"Celtic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sanscrit, it was soon seen, was not the parent, but 'the elder sister' of the Indo-Germanic languages. Behind Greek, Latin, and Sanscrit, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic tongues, lurks a lost language—the mysterious Aryan, which, reechoed through the tones of those six remaining Pleiades, its sisters, speaks of a mighty race which once, it may be, ruled supreme ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... course, fired the Celtic soul of Terry, who told of the sister of his Ould Counthry master who had once been taken to a hospital. And just at dusk on the third day after that his young master was walking down the dark hall. As he passed his sister's door, there she stood all ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... their fathers, and remained part of the Hapsburg inheritance until the Congress of Vienna. Thus the cleavage between Protestantism and Catholicism has made two nations out of one Low German nationality in the Netherlands, as it threatens to do with one Celtic nationality in Ireland. On the other hand, their common Catholic faith has welded Flemings and Walloons together, making one nation out of two nationalities far more racially distinct than the Flemings and the Dutch, and this amalgamation ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... the necropolis of Mazela, and a yet larger number in that of Roknia. "At Bou-Merzoug," says M. Feraud,[157] "in a radius of three leagues, on the mountain as well as on the plain, the whole country about the springs is covered with monuments of the Celtic form, such as dolmens, demi-dolmens, menhirs, avenues, and tumuli. In a word, there are to be found examples of nearly every type known in Europe. For fear of being taxed with exaggeration, I will not fix the number, but I can certify that I saw and examined more than a thousand in the ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... England called 'fairy pipes,' or 'Carl's pipes,' or 'old man's pipes;' in Ireland, where they are likewise known as 'fairy pipes,' they are also called 'Dane's pipes;' and in Scotland, where their common name is 'elf pipes,' or 'elfin pipes,' they are, in like manner, known as 'Celtic pipes.' They are also sometimes named 'Mab pipes,' or 'Queen's pipes,' from the same fairy majesty, Queen Mab. Thus, while in each country they are ascribed to the elfin race—the 'small people' of Cornish folk-lore—their secondary names attach to them a popular belief in their extreme ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... Macnab with a Celtic sigh, as he sipped his tea that night in the mellow light of the ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... Celtic memory only that is tenacious of national wrong. The Saxon was doomed to drink to the dregs the same bitter cup which he administered so unmercifully to the Briton. His Teutonic blood saved him from no humiliation ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... feeling within; a proud strength and sincerity expressed itself through every detail of attitude and gesture; yet perhaps the delicacy, or rather sensibility, mingling with the pride, would have been no less evident to a seeing eye. There was Highland blood in him, and a touch therefore of the Celtic responsiveness, the Celtic magnetism. The old man opposite to him in shadow, with his back to the light, had a crouching dangerous look. It was as though he recognised something in his son for ever lost to himself; and repulsed it, half ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... immaterial world which they mystically apprehended, which eluded direct description, frustrated rhetoric, and was only to be come at by the magical suggestion of colour, music, and symbol. It is most familiar to us in the 'Celtic' verse ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... help smiling when I consider that the priests have objected to admit my former book, The Celtic Druids, into libraries, because it was antichristian; and it has been attacked by Deists, because it was superfluously religious. The learned Deist, the Rev. R. Taylor [already mentioned], has designated me as the religious ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... the Christian community (ecclesia) itself. Similarly the Greek word ecclesia ([Greek: ekklesia]), "assembly," was very early transferred from the community to the building, and is used in both senses, especially in the modern Romance and Celtic languages (e.g. Fr. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... bore you; they are somewhat unpronounceable. Their selection had cost me many hours of study in the British Museum reading-rooms, surrounded by lexicons of the Welsh language, gazetteers, translations from the early Celtic poets—with footnotes. He loved and was beloved by a beautiful Princess, whose name, being translated, was Purity. One day the King, hunting, lost his way, and being weary, lay down and fell asleep. And by chance the spot whereon he lay was near to a place which ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... the province of Alava in the district of Penacerrada. According to Fernandez Guerra, it is an Iberian name derived from Asiatic Iberia. I believe that I have read in Campion that the word Baroja is compounded from the Celtic bar, meaning mountain, and the Basque otza, ocha meaning cold. ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... France opposed to the Germans throughout the war. I never once saw Chanzy excited, in which respect he greatly contrasted with many of the subordinate commanders. Jaureguiberry was sometimes carried away by his Basque, and Gougeard by his Celtic, blood. So it was with Jaures, who, though born in Paris, had, like his nephew the Socialist leader, the blood of the Midi in his veins. Chanzy, however, belonged to a calmer, a more quietly resolute ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... interruptions. Mr. Callahan's was the most dramatic. When announcement was made of his five thousand dollar windfall his Celtic fervor got the better of him and he broke loose with a tangled mass of tearful ejaculations and prayers, a curious mixture of glories to the saints and demands for blessings upon the soul of his benefactor. Mrs. Tidditt ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... in Celtic Gaul, situate on a hill. It was besieged by Julius Caesar. See his Commentaries, lib. vii. ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... perverse ingenuity begins at once to analyze the blood and discovers that the elements are not, when resolved, precisely the same. That, it is said, is the bond of the Anglo-Saxon race; whereupon a Scotchman insists, or a Welshman insists, that it is not all Anglo-Saxon, that there is something Celtic in its constitution, and that to speak of it as the Anglo-Saxon race, either in my country or in yours, is not in strictness historically accurate. Another finds that they are the great English-speaking peoples, whereupon an ingenious man points out that there are people in Great Britain and its ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... of his clerkship he knew little of the law, but he was well versed in languages, being not only a good Greek and Latin scholar, but acquainted with French, Italian, Spanish, all the Celtic and Gothic dialects, and likewise with the peculiar language of the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... point much research and investigation might be employed. But there is no need why these researches should be extended to the region of fancy. Gargantua has been proved by some to be of Celtic origin. Very often he is a solar myth, and the statement that Rabelais only collected popular traditions and gave new life to ancient legends is said to be proved by the large number of megalithic monuments to which is attached ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... column notice says: "Mr Moore's 'Cornish Catches' are just so good as Cornish cream to a Cornish cat, and even those who do not know the dialect, with its faint, far-away echoes of Celtic verse-forms, will delight in his simple 'vitty' songs of the Delectable Duchy. He is a patriotic Cornish-man sure enough ... as good as anything of the kind written by the dialect-poets of Lancashire or Dorset ... it is a thing to rejoice over, this ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... dearest girl," cried O'Brien, with a sudden little spurt of Celtic enthusiasm—"she is the soul ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... derivation is not known. It has been suggested that it was taken from the river Ure, a tributary of the Ouse, but variations of the word are common in the Roman Empire, as, for example, Eburobriga, Eburodunum, and the Eburovices. These are probably all derived from some common Celtic word. In process of time, perhaps in the reign of the Emperor Severus—that is to say, about the beginning of the third century A.D.—the name was changed to Eboracum: from this was derived the later British name Caer Eabhroig or Ebrauc. The Anglo-Saxon ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... of his contemporaries, and of posterity;—he who destroys, or heedlessly neglects it, deserves the reprobation of the civilized world. As Dr. Stukely indignantly hung, in graphic effigy, the man who wantonly broke up the vast and wondrous Celtic Temple of Abury, so every other similar delinquent should be condemned to the literary gibbet. The miserable fanatic who fired York Cathedral is properly incarcerated for life, and thus prevented from doing further public mischief; but there are other fanatics still roaming at large, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... nine-tenths of the deliberately Celtic prose or verse. I mean that it is real and credible and yet insubstantial, the too too solid flesh is melted into something like the mist over the bogland, and it recalls to us times when an account of our physical self, height, width, weight, colour, age, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... stool. This was, at least, more rational than cutting off heads. Next is Abbey Craig, a rock upon which Wallace defeated the English; Dollava, a village on a gloomy rock, almost insulated by two streams, whose Celtic names signify the glens of care and the burns of sorrow; Tillabody, the birthplace and property of Sir Ralph Abercrombie; the crumbling walls and bell tower of Cambuskenneth Abbey, wherein several parliaments were held, and at whose high altar ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... watching for the moment of eating. The fire played on the thin legs and pinched faces of the children; on the baby's cradle in the further corner; on the mother, red-eyed still, but able to smile and talk again; on the strange Celtic face and matted hair of the dwarf. Family affection—and the satisfaction of the simpler physical needs—these things make the happiness of the poor. For this hour, to-night, the ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Chartres, sprang from an ancient Celtic hill fort, and, through successive stages, has since grown to a Roman, a mediaeval, and finally a modern city. It crowns the top of a very considerable eminence, the like of which, says Professor Freeman, does not exist in England. Like Chartres, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... to have something to do with the Celtic genius. One can always understand a Scottish Celt better by comparing him with an Irish one or a Welsh; and it will certainly prove illuminative in the present case to remember Mr. W.B. Yeats while one is thinking of Fiona Macleod. To the present writer it seems that the woman-soul ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... spite of all the disadvantages attending low birth and straitened circumstances, by the dint of his own capacity and inclination, made considerable progress in mathematics and philosophy, acquired all the languages ancient and modern, and executed part of a Celtic dictionary, which, had he lived to finish it, might have thrown some essential light upon the origin and obscurities of the European history. Convinced, at last, that he had nothing to hope from the clemency of the government, he wrote a short poem in defence of suicide; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... that it was any part of this player's intention to bring out, for the amusement of his audiences, an historical exhibition of the Life and Times of that ancient Celtic king of Britain, whose legendary name and chronicle he has appropriated so effectively, will be prevented by that view of the subject from ever attaining the least inkling of the matter here. For this ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... whirlwind is in the wood, a low murmur in the vale; it is the mighty army of the dead returning from the air." These beautiful words occur in one of the ancient Celtic poems quoted by Macpherson and dating some thousand years later than Ossian. For the Celts held to the doctrine of the immortality of souls, and believed that their ethereal substance was wafted from place to place by the wind on the clouds of heaven. Amongst the ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... EXCHEQUER, so as to ensure a properly dramatic exit. At last No. 45 was reached; but Mr. GINNELL was not there to put it. Once more the Saxon intellect had been too slow to keep up with the swift processes of the Celtic cerebellum. Mr. GINNELL has on more than one occasion made what his compatriots call a "holy show" of himself; but he refuses to do this sort of thing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various
... Spotswood was, and is, the most direct route thither from the Dutch settlements. The garb and other appointments of the stalwart Canadian Teuton of those days were such as to make him easily distinguishable from his Celtic or Saxon neighbor. He usually wore a long, heavy, coat of coarse cloth, reaching down to his heels. His head was surmounted by a felt hat with a brim wide enough to have served, at a pinch, for ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... love of roving adventure, of strange tongues, and of anthropology in its widest sense, the author of "The Bible in Spain" had many points in common. As it was, with brief intervals of solitary excursion in the "Celtic fringe" or the Near East, Borrow remained glooming at home, working himself up into a state of nervous excitement bordering upon dementia about a neighbour's dog or a railway bisecting his wife's land. The gloom, of ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... acknowledged to be a most curious racial composite, Vienna contains its very essence. Situated at the parting of the ways for the South and the Orient, it has ever been a much-coveted spot. After the conquest of the original Celtic settlement by the Romans, Teutons, Huns, and Turks have successively fought for its possession and have left their imprint upon its physiognomy. Intermarriage with the neighboring Czechs and Magyars, the affiliations of the court with Spain, Italy, and France, and the final permeation of all ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... white men to their land, and were ever faithful in their friendship, till years of wrong and robbery, and want and insult, drove them to desperation and to war. They were barbarians, and their warfare was barbarous, but not more barbarous than the warfare of our Saxon, Celtic and Norman ancestors. They were ignorant and superstitious. Their condition closely resembled the condition of our British forefathers at the beginning of the Christian era. Macaulay says of Britain: "Her inhabitants, when first they became known to the Tyrian mariners, were little ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... those who may be forgetting that Tir-na-n'Og is the land of eternal youth and joyousness—the Celtic "Land of Heart's Desire." It is a country which belongs to us all by right of natural heritage; but we turned our backs to it and started journeying from it almost the instant we ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... observation of the solstices, the Celts appear to have divided their year, without regard to the solstices, by the times when they drove their cattle to and from the summer pasture on the first of May and the last of October (Hallowe'en), 222-224; the two great Celtic festivals of Beltane (May Day) and Hallowe'en (the last of October), 224; Hallowe'en seems to have marked the beginning of the Celtic year, 224 sq.; it was a season of divination and a festival of the dead, 225 sq.; ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... and Horsa from the old Anglo-Saxon authorities; and modern history generally adopts them. Arthur and Mordred have a Celtic origin, and they are as generally rejected as "mythical persons." It appears to us that it is as precipitate wholly to renounce the one as the other, because they are both surrounded with an atmosphere of the fabulous. Hengist and Horsa come to us encompassed with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... in store clothes—a wild thing who perversely preferred to do his own pursuing? How could Miss Bauers know—she who cashiered in the Green Front Grocery and Market on Fifty-third Street? Or Miss Olson, at the Rialto ticket window? Or the Celtic, emotional Miss Ahearn, the manicure? Or Gertie the goof? They knew nothing of mythology; of pointed ears and pug noses and goat's feet. Nick's ears, to their fond gaze, presented an honest red surface protruding from ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... of the Round Tower stands "The Cathedral" illustrating almost every phase of ecclesiastical architecture which flourished in Ireland from St. Patrick to the Reformation—Cyclopean, Celtic-Romanesque, Transitional and Pointed. The chancel arch is possibly the most remarkable and beautiful illustration of the Transitional that we have. An extraordinary feature of the church is the wonderful series of Celtic arcades and panels filled with archaic sculptures in relief ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous
... The Barryhoo is an ancient Celtic bird about the size of a Mavis, with lavender eyes and a black-crape tail. It continually mourns its mate (Barrywhich, feminine form), which has an hereditary predisposition to an early and tragic demise and ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... have been a spontaneous growth arising from a natural human pleasure in similar sounds. "It lies deep in our human nature and satisfies an universal need." It is an established phenomenon in Sanskrit and Persian prosody, in Arabic, in Chinese, in Celtic, in Icelandic. Greek prosody, and Latin, which was based upon Greek, rejected it, partly perhaps because it was too simple an ornament for the highly cultivated Greek taste, especially on account of the great frequency of similar inflectional endings, and perhaps because ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... editor unobtrusively studied Banneker out of placid, inscrutable eyes, soft as a dove's, while he chatted at large about theaters, politics, the news of the day. Afterward the applicant met the Celtic assistant, Mr. Mallory, who broadly outlined for him the technique of the office. With no further preliminaries Banneker found himself employed at fifteen dollars a week, with Monday for his day off and directions to report on the first ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... undoubtedly the work of the Canaanites, and particularly of some of the Caphtorim, who came from Philistim: and hence these outlets of the river were named Philistinae. The river betrays its original in its name; for it has no relation to the Celtic language, but is apparently of Egyptian or Canaanitish etymology. This is manifest from the terms of which it is made up; for it is compounded of Ur-Adon, sive Orus Adonis; and was sacred to the God of that name. The river, simply, and out of composition, was Adon, or Adonis: and ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... not impossible that there was a time when the western [213] or Celtic princes made themselves masters of Greece, of Egypt and a good part of Asia, and that their cult remained in those countries. When one considers with what rapidity the Huns, the Saracens and the Tartars gained possession of a great part of our continent one will be ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... Smyrna. We cannot tell when he left his native country, or what circumstances led him to settle on the banks of the Rhone; but we know that, towards the termination of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, he was appointed by the Gallic Christians to visit the Roman Church on a mission of importance. The Celtic language, still preserved in the Gaelic or Irish, was then spoken in France, [368:4] and Irenaeus found it necessary to qualify himself for the duties of a preacher among the heathen by studying the barbarous ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... of the coming day he looked supernatural—a strange spirit from under the earth or above the earth, but not of the earth. This was borne in upon Patsy's consciousness, and it set her Celtic blood tingling ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... body of men, commonly known as the Druids, who constituted what may, with some correctness, be called the Celtic priesthood, were the recognised religious teachers throughout Gaul, Armorica, a small part of Germany on the southern border, all Great Britain, and some neighboring islands. The notions in regard to a future life put forth by them ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the saddler, was Scotch; Pash, the watchmaker, was a small, dark, vivacious, triple-baked Jew; Gideon, the optical instrument maker, was a Jew of the red-haired, generous-featured type easily passing for Englishmen of unusually cordial manners: and Croop, the dark-eyed shoemaker, was probably more Celtic than he knew. Only three would have been discernable everywhere as Englishman: the wood-inlayer Goodwin, well-built, open-faced, pleasant-voiced; the florid laboratory assistant Marrables; and Lily, the pale, neat-faced copying-clerk, whose light-brown hair was set up in a small ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Britons.—The earliest known name given to this island was Albion. It is uncertain whether the word is of Celtic or of Iberian origin. The later name Britain is derived from a second swarm of Celts called Brythons or Britons, who after a long interval followed the first Celtic immigration. The descendants of these first immigrants are distinguished ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... population of Ireland at this time consisted mainly of descendants of the Celtic and other prehistoric races which inhabited Britain at the period of the Roman invasion. When the Saxons conquered Britain, many of the natives, who were of the same stock and spoke essentially the same language as the Irish, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... from the bridge. From Kilkenny many interesting excursions may be made. To Kells, twelve statute miles, where there are the ruins of an important twelfth century priory. Two miles from Kells is Kilree, where are situate a ruined church, Round Tower, and Celtic cross, and a remarkable tomb slab in the church, on which is an ancient symbolic sculpture of a cock-in-a-pot crowing. Three miles from Kilree is Aghavillar, with ruined church, attached castellated house, and Round Tower. About seven miles ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... at Australia." I have tried to give the young readers some little indication of what features of Australian life will most interest them. The picture is of a land which appeals very strongly to the adventurous type of the Anglo-Celtic race. I have never yet met a British man or boy who was of the right manly type who did not love Australian life after a little experience. The great distances, the cheery hospitality, the sunny climate, the sense ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... opinions seemed to be incompatible with all organised government, except a popular despotism, such as the French empire exemplified. Hatred to England, her name, race, and institutions, seems to have amounted to a monomania with him; yet he was not himself of Celtic lineage. His intolerance of opinion and rashness of action would have been utterly unendurable, were it not for the directness of his aims, the sincerity of his motives, the disinterestedness of his spirit, and the suavity of his disposition. The only other member of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that claimed through the father. When the stronger and more civilised Celt came he drove before him these little dark men, he enslaved their survivors or wedded their women, and in his turn fell into slavery to the cruel Druidic religion of his subjects. To these Iberians, and to the Celtic dread of them, we probably owe all the stories of dwarfs, goblins, elves, and earth-gnomes which fill our fairy-tale books; and if we examine carefully the descriptions of the abodes of these beings we shall find them not inconsistent with the earth-dwellings, caves, circle ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... after school hours, for his work lay both upon his conscience and his hopes; but if he formed no very deep friendships amongst them, at least he made no enemies, for he was not selfish, and in virtue of the Celtic blood in him was invariably courteous. His habits were in some things altogether irregular. He never went out for a walk; but sometimes, looking up from his Virgil or his Latin version, and seeing the blue expanse in the distance breaking into white under the viewless wing of the summer wind, he ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... jocular, to pretend that nothing had happened and that the marriage was no more than the happy conclusion of a normal courtship. On the eve of the wedding he gave her the contents of her mother's jewel-box, which included some beautiful ornaments of early Celtic work. He kissed her and fondled her and hoped she would be happy, but she could not smile. He dressed elaborately for the ceremony, and when he had left her behind with Considine, feasted solemnly at Roscarna until Biddy and the coachman ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... these Saxon and Celtic societies persecute an Arabian race, from whom they have adopted laws of sublime benevolence, and in the pages of whose literature they have found perpetual delight, instruction, and consolation? That is a great question, which, in an enlightened age, may be fairly asked, but to which even ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... dropped on the instant to hands and knees on the trestle. This gave him better holding and more space, because he crouched beneath the overhang of the box-cars. Tim, not so quick in perceiving and adjusting, also overcome with Celtic rage at the brakeman, instead of dropping to hands and knees, remained upright to flare his opinion of the brakeman, to the brakeman, in ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... by no means confined to them. Occasional instances of it have appeared in almost every nation, but it has always been commonest among mountaineers and men of lonely life. With us in England it is often spoken of as though it were the exclusive appanage of the Celtic race, but in reality it has appeared among similarly situated peoples the world over. It is stated, for example, to be very common ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... Under the old Celtic tenures—the only tenures, be it remembered, through which the lords of Sutherland derive their rights to their lands—the Klaan, or children of the soil, were the proprietors of the soil: 'the whole of Sutherland,' says Sismondi, belonged to 'the men of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... garrison or from the court; being, moreover, in urgent pecuniary embarrassment, landed in Alexandria with the two amalgamated legions accompanying him to the number of thirty-two hundred men and eight hundred Celtic and German cavalry, took up his quarters in the royal palace, and proceeded to collect the necessary sums of money and to regulate the Egyptian succession, without allowing himself to be disturbed by the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... at parting, when the warmhearted Irishwoman clung to Maren and wept against her bosom, calling her all the hundred words for "darling" in the Celtic and vowing to remember ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... Celtic oak-trees and Galatian-born White lilies in lyric Paris blossoming, With Hugo and with thee, ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... visit the Blackmore tin-streamers on their feast-day, which falls on Friday-in-Lide (that is to say, the first Friday in March), you may note a truly Celtic ceremony. On that day the tinners pick out the sleepiest boy in the neighbourhood and send him up to the highest bound in the works, with instructions to sleep there as long as he can. And by immemorial usage the length of his nap will be the measure of ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to a small moss-grown cairn, probably the resting-place of some Celtic chief of other times, and the call of "Officers to the front," soon ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and in passing to and fro between these the Roman legions must frequently have marched either through or near to the site of Romsey. Roman coins found in the immediate neighbourhood clearly show that the place was inhabited during the Roman occupation. Another derivation is the Celtic word "Ruimne" (marshy); this would make the name mean "Marshy island," and there can be no doubt that this would be an apt description of the place in olden times; against this may be alleged that again the word would be hybrid. Yet another ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... unimaginative, and merely clever professors, who have so successfully undermined the ancient and venerable lore. And thirdly, and worst of all, Disraeli never suspected that the French Revolution, which in the same breath he once contemptuously denounced as "the Celtic Rebellion against Semitic laws," was, in spite of its professed attack against religion, really a profoundly Christian, because a democratic and revolutionary movement. What a pity he did not know all this! What ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Ethnic groups: Celtic and Latin with Teutonic, Slavic, North African, Indochinese, Basque minorities overseas departments: black, white, mulatto, East Indian, ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... Genie Linderbeck for the Frazers to come down, Carl found in a rack on the oak table such books as he had never seen: exquisite books from England, bound in terra-cotta and olive-green cloth with intricate gold designs, heavy-looking, but astonishingly light to the hand; books about Celtic legends and Provencal jongleurs, and Japanese prints and other matters of which he had never heard; so different from the stained text-books and the shallow novels by brisk ladies which had constituted his experiences of literature that he ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... The Celtic imagination was aflame, and Granice mutely thanked him for the word. What neither Ascham nor Denver would accept as a conceivable motive the Irish reporter seized on as the most adequate; and, as he said, once one could find a convincing motive, the ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... Gourlay was a dark beauty—a brunette so richly tinted, that the glow of her cheek was only surpassed by the flashing brilliancy of her large, dark eyes, that seemed, in those glorious manifestations, to kindle with inspiration. Her forehead was eminently intellectual, and her general temperament—Celtic by the mother's side—was remarkable for those fascinating transitions of spirit which passed over her countenance like the gloom and sunshine of the early summer. Nothing could be more delightful, nor, at the same time, more dangerous, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Tralee, has made a very favourable impression by the filial affection shown in his election war-cry, which runs, "Tralee, Trala, Tara Tarara, Tzing Boum Oshkosh." His platform is that of a Pan-Celtic Vegetarian, and he has secured the influential support of Mr. UPTON SINCLAIR, who is acting as his election agent, and who publicly embraced him at a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... longer necessary to demonstrate the nullity of the notion of race. It used to be applied to vague groups, formed by a nation or a language; for race as understood by historians (Greek, Roman, Germanic, Celtic, Slavonic races) has nothing but the name in common with race in the anthropological sense—that is, a group of men possessing the same hereditary characteristics. It has been reduced to an absurdity by the abuse Taine made of it. A very good criticism of it will be found in Lacombe (ibid., ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... your back," the man repeated, while his companions looked down at the Colonel with a strange fixedness. The Celtic nature, prone to sudden rage, stirred in them. The stranger who an hour before had been indifferent to them now wore the face of an enemy. The lake and the bog—ay, the secret grave yearned for him: the winding-sheet was high upon his breast. "Stay, and it's ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... a Cornish," said my father. "Some derive it from the Romans,—Vivianus; others from a Celtic word ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... however, was not then carried into execution, owing to the timely arrival of a red-faced, though rather handsome Irish lady of twenty-five or thirty, who, in the broadest Celtic, commanded the peace, and threatened the combatants with a hot flat-iron, which she ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... and mention several other subjects, well worthy of the same distinction. If the study of Celtic languages and Celtic antiquities deserves to be encouraged anywhere, it is surely in England,—not, as has been suggested, in order to keep English literature from falling into the abyss of German platitudes, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... is only the Celtic imagination that will glory in such romantic material; but I am sure the men and women of the poorhouse are much more interested than we are apt to think in stories outside the small circle ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... with loss? and this, moreover and more poignantly, when the flame of responsibility on some high subject is blazing at your heart, and the young Elihu, even if he would, cannot keep silence? Is it not a wrong to find pearls unprized, because many a modern, like his Celtic progenitors, (for I must not say like swine,) would sooner crush an acorn? to know your estimation among men ebbs and flows according to the accident of success, rather than the quality of merit? to be despised as an animal who must necessarily be living on his wits in some purlieu, answering ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... giant buttresses. They are reached, despite the steepness of the hill, by an easy winding road that leads, with long, meandering turns, down to the yellow, sandy beach of the little bay. Clotilde and Julia made a sketch of the old Celtic temple while the gentlemen were smoking; then they amused themselves for some time watching the rising waves spreading upon the sand its fringes of foam. It was agreed to return to the top of the hill on foot in order ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... serfs, of mixed Celtic, Roman, and Frankish parentage, had actually spoken that word of fear to every feudal baron, a "commune." They established a regular representative Parliament with two peasants sent from each district to a general assembly whose decision ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... learned also that the gospel is wider than the forms of Greek philosophy. The speculations of Alexandrian theology were as little appreciated by the Celts of Asia as is the stately churchmanship of England by the Celts of Wales. They were the foreigner's thoughts, too cold for Celtic zeal, too grand for Celtic narrowness. Fickleness is not inconsistent with a true and deep religious instinct, and we may find something austere and high behind the ever-changing phases of spiritual excitement. Thus the ideal holiness of the church, upheld by Montanists ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... that the fatter appendage continually swept the ground,—an inconvenience which I once undertook to remedy by trimming it off short with scissors. No Turk could have more indignantly resented the process than did that small quadruped,—his Celtic feelings being so severely wounded by it, in fact, that he abstained from sustenance for three days, putting himself into moral sackcloth and ashes for that period by retiring into his penitential cell under a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... of the country now called Austria was inhabited before the opening of the Christian era by the Taurisci, a Celtic tribe, who were subsequently called the Norici, and who were conquered by the Romans about 14 B.C. Their land was afterwards included in the provinces of Pannonia and Noricum, and under Roman rule, Vindobona, the modern Vienna, became a place of some importance. The part of the country north ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Complaints were laid against him at the English court by the plundered merchants, and the Irish viking set out for London, to plead his own cause before good Queen Bess, as she was called. He had one powerful recommendation: he was a marvellously handsome man. Not Celtic by descent, but half Spanish, half Danish in blood, he had the great northern stature with the regular features, flashing eyes, and dark hair of the Iberian race. This may account for the fact that his ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... before his execution, the Earl wrote such touching verses; the quaint old kitchen-garden; the ruins of the ancient Castle, where worthy Major Dalgetty is said to have passed such uncom- fortable moments;—the Celtic cross from lone Iona:—all and everything I showed off with as much pride and pleasure, I think, as if they had been my own possessions; and the more so as the Icelander himself evidently sympathised with such ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... to remains of antiquity of the Celtic, Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon Periods. By John Yonge Akerman. London, ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... this has made itself felt in many religions when they have progressed to a certain plane of thought. The ancient Egyptian gods were nearly all triune; Phanes, in the Orphic hymns the first principle of things, was tripartite; the Indian trinities are well known; the Celtic triads applied to divine as well as human existence; the Jews distinguished between Jehovah, his Wisdom and his Word; and in Christian religion and philosophy the doctrine of the trinity, though nowhere taught by Christ, has found a lasting foothold, and often presents itself ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... philological testimony, running through the various nations of the great Thiudic[1] type, until it terminates in the utmost regions of the north. This chain of affiliation, though it had a totally diverse element in the Celtic, to begin with, yet absorbed that element, without in the least destroying the connection. It runs clearly from the Anglo Saxon to the Frisic, or northern Dutch, and the Germanic, in all its recondite phases, with ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... Celtic origin, and is very common as a river-name in England, Ireland, France, and other parts of ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... is Narbonne, the Celtic Venice, as it rises above the level landscape. The great seaport described by Greek historians six centuries before our own era, the splendid capital of Narbonese Gaul, rival of the Roman Nmes and of the Greek Arles, is now as dull a provincial town ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... have been assigned, viz, Athabascan and Nootka-Columbian, and finds that they have been given too high value, and that they are only equivalent to the primary subdivisions of stocks, like the Gothic, Celtic, and Classical, rather than to the stocks themselves. He further finds that the Athabascan, the Kolooch, the Nootka-Columbian, and the Cadiak groups are subordinate members of one large and important ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... the book on Wales will be followed by the one which is called Wanderings in quest of Manx Literature. Now the title alone of that book is worth a library of commonplace works, for it gives the world an inkling of a thing it never before dreamed of, namely, that the little Celtic Isle of Man has a vernacular literature. What a pity if the book itself should be eventually lost! Here some person will doubtless exclaim, 'Perhaps the title is all book, and there is no book behind it; what can Mr. Borrow know of Manx literature?' Stay, friend, stay! A Manx grammar ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... was always reserved for the housewife herself, and the result was that no porcelain was chipped and no cut glass cracked. They sent me an old willow teapot from Biddeford, and it had n't been with us three weeks before our Celtic cook marred its symmetry by chipping ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... Monkbarns, like the burghers of the town near which they were settled, were steady assertors of the Protestant succession. The latter had, however, a pedigree of their own, on which they prided themselves as much as those who despised them valued their respective Saxon, Norman, or Celtic genealogies. The first Oldenbuck, who had settled in their family mansion shortly after the Reformation, was, they asserted, descended from one of the original printers of Germany, and had left his country in consequence of the persecutions directed against the professors of the Reformed religion. ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... my life alone, more change has taken place in the ideas and in the customs of my village than had been seen in the centuries before the Revolution. Already half the ceremonies, Celtic, Pagan, or of the Middle Ages, that in my childhood I have seen in their full vigor, have disappeared. In a year or two more, perhaps, the railroads will lay their level tracks across our deep valleys, and will carry away, with the swiftness of lightning, all our old traditions ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... is not the only species of these trees found in North America. The genus Betula (so called from the Celtic word batu, which means birch) has at least half-a-dozen other known representatives in these parts. There is the "white birch," a worthless tree of some twenty feet in height, and less than six inches diameter. The bark of this species is useless, and its wood, which is soft and white, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... ground to the Phoenician colonists of ages ago. I am sure you know that! The Gaelic tongue is the genuine dialect of the ancient Phoenician Celtic, and when I speak the original language to a Highlander who only knows his native Gaelic ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... of Feanor, a table of letterforms resembling the beautiful Celtic half-uncial hand of the "Book of Kells". Invented and described by J. R. R. Tolkien in "The Lord of The Rings" as an orthography for his fictional 'elvish' languages, this system (which is both visually and phonetically {elegant}) ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... marvel in the history of writing. Modern historians have at last appreciated the blaze of life, religions, literary, and artistic, which was kindled in the 'Isle of Saints' within a century after St. Patrick's coming (about A. D. 450); how the enthusiasm kindled by Christianity in the Celtic nature so far transcended the limits of the island, and indeed of Great Britain, that Irish missionaries and monks were soon found in the chief religious centres of Gaul, Germany, Switzerland, and North Italy, while foreigners found their toilsome way to Ireland to learn Greek! ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... nearly all of the immigrants who came to us came from the countries of Northern Europe. It has been claimed that as high as ninety per cent came from Teutonic and Celtic countries, and were, accordingly, almost of the same blood as the early settlers; but since 1890 the character of our immigration has changed so that since that time nearly seventy per cent have come from non-Teutonic countries, such as Russia, Austria-Hungary, ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... small farmer when not a moss trooper; but all the Border, on both sides, had the strongest ideas of persistent vendetta, such as happily had never been held in the midland and southern counties, where there was less infusion of Celtic blood. Anne was a good deal shocked at the doctrine propounded by the attendant Sister, a mild, good-natured woman in daily life, but the conversation confirmed her suspicions, and put her on her guard as she remembered Hob's warning. She had liked the shepherd lad far too much, and was far too grateful ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her Alma Mater. According to the venerable Bode and others, her noble and second rank flocked thither in the seventh century, where they were "hospitably received and educated, and furnished with books without fee or reward." Even at the present moment, the Irish or Celtic tongue is the only key to her remote antiquities and ancient nomenclature. The distinguished Lhuyd, in his Archaelogia Britannica, and the celebrated Leibnitz himself, place this latter beyond any possible shadow of doubt. Scarcely ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... had always held his life was in itself a daily burden to the parents. Mrs Stevenson, especially in her earlier married life, was often far from strong; to Mr Stevenson came now and then those darker moods to which the Scotch temperament, particularly when tinged with the Celtic, is liable. Personal and business disappointments were not wholly unknown, although life in these latter respects was one saved at least from monetary anxieties, and crowned with a large measure of success. But in "all the changes and chances of this mortal life" ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... green raths are to be seen commonly in the country, above all by the kirkyards; barrows of the dead, standing stones; beside these, the faint, durable footprints and handmarks of the Roman; and an antiquity older perhaps than any, and still living and active—a complete Celtic nomenclature and a scarce-mingled Celtic population. These rugged and grey hills were once included in the boundaries of the Caledonian Forest. Merlin sat here below his apple-tree and lamented Gwendolen; here spoke with Kentigern; ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... many fine scenes, in the Celtic Parnassus of Ossian: but when Burns saw it, the Highland passion of the stream was abated, for there had been no rain for some time to swell and send it pouring down its precipices in a way worthy of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the Verb: AFFIRMATION, in the Affirmative Propositions, as, I love; NEGATION, in Negative Propositions, as, I do not Love; and Limitation, wavering as between two, in the Dubitative or Questioning Forms of the Proposition, as, Do I love? Do I not love? The Celtic tongues have special modal forms to express these modifications ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... "Celtic London" at the head of a chapter we naturally feel inclined to ask, "Was there such a place? Was there any Celtic London?" Although it is almost impossible to answer such a question by either "yes" or "no," it may be worth ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... marquis's farms. I would have said on the lawn, but there was no lawn proper about the place, the ground was so picturesquely broken—in parts with all but precipices—and so crowded with trees. Hence its aspect was specially unlike that of an English park and grounds. The whole was Celtic, as distinguished in character from Saxon. For the lake-like lawn, for the wide sweeps of airy room in which expand the mighty boughs of solitary trees, for the filmy gray blue distances, and the far off segments of horizon, here were the tree crowded ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... of the oldest places in Styria, and was probably a Celtic settlement. It was taken possession of by the Romans in 15 B.C., and in A.D. 50 the emperor Claudius raised it to a Roman municipium and named it Claudia Celeja. It soon became one of the most flourishing Roman colonies, and possessed numerous great buildings, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... us by our ancestors of the Middle Ages. To them all stone circles and megalithic monuments were the work of heathens, if not of the devil himself. Heathenism and all its works was roundly condemned, whether it be Celtic, Mahomedan, or Pagan; and the condemnation was as concise and universal as the phrase "Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics" of the Christian Prayer Book to-day. In the early days of the Moyen Age, the Saracen ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... way in which this anecdote is introduced we learn that Talleyrand had some strong leaning to the Celtic superstition known as the second sight, which, in the adust imagination of a Frenchman, is closely allied to fatalism, and which, we fear, loses its interest, as it certainly does its virtue, when transported ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Poverty!" Man, hast thou traced The blood that throbs commingled in thy veins? Over thy shoulder hast thou cast a glance On thine old Celtic-Saxon-Norman sires— Huddled in squalid huts on beds of straw? Barefooted churls swine-herding in the fens, Bare-legged cowherds in their cow-skin coats, Wearing the collars of their Thane or Eorl, His serfs, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... or English settlers, and with the still more primitive Celtic inhabitants, the Northmen founded a race extremely like that which now inhabits our own country. To this day, the Norman peasants of the Cotentin retain many marks of their origin and their half-forgotten kinship with the English race. While other Frenchmen ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen |
