"Grail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Knight of the Swan, of the Ring of the Nibelungen, the Search for the Grail, of Lohengrin and of Parsifal, are among the richest and deepest of the great mediaeval stories. They are pre-eminently the natural food for children of imagination, and in this volume these stories are retold in a very effective ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... Herbert back to our little nest in London. There's no place like home, as I always say. From there we might work together for the great cause of Peace—what I call 'My Grail.'" ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... river; the cool, placid water sliding through many countries, with the swan as symbol and token of all that is strange and beautiful where it has its source. It is less a theme capable of purely musical development to form pattern after pattern of entrancing beauty, like the Grail or Montsalvat theme, than the equivalent in music of tender colour. It never sings out from the orchestra without carrying the imagination for a moment from the scene before one's eyes to the fernem Land. It blends the actual with ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... works havoc among the heathen Saxon invaders. Accretions naturally are added, and a miraculous origin and a mysterious death throw a superstitious halo around the hero. When the brilliant personality of Lancelot breaks into the tale, and the legend of the Holy Grail is superadded, the theme exercised an irresistible fascination upon the ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... also said, 'Follow God.' In each case you must realise that, whatever you do, you take your life in your [p.44] hands; you enter on a grand enterprise, a search for the Holy Grail, which will bring you to strange lands and perilous seas. For you cannot say, interpreting, 'Thus far and no further, merely according to the bond and the duty.' In following God, you follow by what has been, what is ruled and accomplished, but you follow after what ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... schemes, in spite of their singularity, were as solidly set as the plans of a building contractor. In Arthur's time Sir William Keogh would have been a Knight of the Round Table. In these modern days he rides abroad, seeking the Graft instead of the Grail. ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... one sick," she thought. "We tell our children the tales of the Red Branch Knights—of King Arthur and the Knights of the Grail—and rejoice afresh over the beauty and wonder of them; we stand by the hour worshiping at the pictures of the saints—simple men and women who just went about doing kindness; and we read the Holy Book—the tales of Christ with his fishermen, ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... in that. I was thinking how of old time Christ appeared in the breaking of bread to the disciples whose eyes were holden. And to-night, John, as I have been rocking baby to sleep I have been reading Tennyson's Holy Grail, and thinking how often, in our modern life, Calabad and Percivale kneel at the same shrine, and how often what is but a memorial service to the one affords a beatific vision of a living and life-giving Lord ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... necessary result of our finite senses, that the only Reality is the Spiritual, the Here and the Now; that the Riddle of the Universe is not to be solved by the Intellect but by that method which is employed by those who are earnestly following the "Quest of the Grail"—namely, by realising that our True Personality or Transcendental Ego is an emanation from the Absolute; that we are one-with Him, and that it is by following the old Hellenic command "[Greek: Gnothi ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... of action than to extend the boundary of human knowledge in the face of perils and obstacles more formidable and more mysterious than those encountered by the knights of old in the cause of the Lord's sepulchre or the holy grail—they have thus embodied in a form which will ever awaken enthusiasm in imaginative natures, the noble impulses of our latter civilization. To win the favour of that noblest of mistresses, Science; to take authoritative possession, in her name, of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... too long, though I should like to tell of the three-leaved Herb of Life by which Sigmund made Sinfioti alive again. For this is the very soma-plant of India, the holy grail of King Arthur, the—but ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... traditional blond wig, took his spear in hand, and set forth to conquer. His first phrase, "Das weiss ich nicht" which is about all he has to say in the first act, was coldly received. However, his bare legs and arms were admired from the rear as he stood his half-hour looking at the Holy Grail. In the second act, where he resists Kundry's questionable allurements, he did passably well, though he gave the impression that even for a reiner Thor—the German for a virtuous fool—she had no charms. She ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... the boys with love, my dear, but they turned on me; I came with gentleness, with my heart 'twixt my hands like a bowl, Like a loving-cup, like a grail, but they spilt it triumphantly And tried to break the vessel, ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... Holy Grail lures errants pale Through the wastes of yonder star? What fables sway the Milky Way? In ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... my intention, to avoid trouble and talk, to keep away from the 'Isle o' Man' for the future, but it turned out otherwise. I'd got leave from the Chief on Thursday afternoon to go up to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo to see the Holy Grail. They keep it in the Treasury there and show it on Thursdays for a franc. Most Englishmen laugh at these tales of the Church, and even Catholics I have met tell me they don't believe in miracles. I don't know why; I'm interested in them. Sometimes I ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... touching in the boyish declaration. Ann looked up and saw his face in the moonlight, white and rather stern. It made her think of the face of some young knight of bygone days taking a sacred vow before he set forth to seek and find the Holy Grail. ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... allowed, however, that Titurel the Chief had grown extremely aged, but it was not allowed that he could die in the presence of the Sangrail. He seemed to have been laid in a kind of trance, resting in an open tomb beneath the altar of the Grail; and whenever the cup was uncovered his voice might be heard joining in the celebration. Meanwhile, Amfortas, his ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... of my brain that reminds me of a story told me the other day which brings an old legend very prettily to this country. It is said that when Joseph of Arimathea was hounded from place to place by the Jews, he fled to England taking the Grail with him. The spot where he settled he called Avalon. When Lord Baltimore, a devout Catholic, was given a huge tract of land in the south of this little island, he christened it Avalon in commemoration of Joseph of Arimathea's also distant journey. To the disgrace of the Protestants, the Catholic ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... Music's witchery o'er Sin and Hell Man is redeemed. The Christ is here! The Soul Now claims its own! Nor hope nor fear Nor prayer nor hunger now, for lo! 'tis here, The expected Kingdom—God's and Man's! 'Tis here! Day-dawn has come! The world-wide quest is o'er! The Grail was never lost! 'Twas folded safe Within the petals of my heart, and thou Enchanter wise, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... one summer day To fight the boastful Hun, In khaki clad, as fine a lad As ever carried gun, No braver knight e'er went to fight, In shining coat of mail, In days of old, for love or gold, Or for the Holy Grail. ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... mountain meres I find a magic bark; I leap on board: no helmsman steers: I float till all is dark. A gentle sound, an awful light! Three angels bear the Holy Grail; With folded feet, in stoles of white, On sleeping wings they sail. Ah, blessed vision! blood of God! My spirit beats her mortal bars, As down dark tides the glory slides, And ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... Maxine had the sense of lifting a tangible veil, of gaining a glimpse of the hidden personality—not the half-sceptical, pleasant, friendly Blake of the boy's acquaintance, but Blake the dreamer, the idealist who sought some grail of infinite holiness figured in his own imagination, zealously guarded from the scoffer and the worldling. A swift desire pulsed in her to share the knowledge of this quest—to see the face of the knight illumined for ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... liberty, which thrilled through the veins of the world's greatest in the past, and woke our pulses to responsive throb, has not yet died wholly out of the hearts of men. Still the quest of the Holy Grail exercises its deathless fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven, nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on the agonising ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... it composed of a white, felt-like substance, probably the down of some plant or the wool of some worm, and toned down in keeping with the branch on which it sits by minute tree-lichens, woven together by threads as fine and grail as gossamer. From Robin's good looks and musical turn, we might reasonably predict a domicile of him as clean and handsome a nest as the king-bird's, whose harsh jingle, compared with Robin's evening melody, is as the clatter of pots and kettles beside the tone of a flute. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... the Lady Anne'' at the Royal Academy in 1896, and in that year was elected A.R.A., becoming a full R.A. in 1898. Apart from his other paintings, special mention must be made of the large frescoes entitled "The Quest of the Holy Grail,'' in the Boston Public Library, on which he was occupied for some years; and in 1901 he was commissioned by King Edward VII. to paint a picture of the coronation, containing many portraits elaborately ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... like the Holy Grail," he said, and, with one arm round the woman he loved, he softly quoted ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... hundred summers long, And, binding them all in one blazing sheaf, Had cast them forth; so, young and strong And lightsome as a locust leaf, Sir Launfal flashed forth in his maiden mail To seek in all climes for the Holy Grail.—Lowell. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... country inn the suit case became a knapsack. Kenny went forth into a world of old houses, apple blossoms and winding roads, likening himself to Peredur who had gone in search of the Holy Grail. The Grail in this case was the holy boon ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... that legendary, supernatural thing she gets into it. I never heard the prayer sung like that before. That look that came in her eyes; it went right out through the back of the roof. Of course, you get an ELSA who can look through walls like that, and visions and Grail-knights happen naturally. She becomes an abbess, that girl, after LOHENGRIN leaves her. She's made to live with ideas and enthusiasms, not with a husband." Fred folded his arms, leaned back in his chair, and began ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... second period. It was an age of accumulation, of uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshiped by these men, just as the reliques of Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the Crusades was revived in this quest of the Holy Grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of Pagan authors were valued like precious gems, reveled in like odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed on like the eyes of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad, and the indifferent received an almost equal homage. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... slender sound As from a distance beyond distance grew, Coming upon me—O never harp nor horn Was like that music as it came; and then Stream'd thro' my cell a cold and silver beam, And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail." ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... sound, an awful light! Three angels bear the holy Grail; With folded feet, in stoles of white, On sleeping wings ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... poetry. Spring, spring, endless spring—for three long centuries throughout the world a dreary green monotony of spring all over France, Provence, Italy, Spain, Germany, England; spring, spring, nothing but spring even in the mysterious countries governed by the Grail King, by the Fairy Morgana, by Queen Proserpine, by Prester John; nay, in the new Jerusalem, in the kingdom of Heaven itself, nothing but spring; till one longs for a bare twig, for a yellow leaf, for a frozen gutter, as for a draught of water in the desert. The green fields and meadows enamelled ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... of historical knowledge with the poetry of epic or romantic creations, do we suppose that Tennyson, while writing the Idylls of the King, believed in the stories of Arthur, of Lancelot, of Galahad, or of the Holy Grail? When Morris composed the Earthly Paradise, had his imagination no freedom of flight because stubborn facts of history and ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... histories of chivalry. For indeed there was not any house so famous as it saving only the house of King Ban of Benwick, which brought forth those two peerless knights beyond all compare:—to wit, Sir Launcelot of the Lake and Sir Galahad, who achieved the quest of the San Grail. ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... Arthur's Seat overhangs Edinburgh, whose presence haunts the Lakes, and Wales, and Cornwall, and the forests of Brittany; the race that held up for us the image of the Holy Grail—that race can claim no small share in the moulding of ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... weaving perishable garlands out of flowers. Now he was at Sawston, preparing to work a beneficent machine. No man works for nothing, and Rickie trusted that to him also benefits might accrue; that his wound might heal as he laboured, and his eyes recapture the Holy Grail. ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... they smite self-indulgence, they deny the maxims of the worldly wise. But in accepting Christ's principle and forsaking their palaces that they might be as brothers to beggars, Xavier and Loyola found an exhilaration denied to kings; while each Sir Launfal, in his ease denied the Holy Grail, has in the hour of self-sacrifice discerned the Vision Splendid. To each young patriot and soldier looking eagerly unto the tablets that commemorate the deeds of heroes, to each young scholar aspiring to a place beside the sages, comes this word: Life is through death, and immortal renown ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and Virgil to the "Winepress" of Alfred Noyes), the torture, the pains, the sufferings, the woes, the vision of the prophet of a loving and perfect humanity, the reason of logic—all these and more are to him inspirations, and strengthen him in his great quest. He is a knight of the Holy Grail that is filled from the river of the ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... the building that was open to the public. I spent rapt hours studying the Abbey pictures. I repeated to myself lines from Tennyson's poem before the glowing scenes of the Holy Grail. Before the "Prophets" in the gallery above I was mute, but echoes of the Hebrew Psalms I had long forgotten throbbed somewhere in the depths of my consciousness. The Chavannes series around the main staircase I did not enjoy for years. I thought the pictures looked faded, and their symbolism ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... on lonely mountain-meres I find a magic bark; I leap on board: no helmsman steers, I float till all is dark. A gentle sound, an awful light! Three angels bear the holy Grail: With folded feet, in stoles of white, On sleeping wings they sail. Ah, blessed vision! blood of God! My spirit beats her mortal bars, As down dark tides the glory slides, And star-like mingles ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... are the most scattered about in inexpensive copies are the decorations of the Boston Public Library. Note the pillar-like quality of Sargent's prophets, the solemn dignity of Abbey's Holy Grail series, the grand horizontals and perpendiculars of the work of Puvis de Chavannes. The last is the orthodox mural painter of the world, but the other two will serve the present purpose also. These architectural paintings if they were dramatized, still retaining their powerful ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... is strongly stirred By clink of plate or flight of bird, He has a plumy tail; At night he treads on stealthy pad As merry as Sir Galahad A-seeking of the Grail. ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... the mythology of the Romancers, the San Greal, or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus Christ partook of the last supper with his disciples. It was brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, an object of pilgrimage and adoration, for many years in the keeping of his lineal descendants. ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... of the noble prince, Sir Galahad." Straightway the young man seated himself there where none other had ever sat without danger to his life; and all who saw it said, one to another: "Surely this is he that shall achieve the Holy Grail." Now the Holy Grail was the blessed dish from which Our Lord had eaten the Last Supper, and it had been brought to the land of Britain by Joseph of Arimathea; but because of men's sinfulness, it had been withdrawn ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... feel," he said, "that nothing is impossible—to have you here beside me. I said, that day at Surbiton, 'There's many good things in life, but there's only one best, and that's the wild-haired girl who's pulling away at that oar. I will make her my Grail, and some day, perhaps, if God wills, she shall ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... inconvenience. Baireuth, too; perhaps it will strike you as a dull and stinking little town, and so I dare say it is. But after lunch we shall go up the hillside to where the theatre stands, at the edge of the pine-woods, and from the porch the trumpets will give out the motif of the Grail, and we shall pass out of the heat into the cool darkness of the theatre. Aren't you thrilled, Comber? Doesn't a holy awe pervade you! Are you worthy, ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... taboo whereby, as in the case of Cupid and Psyche, the husband forbids the wife to question him as to his identity or to look upon him. The myth has been treated by both French and German romancers, but the latter attached it loosely to the Grail legend, thus ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... idea of generally applicable regions is a mare's nest, as was the search for the Holy Grail, what is the object of the study of geographical distribution? It is nothing less than the history of the evolution of life in space and time in the widest sense. The attempt to account for the present distribution of any group of organisms involves the aid of every branch of science. It bids ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... am I," he said, "the son of Parsifal, the keeper of the Holy Grail. Gladly would I have helped you, O King, in your fight against the barbarians, but an unavoidable fate calls me away. You will, however, be victorious, and under your descendants will Germany become a ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... spirituality of the Celt. The legends upon which they were based revolved for the most part round the history of King Arthur and his knights; they told of the strange adventures of Lancelot, of the marvellous quest of the Holy Grail, of the overwhelming and fatal loves of Tristan and Yseult. The stories gained an immense popularity in France, but they did not long retain their original character. In the crucible of the facile and successful CHRETIEN DE TROYES, who ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Where the mountains afar are dim 'Neath the tremulous tread of the seraphim, Shall not our querulous hearts prevail, That have prayed for the peace of the Holy Grail. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... great Holy Grail I caught an eagle when I caught that dove, For now you are the queen of all the dames, Even King Constantine, who seldom marks A lady of the court, comes to your side And flatters you with royal courtesies, Which you receive ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... yet the thought disturbed her a trifle. It did not seem quite right for Monte to have no destination. He was worth something more than merely to revolve in a circle. He should have a Holy Grail. Give him something to fight for, and he would fight hard. Twice to-day she had caught a light in his eyes that had suggested this to her—a clean, white light that had hinted of a Monte with a destination. But would ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... paid a beautiful tribute to Miss Anthony, "the Sir Galahad in search of the Holy Grail," and closed with an eloquent prophecy of future success. Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake (N. Y.) gave a clever satire on The Rights of Men, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... knight reached Philip's court, where he was received with the highest honors. Then to his paternal castle he wended his way, to be welcomed by his proud parents as gladly as if he had won the Holy Grail. Dancing and rejoicing followed, in which all the neighboring noble families participated, and many a fair damsel shed her smiles—in vain it seems—on the famous ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... give us half a chance,' said Livingstone, 'she guards her day and night. It's like the monks and the Holy Grail. ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... spiritual product of the Middle Ages, the literature of Romance and the spirit of chivalry, from the Celtic folk-tales of the present day. Mr. Alfred Nutt has already shown this to be true of a special section of Romance literature, that connected with the Holy Grail, and it seems probable that further study will extend the field of application of ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... it between her own, and the girl smiled a happy response, but Geoffrey was oblivious of her presence, his eyes fixed upon his love's face, with the rapt, adoring gaze with which a knight of old may have gazed upon the vision of the grail. His mother looked at him, and her lips quivered. Artificial and frivolous though she was, her only son was dear to her heart. Since the hour of his birth he had been to her as a pivot round which the world revolved. Her son—the last of the Grevilles who had owned the Manor since the days of the ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a dark, portentous secret in his life, it was agreed; an opinion not too well confirmed by the old man's appearance. His fine eyes had a pathetic habit of wandering to the horizon in a questioning fashion that had a queer sort of hopelessness in it, as if his quest were one for the Holy Grail, perhaps; and his expression was mild, vague, and sad. He had a look of race and blood; and yet, at the first glance, one saw that he was lost in dreams, and one guessed that the dreams would never be of great practicability in their application. Some such impression of Fisbee was probably ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... himself than Charlemagne; but when the genius of Map (or of some one else) had hit upon the real knotting and unknotting of the story—the connection of the frailty of Guinevere with the Quest for the Grail—complete developments of the fates of minor heroes, elaborate closings of minor incidents, became futile. Endless stories could be keyed or geared on to different parts of the main legend: there might be a Tristan-saga, a Palomides-saga, a Gawain-saga, episodes ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... in the great Quests of the world,—the Argonauts, Helena in search of the Holy Rood, the Knights of the Holy Grail, the Pilgrim Fathers. There are the Victors in the intellectual wrestlings of the world,—the thinkers, poets, sages; the Victors in great sorrows, who conquer the savage pain of heart and desolation of spirit which arise ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... valley of Avalon, whither Arthur went to heal his overmastering sorrow, and where the air is always sweet with the smell of apple blossoms. In this deep wood lives Merlin, still weaving, as of old, the magic spells. There is the castle of the Grail, and as our eyes fall on it, suddenly there comes a hush, and we seem to hear the sublime antiphony, choir answering choir in heavenly melody, as Parsifal raises the cup, and the light from above smites it into sudden ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... and in this manner one lad felt the fatigue nearly as much as the other. On the whole, perhaps it was the little Queen of the party, the real Leader of the expedition, who suffered the least. Never did knight of old go in search of the Holy Grail more devoutly than did Cecile go now to deliver up her purse of gold, to keep ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... that this Frenchman had not gone to America on a quest solely for military glory. The Jacobin clubs, first by fair promises and then by the demand for his life blood, had sought to force him from liberty to license, from real freedom to debauched freedom. But like Sir Galahad, the Knight of the Holy Grail, he had stood true to his quest, true to his ideal, true to the inward light that unerringly marked the real from the false, true to genuine democracy in its fight against autocracy. And now, greater than all these lures and tests, stood before him Napoleon Bonaparte, ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... Thy keeping hands; As safe as Heaven kept the guarded Grail— So safe, so pure, so compassed as with mail— The soul committed, e'en through Death's ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... the Female Convention Hiram Green on Base Ball Hiram Green among the Fat men Hiram Green to Napoleon Hiram Green in Wall Street How a Disciple of Fox Became a Lover of Bull Horticultural Hints Holy-Grail, and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... you have seen this vision, and in this spirit have come to help us. Sir Launfal, in searching for the Holy Grail, found it in ministering to the suffering and diseased at his own door. Ye who are in search of God's best gift can find it to-day in lifting up these ten millions of people at your door, broken by slavery, bound by ignorance, yet groping for the light. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... and love fought out in the arena of Tannhaeuser's mind; the cosmic glories of the Ring with the resplendent figures of Siegfried and Brunhilde; the self-dedication of Parsifal, the Sir Percival of our Arthurian legends, whom "The sweet vision of the Holy Grail drew from all vain-glories, rivalries and earthly heats." Into the glowing music of Wagner my son read lessons in renunciation, the sordidness of the lust for gold, the sublimity of pure human love, the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. The occasional ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... a soldier in a poet's frame, Heart of a hero in a body frail; Thine was the courage clear that did not quail Before the giant champions of shame Who wrought dishonour to the city's name; And thine the vision of the Holy Grail Of Love, revealed through Music's lucid veil, Filling thy life with heavenly ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... romances also appeared, vast formless compilations, which gathered up into themselves story after story, according to the fancy of each successive editor. Greatest of the additions to the substance of the cycle was the story of the Holy Grail, originally an altogether independent legend. Important changes necessarily developed. Arthur himself, in many of the romances, was degraded from his position of the bravest knight to be the inactive figurehead of a brilliant court; and the only really historical element ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... second period. It was an age of accumulation, of uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshipped by these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the crusades was revived in this quest of the holy grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of pagan authors were valued like precious gems, revelled in like odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed on like the eyes of a beloved ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... spectacle, and who felt forever the desire to resolve his experience of life into a literary form. On this matter of the passion for form,—the attempt at perfection, the quest for which was to his mind the real search for the holy grail,—he said the most interesting, the most inspiring things. He mixed with them a thousand illustrations from his own life, from other lives that he had known, from history and fiction, and above all from the annals of the time that was dear to him beyond all periods,—the ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... enormous pedestals at either side of the entrance. Inside, on the walls of the grand stairway, are magnificent paintings by John La Farge and others, while on the four sides of the main public room are mural paintings by La Farge, depicting the entire history of Sir Arthur and the Holy Grail. ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... saintly, pales before certain relics of our Lord's life on earth which gained currency. Of these the most famous were the Veronica, a cloth on which Christ, on His way to Calvary, was supposed to have left the impress of His face, and a vessel of a green colour which was identified with the holy grail, the cup which our Lord used at the Last Supper. Of garments purporting to be the seamless coat of Christ there were a considerable number shown in different places; but the most famous to this day remains the ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... against the bold-faced heroines and sensual amours of some of the old French romances, an ideal of exaggerated asceticism, of stainless chastity, notoriously pervades the portion of Malory's work which deals with the Holy Grail. Lancelot is distraught when he finds that, by dint of enchantment, he has been made false to Guinevere (Book XI. chap. viii.) After his dreaming vision of the Holy Grail, with the reproachful Voice, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Brittany upon him prest A bride, in gratitude For service done; and though the quest Of sacred grail subdued His full heart-beat of smothered heat— He ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... of old thought. The modern quest of the Grail is not for the crystal cup that held the holy elements, but for the divine life itself, the principle that inspires men to action. The philosopher of our day is not a hermit, theorizing about vague abstractions, ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... heard a voice near the door of the shop asking first for Mr. Povey and then for Mrs. Baines, she rose, and seizing the object nearest to her, which happened to be a pair of scissors, she hurried towards the showroom stairs as though the scissors had been a grail, passionately sought and to be jealously hidden away. She wanted to stop and turn round, but something prevented her. She was at the end of the counter, under the curving stairs, when one ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... He fitted so precisely into a certain pigeonhole of human kind.—What we had not counted on was the fierceness of the stimulus—like the taste of blood to a carnivore or, to the true knight, a glimpse of the veritable Grail. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... uneasily, watching the girl keenly, to know how the picture touched her. Was, then, she thought, this grand, dead Past so shallow to him? These knights, pure, unstained, searching until death for the Holy Grail, could he understand the life-long agony, the triumph of their conflict over Self? These women, content to live in solitude forever because they once had loved, could any man understand that? Or the dead queen, dead that the man she loved might be free and ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... open arms and wings and had drawn fifty pounds on the strength of it. After that came a series of vexatious delays. The chalice became less and less of a commercial man's chalice, acquired more and more the elusive quality of the Holy Grail, and at last even the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... expectation. Perhaps to-night he may realise it; certainly in the morning it will be much nearer; and as for the third day, it will be realised in some great festival of delight. There is, too, a subtle selfishness in this quest after the ideal—the Holy Grail of the imagination. The artist keeps the secret from his brother artists until he can startle them with some gracious surprise. He almost pities them, as he thinks of the revelation that is about to dawn upon unsuspecting ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Time's tired slaves I am of those that delicately sunder Corruptions of contentment from the breast As with rare steel. Like music I unveil Last things, till, weary of earthen cups and rest, You seek Montsalvat and the burning Grail. Ah! blindly, blindly, wounded with the roses, I bear ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... del Graal or Perceval for Philip, count of Flanders, who died of the plague before Acre in 1191. This prince was guardian to the young king, Philip Augustus, and held the regency from 1180 to 1182. As Chretien refers to the story of the Grail as the best tale told au cort roial, it seems very probable that it was composed during the period of the count's regency. It was left unfinished, and added to at divers times by at least three writers, Wauchier de Denain, Gerbert de Montreuil ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Desnoyers had seen in Berlin reflecting the light on metal and leather straps, the magnificent and terrifying Hussars, the Cuirassiers in pure white uniform like the paladins of the Holy Grail, the artillerymen with breasts crossed with white bands, all the military variations that on parade had drawn forth the Hartrotts' sighs of admiration—these were now all unified and mixed together, of uniform color, all in greenish mustard like the dusty lizards that, slipping along, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... with Celia, Watched on a ferry an Italian child, One whom America Had changed. His cheek was hardy and his mouth was frail For sweetness, and his eyes were opening wild As with wonder at an unseen figure carrying a grail. Perhaps he faced, as I did in his glance, The spirit of the living dead who, having ranged Through long reverses, forward without fail Carry deliverance From privilege and disinheritance, Until their universal soul shall prove ...
— The New World • Witter Bynner
... figures at leading moments must have: Sir Galahad, humbly glorying in his perfect achievement of negations; Parsifal, engulfed in an ecstasy of humble gloating over his own worthiness as he holds up the Grail high above bowed, adoring heads; Beerbohm Tree—I can't get away from theatrical analogies—coming before the curtain on his most successful first night, meek with happiness. Hasn't it run through the ages, this great humility at the moment of supreme ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... the pictures are a mine of subjects for description. The pictures themselves may be described, and many of them will suggest other subjects for similar tasks. For instance, in Volume V, on page 219, is a picture of Sir Galahad when the Holy Grail appears to him. Some of the topics for description ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... water-front. The Chinamen were already busy in their shops. The sky had still the pallor of dawn, and there was a ghostly silence on the lagoon. Ten miles away the island of Murea, like some high fastness of the Holy Grail, guarded its mystery. ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... suffering soul, together with an iron self-repression, that those who suffered and questioned came to him, and threw themselves upon him; often getting more buffeting than balm for their pains; but always conscious of some mysterious attractions in him, as of one who, like Sir Boris, had seen the Grail, but might never tell of ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... transplanted, then slighted and left to wither, is not so satisfactory. Of the upper middle class, indeed, at that time, Gissing had very few means of observation. But this defect, common to all his early novels, is more than compensated by the intensely pathetic figure of Gilbert Grail, the tender-souled, book-worshipping factory hand raised for a moment to the prospect of intellectual life and then hurled down by the caprice of circumstance to the unrelenting round of manual toil at the soap and candle factory. ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... the parliamentary vote was a panacea for all human ills, and the ballot-box an object as sacred as the Holy Grail to a knight ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... the most interesting books in the world. Yet this Homer is less valued than the tiny octavo which contains the ballades and huitains of the scamp Francois Villon (1533). 'The History of the Holy Grail' (L'Hystoire du Sainct Greaal: Paris, 1523), in a binding stamped with the four crowns of Louis XIV., is valued at about 500 pounds. A chivalric romance of the old days, which was treasured even in the time of the grand monarque, when old French literature ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... know Little Lord Fauntleroy? And do you know about Sir Lancelot, and the Holy Grail, and King Arthur and his Round Table, and the Lady Rowena, and Ivanhoe, and ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... peering out now, though. It was sleeping. However, it was due to wake up any second. "Then you're not interested in fencing the Holy Grail?" ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... command a seriousness of conception lacking in the old Greek. Within the coffin lay an object of a fresh and brilliant clearness among the ashes of the dead—a flask of lively green glass, like a great emerald. It might have been "the wondrous vessel of the Grail." Only, this object seemed to bring back no ineffable purity, but rather the riotous and earthy heat of old paganism itself. Coated within, and, as some were persuaded, still redolent with the tawny sediment of the Roman wine it had held so long ago, it was set aside for ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... golden Christmas legend and it relates how Joseph of Arimathea—that good man and just, who laid our Lord in his own sepulcher, was persecuted by Pontius Pilate, and how he fled from Jerusalem carrying with him the Holy Grail hidden beneath a cloth ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... correspondence, Wagner states that the Lohengrin Prelude typifies choirs of angels bearing the Holy Grail to earth. This idea and the method of its development can be found in the symphonic thought which follows the Preludium to the Benedictus of the ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... and teach within the university walls must respond to the injunction of the church, "Sursum corda"—lift up the heart to high thinking and impartial search for the unsullied truth in the interests of all the people; this is the holy grail of the universities. ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... drama was familiar to New Yorkers from many concert performances. Once, indeed, there was a "Parsifal" festival in Brooklyn, under the direction of Mr. Seidl, in which all the music was sung by the best singers of the Metropolitan Opera House on a stage set to suggest the Temple of the Grail. Only the action and the pictures were new to the city's music lovers. Nevertheless the interest on the part of the public was stupendous. The first five representations were over on January 21st, but before then Mr. Conried had ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the brave—soon, by God's grace, the free— Thy woe is transient; joy shall come to thee; It cannot fail. The darkest night gives way to rosy dawn, And thou, perchance, shalt see on Easter morn, The Holy Grail. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... salad. Wiping his lips with his napkin, he joined our tete-a-tete. 'Gracious madam, I agree with you. He who seeks from music more than music gives, is on the quest—how shall I put it?—of the Holy Grail.' 'And what,' I struck in, 'is this minimum or maximum that music gives?' 'Dear young friend,' replied the professor, 'music gives melodies, harmonies, the many beautiful forms to which sound shall be fashioned. Just as in the case of shells and fossils, lovely in themselves, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... dishonored. This was in September, 1868. Instead of constituting a Republic at once, in harmony with those popular rights which had been proclaimed, the half-hearted leaders proceeded to look about for a King; and from that time till now they have been in this quest, as if it were the Holy Grail, or happiness on earth. The royal family of Spain was declared incompetent. Therefore a king must be found outside,——and so the quest was continued in other lands. One day the throne is offered to a prince of Portugal, ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... held up his once venerated master Wagner to scorn as the chief of 'decadents' because he had turned from the superhuman heroism of Siegfried and the boundless passion of Tristram to glorify the mystic Catholicism of the Grail and the loveliness of ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... before the intellectual and literary revolutions of the twelfth century. The French epics are full of omens of the coming victory of romance, though they have not yet given way. They still retain, in spite of their anticipations of the Kingdom of the Grail, an alliance in spirit with the older Teutonic poetry, and with those Icelandic histories that are the highest literary expression of the Northern spirit in ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Honour's own! Ye who saved the Holy Grail, Ye who died for Freedom's Crown, Hail, ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... 'twould be to ride in mail A weary quest for the Holy Grail; Wield Saxon steel 'gainst Saracen sword Around the sepulcher of our Lord; See Cross and Crescent and mailed hand All plashed with blood in that sacred land, Than doubt that heaven e'er shed its light Deep into this world's long troublous night; That God hears our prayers, knows ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... The most mystical and spiritual of all the romances of chivalry is doubtless the legend of the Holy Grail. Rooted in the mythology of all primitive races is the belief in a land of peace and happiness, a sort of earthly paradise, once possessed by man, but now lost, and only to be attained again by the virtuous. The legend of the Holy Grail, which some authorities ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... not, it is true, searchers for the North Pole. That quest—which has written in its history as many tales of heroism, self-sacrifice, and patient resignation to adversity, as the poets have woven about the story of chivalry and the search for the Holy Grail—was begun only in the middle of the last century, and by an American. But for three hundred years English, Dutch, and Portuguese explorers, and the stout-hearted American whalemen, had been pushing further and further into the frozen deep. The explorers ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... Alfred Jewel, and Celtic dice-boxes carefully loaded for the despoiling of Roman legionaries or an unwary Phoenician, and heard the story of the Holy Grail from the lips of an ancient who lent credence to the legend by his venerable appearance. Mixed up with the imposing ruins and the glory of St. Joseph's Chapel was a visit to the butcher's at the corner of the street, where the veteran proudly exhibited a duck with ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... corpse whose head caressing rests it on my feet. Ah, no, I did not mean it thus; I would not get away alone. I loved that corpse. It was the sweetest bit of human frailty that to man e'er brought a blessing or a curse. I turned from Dias' holy grail to taste its nectar. Hell, throw a-wide your sulphur-blazoned gates, I'll grasp it in my arms and make the plunge! Hist! what was that? I heard him laugh again. Laugh, fiend, you cannot hurt me more. Ah! Reyenita, mine in life you were, in death you shall be mine. When this clogged blood ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... believed him capable of becoming all that she or others could desire. There is in the world no faith so absolute as that of a woman in the possibilities of the man she loves. Had Sarah read of Sir Galahad—but this was in 1779, and the fame of the search for the Holy Grail had not reached the popular ear—she would have said to herself, "My Jim is just so pure and holy." Had "her Jim" been a Royalist during the English Revolution, Prince Rupert's laurels would not have been unshared. Had Jim been a Puritan—though the little Quaker ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Yet I hold that the true art of my craft lies as much in the furnace as in the brush. See this rose window, which is from the model of the Church of the Holy Trinity at Vendome, and this other of the 'Finding of the Grail,' which is for the apse of the Abbey church. Time was when none but my countrymen could do these things; but there is Clement of Chartres and others in France who are very worthy workmen. But, ah! there ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "Holy Grail" of selfhood and in the light of our higher understanding we look downward and outward and upward, and the length and the breadth and the height are equal. We pass from the old race thought of limitation and live in a divine ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... were the pines and birches, or the cold northern sky. At the fall of night, exhausted, trailing their long ears almost to the ground, they returned to the cook, who fed them and made much of them. Next morning they were at it as hard as ever. To them it was the quest for the Grail,—hopeless, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... rivulet from the same river, is bound in a like fellowship, and there the four heroic virtues are troubled by the abstract virtues of the cloister. Every now and then some noble knight builds himself a cell upon the hill-side, or leaves kind women and joyful knights to seek the vision of the Grail in lonely adventures. But when Oisin or some kingly forerunner—Bran, son of Febal, or the like—rides or sails in an enchanted ship to some divine country, he but looks for a more delighted companionship, or to be in love ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... Star, opening from the cabin, was to me the door to romance. When I was a boy there was more flavor in traderooms than in war. To have seen one would have been as a glimpse of the Holy Grail to a sworn knight. Those traderooms of my youthful imagination smelt of rum and gun-powder, and beside them were racks of rifles to repel the dusky ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... Tennyson, 'Holy Grail,' 53. This thorn, a patriarchal tree of vast dimensions, was destroyed during the Reformation. But many of its descendants exist about England (propagated from cuttings brought by pilgrims), and still retain its unique season for flowering. ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... cried, "that ever I have called myself a socialist, if this is what socialism means! But it does not! I will rescue the word! I will reclaim it for its ancient nobler sense—socialism the dream of the world, the light of the grail on the marsh, the mystic city of Sarras, the vale of Avalon! Socialism the soul of liberty, the bond of brotherhood, the seal of equality! Who is he that with sacrilegious hands would seize our Ariel and prison ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... something which he himself had helped to start. He rose softly and went to the window, staring out into the night. A few moments later he turned back wearing a strange uplifted sort of look, a look perhaps such, as Percival bore when he beheld the Grail. ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... pinks that blush and pale With passions of perfume, — if violets blue That hint of heaven with odor more than hue, — If perfect roses, each a holy Grail Wherefrom the blood of beauty doth exhale Grave raptures round, — if leaves of green as new As those fresh chaplets wove in dawn and dew By Emily when down the Athenian vale She paced, to do observance to the May, Nor dreamed of Arcite nor of Palamon, — If fruits that ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... and ashes; penance &c. (atonement) 952; telling of beads, processional; thurification[obs3], incense, holy water, aspersion. relics, rosary, beads, reliquary, host, cross, rood, crucifix, pax[Lat], pyx, agnus Dei[Lat], censer, thurible, patera[obs3]; eileton[obs3], Holy Grail; prayer machine, prayer wheel; Sangraal[obs3], urceus[obs3]. ritualism, ceremonialism; sabbatism[obs3], sabbatarianism[obs3]; ritualist, sabbatarian[obs3]. holyday, feast, fast. [Christian holy days] Sabbath, Pentecost; Advent, Christmas, Epiphany; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of Kay Khusraw, the sceptre of Anushirwan, "The holy grail of high Jamshid, Afrasiyab's hall?—Canst ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... Skene puts it, to the "full-blown Arthurian romance." Chretien de Troies, the most famous of the old French trouveres in the latter part of the twelfth century, made the Arthur legend the subject for his "Romans" and "Contes," as well as for two epics on Tristan; the Holy Grail, Peredur, etc., belonging to the same cycle. Early in the same century the Arthurian metrical romance became known in Germany, and there assumed a more animated and artistic form in the "Parzival" of Wolfram of Eschenbach, "Tristan und Isolt" of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... Island. Legend has it that St. Joseph of Arimathea, who begged the body of Christ and buried it, came here in the year 63 and was the founder of the abbey. He brought with him, tradition says, the Holy Grail; and a thorn-tree staff which he planted in the abbey grounds became a splendid tree, revered for many centuries as the Holy Thorn. The original tree has vanished, though there is a circumstantial story that it was standing in the time of Cromwell and that a Puritan who undertook to cut ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... remember how we pledged us in the fancies of our youth, We would run the quest forever for the Holy Grail of Truth! ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... thread—started to beat time upon the sands. And then I knew and saw it to be in its happy beating the pulse that governed the music of the stars. Can the heart conduct the symphony of the body? Tonight the sun set, borne away—a Grail—by angels from the questing Galahad. There was a great silence in my heart as I sat in ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... animals, being sacrificed in lieu of the older victims. But all along the line, while the new gods brought their spiritual conceptions, the older ones held men to a cruder and more fleshly way of thinking. There is a similar blend of new and old in all such movements as that of the Holy Grail and the Arthurian legends, where we can see the combination of Christian and pagan elements so clearly as to be able to calculate the moral and spiritual effect of each. Thus we have in the early Greek mythology much of real paganism involved in the retention ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... GRAIL DE LA VILLETTE, better known by the name of Charles de Bernard, was born in Besancon, February 24, 1804. He came from a very ancient family of the Vivarais, was educated at the college of his native city, and studied for the law in Dijon and at ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... books! Everything is beautiful about it, from the pale-pink granites and brown Spanish tiles without to the St. Gauden lions who guard the great marble staircase within. Sargent's "Religions of the World" is a noble decoration, and Abbey's frieze of the Holy Grail is beautiful, but the panel paintings of Puvis de Chavannes—"The Muses Greeting the Genius of Enlightenment"—are worth while coming from London or ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... settle between us, and he named a day three or four years in the future; place of settlement, the lists where the offense had been given. I said I would be ready when he got back. You see, he was going for the Holy Grail. The boys all took a flier at the Holy Grail now and then. It was a several years' cruise. They always put in the long absence snooping around, in the most conscientious way, though none of them had any idea where the Holy Grail really was, and I don't think any of them ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... High History of the Grail, of Sir Lohot, son of King Arthur, that he had a marvellous weakness; which was, that no sooner had he slain a man than he fell across his body. So it happened this night to the valiant ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... haughty Scrymgeour: he might be a pain in the neck to "the family"; but he did know how to stop a dog fight. From the first moment of his intervention calm began to steal over the scene. He had the same effect on the almost inextricably entwined belligerents as, in mediaeval legend, the Holy Grail, sliding down the sunbeam, used to have on battling knights. He did not look like a dove of peace, but the most captious could not have denied that he brought home the goods. There was a magic in his soothing hands, a spell in his voice: and in a shorter time than one would have believed possible ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... said that at that supper, He used a beautiful golden cup in which He passed the wine to them, and when He went away from earth, the disciples loved everything He had touched, and they seemed to love most of all this golden cup. They called it the Holy Grail, and it was given to a very good man, who cared for it carefully, and for years it passed from one good man to another, for it was said that if it ever fell into the hands of a man who was not good and Christ-loving ...
— A Child's Story Garden • Compiled by Elizabeth Heber
... not be owing to me, if you fail in the former," said I. "As for the latter, naturally it will depend upon yourself. What shall you call it—'A Chiel takkin' Notes' or 'In Search of the Grail'?" ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the sextant he made obeisance to the sun-god, he consulted ancient tomes and tables of magic characters, muttered prayers in a strange tongue that sounded like INDEXERRORPARALLAXREFRACTION, made cabalistic signs on paper, added and carried one, and then, on a piece of holy script called the Grail—I mean the Chart—he placed his finger on a certain space conspicuous for its blankness and said, "Here we are." When we looked at the blank space and asked, "And where is that?" he answered in the cipher-code of the higher priesthood, "31-15-47 north, 133-5-30 west." And we said ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... The Kaiser lacks the democratic gift of humour, and does not seem to be aware of the incongruity of the Lohengrin masquerade. A Prussian King cannot honestly play the part of a knight in quest of the Holy Grail. Chivalry and Prussianism, the crusading spirit and the predatory spirit, ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Mediterranean on a summer day, I learned that I was to pursue beauty like the Holy Grail. And I see it now in everything. I know that, just as there is far more beauty in nature than ugliness, so there is more goodness in humanity than evil. There is more happiness in life than pain. Yes, there is. As Monty used to say, we are given now and then moments ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... splendors of song there are in King Alfred's new volume,' he said. 'It is always a delight to get anything new from him. His "Holy Grail" and Lowell's "Cathedral" are enough for a holiday, and ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... the next century a word must be devoted to a not unimportant class of books which seem to have been manufactured chiefly in Picardy and Artois, the illustrated Romances—e.g. the Grail and Lancelot—of great bulk, usually in prose, which served to pass the winter evenings of persons of quality. A few of these, and a book of devotions to take to church (oftenest a Psalter ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... be rector chori on the south side, while his fellow performed a like duty on the north side. On every Sunday and holy day the latter had to read the epistle. At Faversham the clerk was required to sing at every Mass by note the Grail at the upper desk in the body of the choir, and also the epistle, and to be diligent to sing all the office of the Mass by note, and at all other services. Very careful instructions were laid down ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... in them that Bryce did not quite understand. It was the animation of newly-resurrected hope, such a light as might have shone in the eyes of the men who rode to find the Holy Grail. Bryce knew nothing of him or his history, and his only thought was that in some queer way the man had a vital interest in the Grampians. It must be remembered that, as far as known facts were concerned, Bryce knew nothing more than the police records had told him. True, ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... population of Europe had been sufficiently schooled and educated in the new direction, a longing for something new, a yearning for art, for poetry, for beauty, began to stir the hearts of men and women. It found expression in the ideal of chivalry, the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy Grail, and suddenly love, bursting out in a brilliant flame, shed its radiance on the sordid relationship which had hitherto existed between the sexes, and transfigured it. Woman, the despised, to whom at the Council of Macon a soul had been denied, all at once became a queen, a goddess. The drudge, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... hair and face on fire, holding out her heart from the threshold, stretching it out at arms' length, crying, 'Who will take this? To whom may I give it?' A vision here of Heaven's core of light. I have seen it. I, Senhouse, have seen the Holy Grail. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... modern ideas of progress, are, of course, mainly such persons as believe in 'the march of intellect,' and think meanly of each successive stage as soon as it is left behind. The spokesman of this party is Mark Twain, who wrote a burlesque of the Holy Grail, and who in his Life on the Mississippi makes Scott responsible for the vanities and superstitions of the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... has the right to expect the man she is about to marry to regard their troth as a sacred obligation that shall keep him as pure as a young knight who has dedicated himself to the quest of the Holy Grail. And I find you in a public restaurant, dancing with a creature with yellow hair, upsetting waiters, and staggering about with pats of butter ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... ever before realized the beauty of great waste places," I said. "It looks like a world infinite and wonderful, over which we might be traveling in quest of some Holy Grail that should be hidden away beyond those pink ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick |
