"Ecstasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time when the ground on which it stands was an uncultivated waste. A miracle is said to have happened in one of the side chapels in 1842, which received the sanction of the Pope. A young French Jew of the name of Alfonse Ratisbonne was discovered in an ecstasy before the altar; which he accounted for by saying, when he revived, that the Virgin Mary had actually appeared to him, and saluted him in this place, while he was wandering aimlessly, and with a smile of incredulity, through the church. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... soul lives, thinks, invents. Philosophy is a precipitation of its electric spirit, and the need that philosophy feels of basing everything on an ultimate principle is in turn relieved by music. Although the spirit is not master of what it creates through the mediation of music, yet it experiences ecstasy in this creation. In this way every genuine creation of art is independent, mightier than the artist himself, and through its expression it returns to its divine source; it is concerned with man only insomuch as it bears witness to divine ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... plumage in life's budding spring, We rarely note the flutter of his wing. The untutored heart, from pain and sadness free, Beats high with hope and joy and ecstasy; And the fond bosoms of confiding youth Believe their fairy world a world of truth. The thorn is young upon the rose's stem; They heed it not, it has no wound ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... to toss and quaff, made life a jubilee And changed the children's song and laugh to shrieks of ecstasy. ...
— An Old Sweetheart of Mine • James Whitcomb Riley
... delicately attuned musical instrument that God has created. It is capable of a cultivation beyond the dreams of those who have given it no thought. It maybe made to express every emotion in the gamut of human sensation, from abject misery to boundless ecstasy. It marks the man without his consent; it makes the man if he ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... contortions like she was taking an exercise and said she had heard so much about me and how interesting it was to meet one who did things. I said I was merely in the cattle business. She said "How perfect!" and clasped her hands in ecstasy over the very idea. She said I was by way of being the ideal type for it. And did I employ real cowboys; and they, too, must be fascinating, because they did things. I said they did if watched; otherwise ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... days and a night of screaming winds and cataracts of water, through the delays where we rode at anchor below the Chain and Dobbs Ferry, under a vertical sun that started the pitch in every seam—Elsin Grey, radiant, transfigured, drenched to the skin, faced storm and calm in an ecstasy of reckless happiness. ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... Bassett departed on the last little adventure that was to cap the total adventure, for him, of living. With a body of which he was scarcely aware, for even the pain had been exhausted out of it, and with a bright clear brain that accommodated him to a quiet ecstasy of sheer lucidness of thought, he lay back on the lurching litter and watched the fading of the passing world, beholding for the last time the breadfruit tree before the devil- devil house, the dim day beneath the matted jungle roof, the gloomy gorge between the shouldering mountains, the saddle ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... books, which had been prepared for Lizzie immediately on her marriage. It looked out upon the sea, and she had almost taught herself to think that here she had sat with her adored Florian, gazing in mutual ecstasy upon the "wide expanse of glittering waves." She was lying back in a low arm-chair as her cousin entered, and she did not rise to receive him. Of course she was alone, Miss Macnulty having received a suggestion that it would be well that she should do a little gardening in the moat. ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... would have to desert? . . . I daresay, though, that I shall not comprehend your answer when it comes. I am, you know, utterly deficient in that sixth sense of the angelic or supralunar beautiful, which fills your soul with ecstasy. You, I know, expect and long to become an angel after death: I am under the strange hallucination that my body is part of me, and in spite of old Plotinus, look with horror at a disembodiment till ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... out Blanche, in an ecstasy. But he withdrew his hand, which was upon her side, and turned from her with a quivering lip. "That's different," ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... us so much to be useful that it is folly to do without it. It is not gained by narrow selfishness. Those who forget themselves most and are kind and considerate find it. By giving it to others we get it for ourselves. Ecstasy and rapture are emotions of short duration. They are so exhilarating that they soon ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... the violence he spoke of—all this together, threw me into such an ecstasy, that suddenly I interrupted him ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... intensely. John was alive. Mary Hutchinson was at Sockburn. Coleridge was still Coleridge, not the bemused and futile mystic he was to become. As for Dorothy, she lives a thing enskied, floating from ecstasy to ecstasy. It is the third of March, and William is to go to London. "Before we had quite finished breakfast Calvert's man brought the horses for Wm. We had a deal to do, pens to make, poems to be put in order for writing, to settle for the press, pack up.... Since he left me at half-past ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... companion of her thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent, imaginative, starved Soul had come to love with a consuming passion, was a living reality near at hand, to be seen in the flesh by the eyes of her body. It was a thought that set her in an ecstasy of terror, so that she dared not ask Frey Miguel to bring Don Sebastian to her. But she plied him with questions, and so elicited from him a ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... the rejoicing world, and it was like penetrating at last into the heart of that "land a great way off" which holds captive the wistful thought of the children of earth, and reveals itself as elusively as ecstasy. If one can remember some journey that he has taken long ago—Long Ago and Far Away are the great touchstones—and can remember the glamourie of the hour and forget the substructure of events, if he can recall the pattern and ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Beth shrieked in ecstasy as they rushed forward to smother "Toodlums," as they irreverently called the Cherub, with kisses. Inez, a handsome, dark-eyed girl, relinquished her burden cheerfully to the two adoring "aunties," while Uncle John kissed Louise and warmly ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... seen some vision. Often he saw in the mountain what was happening in Egypt, and told it to Serapion the bishop, who saw him occupied with a vision. Once, for instance, as he sat, he fell as it were into an ecstasy, and groaned much at what he saw. Then, after an hour, turning to those who were with him, he groaned and fell into a trembling, and rose up and prayed, and bending his knees, remained so a long while; and then the old man rose up and wept. The bystanders, therefore, trembling and altogether terrified, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... she rises on the last movement of the dance toward ecstasy, the excitement rises with her, expressing itself in short, irrepressible yelps, at the highest point of which a scream from BRIGHT WATER ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... was in such an ecstasy of excitement that dinner went poorly; but finally it was cleared away, and the cots moved to make room for those were coming. Everybody helped that could walk—even those that had to hobble on crutches, ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... fringes of the northward slope of the mountain. Here his reception was benign. On the banks of a tiny brook, rosy-gold in the flooding afternoon light, he found a bed of wild catnip. Here for a few minutes he rolled in ecstasy, chewing and clawing at the aromatic leaves, all four paws in air, and hoarsely purring his delight. When, at last, he went on up the slope, he carried with him through the gathering shadows the pungent, sweet aroma of the herb. In a fierce gaiety of spirit he would now and then leap into the air ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... she's always there, Beside my aunt's old walnut chair; Her big green eyes are bright with glee, Her chin sinks in a creamy sea, And her ecstasy is complete. ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... to repress its mental activity, the fond parents, misled by the early promise of genius too often excite it still further, by unceasing cultivation, and the never-failing stimulus of praise. Finding its progress for a time equal to their warmest wishes, they look forward with ecstasy to the day when its talents will break forth and shed ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... desirable than the being a king, for those who shall be kings; then, the true Ideal of the State will become a possibility; but not otherwise. And if the life of Beatific Vision be indeed possible, if philosophy really "concludes in an ecstasy," affording full fruition to the entire nature of man; then, for certain elect souls at least, a mode of life will have been [58] discovered more desirable than to be a king. By love or fear you might induce such persons to forgo their privilege; to take upon ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... sight, and, since he made no effort to avoid it, presently again into the street of a mud-built village. Few people were astir. A man slept in an angle of a wall, flies about his head; a dog in an entry scratched himself with ecstasy; a woman at a doorway was combing her child's hair, and looked ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... the steps, charged into him. By great good fortune, no damage was done except to a nicely-bound Sophocles. John, however, felt assured that Scaife had deliberately intended to knock him down, seized, possibly, by an ecstasy of blind rage not uncommon with him. Scaife ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Levin in ecstasy, hearing unceasingly the sound of that voice saying, "Good-bye till this evening," and seeing the smile with which it ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... bottle out of his pocket and gave me a dram of cordial, which he had brought on purpose for me. After I had drunk it, I sat down upon the ground; and, though it brought me to myself, yet it was a good while before I could speak a word to him. All this time the poor man was in as great an ecstasy as I, only not under any surprise as I was, and he said a thousand kind and tender things to me, to compose and bring me to myself; but such was the flood of joy in my breast that it put all my spirits ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... excuses (we Irish are good at that, if we are good at nothing else), and declined to read the medical reports. One morning, when she opened the letter of that day, there passed over her a change which is likely to remain in my memory as long as I live. Never have I seen such an ecstasy of happiness in any woman's face, as I saw when she read the lines which informed her that the fever was mastered. Iris is sweet and delicate and bright—essentially fascinating, in a word. But she was never a beautiful woman, until she knew that Mountjoy's ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... became so keen that our hearts were beating as if with a sense of fear. In spite of the heat of the day, and the fatigue caused by toiling through the sand, our souls were still surrendered to the softness unspeakable of our exquisite ecstasy. They were filled with that pure pleasure which cannot be described unless we liken it to the joy of listening to enchanting music, Mozart's "Audiamo mio ben," for instance. When two pure sentiments blend together, what ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... fantasies he imagines. There is no trace of make-believe in his designs. On the contrary, he makes the old legends become vital, not because of the personalities he bestows on his heroes and fairy princesses—his people move often in a rapt ecstasy—but because the adjuncts of his mise-en-scenes are realised intimately. His prince is much more the typical hero than any particular person; his fair ladies might exchange places, and few would notice the difference; but when it comes to the environment, the real incidents of the ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... hoped she wouldn't give up—at least not before she, Verena, had had a chance to see. She felt, however, that for the present there would be no answer for her save in the mere pressure of Miss Chancellor's eager nature, that intensity of emotion which made her suddenly exclaim, as if in a nervous ecstasy of anticipation, "But we must wait! Why do we talk of this? We must wait! All will be right," she added ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... the sun, and as warmth emanates from the beam when it touches material bodies, so from the Father the Son emanates, and thence the Holy Ghost. From these views Plotinus derived a practical religious system, teaching the devout how to pass into a condition of ecstasy, a foretaste of absorption into the universal mundane soul. In that condition the soul loses its individual consciousness. In like manner Porphyry sought absorption in or union with God. He was a Tyrian by birth, established a school at Rome, and wrote against Christianity; ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... sighed mournfully through the rusty coats of mail, and waved the tattered banners which were the tapestry of the feudal hall. At once the footstep of a person was heard ascending the stairs in haste and trepidation; the door of the hall was thrown violently open, and, terrified to a degree of ecstasy, Caspar, the head of the baron's stable, or his master of horse, stumbled up almost to the foot of the table at which his lord was seated, with the exclamation in his mouth—'My lord, my lord, a fiend is in the stable!' 'What means this folly?' said the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XIII, No. 370, Saturday, May 16, 1829. • Various
... the piano and her slim, nervous hands wandered soundlessly a moment above the keys. Then a wailing minor melody grew beneath them—unsatisfied, asking, with now and then an ecstasy of joyous chords that only died again into the querying despair of the original theme. She broke off abruptly, humming the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... folk for ever I abide; Life and the days pass by, yet ne'er my wishes I attain), "Knoweth my loved one when I see her at the lattice high Shine as the sun that flameth forth in heaven's blue demesne?" Her eye is sharper than a sword; the soul with ecstasy It takes and longing leaves behind, that nothing may assain. As at the casement high she sat, her charms I might espy, For from her cheeks the envious veil that hid them she had ta'en. She shot at me a shaft ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... those of the body, whose development some may assist and others retard. Into the elysian fields of thought enters no satisfaction but brings with it youth, and strength, and ardour; nor is there a thing in this world on which the mind thrives more readily than the ecstasy, nay, the debauch, of eagerness, ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... said next, "I couldn't have given them the relief and pleasure of seeing me this evening. And what ecstasy it will be to them, to be sure! I shouldn't be surprised if it broke up the whole thing. They'll faint so—for joy, you know—just at first—that is, the ladies will. The men won't like it at all; and I don't blame 'em. I suppose I shouldn't like it—to see another fellow sweep all ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dreadful boy shot right into his mouth,' said Val, while Fergus went into an ecstasy of laughter. 'Wasn't it a ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... For she had never known—nor ever could know now—the ecstasy of Love. Truly, it conquered; but it left its prisoners to perish of starvation ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... that, Jacky attempted to explore out-of-the-way corners of the farm-yard, and stepped suddenly up to the knees in a mud-hole, out of which he emerged with a pair of tight-fitting Wellington boots, which filled him with ecstasy and ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... archway of an ancient temple. He took in the wonderful proportions and drank of the exquisite detail in an ecstasy ...
— Fables For The Times • H. W. Phillips
... longer be any question of prolonging the situation indefinitely. The only problem that occupied his mind was, when and how to say that word to Leonetta which was to bind her for ever to him, before she receded one hundredth of an inch from the summit of ecstasy to which he imagined she too must have climbed ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... of ecstasy the invalid set to work to obey. There was a hideous trick of legerdemain in the last generation, by which an encoffined skeleton was made to struggle to its feet. Something like this took place as Mina's feeble arms were brought into the ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... And oh! the indescribable ecstasy of it, the joy of it, just to lie there, trembling with weakness, and drink in great drafts of that life-giving air, thinking of nothing, caring for nothing but that they were alive there in their great out-of-doors. One never comes really to appreciate life until ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... it seemed, a command, congratulation, to judge by the ecstasy of the figure below. The warrior turned once to throw himself before the image of the sun; he repeated this again and yet again before he crept back to his fellows. The group arose and rushed ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... ballroom the music rose and fell and swelled again into ecstasy as he held her white young lightness in his arm and they swayed and darted and swooped like things of the air—while the old Duchess and Lord Coombe looked on almost unseeing and talked ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... who boards at the Graham House." He said,—"You can sleep near the railroad, and never be disturbed: Nature knows very well what sounds are worth attending to, and has made up her mind not to hear the railroad-whistle. But things respect the devout mind, and a mental ecstasy was never interrupted." He noted, what repeatedly befell him, that, after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would presently find the same in his own haunts. And those pieces of luck which happen only to good players ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... lay in the grass Sun-baked and tired, looking through a maze Of tiny stems into a new green world; Once more knew eves of perfume, days ablaze With clear, dry heat on the brown, rolling fields; Shuddered with fearful ecstasy in bed Over a book of knights and bloody shields... The ship slowed, jarred and stopped. There, straight ahead, Were dock and fellows. Stumbling, he was whirled Out and away to meet them — and his back Slumped to the old half-cringe, ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... scorning all control, Winging his arrowy flight rapid and strong, As if in search of his evanished soul, Lost in the gushing ecstasy of song; And as I wandered on, and upward gazed, Half lost in admiration, half in fear, I left the brothers wondering and amazed, Thinking that all the choir ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... tell how long a time I lay, Dreaming the ecstasy of joys Elysian, Within my marble shrine. It fled away— The rapture of that calm ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... delicate and charming terms, the gratitude of his soul, his ecstasy of mad tenderness, his offer of a devotion that should be eternal; but in order to intimate all these passionate and high-souled thoughts he could find only set phrases, commonplace expressions, ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... some cave, to remain in a hypnotic or mesmeric state until the moon was full. Then, returning to the tribe quite emaciated, he excited himself, as others do who pretend to the prophetic AFFLATUS, until he was in a state of ecstasy. These pretended prophets commence their operations by violent action of the voluntary muscles. Stamping, leaping, and shouting in a peculiarly violent manner, or beating the ground with a club, they induce a kind of fit, and while in it pretend that their utterances ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... rebuke you every time you sin, the judgment day that is here and praises you and bids you be of good courage, when you do a thing that men disown and despise, is Christ. Therefore it is no figure of speech, it is no mere ecstasy of the imagination of the preacher, when we say that in the midst of these streets of ours, more real than the men that walk in them, more real than the sidewalks that are under our feet, and the buildings that tower over us, there walks ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... endearment one hears at prayer-meetings, "Blessed Jesus," "Dear Jesus," "Loving Jesus," "Elder Brother," "Patient, gentle Jesus," etc., were first used by women in an ecstasy of religious transport. And the thought of Jesus as a loving, "personal Savior," would die from the face of the earth did not women keep it alive. The religious nature and the sex nature are closely akin: no ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... love. Earth was never so green, nor air so sweet, nor skies so bright and azure, as those of Caroline's wooing, on the shores of the beautiful Bay of Minas. She loved this man with a passion that filled with ecstasy her whole being. She trusted his promises as she would have trusted God's. She loved him better than she loved herself—better than she loved God, or God's law; and counted as a gain every loss she suffered for his sake, and for the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... succeeded a new surprise, which was overwhelming. For just as she started, in obedience to her impulse, she saw Lord Chetwynde hurry forward. She saw Mrs. Hart's eyes fixed on him in a kind of ecstasy. She saw her totter forward, with all her face overspread with a joy that is but seldom known—-known only in rare moments, when some lost one, loved and lost—some one more precious than life itself—is suddenly ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... augury of divine indwelling. The romances glow with delight in the startling effect of personal beauty upon the beholder—a beauty seldom described in detail save occasionally by similes from nature. In the Laieikawai the sight of the heroine's beauty creates such an ecstasy in the heart of a mere countryman that he leaves his business to run all about the island heralding his discovery. Dreaming of the beauty of Laieikawai, the young chief feels his heart glow with passion for this "red blossom of Puna" as the fiery volcano scorches ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... that she turned her head in delight toward the group about the piano, fixing her gaze on Nathan. The old man's eyes were riveted on the score, his figure bent forward in the intensity of his absorption, his whole face illumined with the ecstasy that possessed him. Then she looked at Richard, standing. with his back to her, his violin tucked under his chin, his body swaying in rhythm with the music. Unger sat next to him, his instrument between his knees, his stolid, shiny face unruffled by ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... had always been grateful, as people who understood him knew. But this evening his gratitude seemed a gift of small account. The ear was deaf, and what thanks of his could reach it? The body was dust, and in what ecstasy of his could it share? The spirit had fled, in agony and loneliness, never to know that it ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... brain, and the vast number of phenomena which lie along the border line between the physical and spiritual, and which are conspicuous in the phenomena of somnambulism, sleep, dreaming, hypnotism, spiritualism, clairvoyance, trance, ecstasy, and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... walking by the river; Olive had not allowed him to come to the house with her, for his face was so radiant with the ecstasy of not having been discarded by her that she did not wish him to be seen. From her window Mrs. Easterfield saw this young man on his return from his promenade, and she knew it would not be many minutes before he would reach ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... poor, ineffectual; but her look, her breathless voice made up for their lack of originality. Once she said: "I never saw it so lovely before; it is an enchanted land!" with no suspicion that the larger part of her ecstasy arose from the presence of her young and sympathetic companion. He, too, responded to the beauty of the day, of the golden forest as one who had taken new hold ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... for? Why don't they move? Hark! A clatter and a cloud of dust by the market place, an ecstasy of cheers running in waves the length of the crowd. Make way for the dragoons! Here they come at last, four and four, the horses prancing and dancing and pointing quivering ears at the tossing sea of hats and parasols and ribbons. Maude Catherwood ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... domestic life is too intimate, too constant, is an important question. For the majority of people, after the first ecstasy of the bridal year, separate rooms might be better than a single chamber occupied together. There are people to whom one bed and one room is symbolic of their close unity, of their joined lives, who find comfort and companionship in the knowledge that their life partner sleeps beside them. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... Sometimes in lucid moments he thought he was like a place where there had once been a spring. 'There used to be a feeble spring of living water which flowed quietly from me and through me. That was true life, the time when she tempted me!' (He always thought with ecstasy of that night and of her who was now Mother Agnes.) She had tasted of that pure water, but since then there had not been time for it to collect before thirsty people came crowding in and pushing one another aside. And they ...
— Father Sergius • Leo Tolstoy
... row of golden tulips is nodding. They flutter their golden wings In a sudden ecstasy and say: Something comes to us from beyond, Out of the sky, beyond the hill We give it ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... as our zephyrs sing That they bring us in the Spring, Even as our bird grows musical in ecstasy of flight— We see the serpent crawl, With his slimy coat o'er all, And blended with the song is ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... put a small ring-case into the Antiquary's hands, which, when opened, was found to contain an antique ring of massive gold, with a cameo, most beautifully executed, bearing a head of Cleopatra. The Antiquary broke forth into unrepressed ecstasy, shook his nephew cordially by the hand, thanked him an hundred times, and showed the ring to his sister and niece, the latter of whom had the tact to give it sufficient admiration; but Miss Griselda (though she had the same affection for her nephew) had not ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Christopher's presence was still with her—his arm still enveloped her, his voice still spoke in her ears; and so rapt was the ecstasy in which she moved that it was with a positive shock that she found herself presently before the little area which led into the brick kitchen in the basement of the Hall. Here from the darkness her name ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... memories, he had been, in the hay-making time, delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an immense pile "(of haycock)," by his countrymen the victorious British "(boy next door and his two cousins)," and had been recognized with ecstasy by his affianced one "(Miss Green)," who had come all the way from England "(second house in the terrace)" to ransom and marry him. It was in this playing-field, too, as he has himself recorded, he first heard in confidence from one whose father was greatly connected, "being under government," ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... across the lawn; till, as if suddenly aware of being on holy ground, he paused, and stood with reverential aspect and clasped hands, eagerly bending towards her as if in adoration. Thus engaged, as stands in ecstasy some newly arrived pilgrim before a shrine, he stood enrapt; whilst she remained as moveless as a carved angel leaning over a cathedral aisle, and, with her eyes fixed on vacancy, at length mournfully exclaimed: "Sad, sad, so sad!—yet why am I so sad? No denser grows the ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... was pervaded with a sense of ecstasy that seemed to make all past pain and regret sink into utter insignificance. To stand there by her side, to drink in that wonderful beauty of face and form, was a joy that brought absolute forgetfulness of everything outside and apart from its new and magical ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... heiau, the service of the hula was not marred by the presence of groaning victims and bloody sacrifices. Instead we find the offerings to have been mostly rustic tokens, things entirely consistent with light-heartedness, joy, and ecstasy of devotion, as if to celebrate the fact that heaven had come down to earth and Pan, with all the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... the disturbance had now become terrible. Both sides were hard at it, and the Irishmen on the roof, rewarded at last for their long vigil, were yelling encouragement promiscuously and whooping with the unfettered ecstasy of men who are getting the treat of their lives without having paid a ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... an hour every thing was in readiness; and then Mary Anne, who had been sent up-stairs to announce the fact, came down in a most remarkable state of delighted agitation, suppressed ecstasy and amazement ...
— A Fair Barbarian • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thousand forms of opinions for each of which the same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant crawling with bare knees over the splintered rocks on Croagh Patrick, the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary, the Methodist in the spasmodic ecstasy of a revival, alike are conscious of emotions in themselves which correspond to their creed: the more passionate, or—as some would say—the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and more clear is the voice within. But these varieties are no embarrassment to the theologian. He finds no fault ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... not, like the Pistis Sophia, the product of declining Gnosticism, but dates from a period when Gnostic genius, like a mighty eagle, left the world behind it and soared in wide and ever wider circles towards pure light, towards pure knowledge, in which it lost itself in ecstasy. ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... and know nothing about a maiden's heart! In your ecstasy for this Ganymede, who is probably an old crippled monster, you make rare confusion. You force the young girl to play the part of the ardent lover, and give to your monster the character of a cool, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... for the flower-seller was wizened and unsteady of foot, and she had sent him spinning about in a dizzy fashion. She put out a steadying hand. "Oh . . . !" This time it was in ecstasy; she had spied the primroses in the basket just as the sunshine splashed over the edge of the corner building straight down upon them. Margaret MacLean dropped to one knee and laid her cheek against them. "The happy things—you can hear them laugh! I want all—all I can carry." She looked up ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... breaking In fancy's eyes o'er a poet's dream, Clad in the sunlight the waters glisten, And dazzling bright in the radiance gleam. Far and wide o'er the scene of grandeur My glad eyes wander, my heart beats high; Lost in a maze of light and wonder, I faint in a dream of ecstasy; And the spirit of beauty thou seem'st to me In that flood ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... into the vale whose giant domes and battlements had months before thrown their photographic shadow through Watkins's camera across the mysterious wide continent, causing exclamations of awe at Goupil's window, and ecstasy in Dr. Holmes's study. At Goupil's counter and in Starr King's drawing-room we had gazed on them by the hour already,—I, let me confess it, half a Thomas-a-Didymus to Nature, unwilling to believe the utmost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... thought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam. This little isthmus that we are now standing on is the point to which martyrs in their triumphant pain, prophets in their fervor, and poets in their ecstasy, looked forward as the golden future, as the land too good for them to behold with mortal eyes; it is the point toward which the faint-hearted and desponding hereafter will look back as the priceless ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... away in the grate—the cloth was already spread for supper—(remember it was in Germany)—the newspapers of the day were placed before me—and, in a word, every attention showed that I had found the true avenue to Antoine's good graces, who now stood bowing before me, in apparent ecstasy ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... growth of young birches and oak near the church. The Hills dwelt intermediate between the Bull's Head and the ecclesiastical establishment. The school and schoolmaster's house were behind the Bull. The show was surrounded by the children of the place, who looked on silent with ecstasy, while a burly showman piped his pipes and beat his drum. A couple of ostlers, with their shirt-sleeves rolled up to their shoulders, and one of them with a pail in his hand, stood arrested in their work. And in the front of the spectators was Alick Hudson, a sleepy-looking youth of twenty, who ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... discovered in the marble house the pleasing figures on a ten-pound note, Harry Hardwicke, striding up and down his room, in all the ecstasy of a happy lover, had kissed a hundred times a little silver card case—a mere school girl's poor treasure, but priceless now—for within it was a hastily severed tress of gold-brown hair, tied with a bit of blue ribbon. A scrap of paper ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... tragedy she has written in five acts and in verse. You will meet a good many of our celebrated literary men there. You must remember that the watchword at that house is, Admiration, more admiration, still more admiration. You must excite enthusiasm to ecstasy, compliments to lyrical poetry, and carry flattery to apotheosis. But before we go there I beg you to allow me to return your aristocratic breakfast by a poor literary man's dinner, which we will eat, not in Bignon's sumptuous private room, but outside the walls of Paris, at 'Uncle' Moulinon's, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... things set every one in a new place? We worked hard and we made it look lovely, if the things were old; and every now and then we stopped in the midst of a busy rush, at door or window, to see joyfully and exclaim with ecstasy how grandly and exquisitely Nature was furbishing up her beautiful old things also,—a million for one sweet touches outside, ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... hills, or rushing down the streets, to the horror of timid watchers, towards the cool spaces by the river. A shrill music, a laughter at all things, was everywhere. And the new spirit repaired even to church to take part in the novel offices of the Feast of Fools. Heads flung back in ecstasy—the morning sleep among the vines, when the fatigue of the night was over—dew-drenched garments—the serf lying at his ease at last: the artists, then so numerous at the place, caught what they could, something, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... shock of the water the blood whipped her skin; fatigue vanished through the crystal magic; shoulder-deep she waded, crimson-cheeked, then let herself drift, afloat, stretching out in ecstasy until every aching muscle thrilled ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... considered among the number of his early patrons. Mr. (afterwards Sir John) Dick, then the British Consul at Leghorn, and his lady, also treated him with great partiality, and procured for him the use of the Imperial baths. His mind being thus relieved from the restless ecstasy which he had suffered in Rome, and the intensity of interest being diminished by the circumscribed nature of the society of Leghorn, together with the bracing effects of sea-bathing, he was soon again in a condition to resume his study in the capital. But the same overpowering ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. When, on a summer evening, the resounding sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the 'Meseglise way' that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise of falling rain, the odour of ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... she handed them to Douglass, "I felt the full ecstasy of power when that picture was taken. In this I wore a new gown and a new hat, and I was earning fifty dollars at each reading. My success fairly bewildered me; but oh, wasn't it glorious! I took mother out of a tenement and put her in a lovely little home. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... wandering bark upon whose pathway shone All stars of heaven except the guiding one! Again she smiled, nay, much and brightly smiled, But 'twas a lustre, strange, unreal, wild; And when she sung to her lute's touching strain, 'Twas like the notes, half ecstasy, half pain, The bulbul[44] utters ere her soul depart, When, vanquisht by some minstrel's powerful art, She dies upon the lute whose sweetness ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Soliloquy on Life and Destiny, which each repetition invested with new meaning and beauty. What player has ever surpassed his poetic conception of Schumann's Papillons, or the Chopin Nocturnes, which he made veritable dream poems of love and ecstasy. What listener has ever forgotten the tremendous power and titanic effect of the Liszt Rhapsodies, especially No. 2? When Paderewski first came to us, in the flush of his young manhood, he taught us what a noble instrument the piano really is in the hands of a consummate master. He ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... that; when Kitty's head is on my shoulder, I am not capable of any consecutive train of thought. When she puts it there I see stars, then myriads of stars, then, oh! I can't begin to enumerate the steps by which ecstasy mounts to delirium; but, at all events, any operation which demands exclusive use of the intellect is beyond me at these times. Still, I gathered my stray wits ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... procession. Perhaps it may have penetrated, even, to the group upon the float; for, at that moment, the great chief, Red Bull—kinsman to the sitting variety—turned and shook his tomahawk in the direction of the group of boys. Little Tim squealed in an ecstasy of ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... exultant. The professor's linen duster had acquired several of those triangular rents which have the merit of being beyond masculine repair, and may therefore be conscientiously endured. He sat on the camp-chair at Palmerston's tent door, his finger-tips together and his head thrown back in an ecstasy of content. ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... is twin-born with true love. Breathless from our kisses, when presently we released each other, she stood in a glorious rapture, like a white spirit in the moonlight, and as her lovely, starlit eyes seemed to devour me, she spoke in a languorous ecstasy: ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... is never at a loss for a smooth lie or delicious sophism to justify inaction, and, in our day, has rationalized it into a philosophy of the mind, and idealized it into a school of poetry, and organized it into a "hospital of incapables." It promises you the still ecstasy of a divine repose, while it lures you surely down into the vacant dulness of inglorious sloth. It provides a primrose path to stagnant pools, to an Arcadia of thistles, and a Paradise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... be conveyed the five miles from the nearest town up a steep hill? Latin, French, English, German, failed to make me understand the situation. At last I took in the Pfarrer's meaning. I was to send it by the milkman after leaving it at a certain hotel. "Ja," I cried in an ecstasy of joy, at last grasping his meaning, "Ja, ich mittam der Gepaeck von der milkman." I arrived the next day. I found the Pfarrer knew Latin, Greek (but he pronounces both quite differently from me), German, French, ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... still believe; I pray and recite the Lord's Prayer with ecstasy. I am very fond of being in church, where the pure and simple piety moves me deeply in the lucid moments when I inhale the odour of God. I even have devotional fits, and I believe that they will last, for piety is of value even when it is merely psychological. It has a moralising effect ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... in a perfect ecstasy of madness. It was delightful to be alone. He could give his soul full vent. He knew he was mad. He knew he ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... ecstasy of happiness in the voice gave place to accents of dismay as some horror of ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... master of my destiny. Beyond meadow and cornfield to right and left gloomed woods, remote and full of mystery, in whose enchanted twilight elves and fairies might have danced or slender dryads peeped and sported. Thus walked I in an ecstasy, scanning with eager eyes the novel beauties around me, my mind full of the poetic imaginations conjured up by the magic of this midsummer night, so that I yearned to paint it, or set it to music, or write it into adequate words; and knowing this beyond me, I fell ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... whom he mentions in one of his writings. The Indians made their appearance in grand costume, hideously painted and besmeared. In the course of the visit Goldsmith made one of the chiefs a present, who, in the ecstasy of his gratitude, gave him an embrace that left his face well bedaubed ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... way, very probable, very probable. For habits like those must set themselves deep in the very core of the system, don't you think, Colonel? If this woman, now, was descended from a whole line of ancestresses, who had all been trained for their work into a sort of ecstatic fervour, the ecstasy and all that went with it must have ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... and to his own satisfaction, fixed the child's attention on the morbid and over-sensitive workings of her own heart, the good and truly kind-hearted man dismissed her with a fatherly benediction. But where was the joyous ecstasy of that beautiful Sabbath morning of a year ago? Where was that heavenly friend? Yet was not this as it should be, and might not God leave her "to make herself as miserable as she had ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... a choice among these. Her aunt's favorites, beside "China," already mentioned, were "Bangor," which the worthy old New England clergyman so admired that he actually had the down-east city called after it, and "Windsor," and "Funeral Hymn." But Myrtle was in no mood for these. She let off her ecstasy in "Balerma," and "Arlington," and "Silver Street," and at last in that most riotous of devotional hymns, which sounds as if it had been composed by a saint who had a cellar under his chapel,—"Jordan." So she let her wild spirits run loose; and then a tenderer feeling ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... lily-like grace, so pure, so exquisite, that they did indeed seem to be the very essence and spirit of the flower. And now began another of those fantastic movements which Phil had before witnessed. Now in wreaths, now apart, and again in couples, they swayed about in an ecstasy of mirth, and the wind harp gave out strains of wild and melodious sound. They nodded to each other in their glee, and Phil could hardly tell whether they really were fairies or flowers, for they looked just as the flowers might when blown ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... of his existence to save the life of that other, stronger than he. And was not this his lucky day? He felt in him the strength of a giant. Yes, he would stop those terrible hoofs until his friend could get free. And in an ecstasy of confidence he threw himself like a shield ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... king Mithradates had once come forward as the liberator of the Hellenes, if he had introduced his rule with the recognition of civic independence and with remission of taxes, they had after this brief ecstasy been but too rapidly and too bitterly undeceived. He had very soon emerged in his true character, and had begun to exercise a despotism far surpassing the tyranny of the Roman governors—a despotism which drove even the patient inhabitants of Asia ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of the world," he added in a kind of ecstasy, to which I made no response, for this was too preposterous. Nearing the place our train passed an immense hoarding erected by the roadway, a score of feet high, I should say, and at least a dozen times as long, upon which was emblazoned in ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Juliana, clasping her hands in ecstasy. "I will give a party for the sole purpose of drinking tea out of this machine; and I will have the whole room fitted up like an Indian temple. Oh! it will be so new! I die to send out my cards. The Duchess of B——- told me the other day, with such ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... in his life before, lifted Billy to his shoulder and trotted up and down the room. "Nice little boy!" he laughed, Billy's damp fists hitting at him in ecstasy. "I'll just take him to the sitting-room while you finish your dinner." He did his best to pretend that the situation was not unusual, to act as if, in his own home, a man could be nothing but at home. All these ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... crossed upon his breast, the King of Naples looked like one of those aged anchorites who spend their lives in mortifying the flesh, and whose souls, absorbed in heavenly contemplation, glide insensibly from out their last ecstasy into eternal bliss. Some time he lay thus with closed eyes, putting up a silent prayer to God; then he bade them light the spacious room as for a great solemnity, and gave a sign to the two persons who stood, one at the head, the other at the foot of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... alone, lost in a magic garden, but she forgot all in this new revelation of her companion's strange belief. She turned and ran across the lawn, crying as she went, "Follow me, follow me!" and Gilian, all the ecstasy of that lingering moment on the edge of fancy gone, ran after her, feeling himself a child of dream, and her ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... ridges; none the less he and Patsey plunged together over the stony rampart of the field in time to see Negress and Lily springing through the furze in kangaroo leaps, while they uttered long squeals of ecstasy. The rest of the pack, with a confidence gained in many a successful riot, got to them as promptly as if six Whips were behind them, and the whole faction plunged into a little wood on the top of what ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... she must be at the theatre by seven o'clock. Yet she had returned to gaze at the unconscious poet, lulled to sleep in bliss; she could not drink too deeply of this love that rose to rapture, drawing close the bond between the heart and the senses, to steep both in ecstasy. For in that apotheosis of human passion, which of those that were twain on earth that they might know bliss to the full creates one soul to rise to love in heaven, lay Coralie's justification. Who, moreover, would not have found excuse in Lucien's more than human ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... that led him past woods in whose green twilight thrushes and blackbirds piped, by sunny meadows where larks mounted heavenward in an ecstasy of song, and so, eventually he found himself in a road where stood a weather-beaten finger-post, with its two arms wide-spread ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... enforced it; and we know that only the man that forged with clenched teeth after Atalanta, tenderly hungry for all her uncaptured whiteness, brutally driving the pace till her heart burst in her side if need be, tasted the supremest ecstasy of the fighting that lifts us that one tantalising step above the savage—the fight for joy. I am convinced that it is after some one of those red glimpses that a certain proportion of us every year of the world's ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... convent at Paris, she was misled by the poetry of Catholicism, and abandoned herself to the highest transports of religious fervor. She passed whole hours in ecstasy at the foot of the altar. This shows the susceptibility of her imagination. About this time her grandmother died, and she left the convent to close the eyes of her much-loved grandparent. She returned, with the full determination of becoming religious. All the ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... though I had spoken softly, she dropped the pen, rose and, clasping hands to bosom, uttered a scream, though sweetly modulated and extremely ladylike. Then we were in each other's arms and she was weeping and laughing over me in a very ecstasy of welcome. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... The outdoor pair may not look so sentimental as the artistic couple; but their hearts may be as tender and their love as true, though their hands meet over the mending of a tyre or the finding of a tennis ball instead of being clasped in the ecstasy born of sweet sounds. ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... than did the savages lay open the treasures of the caches. Blankets and robes, brass trinkets and blue beads were drawn forth with chuckling exultation, and long strips of scarlet cloth produced yells of ecstasy. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... in a black satin box, a splendid diamond necklace, and her heart began to beat with boundless desire. Her hands trembled as she took it. She fastened it around her throat, over her high-necked dress, and stood lost in ecstasy as ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... city. The senate thought them both extravagant, and not well in their safe senses; for the design of Metellus seemed to be mere rage and frenzy, out of excess of mischief bringing all things to ruin and confusion, and Cato's virtue looked like a kind of ecstasy of contention in the cause of what was good ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... producer of synthetic drugs; transit point for US-bound ecstasy; source of precursor chemicals for South American cocaine processors; transshipment point for cocaine, heroin, hashish, and marijuana entering ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... ecstasy of joyful excitement until the jangling of Canon Beecher's church bell recalled him to common life again. It speaks for the strength of the habits he had formed in Ballymoy that he rose without hesitation and went to take his part in the ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham |
