"Mystic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other in a scamper through the vale on the box of the coach. But any lover of poetry who will submit himself with leisure and meditation to the impressions of the story, the pity of it, the naturalness of it, the glory and the mystic splendours of the indifferent heavens, will feel that here indeed is the true strength which out of the trivial raises expression for the ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... What one is in when hacking, of course. 2. More specifically, a Zen-like state of total focus on The Problem that may be achieved when one is hacking (this is why every good hacker is part mystic). Ability to enter such concentration at will correlates strongly with wizardliness; it is one of the most important skills learned during {larval stage}. Sometimes amplified as ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... a far different grade, running parallel and contemporary with all—a curious, quiet yet busy life centred in a little country village on Long Island, and within sound on still nights of the mystic surf-beat of the sea. About this life, this Personality—neither soldier, nor scientist, nor litterateur—I propose to occupy a few minutes in fragmentary talk, to give some few melanges, disconnected impressions, statistics, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... sense, we can only succeed in saying that they participate in such and such ideas, which, therefore, constitute all their character. Hence it is easy to pass on into a mysticism. We may hope, in a mystic illumination, to see the ideas as we see objects of sense; and we may imagine that the ideas exist in heaven. These mystical developments are very natural, but the basis of the theory is in logic, and it is as based in logic that ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... Perhaps your mystic correspondents will kindly furnish lists of other publications and MSS. of {14} "the Teutonick Theosopher." There are sixteen more of his works, of which fifteen are now extant in High Dutch. As old Behmen is but little known in this country, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... the old world forlorn A mystic child is set in these still hours. I keep this time, even before the flowers, Sacred to all ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... the right. We are now following the coast-line towards Ostend. How beautiful the sand dunes looked from above. The heavy billows of sea-mist gave it a somewhat mystic appearance. How cold it was. I huddled down close into my seat, my head only above the fuselage. Keeping my eye upon the wonderful panorama unfolding itself out beneath me, I glanced at my camera and tested the socket. Yes, it was ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... brains With chains, And gibberings grim and ghastly. Then, if you plan it, he Changes organity With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity - Driving your foes to the verge of insanity. Barring tautology, In demonology, 'Lectro biology, Mystic nosology, Spirit philology, High class astrology, Such is his knowledge, he Isn't the man to require an apology Oh! My name is JOHN WELLINGTON WELLS, I'm a dealer in magic and spells, In blessings and curses, And ever-filled ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... in silence, gazing out across the dark and restless water, touched here and there with white, as a wave combed and broke. Then Dan's gaze wandered to her face. Seen thus, in the dim light, framed by her dark hair, it, too, seemed wonderful to him; there was about it a mystic allusiveness, a subtle charm, far more compelling than mere beauty ever is; her eyes had depths ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... very still and undisturbed, if she could empty her consciousness of all else, bend her whole will to an act at once of determination and of reception, perhaps, it would be given her clearly to see and understand. The idealist, the mystic, were very present in Honoria just then. She fixed her eyes upon the shining surface of the water. A conviction grew upon her that, could she maintain a certain mental and emotional equilibrium, something of permanent and very ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... chair and wore the vulture cap on which traces of colour remained. Her arms were held forward as though to support a child, which perhaps she was suckling as one of the breasts was bare. But if so, the child had gone. The execution of the statue was exquisite and its tender and mystic face extraordinarily beautiful, so life-like also that I think it must have been copied from a living model. Oh! my friend, when I looked upon it, which we did by the light of the candles, for the sun was sinking and shadows gathered in that excavated hole, I felt—never ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... sex, that gentle hope of pleasing man, that secret emotion of being pleased by him, that tremor at the idea of being desired, and that flush at the thought of being desirable, which, I suppose, may animate the mystic sensibilities of spinsterhood. She was anything but aggressive and confident, yet there was a modest, puny poise about her; she was like a plant that has always lived in a narrow, city flower-pot, at a window too seldom visited by the sun, which has never known the freedom of the rain, but ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Litanies the Virgin is denominated "the Mother of God, the Queen of Angels, the Refuge of Sinners, the Mother of Mercy, the Gate of Heaven, the Mystic Rose, the Virgin of ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... emotional feeling was a patriotic nationalistic devotion to Russia and a mystic devotion to the Emperor and the Russian Orthodox Church. Then her next emotional feelings embraced the devotion and loyalty for her family and ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... to admit, with the liberal opinion of the time, that ancient mythology 'was a system of nature concealed under the veil of allegory', a system in which 'a thousand fanciful fables contained a secret and mystic meaning': [Footnote: Edinb. Rev., July 1808.] he was prepared to go a considerable step farther, and claim that there was no essential difference between ancient mythology and the theology of the Christians, that both were ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... Tunbridge. Why did he stay behind, unless he was in love with either of the young ladies (and we say he wasn't)? Could it be that he did not want to go? Hath the gracious reader understood the meaning of the mystic S with which the last chapter commences, and in which the designer has feebly endeavoured to depict the notorious Sinbad the Sailor, surmounted by that odious old man of the sea? What if Harry Warrington should be that sailor, and his fate ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... light of the tangled lawn made him suddenly feel tremendously apparent, and he wondered if there could be some mystic thing in the house which was regarding this approach. His men trudged silently at his back. They stared at the windows and lost themselves in deep speculations as to the probability of there being, perhaps, eyes behind the blinds—malignant ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... lesson, I think, of what we call folklore or anthropology, which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull. It may become the most attractive and serious of the sciences; certainly it is rich in strange curiosities, like those mystic stones which were fingered and arrayed by the pupils in that allegory of Novalis. I am not likely to regret the accident which brought me up on fairy tales, and the inquisitiveness which led me to examine the other fragments of antiquity. But the poetry ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... bitter to thee, pardon, If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live; And to give thanks is good, and to forgive. Out of the mystic and the mournful garden Where all day through thine hands in barren braid Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade, Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants grey, Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted, ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... bruised on the shadow trail? What wonder the gauzy northern lights are bands of marshaling warriors and the stars torches lighting those who ride the plains of heaven? Indeed, I defy a white man with all the discipline of science and reason to restrain the wanderings of mystic fancy during the hours ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... Egypt kneel adown Before the vine-wreath crown! 260 I saw parch'd Abyssinia rouse and sing To the silver cymbals' ring! I saw the whelming vintage hotly pierce Old Tartary the fierce! The kings of Inde their jewel-sceptres vail, And from their treasures scatter pearled hail; Great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans, And all his priesthood moans; Before young Bacchus' eye-wink turning pale.— Into these regions came I following him, 270 Sick hearted, weary—so I took a whim To stray away into these forests drear Alone, without ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his lips, and cried that "the gospel of the Father was past, the gospel of the Son was passing, the gospel of the Spirit was to be." These three men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting signs, especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were ready to resume their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... makes responsibility. We shall have to give account to God for all that he sends to us by the mystic hands of the passing hours, and which we refuse or neglect to receive. "They are wasted and are added to ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... than ten years and in actual existence for about four years. During the period of development the revolutionists denounced the monarch in most extravagant terms and compared him to the devil. Their aim was to kill the mystic belief of the people in the Emperor; for only by diminishing the dignity of the monarch could the revolutionary cause make headway. And during and after the change all the official documents, school text-books, press views and social gossip ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... the island of Hvar, a great linguist, was a man who made you think that a very distinguished mind had entered the body of the late Cardinal Vaughan. To him the most noticeable features of the President were the clear brow, the mystic eyes and the mouth which showed that he stood ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... appear to those who know not what it means to wear the Oneida clan-mark of nobility, I, clean-blooded and white-skinned, was as fiercely proud of this Iroquois honor as any peer of England newly invested with the garter. And it was strange, too, for I was but a lad when chosen for the mystic rite; but never except once—the day before I left the north to serve his Excellency's purpose in New York—had I been present when that most solemn rite was held, and the long roll of dead heroes called in honor of ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... over the two windows. Then, candle in hand, she went lightly across the big living room to a stern and businesslike safe that stands against the farther wall. Kneeling before this she rapidly twirled the lock to a series of mystic numbers and opened ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... family, feigned sickness; Glendower and Mortimer were kept away; the Archbishop dallied; and failure was the result. This situation gave Shakespeare an opportunity to paint a number of remarkable portraits; but the scheming, crafty Worcester, the vacillating Northumberland, the mystic Glendower, are all overshadowed by the figure of Hotspur, wrong-headed, impulsive, yet so aflame with young life and enthusiasm, so ready to dare all for honor's sake, that he is almost more attractive than the Prince himself. Over against the older leaders ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... novel fashions and unknown garbs, were to them earnest and absorbing realities. The aspect of cities and havens, and leagues of forest and solitary plains, were to them "as a banner broad unfurled," and inscribed with mystic signs and legends. They were not whirled about from place to place: they had leisure to mark the forms and the colours of objects. They were in perils often: if they escaped shipwreck they were in danger of slavery; they journeyed ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... passed busy days and brisk evenings, and filled up whatever spare moments he could find or manufacture, with treasury papers, books on taxation, consolidated annuities, and public accounts, alternating with dips into Lamennais—the bold and passionate French mystic, fallen angel of his church, most moving of all the spiritual tragedies of that day of ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair; it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none but the life Kate had left—the sense of which, for that matter, by mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor—the very impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... thoughts and emotions into nature. In a few eminent examples the two types of mind to which I refer seem more or less blended. Sir Oliver Lodge is a case in point. Sir Oliver is an eminent physicist who in his conception of the totality of things is yet a thoroughgoing idealist and mystic. His solution of the problem of living things is extra-scientific. He sees in life a distinct transcendental principle, not involved in the constitution of matter, but independent of it, entering into it and using it ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... stretched a vast prospect of woodland and tufted heath, bounded far off by a range of chalk-hills speckled with farm-houses and villages, and melting towards the west into a distance faint and far, and mystic as ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... slipped out: what is meant is that Behmen "derived his doctrine from Robert Fludd,[595] for whom see Wood's etc. etc." Even this is absurd enough: for Behmen began to publish in 1610, and Fludd in 1616. Fludd was a Rosicrucian, and a mystic of a different type from Behmen. I have some of his works, and could produce out of them paradoxes enough, according to our ways of thinking, to fit out a host. But the Rosicrucian system was a recognized school of its day, and Fludd, a man of great learning, had abettors enough ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... overnight, by the help of a cigar and a moonlight contemplation on deck, for sensations on landing in Egypt. I was ready to yield myself up with solemnity to the mystic grandeur of the scene of initiation. Pompey's Pillar must stand like a mountain, in a yellow plain, surrounded by a grove of obelisks as tall as palm-trees. Placid sphinxes brooding o'er the Nile—mighty Memnonian countenances ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... herself that there must be at the root of all this suffering some great sin she herself was ignorant of. Morning and evening she knelt long before the sacred images, imploring God to deliver her from her pain; and feeling herself soothed by this effusion of mystic tenderness, she kept her sadness to herself, still refusing to fathom it. But she was visibly wasting away: the smoky atmosphere of her home had now the same painful influence upon her that the want of fresh air had formerly when she first left her village. She passed the winter suffering, uncomplaining, ...
— The Little Russian Servant • Henri Greville
... two battles—the one on earth, the other in the air, according to the legend that warriors, after their death, continue fighting incessantly as spirits. In the middle of the picture appears the Cross and its mystic light; on this my "Symphonic Poem" is founded. The chorale "Crux fidelis," which is gradually developed, illustrates the idea of the final victory of Christianity in its effectual love to ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... covenant, to be His people.... "Whosoever (says Christ) shall receive this child in my name, receiveth me;" but such an identity of Christ with His disciples stands wholly upon their relation to Him as members of His "mystic body, the Church." It is in this respect only that they are "one with Him;" and there can be no identity of Christ with "little children" but by virtue of the same relation, that is, as they are members of His mystical body, the Church; of which ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... in a dream, as the patriarchs were of old; but to use mystic or unholy charms to procure a vision, is making a compact with ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... and went back down Carl Johann. It was now about eleven. The streets were fairly dark, and the people roamed about in all directions, quiet pairs and noisy groups mixed with one another. The great hour had commenced, the pairing time when the mystic traffic is in full swing—and the hour of merry adventures sets in. Rustling petticoats, one or two still short, sensual laughter, heaving bosoms, passionate, panting breaths, and far down near the Grand Hotel, a voice calling "Emma!" The whole ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... palace building, in the exquisite confections of costly feminine adornment, in the luxurious binding of books, in the cooking of larks, in the distinguished portraiture of undistinguished persons, in the various refinements of prostitution, in the subtle accommodations of mystic theology, in jewellery. It is quite conceivable that in such departments Socialism will discourage and limit aesthetic and intellectual effort. But no mercantile plutocracy could ever have produced a Gothic cathedral, a folk-lore, a gracious natural type of cottage or beautiful ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... went down to the river to embark; he had provided a boat, victims, hydromel, and all necessaries for our mystic enterprise. We ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... him? All the years I had known him I had known but little of him. God only knows the hearts of these men who rove or drift, who, anchorless and rudderless, beat upon the ragged reels of life till the breath leaves them and they pass through the mystic channel into the serene harbor of eternity. A sudden wave of dissatisfaction swept over me. What had I done in the world to merit attention? What had I done that I, and not he, should know the love of woman? ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... haled us to the Princess where she sat High in the hall: above her drooped a lamp, And made the single jewel on her brow Burn like the mystic fire on a mast-head, Prophet of storm: a handmaid on each side Bowed toward her, combing out her long black hair Damp from the river; and close behind her stood Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men, Huge women blowzed with health, and wind, and rain, And labour. ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... overstrained nerves produces a sense of the most exquisite relief and repose; and so when mind and body are harrowed, harassed to the very outer verge of endurance, come wild throbbings and transports, and strange celestial clairvoyance, which the mystic hails as the descent of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... stood before me, whom I'd sought, With dying hope, through life's decaying years— A form, a spirit, human yet divine. Love gave her eyes the light of heav'n, and taught Her lips the mystic music of the spheres. Our beings met,—I felt her soul ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... amid the mimic rout A mystic shape intrude! A formless thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes! it squirms!—with mortal pangs, Mocked at by laughter rude; There's no more snap in its sharp fangs, Which once ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 26, 1891 • Various
... There was no mystic sign to be seen about her. The only mystery was in her absolutely blooming health and naturalness and in the gentle and clear happiness of her voice and eyes. She was not tired; she was not dragged or anxious looking ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... trees in the strange dead night, Under the vast dead sky, Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell, And ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... of axioms, advocated by modern axiomatics, purges mathematics of all extraneous elements, and thus dispels the mystic obscurity which formerly surrounded the principles ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... revivalist preachers of to-day. In other respects he was a true child of the Middle Ages. An ascetic, he fasted, wore a hair-cloth shirt, mixed ashes with his food to make it disagreeable, wept daily, so that his eyesight was nearly destroyed, and every night flogged himself with iron chains. A mystic, he lived so close to God and nature that he could include within the bonds of his love not only men and women, but also animals, trees, and flowers. He preached a sermon to the birds and once wrote a hymn to praise God ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the beginning by his native disposition; they remain plastic until the hour of his death, and whatever touches his circumference, influences them for better or worse. The power of decision develops only out of practice. There is nothing mystic about it. It comes of a clear-eyed willingness to accept life's risks, recognizing that only the enfeebled are comforted by thoughts of ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... not grow smaller under the care of Donald; and as each of the three was married in succession out of his family, he added to all his other kindnesses the gift of a gold ring. They had been brought up under his eye sound in the faith; and Donald's ring had, in each case, a mystic meaning;—they were to regard it, he told them, as the wedding ring of their other Husband, the Head of the Church, and to be faithful spouses to Him in their several households. Nor did the injunction, nor the significant ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... artistic ideas was rich in helmeted Minervas, vine-wreathed Bacchuses, winged Apollos and nameless classic nymphs, all staring downward from the spandrels of pointed arches with quite as much at-homeness as Olympian heroes would feel amid the mystic shades of the Scandinavian Walhalla. This room was magnificent with crimson upholstery, upon which rested a multitude of scarlet-embroidered cushions that seemed to the color-loving eye like a dream of plum-pudding after a nightmare of mince-pie. Through this magnificence ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... and significance were known unto men. The sounds of harps and cymbals and lyres and timbrels blended with those of conch-shells and antelope horns. Sighs and laughter and curses and weeping mingled with the wild strains of Homeric song and mystic rites of Chaldea and Babylon, and the sacred chant of Isis. The Voodoo danced to the rattle of shells and antelope hoofs before the shrines of Ethiopia's dark woman, crowned with the sickle moon, and vast multitudes knelt and lay prostrate before the car ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... them in her basket of wickerwork, walked out of the market, and passed up the way which led to the home of her mistress. But the splendour to which she hastened was a prison to her. She so full of young life, she who felt within her the rising for supremacy (an unquenchable spirit), she with a mystic flame burning up her soul, felt it was not a home but a waiting-place until the Fates passed by and led ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... battlefield a holy intoxication, a holy happiness, takes possession of those for whom has been reserved the supreme joy of braving death for their country. Death is everywhere, but they do not believe in it any more. And when, on certain mornings, to the sound of cannon that mix their rumblings with mystic voices of bells, in the devastated church which cries to the heavens through every breach opened in its walls, the Chaplain blesses the regiment that he will accompany the next minute to the firing line, every head will ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... autumn is not bare, Nor winter's rattling boughs lack lusty green: Our summer hearts make summer's fullness where No leaf or bud or blossom may be seen: For nature's life in love's deep life doth lie, Love,—whose forgetfulness is beauty's death, Whose mystic key these cells of Thou and I Into the infinite freedom openeth, And makes the body's dark and narrow grate The wide-flung ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... duller being at her side. She was not subdued under her falling veil, like so many brides, but saw everything, them among the rest, as she passed, and showed by a half smile her recognition of their presence. There was no mystic veil of sentiment about her; no consciousness of any mystery. She walked forth bravely, smiling, to meet life and the world. What was there in that beautiful, beaming creature to suggest a thought of future necessity, trouble, or the most distant occasion for help or succour? Perhaps it is ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... not in accordance with modern Christian sentiment to dwell very much on the physical sufferings of Christ. Once the feeling on this subject was very different: in old writers, like the mystic Tauler, for example, every detail is enlarged upon and even exaggerated, till the page seems to reek with blood and the mind of the reader grows sick with horror. We rather incline to throw a veil over the ghastly details, or ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... of jewels, emanating their own glory, then he had arrived. Here the satisfaction he had yearned after came near, towards this, the porch of the great Unknown, all reality gathered, and there, the altar was the mystic door, through which all and everything ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... wondered at that men, endowed with such powers of blessing or banning, possessed of such mystic communion with the then utterly unknown powers of nature, should have exercised an all but unlimited influence over the minds of their countrymen, especially at a time when the powers of evil were still supposed ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... forest, And they gave it the name of their ship Mayflower. Beauty was at their feet, and their eyes beheld it; The earth cried out for labor, and they gave it. But ever as they saw the budding spring, Ever as they cleared the stubborn field, Ever as they piled the heavy stones, In mystic vision they saw, the eternal spring; They raised their hardened hands above the earth, And beheld the walls that are not built of stone, The portals opened by angels whose garments are of light; And beyond the radiant walls of living stones They dreamed vast meadows ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... Pisistratus, and this name already passed from mouth to mouth. A circumstance, insignificant enough at any other time, gave them an opportunity of attacking him indirectly. An old woman, called Catherine Theot, played the prophetess in an obscure habitation, surrounded by a few mystic sectaries: they styled her the Mother of God, and she announced the immediate coming of a Messiah. Among her followers there was on old associate of Robespierre in the constituent assembly, the Chartreux Dom Gerle, who had a civic certificate from Robespierre ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... so flimsy a device and entered unbidden. Even the death of a grave-digger did not stay the dread disease, although it had been prophesied that such an event would end the trouble. The cabalistic books were ransacked for charms and mystic signs with which to resist the power of the conqueror, but ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... for. But the pines—the grim silence of their slender frames and gently swaying summits—fascinated me. They spoke of possibilities few could see or appreciate as I could; possibilities of a sylvan phantasmagoria enhanced by the soft and mystic radiance of the moon. An owl hooted, and the rustling of brushwood told me of the near proximity of some fur-coated burrower in the ground. High above this animal life, remoter even than the tops of my beloved trees or the mountain-ranges, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... nothing interested her so much as a low cottage, something like her own, which lay away in the distance. She could not guess how far it might be, because distances are deceiving out there, where the altitude is high and the air is as clear as one of those mystic balls of glass in which the sallow mystics of India see the ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... artistic merits of the work, but invests it with a corresponding proportion of interest as a revealer of some of the deepest secrets and hidden phases of the human soul, if one only has the courage to wade through it. The dreamy mystifications and the wild insanity and mystic passion of Brother Medardus are not unrelieved by scenes and characters which bear the stamp of bright poetic beauty and rich comic humour (e.g., the character of the Abbess of the Cistercian convent, the jaeger, the ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... unreal was in the air about them. The rugged mountain-side with its chaos of riven boulders, its forest of splintered rocky spires, silver cold in the twilight, its impassive bulk looming so large, yet a mere segment in the circling range, was as a day-dream of some ancient Valhalla, clothed in the mystic glory of ever-changing light, ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... used among the old races of Northern Europe, contains in its true signification something mystic and religious. The female patriarch of the household was regarded with superstitious veneration. Her sayings were wise and good, and the warrior sat at her feet on the eve of battle and gathered from her as from an oracle, the confidence and courage which nerved him for ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... nevertheless left him benumbed in his baseness, cowardliness and weakness. Now he understood that love, in order to triumph, must first humble its own power, still its own movement and soften its brutal will. Now he comprehended that he must carve mystic runes of passion upon his own heart as upon a glowing rose and fling it into the mighty sea of feeling, praying it to bring the maiden Gro ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... on the other hand, the Christian believer who avoids seeing God in nature, and who finds him only in his Bible, loses the sense of law or order, of harmonious growth, and becomes literal, dogmatic, and narrow. And so, too, the mystic, believing only in God's revelation through the soul, and not going to nature or to Christ, becomes withdrawn from life, and has a morbid and ghastly religion, and, having no test by which to judge his inward revelations, may become the prey of all fantasies and all evil spirits, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... especial worth, which has a similarity to the Socratic "maieutike," the "obstetric." From this state of affairs one can only expect that psychoanalysis for many people who have taken a certain pose, in which they firmly believe, is a real torture, because according to the ancient mystic saying: "Give what you have, then shall you receive!" They must of their own free will offer as a price their beloved illusions if they wish to allow something deeper, more beautiful and more vast to enrich them. Only through the mystery ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... attention to your magic cap and die, and in order to exhibit their mystic powers, you request the loan of half a dozen cents (the number must, of course, correspond with that of your own pile). While they are being collected, you take the opportunity to slip the little cap over your prepared pile, which should ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... at night interfered with by consideration of the question—"What should the 100 pound rate be by Wells Fargo & Co. from New York to San Francisco?" And at night often I am aroused from sleep, feeling confident in my dreams that the mystic figure of "a just and reasonable rate," under Section One, on 100-pound shipments to San Francisco, had been determined, and awaken with a joyous cry upon my lips, to discover that life has been made still more ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... and neglected by other tribes. The Haytian word tabaco, which designated the pipe from which they sucked the smoke into their nostrils, and also the roll of leaves,—for they employed both methods,—has passed over to the weed. The pipe was a hollow tube in the shape of a Y, the mystic letter of Pythagoras: the two branches were applied to the nose, and the stem was held over the burning leaves. The weed itself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... shown in all the previous conversation. His face quite changed. "I admit it's an unpardonable weakness, but I can't help it. I am afraid of death and I dislike its being talked of. Do you know that I am to a certain extent a mystic?" ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... only by those who, like myself, were brought up in the school of the old teleological morphology, and whose eyes were suddenly opened by the theory of selection to a comprehension of that greatest of all biological riddles, the creation of specific forms. The dogma of creation, the mystic and dualistic doctrine of the isolated creation of each separate variety, was annihilated at one blow; the belief in transmutation has now for ever taken its place—the mechanistic and monistic doctrine of the metamorphosis of organic forms, of the descent ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... you ask if I will be true? Have I any will left then? Have I power to be untrue to you, even if I would?—you came by night; you knocked upon my door;—and I opened to you. You spoke to me. What was it you said? You gazed in my eyes. What was the mystic might that turned my brain and lured me, as it were, within a magic net? (Hides her face on his shoulder.) Oh, look not on me, Nils Lykke! You must not look upon me after this—— True, say you ? Do you not own me? I am yours;—I must ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... raised upon it, and therefore a desire for forbidden knowledge is made to account for the woman's sin and the sorrows of all her female progeny. To me this merely sensual sin, the sin of a child, seems much more picturesque, a good deal fitter for the purposes of art, without the mystic and mythical addition of an intellectual desire for knowledge and the agency of the Satanic serpent. Alas! the mere flesh is devil enough, and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... And these mystic shadows, flitting about in the thick grayness, were unbodied souls; not like visitants from the bright summer land, nor yet beings resembling the dark, undeveloped "dwellers on the threshold," whom earthly crimes held bound near their former homes, but they seemed as if they were misty ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... he snatched up a broom handle. He waved it menacingly over the dog. Chum gave back not an inch. Under the threat of a beating he stood his ground, his brave eyes steadfast, and, lurking in their mystic depths, that same glint of sorrowful ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... recognition of her merit as an artist, apart from her novel subject, perhaps went further to remove her uneasiness than any serious conviction of the professor's theory. Nevertheless, it appealed to her poetic and mystic imagination, and although other subjects from her brush met with equally phenomenal success, and she was able in a year to return to America with a reputation assured beyond criticism, she never entirely forgot the strange incident connected with ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... the most interesting relates to amulets and protective charms, which represent an important stage in the gradual development of Medicine as a science. And especially noteworthy among medical amulets are those inscribed with mystic sentences, words, or characters, for by their examination and study we may acquire some definite knowledge of the mental condition of the people ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... bedroom window above their heads Bathsheba's head and shoulders, robed in mystic white, were dimly seen ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... SIGMA}. T was taken as a picture of a cross. For the Tau or Egyptian cross, see DCA, art. "Cross." The method of allegorical interpretation here used is that species known as gematria, in which the numerical equivalence of letters composing a word is employed as a key to mystic meaning. This differs somewhat from the ordinary gematria, for which see Farrar, History of Interpretation, 1886, pp. 98 ff., 445 f. Barnabas is by no means singular among early Christians in resorting to ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... (especially the middle parts, second tenor and first bass)—and then, above all, religious absorption, meditation, expansion, ecstasy, shadow, light, soaring—in a word, Catholic devotion and inspiration. The "Credo," as if built on a rock, should sound as steadfast as the dogma itself; a mystic and ecstatic joy should pervade the "Sanctus;" the "Agnus Dei" (as well as the "Miserere" in the "Gloria") should be accentuated, in a tender and deeply elegiac manner, by the most fervent sympathy with the Passion of Christ; and the "Dona nobis pacem," expressive ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... While the mystic twist is spinning, And the infant's life beginning, Dimly seen through twilight bending, Lo, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... a spiritual, a mystic rose. The rose therefore is a fitting symbol of the virtuous life of the mother of God. As mystical rose she deserves our admiration and veneration, and she must be our example and model in all Christian virtues, the model of a ...
— The Excellence of the Rosary - Conferences for Devotions in Honor of the Blessed Virgin • M. J. Frings
... enters with words the interior of his house,(496) 2 When he willeth he goeth forth from his mystic fane. 3 Thy wrath is destruction of fishes.(497) 4 Then(498) men implore thee for the waters of the season. 5 "That the Thebaid may be seen like the Delta. 6 That every man be seen bearing his tools, 7 No man ...
— Egyptian Literature
... warning and awaken, In hushed processional issuing from the night, Like Druid priests with mystic white robes shaken, Communing in some immemorial rite: Round their old brows burns what pale augury, What benison, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... little Ted Fairfax listened with his mouth open, seeming to see the great arm that rose out of the water to take back the king's sword into the sea, from which it had been given him. An arm like a giant's, "clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, that caught the sword by the hilt, flourished it three times, and drew it ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... mystic pair by priestly hands, In wedlock joined, forth flashes Agni bright; But—O ye heaven and earth I tell you right— The unnatural ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... a certain degree melancholy—like the tune of a long ballad; and its harmony grave and gentle, sad and tender: it would be unendurable else. The loneliness of women in the country makes them of necessity soft and sentimental. Leading a life of calm duty, constant routine, mystic reverie,—a sort of nuns at large—too much gaiety or laughter would jar upon their almost sacred quiet, and would be as out of place ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of Scotland! Nicol, failing a couple of broadswords or four dirks, had got two pieces of rusty old iron and placed them cross-wise on the extemporised floor. With what skill and nimbleness he proceeded to execute this sword-dance,—which is no doubt the survival of some ancient mystic rite,—with what elegance he pointed his toes and held his arms akimbo; with what amazing dexterity, in all the evolutions of the dance, he avoided touching the bits of iron; nay, with what intrepidity, at the ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... towards him, her hands outheld, her mouth still touched with that little, mystic smile. "Please—tell me all over again now ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... lintel of the door represented on Plate V., enlarged. I intended, in the Lecture on Marble Couchant, to have insisted, at some length, on the decoration of the lintel and side- posts, as one of the most important phases of mystic ecclesiastical sculpture. But I find the materials furnished by Lucca, Pisa, and Florence, for such an essay are far too rich to be examined cursorily; the treatment even of this single lintel could scarcely be enough explained in the close of the Lecture. ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... the Lady of the Lake, Who knows a subtler magic than his own— Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful. She gave the King his huge cross-hilted sword, Whereby to drive the heathen out: a mist Of incense curl'd about her, and her face Well-nigh was hidden in the minster gloom; But there was heard among the holy hymns A ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... by unsuccessful searching pained, Weary he fainted thro' the toilsome hours; And then his mystic nature he sustained On steam ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... of Alo[e]us I you have chosen a worship that admits not a divided heart. But your faith, like the Mystic's, shall also make your strength; and though Aspiro stoops not to your stature, yet she reigns, and she rewards. Be true. Be firm. Even if it be upon the wreck of some frail, temporal heart-hopes, you must reach higher, till, in the sheen of the approving smile, you read the world-lesson: ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... the Wise One, smiling. He stepped to an ancient chest, deeply carved with mystic signs, that stood quite by itself in a corner of the hut. From out that chest many magic gifts had come, when need was great. Filled to the brim with treasures as it always was, none saw aught within but those gifts which ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... their calabashes. They were trying to appease the dread deity of Thunder, as did their Inca ancestors. The voice of the old priest led the worship, and for four hours there was no cessation of the monotonous song, except when he performed some mystic ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... already said. Paul and Peter had a great quarrel about circumcision and related subjects. The Apostolic writings are wondrously diverse from one another. Peter is far less constructive and profound than Paul. Paul and Peter are both untouched with the mystic wisdom of the Apostle John. But, in regard to the facts that I have signalised, the divinity, the person of Jesus Christ, His death and Resurrection, and the significance to be attached to that death, they are absolutely one. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... for the perfumer Ciano, an eccentric man, but respected after his kind, a sign for his shop, containing a gipsy woman telling the fortune of a lady in a very graceful manner, which was the idea of Ciano, and not without mystic meaning. Another who learnt to paint from the same master was Antonio di Donnino Mazzieri, who was a bold draughtsman, and showed much invention in making horses and landscapes. He painted in chiaroscuro the cloister of S. Agostino at Monte Sansovino, executing therein scenes ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... and spoke again in her sleep. She uttered the following deep and mystic words: "Gustel, bring in the shark, please; mother can't ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... lapis-lazuli—that belongs alone to the basements of Italian mountains. Higher, the roseate whiteness of ridged snow on Alps or Apennines. Highest, the blue of the sky, ascending from pale turquoise to transparent sapphire filled with light. A mediaeval mystic might have likened this chord to the spiritual world. For the lowest region is that of natural life, of plant and bird and beast, and unregenerate man; it is the place of faun and nymph and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and cities built, and work is done. Thence we climb to purified ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... broncho, and by the same token, a broncho is not much smaller. The craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high. The manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and, moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white water, the foam racing down from the summit of each wave, requiring a new leap, and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully bumping a crest, she would slide, ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... was squeezed from Marufa by the chance mystic phrase which was interpreted by him as referring ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... not Spanish for nothing. He is a mystic; which, of course, does not prevent him being a remarkably gay and competent man of the world. Amateurs who knew him in old days are sometimes surprised to find Picasso now in a comfortable flat or staying at the Savoy. I should not be surprised to hear of him in a Kaffir ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... the chase he led, By his loved huntsman's arrow bled - Ytene's oaks have heard again Renewed such legendary strain; For thou hast sung how he of Gaul, That Amadis so famed in hall, For Oriana foiled in fight The necromancer's felon might; And well in modern verse hast wove Partenopex's mystic love: Hear, then, attentive to my lay, A knightly ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... she didn't doubt it. She did not deem it necessary to add that she knew that one of Mr. Henson's mystic telegrams had been addressed to one James Merritt at an address in Moreton Wells, a town some fifteen miles away. That the scoundrel was up to no good she ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... where o'er the pavement cold The glimmering moonbeams lay. May Ellen gazed with wide, scared eyes, Nor could she turn away, For, as in mystic dreams we see A spirit, ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... boys, Every man a brother! That's where honor lies, Nay, but greatness rather: One's the mystic whole, Lordly flesh won't know it; But the kingly soul, Sees but ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... possibly that this was the most palatable seasoning for the latter which they could possibly supply. His wife furnished out an entertainment present for him of all her hair and rags, with which, together with his arms, his provisions, his ornaments, and his mystic medicine bag, he was wrapped up in the skin which had been his last covering when alive. He was then tied round with the bark of some particular trees which they use for making cords, and bonds of a very firm texture and hold (the only ones indeed which they have), and ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... of vines, or what will be vines when the summer comes, but are now black, knotted and gnarled clubs, without a sign of life in the seemingly dead stick. One who sees that sight may find a new beauty and meaning in the mystic words, "I am the Vine, ye are the branches." It is not merely the connection between branch and stem common to all trees; not merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the grape, which made the very heathen look ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... He was magnanimous. He harbored no grudge, nursed no grievance; was quick to forgive, and was anxious for reconciliation. Hear him appealing to the South: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every loving heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... thought, when the mind grows faster and the heart more slowly; then wakes the storm in the forest of human relation, tempest and lightning abroad, the soul enlarging by great bursts of vision and leaps of understanding and resolve; then floats up the mystic twilight eagerness, not unmingled with the dismay of compelled progress, when, bidding farewell to that which is behind, the soul is driven toward that which is before, grasping at it with all the hunger of the ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... of the time. It is in stories like these that we find the keen sense of what is beautiful in nature, the sense of "man's brotherhood with bird and beast, star and flower," which has become the mark of "Celtic" literature. We cannot put it into words, perhaps, for it is something mystic and strange, something that takes us nearer fairyland and makes us see that land of dreams with ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... bethought her of the old shrine back near the woods. It was many a day since she had been there—not since the autumn before—and she felt old and different, but still she had a sudden desire to return to it and try again the mystic rite she had practised when she was a little girl. It was like going back to play, to be sure; all the sacredness was gone, but the interest remained, and her yearning spurred her to her ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... death and hell The mystic power we prove; And conquerors of the world, we dwell In Heaven, ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... recess. Seated, oriental fashion, upon an improvised divan near the grand piano and propped up by a number of garish cushions, Rita beheld Mrs. Sin. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers. Her face wore an expression of mystic rapture like that characterizing the ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... realities, and in pursuing its splendid visions. The essential element in the Celt's poetic life is the adventure—that is to say, the pursuit of the unknown, an endless quest after an object ever flying from desire. It was of this that St. Brandan dreamed, that Peredur sought with his mystic chivalry, that Knight Owen asked of his subterranean journeyings. This race desires the infinite, it thirsts for it, and pursues it at all costs, beyond the tomb, beyond hell itself. The characteristic ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... teaching of Wishart, raised him from a mundane life. Then he awoke to a passionate horror and hatred of his old routine of "mumbled masses," of "rites of human invention," whereof he had never known the poetry and the mystic charm. Had he known them, he could not have so denied and detested them. On the other hand, when once he had embraced the new ideas, Knox's faith in them, or in his own form of them, was firm as the round world, made so fast that it cannot be moved. He had ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... they talk in flowers, And they tell in a garland their loves and cares: Each blossom that blooms in their garden bowers On its leaves a mystic language bears. —PERCIVAL. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... of unmistakable anger. The woman rejoined, in the same melancholy music of voice. And Margrave then, leaning his arm upon her shoulder, as he had leaned it on mine, drew her away from the group into a neighboring copse of the flowering eucalypti—mystic trees, never changing the hues of their pale-green leaves, ever shifting the tints of their ash-gray, shedding bark. For some moments I gazed on the two human forms, dimly seen by the glinting moonlight through ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... of night, with the hum of the great city rising below her—at times even in theatres or crowded assemblies of men and women—she forgot herself, and again stood in the weird brilliancy of that moonlight night in mute worship at the foot of that slowly-rising mystic altar of piled terraces, hanging forests, and lifted plateaus that climbed forever to the lonely skies. Again she felt before her the expanding and opening arms of the protecting woods. Had they really closed upon her in some pantheistic embrace that made ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... answered the requirements of spirits that were pious and earnest without enthusiasm: less ardent in faith and less absolute in religious practice than M. de St. Cyran and Port-Royal, less exacting in his demands than Father Bourdaloue, susceptible now and then of mystic ideas, as is proved by his letters to Sister Cornuau, he did not let himself be won by the vague ecstasies of absolute (pure) love; he had a mind large enough to say, like Mother Angelica Arnauld, "I am of all saints' order, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... their credit, not for being just, but because they are laws; 'tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by fools, still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but always by men, vain and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... meditation; though of the latter I could not see that I could make much, if any, more than confirming myself against all preternaturals as agents on earth, however certain their existence may be beyond the mystic veil that divides the two worlds. I had known Graeme's crime and Gourlay's self-murder; but the crime was a trick among blacklegs, and the suicide was the madness of a gambler, who had risked his money and was ruined at the moment he wanted to ruin another. Surely ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... true Corsicans are. He took his hat, hardly paused to blow the dust off it, and hurried out into the sunlit Place. He went rather slowly up the church steps, however, for he was afraid of Denise. Her youth, and something spring-like and mystic in her being, disturbed him, made him uneasy and shy; which was perhaps his reason for drawing aside the heavy leather curtain and going into the church, instead of waiting for her outside. He preferred to meet her on his own ground—in the chill air, heavy with the odour ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... church. At one end of an aisle, Against a wall where mystic sunbeams smile Through painted windows, orange, blue, and gold, The Christ's unutterable charm behold. Upon the cross, adorned with gold and green, Long fluted golden tongues of sombre sheen, Like four flames joined in one, around the head And by the outstretched arms, ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... By dusk, when his majesty withdrew, the town was founded and complete, a new and ruder Amphion having called it from nothing with three cracks of a rifle. And the next morning the same conjurer obliged us with a further miracle: a mystic rampart fencing us, so that the path which ran by our doors became suddenly impassable, the inhabitants who had business across the isle must fetch a wide circuit, and we sat in the midst in a transparent privacy, seeing, seen, but unapproachable, like bees in a ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sleeping, she dreamed a strange dream. She found herself again in Westleydale, walking in green aisles of the holy, mystic, cathedral woods. The tall beech-stems were the pillars of the temple. A still light came through them, guiding her to the beech-tree that she knew. And she saw an angel lying under the beech-tree. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... frontier everywhere overlap, and in a cleft of the wooded hills that conceal the German batteries we saw a dark grey blur on the grey horizon. It was Metz, the Promised City, lying there with its fair steeples and towers, like the mystic banner that Constantine saw upon ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... laboured hard upon a thousand schemes for human improvement, some admirable, others mere frenzy, while mobs filed in and danced mad carmagnoles before them—all this is a magnificent masterpiece of accurate, full, and vivid description. To the philosophy of it we venture to demur. The mystic, supernatural view of the French Revolution, which is so popular among French writers who object to the supernatural and the mystical everywhere else, is to us a thing most incredible, most puerile, most mischievous. People talk of '93, as a Greek tragedian treats the Tale of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... fool has trodden The summits of that range, Nor walked those mystic valleys Whose colors ever change; Yet we possess their beauty, And visit them in dreams, While the ruddy gold of sunset From cliff ...
— The Red Flower - Poems Written in War Time • Henry Van Dyke
... tones (the so-called "third" or Tartini's tone). This discovery, a lasting and valuable acquisition to all later investigations into acoustics, led him further and further, but apart from the exact road of natural science into the nebulous regions of mystic philosophy. Tartini taught that with the problem of harmony would also be solved the mystery of creation, that divinity itself would be revealed in the mystical symbols of the tone relations. In these mystical investigations, the ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... good dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club of Queer Trades has one very curious thing about it. The most curious thing about it is that it was not discovered by me; it was discovered by my friend Basil Grant, a star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... chronicle of future time, The mystic mirror of events sublime Where deeds of virtue gild each pregnant page And some grand epoch makes each coming age, Where germs of future history strike the eye And empires' rise and fall in embryo lie, Though statesmen, heroes, sages, chiefs abound Yet none of worth ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... O mystic Nile! Thy secret yields Before us; thy most ancient dreams Are mixed with far Canadian fields And ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... for the "it" of a fictitious aspiration, the approach to a Living Friend? Sanctity is in character and not in moods; Divinity in our own plain calm humanity, and in no mystic rapture of the soul. ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... (looking east), the mystic pillar, and the ram, surely bear some evidence in favour of the Ram Feast being a sacrifice ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... person to test the rival powers of a sham prophecy and a real American bullet, he prudently took a position on an adjacent eminence; and, when the action began, he entered upon the performance of certain mystic rites, at the same time singing a war song. Soon after the engagement commenced, he was informed that his men were falling. He told them to fight on, it would soon be as he predicted; and then in, wilder and louder strains, his inspiring battle song was heard ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... that that foreshadowed.... Truly, he had served his apprenticeship, and was meet for his opportunity. For eight long months he had stood in line, doing his duty quietly and well, asking no favor of anybody. And now at last Warwick had beckoned him and set the mystic ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... poet was a member, was noted for its socialities. Masonic lyrics are all of a dark and mystic order; and those of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... by the admiring glances of the other girls, who from behind the bars of their cage noted the brilliant plumage of this bird who was at liberty. She crossed the courtyard, and, followed by Modeste, entered the chapel, where she sank upon her knees. The mystic half-light of the place, tinged purple by its passage through the stained windows, seemed to enlarge the little chancel, parted in two by a double grille, behind which the nuns could hear the ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... forced operatic business of sending out or bringing in characters as seems advisable there is not a sign. The story is on the whole simpler than that of Tannhaeuser. Lohengrin is son of Parsifal, head of the mystic Montsalvat monastery where the Holy Grail is kept; where the monks never seem precisely to die; and where, without marriage and even without women, children are somehow born to the favoured ones. He comes in ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... find that my childish thoughts and dreams Lie strewn on the sands by the cruel blast That scattered my hopes on the restless streams That flow through the mystic ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... centre of the world, And waited for the middle hour of night, Now swiftly coming, to convene her court. Set in an ocean of perpetual calm Was the fair island honoured by her reign; Slowly around her rolled the Frigid Zone, Dim in the mystic moonlight far away,— A silvery ring, circling her nearer realm With the pale lustre of its snowy walls, Defending from all storm and sudden change The sea which bathed the island's level shores. She sat upon her ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown |
