate of the hero is dependent altogether upon the caprice of superhuman powers, the moral ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... more often when his manner of life was changed for the better, and were both glad to see that he had found the jewel which adversity possessed. It happened that he was with them one evening when the conversation turned on supernatural appearances, the possibility of which was maintained by Julian and Owen, while Lillyston in his genial way was pooh-poohing them altogether. Hazlet alone sat silent, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... in the supernatural, and had had absolutely no apprehensions of coming across anything of a ghostly character—all my fears had been of malicious natives and tigers; they now, however, changed, and I was confronted with a dread of what I could not understand ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... end here. With the point, saw, drill, and grindstone, they fashioned these materials into an infinity of shapes—hearts, human fingers, serpents, animals, images of divinities. All these were amulets; and they were probably less valued for the charm of the workmanship than for the supernatural virtues which they were supposed to possess. The girdle-buckle in carnelian (fig. 210) symbolised the blood of Isis, and washed away the sins of the wearer. The frog (fig. 211) was emblematic of renewed birth. The little lotus-flower column in green felspar (fig. 212) typified ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... that would have made a saintly priest in parentagearlier times. He accepted the angel theory, swallowed it whole, tried to force it on us—with varying effect. He so worshipped Celis, and not only Celis, but what she represented; he had become so deeply convinced of the almost supernatural advantages of this country and people, that he took his medicine like a—I cannot say "like a man," but more ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... to all such as attained the necessary fineness of soul. Perhaps we should find in this the gospel of a new Covenant in which Shakespeare would be the great teacher and leader. Mysteries were gathering about him, who was he? Who really wrote his plays and poems? The adumbrations of a new supernatural figure were looming in the conception of the world. Mr. Alcott mused through the afternoon in characteristic fashion and Emerson sat with us, silently absorbing ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... covered my eyes, resolved to shut out the catastrophe of their broken necks and mangled limbs,—when thunders of acclamation shook the house; and, looking up, I beheld a transformation that seemed supernatural. The old great-coats, clumsy sabots, and hats, were scattered to the ground; and two youthful figures, glittering in white and silver, light and graceful as "feathered Mercuries," stood, hand in hand, poised on one foot, on the tight-drawn ropes. They danced. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... his answer, stamped her foot on the ground and an earthquake followed, which rent the hill in sunder. She called, and fire and liquid lava arose, and, assuming her supernatural form, with these irresistible ministers of vengeance, she followed down the hill. When Kahawali reached the bottom, he arose, and on looking behind saw Pele, accompanied by thunder and lightning, earthquake, and streams of ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... did not mean what they pretended, she suspected there might be some sort of mechanical efficacy at last; like the partly undeceived disciple and assistant of a master juggler, who is not quite sure that there may not be a supernatural power behind some of the tricks. Beyond an overflowing animal vitality, and a passion for having men make love to her, there really was not much of Victorine. But it is wonderful how far these two qualities can ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... literally dumb-stricken. Yes, he certainly was haunted! He stared at this second questioner, and fancied that there was something very supernatural and unearthly about him. He was so tall, and so dark, and so stern, and so strange. Was it the Unspeakable himself come for the linendraper? Nephews again! The uncle of the babes in the wood could hardly have been more ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... supposed to excite a strong degree of surprise and terror. In the minds of the vulgar, any species of the wonderful is received with avidity; and the servants did not hesitate in believing the southern division of the castle to be inhabited by a supernatural power. Too much agitated to sleep, they agreed to watch for the remainder of the night. For this purpose they arranged themselves in the east gallery, where they had a view of the south tower from which the light had issued. The night, however, passed without any further disturbance; and the ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... need any such testimony. Our life here makes us sure of the life there. At any rate, no externation of the supernatural, no objective miracle, has been wrought in our behalf. We have had faith to do what we prayed for, and the prescience of which I speak has been added ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... extraordinary, and, indeed, my son Emile, then aged twelve, possessed all the essential qualities to produce this opinion, for his pale, intellectual, and ever thoughtful face represented the type of a boy gifted with some supernatural power. ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... the Mikado's legions were hurled upon the surprised Zassulitch, whose troops were widely scattered along the river. And the battle!—well, you know what Ames can do with a battle if you give him just one smell of smoke for a foundation. And in the same story, with seemingly supernatural knowledge, he gleefully scored the most profound and ponderous paper in England for the false and misleading account of the intended movements of the Japanese First Army printed in its issue ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... the "natural" forms the antithesis to the supernatural, on the one hand, and to the historical, on the other. This combination of the revealed and the historical will not appear strange, if we remember that the mediaeval view of the world under criticism was, as Christian, historico-religious, and, moreover, that for the philosophy of religion ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... experiences of inspiration and spirit manifestation make credible and acceptable many things in ancient records which must otherwise have been discarded as superstitious and false. Spiritualism redeems the so-called 'supernatural' and 'miraculous' occurrences of the Bible, by explaining them and proving the naturalness. The capability claimed for old-time seers and prophets to see angels and hear voices is now known to be a natural faculty, which, in certain people, is perfectly normal while it can be ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... my blessed infant,' she retorted, tapping her nose again, screwing up her face, and twinkling her eyes like an imp of supernatural intelligence. 'Never YOU mind! You'd like to know whether I stop her hair from falling off, or dye it, or touch up her complexion, or improve her eyebrows, wouldn't you? And so you shall, my darling—when I tell you! Do you know what my ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... at this sight almost bereft her of her understanding; it appeared to her supernatural, and she rather believed it was his ghost than himself. Fixed in mute wonder, she stood still though terrified, her eyes almost bursting from their sockets to be satisfied if ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... logic, cosmogony, and paradox. But in Marcus Aurelius these doctrines no longer stain the pure current of eternal truth which ever flowed through the history of Stoicism. It still speculated about the immortality of the soul and the government of the universe by a supernatural Intelligence, but on these subjects proposed no dogma and offered no final authoritative solution. It did not forbid man to hope for a future life, but it emphasized the duties of the present life. On purely rational grounds it sought to show men that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... whose imagination concerns itself with supernatural phenomena, especially in the doings of spooks. One of the most illustrious spookers of our time is Mr. William D. Howells, who introduces a well-credentialed reader to as respectable and mannerly a company of spooks as one could wish to meet. To the terror ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... atmosphere they breathed—heavier upon them fell the sense of something almost supernatural, beyond the human and the finite. Skeptic and faint believer, sinner, Christian and scoffer, they were all alike now in the presence of a faith whose evidence was before them in harrowing vividness, in the torment and agony of a fellow creature who sought again through faith a restoration ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... wiped his hand on a dog, and the dog got some of the electricity and ki yield to beat the band. Then Pa shook hands with everybody, and they all went through the same kind of performance, and were scared silly at the supernatural power Pa seemed to have. The squaws seemed to get more electricity than the buck Indians, 'cause Pa squeezed harder, and the way they danced and cut up didoes would make you think they had been drinking. Finally Pa touched them all with his magic wand, and then they prepared a ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... black chief as tightly as I ever clung to a top-gallant-yard in a gale of wind. The chief and his followers were so much taken by surprise, that no one knew what to say or how to act. The awe with which the captain had inspired them, and the supernatural mode, as it seemed, by which he had freed himself from his bonds, and freed me also, made them afraid of approaching lest he should destroy ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... to come will look back upon his history as to some grand and supernatural romance. The fiery energy of his youthful career, and the magnificent progress of his irresistible ambition, have invested his character with the mysterious grandeur of some heavenly appearance; and when all the lesser tumults and lesser men of our age shall have ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... is usually the heart's first choice of a phrase to describe the swift flight of a happy time, but like a few days spent on some other planet, where, for the interval, she had been changed into a sort of supernatural child. Except at night, they were never in the house. The harsh New England May laid aside for them all its treacheries, and was indeed the month of spring. Their mornings they spent on the water, ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... for a time and the disease gradually disappeared. Such diseases were attributed to changes in the air, to the influence of planets or to the action of offended gods. The priests and charlatans who sought to excuse their inability to treat epidemics successfully were quick to affirm supernatural causes. Hippocrates (400 B.C.), with whom medicine may be said to begin, thought such diseases, even then called epidemics, were caused by the air; he says, "When many individuals are attacked by a disease at the same ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... level. I tried to reduce the distance he has placed between his nature and mine. I desired more immediate relations, more individual instruction; not content to make God in the image of man that I might be favoured above my fellows, I desired supernatural knowledge; I required a special form of worship; I wanted God to tell me what he had not told others, or what others had ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... the praise of Him consisted in ascribing miracles to Him, and the knowledge of the hidden and the future. But since all this is now within the capacity of the saints of the Order, the Almighty has no longer any pre-eminence over them in respect of the supernatural—'His praise is in the congregation of the saints,'—and therefore it is necessary to find for Him some new praise—'Sing unto God a new song'—suitable to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... beads of a necklace of great pearls, that lay on the ocean of her surging breast, so that it was carried up and down on its wave. And she looked, as she stood before me, like a faultless feminine incarnation of the essence of a bosom friend, turned into an instrument of supernatural seduction by the infusion of the intoxication of the other sex, and seeming as it were to say: How much dearer is a dear friend, that looks at ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... been rescued by the interposition of some supernatural agency, and solemnly declared his fixed determination never again to approach a gaming table, and throughout the voyage adhered to his resolution, spite of every influence Ward could bring to bear upon him to ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... I used often to contemplate all the objects on the walls: vultures carrying sceptres, crocodiles playing on lyres, men's faces joined to serpents' bodies, women with cows' heads prostrated before the ithyphallic deities; and their supernatural forms carried me away into other worlds. I wished to know what those calm eyes were gazing at. In order that matter should have so much power, it should contain a spirit. The souls of the gods are attached to their images. Those who possess external beauty may fascinate us; but the others, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... pleasure, to Louis was tedious. Though passionately attached to his mother, yet the impious and often blasphemous remarks of his father chilled his heart; the levity with which his sisters ridiculed his piety was very disagreeable; hence, under the guidance of a supernatural call to grace, he longed to be back with the kind fathers, where the quiet joys of study and solitude far outweighed the short-lived excitement called pleasure by his worldly sisters. This religious tendency found at last its consummation in an act of heroic self-denial ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... with their rifles, and they think I am not to be hurt—that's their superstition—and my rifle, they think, never misses (they're almost right there, for it does not once in a hundred times), so what with this and that, they fear me as a supernatural, as we call it. But that's not the case with you all here; and if the Snake could creep within these palisades, he ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... supremacy. The same views are repeated in the periodical essays. The Mirror regards it as "preposterous" to endeavour to regularise his plays, and finds the source of his superiority in his almost supernatural powers of invention, his absolute command over the passions, and his wonderful knowledge of nature; and the Lounger says that he presents the abstract of life in all its modes and in every time. The rules are forgotten,—we cease to hear even that they are useless. ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... immediately declared that she would do all that lay in her power to help young Ellangowan to his right, even if it should be by informing against Dirk Hatteraick; and that many of her people assisted her besides himself, from a belief that she was gifted with supernatural inspirations. With the same purpose, he understood, his aunt had given to Bertram the treasure of the tribe, of which she had the custody. Three or four gipsies, by the express command of Meg Merrilies, mingled in the crowd when the Custom-house was attacked, for the purpose ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... the divinity had arisen—a veil that might be stripped off without special damage. Pallas Athene might be indignant, when she found herself suddenly transmuted into the conception of memory: Minerva had hitherto been in reality not much more. The supernatural Stoic, and the allegoric Roman, theology coincided on the whole in their result. But, even if the philosopher was obliged to designate individual propositions of the priestly lore as doubtful or as erroneous—as when the Stoics, for example, rejecting the doctrine ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... preservation in Wales of a bridge-sacrifice tradition. It relates to the "Devil's Bridge" near Beddgelert. "Many of the ignorant people of the neighbourhood believe that this structure was formed by supernatural agency. The devil proposed to the neighbouring inhabitants that he would build them a bridge across the pass, on condition that he should have the first who went over it for his trouble. The bargain was made, and the bridge appeared in its place, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... the symbol of all of harmony and beauty that is known to man, must we still talk of the supernatural, not as a convenient word, but as a different order of world, . . . where the Reign of Mystery supersedes the Reign of Law? Natural Law, Introduction, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... egregiously deceived, the phenomena in question indicate the speedy discovery of relations not hitherto suspected to exist between matter and spirit. We do not anticipate the development of any other than natural laws. We are not credulous as to the interference of supernatural agencies; but we are fully prepared for almost any discoveries in the department of psychology, unveiling the mysterious but unquestionable relations of harmony—of action and reaction—existing between the soul of man ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... constitutions, through illness to death, is painfully revealed by these histories of twins. We are too apt to look upon illness and death as capricious events, and there are some who ascribe them to the direct effect of supernatural interference, whereas the fact of the maladies of two twins being continually alike shows that illness and death are necessary incidents in a regular sequence of constitutional changes beginning at birth, and upon which ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... words to distinguish between the concepts, and I find none so clear and expressive as the two I have chosen. The perfected individual, Buddhistically speaking, is a Buddha, I should say; for a Buddha is but the rare flower of humanity, without the least supernatural admixture. And, as countless generations—"four asankhyyas and a hundred thousand cycles" (Fausboll and Rhys-David's Buddhist Birth Stories, No. 13)—are required to develop a man into a Buddha, and the iron will to become one runs ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... justice, peace and right. Therefore, the Scientist, who perceives that all is good when rightly received and rightly understood, is really the priest or holy man—the mediator and explainer of the mysteries. As fast as we understand things they cease to be supernatural, for the supernatural is the natural not yet understood. The theological priest who believes in a god and a devil is the real modern infidel. Such a belief is fallacious, contrary to reason, and contrary to all the man of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... the fantasy of tales filled him with at least as much enthusiasm as the supernatural. At Madaura he lived in a miraculous world, where everything charmed his senses and his mind, and everything stimulated his precocious ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... admits that it is desirable to have negroes know enough of religion to make them friends to humanity, and grateful to their creator; but he considers it very wrong to load their weak minds with a belief in supernatural dogmas, such as a belief in a future state. He says, "such knowledge is apt to render them intractable, averse to labor, and induces them to commit suicide on themselves and their children, of which the colony, the State, and commerce have ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... go was good-natured, harmless Victor Seitz, a Detroit cigar maker, a German, and one of the slowest of created mortals. How he ever came to go into the cavalry was beyond the wildest surmises of his comrades. Why his supernatural slowness and clumsiness did not result in his being killed at least once a day, while in the service, was even still farther beyond the power of conjecture. No accident ever happened in the company that ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... sailors to shorten and take in the canvas, urging them to increased efforts by working at the ropes with his own hands, springing up the rigging and on deck, flashing backwards and forwards amidst the rigging like a being of supernatural power. He had taken off his jacket, and was clad from top to toe in white, save for that streak of scarlet which tightly girdled his waist. His tall flexible form, perfect in line as a Greek statue of Hermes, stood out against the background of black night. His voice, with ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... "'It's a supernatural warning,' ses the second mate, who had a great uncle once who had the second sight, and was the most unpopular man of his family, because he always knew what to expect, and ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... there was youthful coquetry about her—something that, to me, seemed like erotic experience. I soon lost sight of her. But I retained a sentiment of gratitude towards her for what, as a ten-year-old child, she had afforded me, this naturally supernatural impression, my first ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Hawthorne is so dripping wet with the supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical—so surcharged with adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a poet of greater imaginative impulse than Emerson or Thoreau. He was not a greater poet possibly than ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... stream to Nicolo Musso's little theatre outside the Porta del Popolo, whilst Formica's name was on everybody's lips, and people shouted with wild enthusiasm, "Oh! Formica! Formica benedetto! Oh! Formicissimo!"—not only in the theatre but also in the streets. They regarded him as a supernatural visitant, and many an old lady who had split her sides with laughing in the theatre, would suddenly look grave and say solemnly, "Scherza coi fanti e lascia star santi" (Jest with children but let the saints alone), if anybody ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... of the past had led by different paths to a similar conclusion. The primitive ethical codes of man were not unlike the compacts of a wolf-pack, the understanding to refrain from mutual attack during the chase of a common prey. Conceptions of this kind became arranged in codes and invested with supernatural sanction. But in Hindustan and Ionia alike, material prosperity, no doubt partly the result of the accepted codes, produced culture of the intellect and culture of the pleasures. With these came the "beneficent ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... discussion tempts to many an excursion into particulars, its treatment is restricted to general outlines, with an aim simply to clarify current ideas of miracle and the supernatural, so as to find firm holding ground for tenable positions in the present "drift period" of theology. The chief exception made to this general treatment is the discussion given to a class of miracles regarded with as much incredulity as any, yet ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... hour later he was in his room again, and the real world had come back to him. It had come back with the surprise of some supernatural mechanism; it was as though the sofa, chairs, pictures had five minutes before been grass and toadstools in a world of mist and now were ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... town. It was a remarkable quality of the Ghost (which Scrooge had observed at the baker's) that, notwithstanding his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any place with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as gracefully, and like a supernatural creature, as it was possible he could have ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... life and weary of the world; he sends Seth to the gates of Paradise to ask mercy and release for him, telling his son that he will find the way thither by his father's foot-prints, burnt into the surface of the earth which was cursed for Adam's transgression. Seth finds and follows the supernatural marks, is welcomed by the angel at the gate of Paradise, and is permitted to look in. He beholds there, an Apocalypse of the redemption of the world. On the tree of life sit the Virgin and Child; while on the tree from which Eve plucked the apple, "the woman" is seen, having ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... exaltation: "That Christ will save my soul. He gives me fresh courage and strength every time that I look at Him." And pausing before the picture, she murmured: "How beautiful He is! How frightened those men are, and how they love Him! Look at His head, His eyes, how simple and supernatural He is ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... worms, and are therefore often called cutampiru, which signifies vermiculous diseases, or diseases proceeding from worms. The machis are a superstitious class, or pretenders to sorcery, and allege that all diseases proceed from witchcraft, and pretend therefore to cure them by supernatural means, for which reason they are employed in desperate cases, when the exertions of the ampives and vileus have proved ineffectual; They have likewise a kind of surgeons, called gutarve; who are skilful in replacing luxations, setting fractured ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... strange and weird to me, this one-sided recognition, this unfamiliar familiarity: it gave me a queer thrill of the supernatural that I can hardly express to you. But I didn't know what to do, when a kindly-faced, middle-aged English upper-class servant rushed out at me, open-armed, and hugging me hard to her breast, exclaimed with many ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... he looked to the gods for help, and by sacrifices, processions, and choral dances, which he himself organised and arranged, he awed, interested, and softened the manners of the Romans, artfully beguiling them out of their warlike ferocity. Sometimes he spoke of supernatural terrors, evil omens, and unpropitious voices, so as to influence them by means of superstition. These measures proved his wisdom, and showed him a true disciple of Pythagoras, for the worship of the gods was ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... produced by the collision of the atoms, must, as to something else, have been a cause. Then we have matter, force, law, order, cause and effect without a being superior to nature. Nothing is left for the supernatural but empty space. His throne is a void, and his boasted realm is without matter, without force, without law, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the instances which our verger heard in his kitchen of the supernatural skill of this cunning man; and whilst Mr. Hill ate his snack with his wonted gravity, he revolved great designs in his secret soul. Mrs. Hill was surprised, several times during dinner, to see her consort put down his knife and fork, and meditate. "Gracious me, Mr. ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... they are any more supernatural than the telegraph and telefone and electric light, and many other seemin'ly supernatural works. And who knows but there may still be some hidden powers in nature that is the source of what you ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... to death until the galley returned. The mere fact of such a tradition as that of the galley is at least presumptive evidence that some historic ground lay behind a belief so persistent, however the story may have been added to and adorned with supernatural details by later imagination; and it is difficult to see how Grote, on the very threshold of recounting the Athenians' conviction about the ship, and their solemn sacrificial use of her, should pause to reaffirm his unbelief in the existence of any historic ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... that usually called experiment, but it can give no complete knowledge even of corporeal things, much less of spiritual. On the other hand, in inner experience the mind is illuminated by the divine truth, and of this supernatural enlightenment there ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... through all the natural—as opposed to supernatural—miseries incidental to our state. Dispiriting reports ascended (like the smoke) from the basement in volumes, and descended from the upper rooms. There was no rolling-pin, there was no salamander (which failed to surprise me, for I don't know what it is), ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... the manner of instructing proportioned to them. But there is one thing which suits all persons, and without which knowledge is nothing but "a sounding brass and tinkling cymbal": this is the supernatural culture of the soul, or the habitual endeavor of man of rendering himself more pleasing in the sight of God by the acquisition of solid Christian virtues, in order thus to reach his last end—his ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... taste for the supernatural, there was ample opportunity for its gratification in this haven of tradition. He may have seen the headless man who was accustomed to walk down Green Street to Market Space, with what intention was never ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... Valhalla, and whether they had anything but water to drink—in huge disdain, inquiring of Gangler whether he supposed that the Allfather would invite kings and jarls and other great men, and give them nothing to drink but water. How do things divine and supernatural, when conceived of by man and cast in an earthly, finite mould, necessarily assume human attributes and characteristics! Strong drinks, the passion of the Northern races in all ages, are of course found in their old mythic heaven, in their fabled Hereafter,—and even boar's flesh ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... awakened towards certain animals, by seeing their vast importance arising from their special instincts and faculties. The cow and the ox, the dog, the ibis, and the cat, may thus have appeared to the Egyptians, from their indispensable utility, to be endowed with supernatural gifts. But this feeling itself must have had its root in a yet deeper tendency of the Egyptian mind. They reverenced the mysterious manifestation of God in all outward nature. No one can look at an ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... course concluded that his visitor must be something more than mortal. It is no matter about telling you who he was. In those days, when the earth was comparatively a new affair, it was supposed to be often the resort of beings endowed with supernatural powers, who used to interest themselves in the joys and sorrows of men, women, and children half playfully and half seriously. Midas had met such beings before now, and was not sorry to meet one of them again. The stranger's aspect, indeed, was so good-humored and kindly, if not beneficent, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... examination of the specimen of the genus Zana which the bursar still held in captivity, and pronouncing an unanimous opinion, that, come from where he would, he was a bona fide frog, with nothing supernatural about him, the conclave proceeded round the quadrangle, calculating the numbers, and conjecturing the probable origin of these strange visitors. Equally curious, if not equally scientific, were the under-graduates who followed them; for, having ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... sensation of chill anguish accompanying it, many would have regarded as supernatural; but I recognized it at once as the effect of reaction. Man is ever clogged with his mortality, and it was my mortal nature which now faltered and plained; my nerves, which jarred and gave a false sound, because the soul, of late rushing headlong to an aim, had overstrained the body's comparative ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... healthy frame, charged, as it seemed, with fresh air, jollity, and strength, made us think better of walking. We looked at his six feet of height, his broad chest, and his firmly knit limbs, and fancied how Antaeus gained supernatural vigor from natural contact: he trod the earth with a loving and free step, as a child approaches and caresses his mother. So, too, his voice, and the topics he chose in talking, gave us the feeling of out-door existence always connected with him: of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... living at Palmyra, N. Y., claimed to have had a supernatural revelation, by which he was directed to a spot where he found buried a series of golden plates covered with inscriptions, which he translated by means of two transparent stones (Urim and Thummim) found with them. ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... should appear a potentially normal faculty, to be studied and pursued by methods that are efficient while yet harmless; and this is the purport of the present treatise. I will therefore ask the reader to follow me in these pages with a mind divested of all disposition to the supernatural. ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... of men who see monstrous forces at work, in which human lives are tossed like straws in flame. A silence reaching back to old ghosts of history, reaching out to supernatural aid. Then from one speaker or another a kind of curse and ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... late terrifying scenes had been wrought, she had now effectually precluded a recurrence thereof, for she was well convinced that no human being could now enter the enclosure without her permission. But if supernatural agents had been the actors, what had she to fear from them? The night passed away without any alarming circumstances, and when daylight appeared she flung herself upon the bed, and slept until the morning was considerably advanced. ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... at gaze, uncomprehending, too astonished for speech. We had come, even the unbelievers of us, prepared for the supernatural, for something surpassingly eery, and anything so commonplace as the smoke of a fire was a surprise greater than the sight of all Jo Kettle's ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... time and space, and of future worlds, are but natural growths from the nature of the North. Their gods, like their men, are all action, and to raise their actions above those of the human race, they naturally invest them with peculiar supernatural physical endowments, and a strange, mysterious mode of action. The powers of magic come to their aid; they are not absolutely omnipotent. Dwarfs forge them invincible arms in subterranean caverns; earth, air, fire, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... finger, and then began deliberately to unclasp the volume he held in his hands. He turned the leaves hastily for a few minutes; then, holding the book aloft in his left hand, he pointed with his right to a line which seemed to start forth from the page glowing with supernatural fire. Lovel did not understand the language in which the book was printed, but the wonderful light with which the words glowed impressed them somehow on his memory. The vision shut the volume. A strain of music was heard, and Lovel awoke. The sun was shining full into ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... waxed inordinately, almost to the point of hampering action, when an Asiatic delicacy had begun to be manifest in Western character, when the fusion of Europe and Asia was commencing to make itself felt. And in Scriabine, that new intensity of sensation attained something near to heroic supernatural stature. What was beautiful and sick in his age entered into his art. Through it, we learn, not a little, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... necessary in their profession. Bradford had not been brought up to it, and was very illiterate. Keimer, though he understood a little of the business, was merely a compositor, and wholly incapable of working at press. He had been one of the French prophets, and knew how to imitate their supernatural agitations. At the time of our first acquaintance he professed no particular religion, but a little of all upon occasion. He was totally ignorant of the world, and a great knave at heart, as I had afterward an opportunity ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... to employ force. In spite of the bravery and numerical superiority of the Indians, the Spaniards overcame them in several engagements, thanks to the terror caused by the reports of their fire-arms and the sight of the cavalry, whom the Indians took for supernatural beings. The Indians lost a large number of men in these engagements, while among the Spaniards two were killed, and fourteen men and several horses wounded; the wounds of the latter were dressed with fat taken from the dead bodies of the Indians. At ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... anti-Christ, the Inquisition, and the Saint Bartholomew, and the stakes of Vanini and Bruno, and the tortures of Galileo, and the martyrdom of so many free thinkers? Do not try to distinguish here between use and abuse: for I should reply to you that from a mystical and supernatural principle, from a principle which embraces everything, which explains everything, which justifies everything, such as the idea of God, all consequences are legitimate, and that the zeal of the believer is the sole judge of ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... where he meant to hurl himself over the line, and clutch that envied touchdown. Had a dozen followed he would have distanced them every one, such was his mettle just then. He seemed endowed with supernatural speed, many who stared and held their ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... she remained in sole charge, under Mrs. Martha's occasional supervision. She found herself, her household cares over all too soon, on a cold light March afternoon, with the clock ticking loud enough for midnight, the smoke-jack indulging in supernatural groans, and the whole lonely house full of undefined terrors, with an unlimited space of the like solitude before her. She would even have been glad to be sure of an evening of Mrs. Martha's good advice, and of darning stockings! She sat down by ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more and more nervous. Liddy had given up all pretense at bravery, and slept regularly in my dressing-room on the couch, with a prayer-book and a game knife from the kitchen under her pillow, thus preparing for both the natural and the supernatural. That was the way things stood that Thursday night, when I myself took a hand in ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Nevada, more than six thousand feet above sea-level, it lies in placid transparency. The surrounding heights are all the more pleasing to the eye because of their lingering winter-cover; and as we gaze upon the Lake, unruffled by the gentlest breeze, we marvel at the quiet,—almost supernatural,—radiancy of the scene. Lakes in other lands may present greater beauty of artificial setting,—beauty dependent largely upon picturesqueness, where vineyards and ivied ruins heighten the effect of natural environment,—but for ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Mr. Brett, I have had good cause to lose faith. My case defies analysis. It savours of the supernatural." ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... had rather have been in the hottest part of an engagement, for the congregation of broad-brims, together with the ravings of the prophet, were too much for his gravity, though I saw even he had delicacy enough not to laugh out. And the inspired gentleman, though his manner was so supernatural, yet neither talked, nor professed to talk anything more than good sober sense, common morality, with, now and then a declaration of not speaking from himself. Among other things, looking back to this childhood and early youth, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... artificial and against the grain of our spontaneous perceiving are the later habits into which science educates us. It was simply impossible for untutored men to take earthquakes into their minds as anything but supernatural warnings ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... loveliness to scorn. Even in crises of graver difficulty, where sterner assailants are to be encountered than Helen's magical smile or Florence's magnetic eyes, the invisible presence seems to inspire her lover with supernatural valiance. Remember the story of Aslauga's Knight; when once through the cloud of battle-dust gleamed the golden tresses, horse and ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... humbly presume, far otherwards than that grand primeval one, the materials are to be fished up from the weltering deep, and down from the simmering air, here one mass, there another, and cunningly cemented, while the elements boil beneath: nor is there any supernatural force to do it with; but simply the Diligence and feeble thinking Faculty of an English Editor, endeavoring to evolve printed Creation out of a German printed and written Chaos, wherein, as he shoots to and fro in it, gathering, clutching, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... of fixing the story in the minds of the people, enabling them to retain and pass down their traditions from one generation to another for an immensely long period of time. Outside of their traditions, their stories deal largely with the supernatural in the form of ghosts and fairies. Occasionally, one may hear a fable that apparently has a moral attached. The following are a few of the stories that mothers interest their children with, and that are eagerly listened to by the older ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... as setting forth the very deepest characteristic of the gospel. Consider man's need, as typified in the image of the desert. Mark that the supply for that need must come from without; that coming from without, it must be lodged in the heart of the race; that the supernatural communication of a new life and power is the very essence of the work of Christ; that such a communication is the only thing adequate to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... the King and Archbishop, in the ecclesiastical reforms of the day. Mr Poole well describes the commencement of the work. "At Medeshamstede the ruins were made to their hands, and they at once commenced the grateful task of their restoration and appropriation. As usual, we find certain supernatural interferences assigned as indications of the divine approval of the work. It is related how Ethelwold was directed by God, in a dream, to go to the monastery of S. Peter, among the Mid-English; ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... (prestige, prestigiateur, -trice, prestigieux). The use of the word was not restricted to the prestige of prophets, conjurers, demons, but was transferred by analogy to delusions the cause of which is not regarded any longer as supernatural. Diderot actually makes mention of the prestige of harmony. The word "prestige" became transfigured, ennobled, and writers and orators refined it so as to make it applicable to analogies of the remotest character. Rousseau refers to the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... dropped dead from joyful excitement. And if this long war between your soul and God should come to an end this morning by your entire surrender, the war forever over, the news would very soon reach the heavens, and nothing but the supernatural health of your loved ones before the throne would keep them from being prostrated with overjoy at the cessation of ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... from a fitful dream of his Cousin Maria. She with a supernatural strength seemed to be holding the door against some unseen, unknown power that moaned and strove without, and threw itself in despairing force against the cabin. He could see the lithe undulations of her form as she alternately yielded to its power, and again ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... friend, right you are; and your revenge will be terrible. Her supernatural and high-bred nonchalance will be lost forever should she see her portrait;" and with mutual chaffing, spiced with good- natured satire, as good-naturedly received, the little party in a ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... ban sith, "woman of the fairies"), a supernatural being in Irish and general Celtic folklore, whose mournful screaming, or "keening," at night is held to foretell the death of some member of the household visited. In Ireland legends of the banshee belong more particularly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... Genius can find ways and means for persuading Faith to any belief. These simple children of nature have implicit faith in the supernatural. As for genius—well, some persons possess it, while others do not, and modesty forbids my making invidious comparisons. Seeing by their incredulous smiles that the several members of my crew were ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... sixth century before Christ, an Aryan tribe named Sakya dwelt in Kapilavastu, 120 miles north of Benares. The king of the country had a son, Siddharta, gifted with supernatural powers both of body and mind. When the prince had reached his eighteenth year he was allowed to choose his bride, and his choice fell on the beautiful Yasodara; but in order to obtain her hand he had to vanquish in ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... if she were disgraced, stained with shame. Yet it was through no fault of her own, and overwhelmed by the terrible conviction that mysterious, supernatural powers, against which resistance was hopeless, were playing a cruel game with her, she had felt as if the stormy sea were tossing her in a rudderless boat on its ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... so many observers to witness it. The star was doubtless Venus, which, in certain circumstances, is often bright enough to be seen when the sun is above the horizon. The populace of London, however, who were not in those days very profound astronomers, regarded the shining of the star as a supernatural occurrence altogether, and as portending the future greatness and glory of the prince whose natal day ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... many philosophers think themselves obliged by reason to have recourse, on all occasions, to the same principle, which the vulgar never appeal to but in cases that appear miraculous and supernatural. They acknowledge mind and intelligence to be, not only the ultimate and original cause of all things, but the immediate and sole cause of every event which appears in nature. They pretend that those objects which are commonly denominated causes, are in reality nothing but occasions; and ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... creature's throat came forth the strangely-solemn whisper, "touching that little account." For this once, indignation got the better of affright. "Go where I will," I exclaimed, passionately interrupting him, "I find I cannot avoid you, you have a supernatural gift of omnipresence, but be you fiend or mortal I will now grapple with you;" and accordingly snatching at that obnoxious feature which, like the tail of the rattle-snake, had twice warned me of its master's fatal presence, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... first lesson in suppressing my natural feelings. As the years went by I had more lessons in it than in anything else. And I reckon it is not such a bad thing to do, for if one's natural feelings are suppressed long enough one develops supernatural feelings and feels surer of having ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... all men, but the history of one of those exceptional beings selected by God to perform the highest missions and to teach great lessons. The student, upon leaving the subject, feels the same reverence experienced upon leaving a sacred place, where the spirit has been under the influence of the supernatural. Bolivar's ambition was the legitimate desire for glory, but he never wanted that power which consists in the oppression of fellowmen ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... separate. They were no sooner returned to their respective camps, than the face of the heavens grew calm and serene. The same incident happened frequently afterwards; insomuch that Hannibal, believing that there was something supernatural in the event, said, according to Livy, that sometimes(788) his own will, and sometimes fortune, would not suffer ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... to-day in the older churches. Its period of criticism, controversy, and agitation is being reproduced in many another religious body of the present time. The debates about miracles, the theory of the supernatural, the authenticity of Scripture, the nature of Christ, and other problems that are now agitating most of the progressive Protestant denominations, are almost precisely those that exercised Unitarians years ago. The only final solution of these problems, that will give peace and harmony, is that ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... the young blood of her school-children by telling them at the end of the year how many inches of cambric frilling they had hemmed, and how many times they had missed afternoon service. To them she appeared a supernatural creature—a kind of prophetess, sent upon earth for their correction ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... the story depends upon occurrences in some measure within the bounds of probability, and in which the heroes and heroines are neither invested with superhuman qualities, nor extricated from their difficulties by supernatural means, must be ascribed to a more European state of society than that which produced those tales of wonder, which are commonly considered as characteristic of the climes of the East. Even the authors enumerated by the learned bishop of Avranches himself, in the passage above quoted, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... had moved out of sight. Julia was abstracted, following them with her eyes. With almost supernatural keenness she seemed to catch their voices ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... this is journeyman's work for the journeyman, for Borrow it was of great value because it familiarised him with the marvellous and the supernatural and so helped him towards the expression of his own material and spiritual adventures. The wild and often other- worldly air of much of his work is doubtless due to his wild and other- worldly mind, but owes a considerable if uncertain ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... are the two plays! and how immeasurably superior the later one! It may seem, on a superficial view, that in John Gabriel Borkman Ibsen has returned to prose and the common earth after his excursion into poetry and the possibly supernatural, if I may so call it, in The Master Builder and Little Eyolf. But this is a very superficial view indeed. We have only to compare the whole invention of John Gabriel Borkman with the invention of Pillars of Society, to realise the difference between ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... and sweetness, filled the old hall and overflowed it, throbbing in scarcely weakened vibrations through court-yard and castle. The melody was a prayer—the cry of a tortured heart for pardon and repose; and she sang it with almost supernatural expression. Every sound in the castle was hushed: the serfs outside knelt and ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... ark moved at the commandment of the leader Joshua, for he was the mouthpiece of the divine will in the matter. And so when the ark moved at the bidding of the leader, and became the guide of the people, there was a kind of a drop down from the pure supernatural of the guiding pillar. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... another door. Again silence when this was thrown open. But, stepping outside, as he afterward told the story, Mompesson became aware of "a strange and hollow sound in the air." Forthwith the suspicion entered his mind that the noises he had heard might be of supernatural origin. To him, true son of the seventeenth century, a suspicion of this sort was tantamount to certainty, and an unreasoning alarm filled his soul; an alarm that grew into deadly fear when, safe in the bed he had hurriedly sought, ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... a morbid young person who loved to dabble in the supernatural. Her taste in literature was for Edgar A. Poe. In religion she inclined toward spiritualism. Her favorite amusement was to gather a few shuddering friends about her, turn out the gas, and tell ghost stories. She had an extensive repertoire of ghoulish incidents, that were not fiction but the ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... them a great globe of fire, of unknown dimensions, at an unknown distance. The Moon was a mass of softer light; the stars and planets lucent bodies, armed with unknown and supernatural influences. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... all her feminine being, loving and jealous; had grown attached to him with body, feeling, thoughts. The prince was funny and entertaining to her, and the expansive Soloviev interestingly amusing; toward the crushing authoritativeness of Simanovsky she felt a supernatural terror; but Lichonin was for her at the same time a sovereign, and a divinity; and, which is the most horrible of all, her property ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... waters so sacred arose from a notion, that they were gifted with supernatural powers. Jamblichus takes notice of many ways, by which the gift of divination was to be obtained. [621]Some, says he, procure a prophetic spirit by drinking the sacred water, as is the practice of Apollo's priest at Colophon. Some ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... could not want occasions for promoting his aim; when, after having soothed her sense of hearing, even to a degree of ravishment, so as to extort from her an exclamation, importing, that he was surely something supernatural! he never failed to whisper some insidious compliment or tale of love, exquisitely suited to the emotions of her soul. Thus was her heart insensibly subdued; though more than half his work was still undone; for, at all times, she disclosed such purity of sentiment, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... was greatly interested in the performances of the spiritualists, trance mediums, and other persons pretending to supernatural powers. How far he believed in this occult science can now only be conjectured, but he was not a man to be easily played upon. He thought at least that there was more in it than was dreamed of by philosophers. When the Longfellow party was ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... continued, and the excitement on shore grew intense, for no one thought it possible that he could reach the land alive. But, after a terrible fight which would have exhausted anyone not endowed with supernatural powers, his bravery was rewarded, and with one tremendous leap he landed safely on the shore, well beyond the deadly clutch of ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... which constitutes poetic faith," was literally forced upon him. "The excellence aimed at," says Coleridge, "was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations," those produced by supernatural agency, "supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever sense of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency." To Coleridge, whatever appealed vitally to his imagination was real; and he defended his belief philosophically, ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... windows strange lights were glittering, that the carriage was slowly filling with the ineffable splendours of the west. Long afterwards she often wondered whether she endowed the sunset of that day with supernatural glories because she was so tired. Perhaps the salt mountain of El-Alia did not really sparkle like the celestial mountains in the visions of the saints. Perhaps the long chain of the Aures did not really look as if all its narrow clefts had been powdered with the soft and bloomy leaves ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... natural law is broken. On earth one man can learn a handicraft better in a few days than another in a month, while some can solve with ease a mathematical problem that others could never grasp. So it is here. Perhaps I was in a favourable frame of mind on dying, for the so-called supernatural always interested me on earth, or I had a natural aptitude for these things; for soon after death I was able to affect the senses of the friends I had left." "Are we to understand, then," asked Cortlandt, "that the reason more of our departed do ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... glad to turn attention from herself, "usually folks talk a lot of nonsense when they attribute supernatural things to certain places. But for once they're right, mother Hephzy; I shall never disbelieve in ghosts again. Oh, the horror of it—it was awful," and the girl gave a shudder of ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... seemed to pass over the crowd in a breathless whisper, soundless, supernatural, like the flight of a ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... made should prove interesting, not merely because it will introduce the reader to a class of Japanese poetry about which little or nothing has yet been written in English, but much more because it will afford some glimpses of a supernatural world which still remains for the most part unexplored. Without knowledge of Far Eastern superstitions and folk-tales, no real understanding of Japanese fiction or drama or poetry will ever ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... papal decision that the sun goes round the earth, this is because all intelligent Catholics now hold, with Pascal, that, in deciding the point at all, the Church exceeded her powers, and was, therefore, justly left destitute of that supernatural assistance which, in the exercise of her legitimate functions, the promise of her Founder authorized her ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... familiar voice rose above the whisperings of the jungle. A voice familiar, yet unreal; supernatural; a calm, commanding one that did not sound but echoed ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... had the Daimon {Greek Letters}, a family which separated, like the Jinn and the Genius, into two categories, the good (Agatho-daemons) and the bad (Kako-daemons). We know nothing concerning the status of the Jinn amongst the pre-Moslemitic or pagan Arabs: the Moslems made him a supernatural anthropoid being, created of subtile fire (Koran chapts. xv. 27; lv. 14), not of earth like man, propagating his kind, ruled by mighty kings, the last being Jan bin Jan, missionarised by Prophets and subject to death and Judgment. From the same root are "Junun" madness (i.e., possession ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... groan, and for a moment was silent. During the brief period, I heard, with awful distinctness, the sound of the pickaxe, as it was struck against the rocks upon the island, worked, I had no doubt, by supernatural hands. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... of my design to combat the belief which I know you to hold, that mortal creatures may be the objects of supernatural intervention in their pilgrimage through this world. Speaking as a reasonable man, I own that I cannot prove you to be wrong. Speaking as a believer in the Bible, I am bound to go further, and to admit that you possess ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... humbly; for like all savages he was very superstitious, and, moreover, a sincere believer in Hokosa's supernatural capacities. "This wizard is too strong for us; he is invulnerable, and as I know well he can read the secret thoughts of men and can suck wisdom from the dead, while to his eyes the darkness ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... Bunyan's time the universally received opinion that Satan appeared in the shape of animals to allure poor wretches into sin—Shakespeare, Judge Hale, Cotton Mather, Baxter, with all our eminent men, believed in these supernatural appearances.—Ed. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... dwarfs had received a shock; she was much more inclined to take things prosaically. But it was very difficult to explain matters. I think the dwarf at the first moment was more inclined to take her for something supernatural than she was now to imagine him a brownie or a gnome. For she was a pretty little girl, with a mass of golden fair hair and English blue eyes; and with her hat half fallen off, and her cheeks flushed, she might have sat for a picture of a fairy ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... existence of man may be due to natural causes? In deciding this question, just as in deciding any other question of a purely scientific character, we must be guided in our examination by the Law of Parcimony; we must not assume the agency of supernatural causes if we can discover the agency of natural causes; neither must we merge the supposed mystery directly into the highest mystery, until we are quite sure that it does not admit of being proximately explained by ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... The strongest objection he has to violate his sacred trust arises from the fear that such a revelation would break the heart of an exemplary old Goody Two-Shoes, for whom he has all his life long cherished a youthful love, the thought of which, and not his supernatural vocation, has sustained him, so I understood him to say, throughout his priestly career. All very pretty and "pale young Curatey," and theatrically sentimental, but don't put this man forward as the self-sacrificing hero of a Melodrama. No; the subject is best let ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... about it myself," says he. "He'll not, though, so I must make you understand in order that you may give him the facts. I want him to know. Of course, I can't pretend to explain the thing. It was psychic, that's all; supernatural, if you please. Must have been. For there I was, a confirmed duffer, playing that course exactly as Alexander McQuade would have played it had he been in my shoes. And he was, for the time being. At least, I claim that I was being controlled, or whatever you want to call ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... speculators, he was much given to dreaming. Never did anything extraordinary happen at Communipaw but he declared that he had previously dreamt it, being one of those infallible prophets who predict events after they have come to pass. This supernatural gift was as highly valued among the burghers of Pavonia as among the enlightened nations of antiquity. The wise Ulysses was more indebted to his sleeping than his waking moments for his most subtle achievements, and seldom undertook ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... It recalls the Homeric poetry. The constant epithets, the military enumerations, the discourses of the heroes before combat, and the idea of God, are simple, childlike, and superstition has no place. The supernatural exists in plenty, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... formed the personal acquaintance of many of the very first minds of England; but, among all with whom this experience brought her in connection, there was none who impressed her so strongly as Lady Byron. There was an almost supernatural power of moral divination, a grasp of the very highest and most comprehensive things, that made her lightest opinions singularly impressive. No doubt, this result was wrought out in a great degree from the anguish and conflict of these two years, when, with no one to help or ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... verdict of posterity will probably be that The Golden Bough has influenced the attitude of the human mind towards supernatural beliefs and symbolical rituals more profoundly than any other books published in the nineteenth century except those of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... old hag was one of those whose hearts adversity turns to very stone, and obstinately kept her door shut, impelled more probably by general hatred to the human race, than by the superstitious fears which seized her; although she perversely argued that she was startled at the supernatural melody and sweetness of tone, with which the benighted wanderer made her supplication. She admitted, that when she heard the poor petitioner turn from the door, her heart was softened, and she did intend to open with the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... feel the presence of supernatural assistance! circled in the embrace of my elbowchair, my breast labours, like the bloated Sybil on her three-footed stool, and like her, too, labours with Nonsense.—Nonsense, suspicious name! Tutor, friend, and finger-post in the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... ineffaceable characters on men and things from Cadiz to Moscow. It overrides all natural barriers and transcends all ordinary limits. "The French soldier," writes a Prussian officer after Jena,[3353] "are small and puny. One of our Germans could whip any four of them. But, under fire, they become supernatural beings. They are swept along by an indescribable ardor of which there is not a trace among our soldiers.... What can you do with peasants whom nobles lead into battle, but whose danger they share without any interest in their passions or recompenses!"—Coupled ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... news of Ramy; and as she folded this letter and laid it between the leaves of her Bible, Ann Eliza felt that her last hope was gone. Miss Mellins, of course, had long since suggested the mediation of the police, and cited from her favourite literature convincing instances of the supernatural ability of the Pinkerton detective; but Mr. Hawkins, when called in council, dashed this project by remarking that detectives cost something like twenty dollars a day; and a vague fear of the law, some half-formed vision of Evelina in the clutch of a blue-coated ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... the nymph who skipt up and down stairs with the kettle grew sleepy at last; and Mrs. Irons rebelled in her bed, and refused peremptorily to get up again, to furnish the musical topers with rum and lemons, and Puddock, having studied his watch—I'm bound to say with a slight hiccough and supernatural solemnity—for about five minutes, satisfied himself it was nearly one o'clock, and took an affecting, though soldier-like leave of his comrade, who, however, lent him his arm down the stairs, which were ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... of man is a strange thing. It may be a godlike instrument, the powers of which are yet but little known. John did not believe in the least in anything supernatural, but he did believe in the immense and unfathomed power of the natural. Alone, and in the early dawn with silence all about him it seemed that he heard Julie calling to him. Her voice traveled like the wireless on the pulsating air. She needed him and she turned to him alone ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... shivering, like an ocean liner, under the impulse of its engines, and the sudden silence, succeeding the ceaseless roar of the downpour, which had never been out of their ears from the start of the voyage, seemed supernatural. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... his apathetic attitude in their presence, but his utter and complete unlikeness to the white frontiersmen of their knowledge and tradition—creatures of fire and sword and malevolent activity—as well as his manifest dissimilarity to themselves, settled their conviction of his supernatural origin. His gentle, submissive voice, his yielding will, his lazy helplessness, the absence of strange weapons and fierce explosives in his possession, his unwonted sobriety—all proved him an exception to his apparent race that was in ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... speaking on a sudden occasion; and if we believe Eratosthenes, Demetrius the Phalerean, and the comic poets, there was a greater spirit and boldness in his unpremeditated orations than in those he had committed to writing. Eratosthenes says that in his extemporaneous harangues he often spoke as from a supernatural impulse; and Demetrius tells us that in an address to the people, like a man inspired, he once uttered ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... surging breast, so that it was carried up and down on its wave. And she looked, as she stood before me, like a faultless feminine incarnation of the essence of a bosom friend, turned into an instrument of supernatural seduction by the infusion of the intoxication of the other sex, and seeming as it were to say: How much dearer is a dear friend, that looks at thee ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... boots." The cook, craning his neck to hear better, was scandalised. "Keep your mouth shut when your elders speak, you impudent young heathen—you." "All right, old Hallelujah, I'm done," answered Charley, soothingly. At some opinion of dirty Knowles, delivered with an air of supernatural cunning, a ripple of laughter ran along, rose like a wave, burst with a startling roar. They stamped with both feet; they turned their shouting faces to the sky; many, spluttering, slapped their thighs; while one or two, bent double, gasped, hugging themselves with both arms like men in pain. The ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... the nearness of the supernatural took possession of me, for Elsie's voice was not the voice of fevered fancy; the fast ebbing tide of life seemed to flow back again, her strength visibly increased, as if she must remain till her ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... free-agency; the passive side was beheld by Augustine, and hence he became a one-sided and exclusive advocate of divine grace. If we would possess the truth, and the whole truth, we must view it on all sides, and give a better interpretation of the natural consciousness of the one, as well as the supernatural consciousness of the other, than they themselves were enabled to give. Then shall we not instinctively turn to one-sided views of revelation. Then shall we not always repeat with Pelagius, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," nor always exclaim with Augustine, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... in this Arch too, leading, as we humbly presume, far otherwards than that grand primeval one, the materials are to be fished up from the weltering deep, and down from the simmering air, here one mass, there another, and cunningly cemented, while the elements boil beneath: nor is there any supernatural force to do it with; but simply the Diligence and feeble thinking Faculty of an English Editor, endeavoring to evolve printed Creation out of a German printed and written Chaos, wherein, as he shoots ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... dramatic instant on the threshold and then disappeared into the corridor which led up into the Temple. When he had gone the startled actress retained a picture of a face, fearless, beatified, mystic to the very edge of the supernatural. ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... to give religious significance to their pictures, artists have tried in many ways to suggest the supernatural. They have introduced halos about the heads of Mary and Jesus, and have made the light seem to shine mysteriously from the child's body. Now our painter Millet, representing only an ordinary mother and babe, has not used any such methods. Nevertheless, without going beyond strict reality, ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... band of mountebanks and jugglers, who stretched out her legs in such an extraordinary manner, and raised up her feet to her head, before and behind, with as much suppleness as if she had neither nerves nor joints. There was nothing supernatural in all that; she had exercised herself from extreme youth in these movements, and had contracted the ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... of frenzied fear of the supernatural desire to appease the power above, a fierce quivering excitement in every inch of nerve and blood vessel, there comes a time when nature cannot endure longer, and the spring long bent recoils. We sink down emasculated. Up creeps ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... to the library. It seems natural that he should move softly, cautiously. A supernatural stillness pervades the lower floor. Frank Lamotte shudders and keeps his eyes turned away from the closed-up drawing room with ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... by God' has occasioned much speculation of the critics. We may simply draw the conclusion that the poet meant to have his readers believe with him that the conception of his hero was supernatural. We saw in the third of the Sacrificial Odes of Shang that there was also a legend assigning a prternatural birth to the father of the House ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... but only when they should reach their country; and that this box contained something that would do them great good, and their people! The foolish people believed really there was something in the box supernatural, that would do them great good. Accordingly, after they reached home they opened the box; but behold there was another tin box inside, smaller. They took it cut and opened the second box, and behold, still there was another box inside of the ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... of the fifth act of Hamlet set off by the comedy of the first scene. Sometimes all the natural qualifications of eminence are united in a single work: in old paintings, for example, the Christ Child, spiritually the most significant element of the whole, will be of supernatural size, will occupy the center of the picture, will have the light concentrated upon him, and will be dressed ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... too astonished for speech. We had come, even the unbelievers of us, prepared for the supernatural, for something surpassingly eery, and anything so commonplace as the smoke of a fire was a surprise greater than the sight of all Jo Kettle's imaginations coming ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... a dream, which is usually the heart's first choice of a phrase to describe the swift flight of a happy time, but like a few days spent on some other planet, where, for the interval, she had been changed into a sort of supernatural child. Except at night, they were never in the house. The harsh New England May laid aside for them all its treacheries, and was indeed the month of spring. Their mornings they spent on the water, ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... Tobias, doubting as Paul; have mercy on me, O master! for in this hour the divine light of belief and knowledge banishes doubt from my sinful heart. I acknowledge thy supernatural power and heavenly wisdom! My whole being bows in humility before you and your sublimity, and henceforth I will only be your humble scholar and servant, the tool of your will. Forgive me, all-knowing one, if my heart doubted. Breathe upon me the breath of knowledge, and lay thy august ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... pollution and devoted to eternal destruction, according to the arbitrary will of the Framer, without any liberty of choice in himself, or any power of expediting his own faith or final justification. They spoke of the saving call as discernibly supernatural, preceded by bodily as well as mental torture, and instantaneously followed by a perceptible assurance that they could never more sin, that the righteousness of their Redeemer was imputed to them, and that, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... personality into this, as into everything that he undertook to investigate; for he was held back on the steeps of mysticism by the science which he had created, and which could only afford a shelter to the supernatural as an extension of those psychical faculties which have been ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... was observed approaching, seemingly by supernatural means, for no driver could be seen. The barrow was piled to a great height, and staggered drunkenly from side to side of the road; but the load, whatever it was, lay hidden beneath a ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and terror. In the minds of the vulgar, any species of the wonderful is received with avidity; and the servants did not hesitate in believing the southern division of the castle to be inhabited by a supernatural power. Too much agitated to sleep, they agreed to watch for the remainder of the night. For this purpose they arranged themselves in the east gallery, where they had a view of the south tower from which the light had issued. The ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... in spite of ourselves. Never shall I forget the horrid sight which presented itself: stretched in a row on the deck of the vessel lay the fifteen bloody corpses of my shipmates who had been murdered. We stood aghast; the hair rose straight up from our heads, as we viewed the supernatural reappearances. After a pause of about five minutes, during which we never spoke or even moved, one of the corpses cried out in a sepulchral voice, "Come, every man his bird!" and held up its ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... about it, without so infuriating the relations that they will have nothing more to do with us. Naturally their view-point is entirely different from ours, and they cannot appreciate our reasons. At such a time we lean upon the Invisible, and count upon that supernatural help which alone is sufficient for us; we count also upon the prayers of those who know what it is to pray through all opposing forces, till the battle is won by faith which ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... was, on his own showing, practically insufficient to prove the truth of the alleged facts, and, much more, to base upon them the claim of the infallible Church. It is precisely the insufficiency of this view that gives force to the demand for a supernatural authority. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the considerations of supernatural agency which are suggested by the inspired narrative, a candid man will nevertheless feel himself compelled to acknowledge that the course of events which constitutes the history of ancient Palestine has no parallel in any other part of the world. Fixing his eyes on the small district ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... when she placed her hand on the board she was conscious of a vague and nameless fear at this toying with the supernatural. She was twentieth-century, and the thing in essence, as her uncle had said, was mediaeval. Yet she could not shake off the instinctive fear that arose in her—man's inheritance from the wild and howling ages when his hairy, ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... of the universe. Classicism treats man as worthy and great, living his life among cold and neutral forces. This is the very opposite of the sinfulness, imperfection, and nothingness habitually imputed to man, and the hourly presence of a whole hierarchy of busy supernatural agents placed about man by the Middle Ages. Yet we cannot but see that Diderot was feeling for dramatic forms and subjects that would have been as little classic as romantic. He failed in the search. There is one play and only one of his epoch that is not classic, and is not romantic, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... fable includes whatever is supernatural, and especially the machines of the gods. If Homer was not the first who introduced the deities (as Herodotus imagines) into the religion of Greece, he seems the first who brought them into a system of machinery for poetry, and such a one as makes its greatest importance ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... age, and old for his years, when the Pope delegated to him the office of preaching the Second Crusade. Pale and attenuated to a degree which seemed almost supernatural, his contemporaries discovered something in the mere glance of his eyes which filled them with wonder and awe. When his words of love, aspiration and sublime self-sacrifice reached their ears, they were no longer masters ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... light or brilliance with your bodily eye, or in imagination, or if ye hear any wonderful supernatural sound with your ears, or if ye perceive a sudden sweet taste in your mouths or feel any warmth in your breasts, like fire, or any form of pleasure in any part of your body, or if ye see a spirit in a bodily form, as if he were an angel to fortify or instruct ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... Jinks with supernatural activity, and making a leap, he lit, so to speak, behind Ralph, much after the fashion of a monkey falling on the bough ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... devotion or flattery, that they could not presume to gaze, with a steady eye, on the divine majesty of the King of the Huns. His brother Bleda, who reigned over a considerable part of the nation, was compelled to resign his sceptre and his life. Yet even this cruel act was attributed to a supernatural impulse; and the vigor with which Attila wielded the sword of Mars convinced the world that it had been reserved alone for his invincible arm. But the extent of his empire affords the only remaining evidence ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... under full sail is a beautiful, stately, thrilling thing! To these red men there was a perilous joy in the vision. If to us in the ships there hung in this voyage something mystic, hidden, full of possibility, inch by inch to unroll, throbbing all with the future which is the supernatural, be sure these, too, who were found and discovered, moved in a cloud of mystery torn ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... meaning half-revealed and half-concealed by Jasper's babblings under the influence of opium. He saw in his vision, "THAT, I never saw THAT before." We may be sure that he was to see "THAT" in real life. We must remember that, according to Forster, "such was Dickens's interest in things supernatural that, but for the strong restraining power of his common sense, he might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism." His interest in such matters certainly peeps out in this novel—there are two specimens of the supernormal—and he may have gone to the limited extent which my hypothesis requires. ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... the sibyl-like grandeur of his head and outstretched arms as he uttered these strange words. His voice was hoarse with some surging emotion; and if so poor a creature could have been the recipient of a supernatural inspiration, he might have sat at that moment for the portrait of one of the deformed soothsayers in a tale ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... vast collection of anecdote, its developments of diablerie, its tidings from the spiritual world, and the many cases which it brings together of the curious and the wonderful in nature and art, which former ages, and ignorance and superstition, have concluded to consider supernatural. Where science and modern speculation furnish the solution to the mystery, Mr. Dendy couples it with the statements, and the book is thus equally ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... further, that the Jews were under strange apprehensions of supernatural powers: and as their own religion was founded on the belief of certain miracles said to be wrought by their lawgiver Moses; so were they ever running after wonders and miracles, and ready to take up with any stories of this kind. Now, as something extraordinary was necessary ...
— The Trial of the Witnessses of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ • Thomas Sherlock
... of all superstitions that is the most imposing which makes the other world interested in the events which befall our mortal lot. For the mere pomp and pride of it, your ghost is worth a dozen retainers, and it is entirely inexpensive. The peculiarity and supernatural worth of this story lies in the idea of the old wail piercing through the sweet entanglement of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for a moment ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... illumined the pitchy darkness of the night. I walked out into the grounds, where the wind was fiercely howling through the trees. A new flash illumined the hills, and I distinctly saw the naked rock of the Drachenfels, with the broken tower tottering on the half-ruined crag, looked fearful and supernatural. By watching a minute, another flash exposed Rolandseck, looking down upon me with melancholy solicitude. Big drops began to patter on the leaves, and, still bent on sensations, I entered ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... brought them to Ireland, and in the plains of Kildare, not far from the castle of Naas, miraculously set them up.... These stones (according to the British history) Aurelius Ambrosius, King of the Britons, procured Merlin by supernatural means to bring ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... midst of her invocation, and to avert the danger that menaced himself. And now he saw the very man draw nigh who had withdrawn the heart of his wife from him, and had made his home miserable; the man on behalf of whom Mehetabel had summoned supernatural aid to ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... ancients, the heroes in philosophy, as well as those in war and patriotism, have a grandeur and force of sentiment, which astonishes our narrow souls, and is rashly rejected as extravagant and supernatural. They, in their turn, I allow, would have had equal reason to consider as romantic and incredible, the degree of humanity, clemency, order, tranquillity, and other social virtues, to which, in the administration of government, we have attained in modern times, had any one been then ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... that all the rest of those present disbelieved in the existence of the condemned Dutchman. The state of the atmosphere, the strange, wild, awful look of the ocean, prepared our minds for the appearance of anything supernatural. The captain told me that I looked ill and tired from having been on deck so many hours, and insisted on my turning in, which I at length ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... repentance. Accordingly, you will find that though a religion may last unchanged for many centuries in primitive communities where the conditions of life leave no room for poverty and riches, and the process of propitiating the supernatural powers is as well within the means of the least of the members as within those of the headman, yet when commercial civilization arrives, and capitalism divides the people into a few rich and a great many so poor that they can barely live, a movement for religious reform ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... supernatural was strong in this unhappy man, and he turned away as one might have done in the actual presence of an appalling miracle. He covered his eyes and bowed his head. Without looking again into the stream he took his coat and hat, and ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... seized upon Adam, who, stupefied by astonishment rather than fear, uttered no sound, and attempted no struggle. But it was in vain they sought to tear from him Sibyll's clinging and protecting arms. A supernatural strength, inspired by a kind of superstition that no harm could chance to him while she was by, animated her slight form; and fierce though the soldiers were, they shrunk from actual and brutal violence to one thus young ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the flowers; how some seemed only to flaunt themselves, and others had so much more character. As we passed a little opening in the woods, a great dark purple flower, that was a stranger to me, fixed its gaze upon me so that I felt the look, as we sometimes do from human eyes. Any thing supernatural is so in keeping with these solitary places, I felt as if some one had assumed that form to greet me. There were some beautiful new flowers; among them a snow-white iris, which was very lovely. It seemed like a miracle that this fair little ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... specified in time, With strict regard to Aristotle's rules, The Vade Mecum of the true sublime, Which makes so many poets, and some fools: Prose poets like blank-verse, I 'm fond of rhyme, Good workmen never quarrel with their tools; I 've got new mythological machinery, And very handsome supernatural scenery. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... the light of love's lingering ember Has faded in gloom, You cannot neglect, O remember, A voice from the tomb! That stern supernatural diction Should act as a solemn restriction, Although by a mere legal fiction A voice ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... disposition with a deadly poison. To master with more certainty her understanding, they would render her austere, intolerant, and vindictive. In a word, by the magical power of superstition and supernatural notions, they would succeed, perhaps, in transforming to vices those happy dispositions that nature has given you. Believe me, Madam, you would gain nothing by such a metamorphosis. Rather be what you really are. Extricate ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... is in a dilapidated condition. In my wanderings among them, I never rejected their proffers of rude hospitality, and I have listened with pleasure to their wild traditions. I soon found that, like other Indians, they draw from a supernatural "dream-world" the fortitude that enables them to bear without a murmur their hard lot in the present. They readily embraced the superstitions of the Spaniards, and rendered to the virgin of Guadalupe the adoration they had formerly ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... indeed but all alike in this, that they frankly accept a materialistic basis. One derives all things from water, another from air, another from fire; one insists upon unity, another on a plurality of elements; but all alike reject the supernatural, and proceed on the lines ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... faded, he felt springing up within him an irrepressible desire to follow it. A mysterious fascination seized him, a wild desire to seek the phantom bridge. His whole being was swayed as by a supernatural power toward the west whence the vision had passed. He started forward eagerly, then checked himself in bewilderment. What ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... She stared incredulously at his heavy, sincere, embarrassed face, as if it were something abnormal, almost supernatural, a hallucination. ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... cannot but regard it as a grave omission that the public have hitherto been left without any statistical returns of their numbers, activity, etc., etc. And I am persuaded that a Commission to inquire into and report upon the numerical strength, habits, haunts, etc., etc., of supernatural agents resident in Ireland, would be a great deal more innocent and entertaining than half the Commissions for which the country pays, and at least as instructive. This I say, more from a sense of duty, and to deliver my mind of ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... skill as the "King Oedipus" of Sophocles. Emotion, and generally the emotion of love, is the motive in the "Sakoontala" of Kalidasa, and different phases of feeling, rather than the struggles of energetic action, lead on to the denouement of the play. The introduction of supernatural agencies controlling the life of the personages, leaves very little room for the development and description of human character. As the fate of the hero is dependent altogether upon the caprice of superhuman powers, the moral elements of a drama are but faintly discernible. Thus the central action ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... ghosts, nevertheless I collapsed from a hideous dread of the dead, and I suffered, oh! I suffered in a few moments more than in all the rest of my life from the irresistible terror of the supernatural. If she had not spoken I should have died perhaps. But she spoke, she spoke in a sweet, sad voice that set my nerves vibrating. I dare not say that I became master of myself and recovered my reason. No! I was terrified and scarcely knew what I was doing. But a certain innate pride, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... could have been wished all that day, for there was much on his mind. Perplexing questions tinged with supernatural terrors tormented him. Passing over those having a moral point, the most urgent one was, "S'pose dat ar soger miss him box an come arter it ternight. Ki! If I go ter see, I mout run right on ter de spook. I'se a-gwine ter gib 'im his chance, an' den take mine." So that evening Jeff fortified ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... still chuckling, "you seem to think we human beings are half supernatural and half stinking dirt. Why, in Heaven's name, don't you once see us as plain, ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... then in vain that nations refer the origin of their religion to heavenly inspiration; it is in vain that they pretend to describe a supernatural state of things as first in order of events; the original barbarous state of mankind, attested by their own monuments, belies all their assertions. These assertions are still more victoriously refuted by considering this great ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... periphery, or circumference; which attract and repel; which by continual approximation and constant collision, produce and decompose all the bodies we behold; then, I say, there is no necessity to have recourse to supernatural powers, to account for the formation of things, and those extraordinary appearances which are ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... the Church wishing to back out of the supernatural and anxious to explain it away where possible, we would keep our disbelief in the supernatural in the background, as far as we could, and would explain away our rejection of the miracles, as far as was decent; furthermore ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... even of educated Englishmen have any suspicion of the depth and solidity of the Catholic dogma, its wide and various adaptation to wants ineffaceable from the human heart, its wonderful fusion of the supernatural into the natural life, its vast resources for a powerful hold upon the conscience. We doubt whether any single reformed church can present a theory of religion comparable with it in comprehensiveness, in logical coherence, in the well-guarded disposition of its parts. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... undeniable; and yet how utterly unlike are the two plays! and how immeasurably superior the later one! It may seem, on a superficial view, that in John Gabriel Borkman Ibsen has returned to prose and the common earth after his excursion into poetry and the possibly supernatural, if I may so call it, in The Master Builder and Little Eyolf. But this is a very superficial view indeed. We have only to compare the whole invention of John Gabriel Borkman with the invention of Pillars of Society, to realise the difference between the poetry ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... A strange ceremony followed. In Worcester Cathedral stood the shrine of St. Wulfstan, the last of the English bishops, the saint who had preserved the glory of the old English Church in the days of the Confessor, and carried it on through the troubled time of the Conquest, to whose supernatural resources the Conqueror himself had been forced to yield, and who had since by ever-ready miracle defended his city of Worcester from danger. On this shrine the king and Queen now laid their crowns, with a solemn vow never ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... excuse for his damning, because for them too profound excellencies,—such was Shakespeare. But alas! the exceptions prove the rule. For who will dare to force his way out of the crowd,—not of the mere vulgar,—but of the vain and banded aristocracy of intellect, and presume to join the almost supernatural beings that stand by ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Lewis at the end of his Preface and frequently referred to in the footnotes. It rests, however, on inadequate evidence, namely on a single passage in the Life [5] where the Saint says that she was not yet twenty years old when she made her first supernatural experience in prayer. She was twenty in March, 1535, and as this event took place after her profession, the latter was supposed by Yepes and his followers to have taken place in the previous November. Even if we had no further evidence, the fact that ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... might have done for Patty what is performed by Vulcan. The appearance of Cloacina is nauseous and superfluous; a shoe-boy could have been produced by the casual cohabitation of mere mortals. Horace's rule is broken in both cases; there is no dignus vindice nodus, no difficulty that required any supernatural interposition. A patten may be made by the hammer of a mortal, and a bastard may be dropped by a human strumpet. On great occasions, and on small, the mind is repelled by useless ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... settlement of Upper and Lower Cuzco. Any one acquainted with the general principles on which the division of Indian tribes into phratries took place, can not help concluding that these divisions were simply two phratries. The inhabitants of each traced their descent back to a supernatural personage. They were equal in power to each other as elder and younger brothers. Polo Ondegardo simply remarks that "the lineage of the Incas was divided into two branches, the one called Upper Cuzco, the other Lower Cuzco." There ought ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... Ghost Book, M. Larigot, himself a writer of supernatural tales, has collected a remarkable batch of documents, fictive or real, describing the one human experience that is hardest to make good. Perhaps the very difficulty of it has rendered it more tempting to the ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... answer to that intense heart-question, and only one. We must have power, some supernatural power, something outside of us, and above us, and far greater than we, to come in and win the victory within us ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... king had to die; therefore the substitute who died for him had to be invested, at least for the occasion, with the divine attributes of the king. This, as we have just seen, was certainly the case with the temporary kings of Siam and Cambodia; they were invested with the supernatural functions, which in an earlier stage of society were the special attributes of the king. But no one could so well represent the king in his divine character as his son, who might be supposed to share the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the strange state in which she found herself that day, the supernatural itself had seemed credible. And yet—she was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... added Cicely, seeing Mr. Talbot less impressed than she expected by these supernatural powers of divination. "She can change from a ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that if the weird white object was human and could witness his movements the best thing to do would be to try and creep upon it unobserved. On the contrary, if the ghost was some natural phenomenon, or a supernatural agent, all he could do would be of ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... any phenomenon, we know not more but less than ever; for those laws or customs which seem to us simplest ("endosmose," for instance, or "gravitation"), are just the most inexplicable, logically unexpected, seemingly arbitrary, certainly supernatural - miraculous, if you will; for no natural and physical cause whatsoever can be assigned for them; while if anyone shall argue against their being miraculous and supernatural on the ground of their being so common, I can only answer, that of all ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... which first gave me a hint of the possible natural "supernatural," and thus for ever saved me from dogmatising ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... during the interval since he had gone out of the workshop Willie could only surmise, but it had evidently been of sufficiently inspiring a character to bring into his countenance a radiance almost supernatural in its splendor. Nevertheless he did not speak but stood immovable before the little old inventor as if awaiting a judge's decree, the glory fading from his eyes and a ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... suggestive. It is probable that Sun worship is the older of the two, while that of Montezuma, as a later growth, remained concurrent with the other in all the New Mexican pueblos without superseding it. In this supernatural person, known to them as Montezuma, who was once among them in bodily human form, and who left them with a promise that he would return again at a future day, may be recognized the Hiawatha of Longfellow's poem, the Ha-yo-went'-ha of the Iroquois. It is in each case a ramification ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... cry all this we know, And 'tis this very reason I despise, This supernatural gift that makes a mite Think he's the image of the Infinite; Comparing his short life, void of all rest, To the eternal and the ever blest. This busy, puzzling stirrer up of doubt, That frames deep ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... her letters, nor did he criticize the many contradictions which had perplexed him: it seemed to him that he accepted her now, as the phrase goes, 'as she was,' thinking of her as he might of some supernatural being whom he had offended, and who had revenged herself. Her wickedness became in his eyes an added grace, and from the rack on which he lay he admired his executioner. Even her liking for Mr. Poole became submerged in a tide of suffering, and of longing, and weakness of spirit. ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... long in doubt as to whether or not there was anything supernatural about them. "There," exclaimed David, pointing with great satisfaction at them, "that big one, with the thing on his head which looks for all the world like a tin kettle, is King Neptune, and the thing is his helmet. T'other, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... realised that I had an almost supernatural attention from the lad who did not deign to grant me even a nod of acquiescence. I began to tell him a few things about the technical end of writing for others to read. I encountered resistance here. Until I pressed upon them a little, the same mistakes were repeated. This should have shown ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... had recruited his strength a little, he began his story; saying that the day before he had left his monastery, which was a good way off beyond the lake, intending to visit the bishop at his palace, and report to him the distress which these almost supernatural floods had caused the monks and their poor tenantry. After going round a long way, to avoid these floods, he had been obliged toward evening to cross an arm of the overflowing lake, with the help of two honest sailors. "But," added he, "no sooner had our little vessel touched the ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... gaze, uncomprehending, too astonished for speech. We had come, even the unbelievers of us, prepared for the supernatural, for something surpassingly eery, and anything so commonplace as the smoke of a fire was a surprise greater than the sight of all Jo Kettle's imaginations ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... which are many, in which the present writer has had an opportunity of comparing the manuscript of his departed friend with the actual traditions which are current amongst the families whose fortunes they pretend to illustrate, he has uniformly found that whatever of supernatural occurred in the story, so far from having been exaggerated by him, had been rather softened down, and, wherever it could be ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... it of all standards, so that small misdemeanours may seem huge and disastrous as the sin of Cain. Madness lurks in its swampy creeks and wanders along the edges of its woodland seas, so that the border-line between natural and supernatural ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... appearance bruised and dishevelled as the Second Messenger does after his fight with the Greeks. Of course there is no great harm in making the Taurians bad shots as well as cowards, and possibly there is some value in the suggestion of a supernatural protection which is only saving its object for a crueller death. But very likely the two ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... beauty took on a touch of something supernatural from the magic of moonlight and soft shadow and the man slipped his arm about her, while they looked off across the tempered nocturne of the hills and heard the lullaby of the night breeze in the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... succeeded their fear of surprise, which they knew could not be attempted from their opponents in front. The bombs burst, the wheels threw their large circles of coloured sparks, and the savages gazed in silent admiration. But their astonishment was followed by fear of supernatural agency; confusion spread among them, and their silence was at last broken by hundreds of loud voices! The moment had now come; the two Shoshone war-parties rushed upon their terrified victims, and an hour afterwards, when the moon ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... rival of Angelo, but who, as Hallam proves, 'anticipated in the compass of a few pages the discoveries which made Galileo, Kepler, Maestlin, Maurolycus, and Castelli immortal,' it may well 'strike us,' he suggests 'with something like the awe of supernatural knowledge;' and in the presence of Leonardo da Vinci the modern scientist of highest rank may ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... incomprehensible that critics, M. Viardot among them, should call it the first in rank of Raphael's Virgins in Glory. There are none which can dispute that title with Our Lady of San Sisto, unearthly and supernatural in beauty ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... to begin his public ministry. The first glimpse we have of the mother is at the wedding at Cana. Jesus was there too. The wine failed, and Mary went to Jesus about the matter. "They have no wine," she said. Evidently she was expecting some manifesting of supernatural power. All the years since his birth she had been carrying in her heart a great wonder of expectation. Now he had been baptized, and had entered upon his work as the Messiah. Had not the time ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... smoke floated away into the depths of the dark cavern, in such loneliness and silence as he had never experienced before. He would have thought himself in some grotto of the gnomes, or some awful cell of enchantment, whose supernatural fire never went out, and whose smoke rolled away into darkness the same perpetually,—but for the sound of the crackling flames, and the sight of piles of wood on the floor, so strongly suggestive of ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... utensils took the place of bows and arrows and spears. This strange change in African savages came to be talked over among the people. It was so wonderful that the other tribes could account for it only as an instance of supernatural magic. There was nothing they knew of that would lead men like the Bechuanas to bring war to an end, and no longer rob ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... attempted explanation of them which we have seen, we detect some such difficulty or absurdity as makes necessary its rejection, we certainly could never for a moment be tempted to a suspicion that there is anything supernatural in the matter. Such an idea is simply ridiculous, and will be tolerated only by the ignorant, the feeble-minded, or the insane. Still, the "knockings" are sufficiently mysterious, and if unexposed, sufficiently fruitful of evil, to be legitimate ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... and asked to commune likewise, saying: "It is my God who will heal my soul and body; I entreat you that I may receive him." Then, the Host having been divided in two, the king received one half with the greatest devotion, and his sister the other half. The sick man felt himself sustained by a supernatural force; a celestial consolation descended into the soul that had been despairing. Marguerite's prayer had not ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... day pride themselves upon the growth of what they call the naturalistic spirit. What do they mean by this? They mean that the older ways of interpreting nature, animistic or supernatural, are being supplanted by explanations founded on knowledge of physical facts and "natural" laws. And, up to a point, there are but few natural mystics who will not concur in their feelings of satisfaction that ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... death in no long time. This is another form of that universal faith which made it impossible for any man to survive a bodily commerce, by whatever sense, with a spiritual being. We find it in the Old Testament, where the expression, 'I have seen God and shall die,' means simply a supernatural being; since no Hebrew believed it possible for a nature purely human to sustain for a moment the sight of the Infinite Being. We find the same faith amongst ourselves, in case of doppelgaenger becoming apparent to the sight of those whom they counterfeit; and in many other varieties. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Trinity and the Incarnation, and a still larger section insisted on the subjection of Christian revelation to the judgment of reason, and as a consequence on the rejection of everything in Christianity that flavoured of the supernatural. The works of these men were imported from the Netherlands into France in spite of all restrictions that could be imposed by the police authorities, and their views were popularised by a brilliant band of /litterateurs/, until in a short time Deism and ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... disturbed. To him Roman Catholicism was superstition, and he wondered how any rational person could submit to it. To be sure he assented every week to supernatural history and doctrines presented to him in his own parish church, but to these he was accustomed, and his reason, acute as it was, made no objection. There was another cause for his distress. His only sister, whom he tenderly loved, had become a foreign nun ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... burst from his gaping throat—a cry of human agony. And Yseult saw in the werewolf's eyes the eyes of some one she had seen and known, but 't was for an instant only, and then the eyes were no longer human, but wolfish in their ferocity. A supernatural force seemed to speed the spear in its flight. With fearful precision the weapon smote home and buried itself by half its length in the werewolf's shaggy breast just above the heart, and then, with a monstrous sigh—as if he yielded up his life without regret—the ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... regard to Aristotle's rules, The Vade Mecum of the true sublime, Which makes so many poets, and some fools: Prose poets like blank-verse, I 'm fond of rhyme, Good workmen never quarrel with their tools; I 've got new mythological machinery, And very handsome supernatural scenery. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... that of his scholar Isidore, composed by two of their most learned disciples, exhibits a most deplorable picture of the second childhood of human reason." By long fasting and prayer Proclus pretended to possess the supernatural power of ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... is termed Mystical, that is, above sense, supernatural; and this it is, when spiritually one expounds a writing which even in the Literal sense by the things signified bears express reference to the Divine things of Eternal Glory; as one can see in that Song of the Prophet ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... twisted him round three times; at the third twist, the men in company seemed struck with astonishment and envy, the ladies clasped their hands, and some of them kissed his. Everybody declared his beauty to be supernatural. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Religion and Science. It will be a war to the death, for if Science wins it will do away with the personal God of the Jews, the Christians and the Muhammedans, the childish doctrine or dogma of future rewards and punishments, and everything connected with the supernatural. It will be shown that Law reigns supreme. The police representing Law and Order will be of more importance than the clergy. Even now we might do away with the latter, everybody becoming his own priest—a ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... fingers. The "fingers of a fairy" my cousin Maurice used to call them, and, there certainly is magic in those dainty, rapidly-moving hands of hers. They have an art, a skill, a facility that partakes of the supernatural. Madeleine is a dependent upon your bounty, but her magic fingers make her a very valuable one; and, if you would not think it very impertinent, I would say that we are all her debtors, rather than she ours. There, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Rationalism) lays it down as an axiom that religion is revealed to men in no other manner than that which is agreeable both to the nature of things and to reason, as the witness and interpreter of divine providence; and teaches that the subject-matter of every supposed supernatural revelation, is to be examined and judged according to the ideas regarding religion and morality, which we have formed in the mind by the help of reason.... Whosoever, therefore, despising that supremacy of human reason, maintains that the authority of a revelation, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... lights, shadows and gentle breezes under the mysterious alcoves of the trees. Oh! how happy they must have been in this paradise! The whole air was filled with the life of their love and happiness! There must have been present a supernatural and invisible being, who was a jealous witness of this wedded bliss, and who made use of your sword to destroy it! So much happiness was an offence before heaven. We have been the blind instrument of a wrathful spirit. But what mattered death after such a day of perfect bliss! After having tasted ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... said Pete, turning to Philip with amazement at the child's supernatural wisdom. "And there's Tom Hommy's boy—and a fine lil fellow enough for all—but six weeks older than this one, and not a ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... solution of the problem of the Hereafter. Again and again we see the unrest of the ever-questioning soul depicted in the drama and the literature of the day as it seeks enlightenment on the potentiality of the future life. The stage presents plays based on spiritualistic manifestations or upon supernatural healing or miraculous intervention. Many recent novels have either psychical phenomena for their central interest or plots evolved out of the miraculous in religion. As exponents of psychical research, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W.T. Stead and Sir Oliver Lodge make an appeal to readers to accept ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... the sixteenth century the belief in potions, magic formulas, etc., was still strongly rooted in the popular mind. The Spanish court and the priests were supposed to employ supernatural agencies against ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... which came into him again, and gave the Great Spirit's healing to the fingers. This had been the man's safety through how many years— or how many generations—they did not know; for legends regarding the pilgrim had grown and were fostered by the medicine men who, by giving him great age and supernatural power, could, with more self-respect, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... understand me. The burden of this story is that there is a supernatural power that looks after the so-called good people in this world and makes everything happen for the best in their case—while all the so-called ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... liberated her, General Serano? There was only one means of escape and that was through the door of her cell. If these boys, themselves, confined by locks, walls, and bars, could have unlocked the door of her prison-house, then they are possessed of supernatural powers that should enable them to walk out of your jail themselves. No, General Serano, unless you can establish the fact of physical communication between these prisoners and the escaped woman they can in no way be held responsible ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... of the Convent or requisitions of the Superior; others, that they were heiresses whose property was desired for the convent, and who would not consent to sign deeds of it. Some of the nuns informed me, that the severest of their sufferings arose from fear of supernatural beings. ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... whistle be heard in the howling of the gale, and the officer sometimes betrays a feeling of uneasiness, if at such a moment he should witness any violation of the received opinions of his profession. He finds himself in the situation of one whose ears have drunk in legends of supernatural appearances, which a better instruction has taught him to condemn, and who when placed in situations to awaken their recollection, finds the necessity of drawing upon his reason to quiet emotions that ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... in the presence of Law, which accumulated experiences have gradually produced in the human mind. From generation to generation Science has been proving uniformities of relation among phenomena which were before thought either fortuitous or supernatural in their origin—has been showing an established order and a constant causation where ignorance had assumed irregularity and arbitrariness. Each further discovery of Law has increased the presumption that Law is everywhere conformed to. And hence, among other beliefs, has arisen the belief ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Birdwood says: "The intimate absorption of Hindu life in the unseen realities of man's spiritual consciousness is seldom sufficiently acknowledged by Europeans, and, indeed, cannot be fully comprehended by men whose belief in the supernatural has been destroyed by the prevailing material ideas of modern society. Every thought, wish, and deed of the Hindu belongs to the world of the unseen as well as the seen; and nothing shows this more strikingly than the traditionary ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... frogs erect on their hind legs. In one corner was a cottage piano, close to a writing-table heaped with books and papers; this nook, sacred to Christian, was foreign to the rest of the room, which was arranged with supernatural neatness. A table was laid for breakfast, and the sun-warmed air ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Catherine of Siena, Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, Saint Gertrude, and others have set forth in a masterly way the principles and theories of Mysticism, and it has found at last an admirable psychologist to sum up its rules and their exceptions; a Saint who has verified in her own person the supernatural phases she has described—a woman whose lucidity was more than human—Saint Teresa. You have read her life, and ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... which I have discovered, throw light on an old tradition which still exists in the neighbourhood of Affeton, once the residence of this wretched man. The country people have long entertained a notion that a hidden treasure lies at the bottom of a well in his grounds, guarded by some supernatural power: a tradition no doubt originating in this man's history, and an obscure allusion to the gold which Stucley received for his bribe, or the other gold which he clipped, and might have there concealed. This is a striking instance of the many historical facts ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... fantasy of tales filled him with at least as much enthusiasm as the supernatural. At Madaura he lived in a miraculous world, where everything charmed his senses and his mind, and everything stimulated his precocious instinct ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... dreadful happening could have wrung from human lips such blood- curdling sounds? We were all eagerly discussing the matter, some of the men agreeing with me that the sounds were human, while others stoutly maintained that they were supernatural, and boded some terrible disaster to the boats, when our discussion was abruptly broken in upon by the sound of rippling water near at hand, as though a craft of some kind were bearing down upon us at a speed sufficient to raise a brisk surge under her bows, and the next instant the voice ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... singularly light one, since he never came to close quarters with his antagonist at all and had the Lord of Hosts on his side. A David of mythology, Perseus, another Florentine hero, a stripling with what looked like a formidable enemy, also enjoyed supernatural assistance. ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... the Cordovese Kalif, beaten, and expelled. They were called by the Moors Majus, Madjous, Magioges (Conde, i. 282), and by the early Spanish annalists Almajuzes. The root has been erroneously derived from [Greek text], Magus, magicians or supernatural beings, as they were almost held to be. The term Madjous was, strictly speaking, applied by the Moors to those Berbers and Africans who were Pagans or Muwallads, i.e. not believers in the Khoran. The true etymology ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... more bent upon personal notoriety than upon the welfare of his people; and, whilst professing the latter, indulged his ambition, in Tecumseh's absence, by a precipitate attack upon Harrison's force on the Tippecanoe. His defeat discredited his assumption of supernatural powers, led to distrust and defection, and wrecked Tecumseh's plan of independent action. But the protection of his people was Tecumseh's sole ambition; and, true statesman that he was, he joined the British at Amherstburg (Fort Malden), in Upper Canada, with a large force, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... time," admonishes the visitor again and again, and still again. Don Giovanni remains unshaken in his wicked fortitude. At length he wrests his hand out of the stony grasp and at the moment hears his doom from the stony lips, "Ah! the time for you is past!" Darkness enwraps him; the earth trembles; supernatural voices proclaim his punishment in chorus; a pit opens before him, from which demons emerge and drag ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... stunned to move or speak. Her knowledge of the hills forbade the usual fear, but a supernatural terror seized her and she waited for the old woman—she decided it was a woman—to make the first advance. This the woman presently did. She turned, and with trembling haste took up a rusty spade by the door; she shuffled toward a corner ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... matter of idle curiosity with us how an unbelieving generation, ingenious in devising natural explanations (which are most unnatural) of supernatural phenomena, would explain away the wonder of the young Saint's life which is the subject of the following pages. It presents to us a picture of Divine Condescension guiding and inspiring and aiding human effort, so convincingly clear and transparent in its smallest ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... legislators are agreeably conspicuous by their absence. But other agencies are active. According to an advertisement in the Nation the Fabian Research Department have issued two Reports, "together with a Project for a Supernatural Authority that will Prevent War." The egg, on the authority of the Daily Mail, is "disappearing from our breakfast table," but even the humblest of us can still enjoy our daily mare's nest. The effect of the Zeppelin on the young ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... will look back upon his history as to some grand and supernatural romance. The fiery energy of his youthful career, and the magnificent progress of his irresistible ambition, have invested his character with the mysterious grandeur of some heavenly appearance; and when all the lesser tumults and lesser men of our age shall have passed away into the darkness ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... know as they are any more supernatural than the telegraph and telefone and electric light, and many other seemin'ly supernatural works. And who knows but there may still be some hidden powers in nature that is the source of what ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... which could have come only through a supernatural agency. I am sure of it, from your manner. You were temporarily possessed." ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... is he,' said the Prince, 'that must be your chief teacher; for it is he, and he only, that can teach you clearly in all high and supernatural things. He, and he only, it is that knows the ways and methods of my Father at court, nor can any like him show how the heart of my Father is at all times, in all things, upon all occasions, towards Mansoul; for as no man knows the things of a man but that spirit of a man ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... however brief, from all the familiar surroundings of modern life, and on opening a volume to pass at once into another region, where all is strange, and where the sceptical glances of science never intrude to banish magic and the supernatural. ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... direct perception of ultimate truth rather than the processes of logic. It believed in man's ability to apprehend the absolute ideas of Truth, Rectitude, Goodness. It resembled the Inner Light of the Quaker, though the Quaker traced this to a supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit, while the Transcendentalist believed that a vision of the eternal realities was a natural endowment of the human mind. It had only to be trusted. Stated in this form, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the castle. A dumb tempest, without lightning or thunder, broods over it, like an electric vapour on a marsh. All is silence, deep silence; but the lady is troubled. She suspects that some supernatural power has been at work. For why indeed be thus drawn to this youth, more than to some one else, handsomer, nobler, renowned already for deeds of arms? There is something toward, down yonder! Has that woman cast a spell upon her, or worked some hidden charm? The ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them. Such sentiments—for the half-credences of which I speak have never the full force of thought—such sentiments ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... them: [9]Thyreus mentions several Apparitions of absent living persons, which happened in his time, and which he had the certain knowledge of. A Man that is in one place cannot (Autoprosopos) at the same time be in another. It remains then that such Spectres are Prodigious and Supernatural, and not without Diabolical Operation. It has been Controverted among Learned Men, whether innocent Persons may not by the malice and deluding Power of the Devil be represented as present amongst Witches at their dark Assemblies. The mentioned Thyreus says, ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... some of the secrets of life and death. Many of them have known a reinforcement of spiritual power. It is quite natural that this fact should often be described in emotional form as direct interposition of angels and other supernatural agencies. Among these the most beautiful and tender stories are those of "The Comrade in White." In essence they are all testimony to the perennial fount of strength and comfort of religion—the human need which in all ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem
... "Punch,"—started a newspaper,—started a magazine,—published a romance,—all within a few years of each other. The romance was "A Man made of Money," which bids fair, I think, to be read longer than any of his works. It is one of those fictions in which, as in "Zanoni," "Peter Schlemil," and others, the supernatural appears as an element, and yet is made to conform itself in action to real and every-day life, in such a way that the understanding is not shocked, because it reassures itself by referring the supernatural to the regions of allegory. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... destiny was to be a queen; but there is in this prediction a minuteness of detail, that cannot be accounted for on the ground of accidental coincidence. It is a brief history of her life. Unless we are prepared to believe that an ignorant old mulatto woman was gifted by divine Providence with supernatural power, constituted a second Witch of Endor, and able by "examining the ball of Josephine's left thumb with great attention," to discover the minute particulars of her future life, we must discredit the absurdity. A prediction believed sometimes effects its own fulfillment; and Josephine, whose ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... spent some of his earliest years. Over that parish, he says, might have been written Dante's inscription over the entrance to the Inferno: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." After speaking of its physical misery and its supernatural and perfectly astonishing deadness, he says that he embarked on a voyage round the world, and had the opportunity of seeing savage life in all conceivable conditions of savage degradation; and ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him to death, that would not make his story tragic. Nor yet would it become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fire, and the great wind from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were conceived as sent by a supernatural power, whether just or malignant. The calamities of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly from actions, and those ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... himself came in, he, too, in white gown, ready for the operation. He looked so strange; to her nervous vision, supernatural, a being from other worlds, holding the destiny of this one in those strong, supple, incisive fingers. "I don't suppose you'll enjoy this much," he said, "but you'd better get used to them. Karl may need you to do some of this for him, ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... the question, Full of troublesome suggestion, As at length, with hurried pace, Toward his cell he turned his face, And beheld the convent bright With a supernatural light, Like a luminous cloud expanding Over floor ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... his children and servants, even to the extent of life and death. What the father was to the family, the gods were to the whole people, the awful lords and rulers at whose pleasure they lived and breathed. Unlike the Greeks, the reverential Romans invented no idle legends about the supernatural world. The gods to them were the guardians of the State, whose will in all things they were bound to seek and to obey. The forms in which they endeavored to learn what that will might be were childish or childlike. They looked to signs in the sky, to thunder-storms and comets and shooting ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... increasing accumulation of legend and fable. I have no doubt that to the next generation, or even before, I myself shall be transformed into a magician or a demigod, a worker of miracles, and a being of supernatural knowledge. They already believe that all the animals I preserve will come to life again; and to their children it will be related that they actually did so. An unusual spell of fine weather setting in just at my arrival has made ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... bare patch, lying transversely, about the length and breadth of a man. It did not appear to be a beaten path, nor were there people enough in the neighbourhood to make such a path. Probably it was an old track, long disused and forgotten, for by such natural causes is man's belief in the supernatural fed. ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... and she made it a rostrum, miming her stories as she told them, fitting them with vital detail, spinning them out with endless "quo' he's" and "quo' she's," her voice sinking into a whisper over the supernatural or the horrific; until she would suddenly spring up in affected surprise, and pointing to the clock, "Mercy, Mr. Archie!" she would say, "whatten a time o' night is this of it! God forgive me for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... printer: it was the only example of such a piece of fortune which could then be instanced, and which, even during Fabert's life, had appeared so extraordinary, the vulgar never feared to ascribe his elevation to supernatural causes. It was said that from his youth he had busied himself with magic and sorcery, and that he had made a league with the devil. Mine host, who, to the stupidity inherent in all the natives of the province of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... termed the Blessed Bear of Bradwardine (though old Doctor Doubleit used jocosely to call it Ursa Major), and was supposed, in old and Catholic times, to be invested with certain properties of a mystical and supernatural quality. And though I give not in to such anilia, it is certain it has always been esteemed a solemn standard cup and heirloom of our house; nor is it ever used but upon seasons of high festival, and such I hold to be the arrival of the heir of Sir Everard under my roof; ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... It is possible that this may be one of those hymns; but I think rather that the more ordinary reference is the correct one, which sees in this psalm and in the two succeeding ones, echoes of that supernatural deliverance of Israel in the time of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... names of their victims, his peers and comrades, all lost! The ugly misshapen mountains look like sinister giants, lying chin upon hand, lazily awaiting his destruction. But this atom of humanity, in the presence of all the material forces of this world and the supernatural powers of darkness, places the horn to his lips, and sends out on the evening air a shrill blast of utter defiance. He that endureth to the end shall be saved. Not his possessions, not his happiness, not his bodily frame—they all succumb: but ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... fairy sword, and says that it was made in Avalon, namely, the Celtic otherworld. We may also feel confident that the full panoply of armour with which Geoffrey equips Arthur (ix. 4) consisted of magic objects, although Geoffrey, who in general, as an historian, rationalises the supernatural, merely describes them as amazingly efficacious. The shield he calls by the name of Arthur's ship in Welsh sources, Pridwen (evidently a fairy boat, limitless in capacity), either from some confusion in tradition, or because, being enchanted, Pridwen might, of course, serve ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... slowly to take possession of his body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses was affected; he felt it rather as a consciousness—a mysterious mental assurance of some overpowering presence—some supernatural malevolence different in kind from the invisible existences that swarmed about him, and superior to them in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be approaching him; from what direction he did not ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... heavenly toys those were that the children of this soil beheld, that mystic night, in their dreams! Painted cars with orchestral wheels, making music more delicious than the roll of planets. Agile men of cylindrical figure, who sprang unexpectedly out of meek-looking boxes, with a supernatural fierceness in their crimson cheeks and fur-whiskers. Herds of marvellous sheep, with fleeces as impossible as the one that Jason sailed after; animals entirely indifferent to grass and water and "rot" and "ticks." Horses spotted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
