"Preternatural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... With a face of preternatural gravity, he advances, seizes the arm of John Burrill, drags him toward Constance, and says, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... the detective officer who pierces the mystery—unravels it thread by thread, and by unerring sagacity penetrates its innermost depths and lays his hand on the criminal—is at once invested, in the popular mind, with qualities approaching the preternatural. The vivid and fertile imagination of the literary romancist magnifies the illusion. The detective of the successful novel resembles the Deity in his attributes of ubiquity and omniscience. In whatever city ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... this preternatural solemnity, as if each was a study in style after the favorite Addisonian model. One wonders if he did not, in the privacy of his own room and with the door locked, venture to throw his hat to the ceiling and give one hurrah ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... started off, and Mrs. Thornburgh was left staring into the receding eyes of 'Jim the Noodle,' who, from his seat on the near shaft, regarded her with a gaze which had passed from benevolence into a preternatural solemnity. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of admiration; that men pause to regard him as a miracle of conceit and assurance rather than as a prophet; and that his commonplaces about "olive leaves," "calumets," "universal brotherhood," "fatherland," etc., have no more influence than the maudlin rigmarole of the madman whose preternatural force is lost in senility. It is time for Elihu Burritt to go back to his shop: the world wants ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... its horns; exact, as sportsmen have found in modern times. He mentions the Kubizeteres, Cretan tumblers, who indulge in a 'stunt' unknown elsewhere. They perform in couples; and when he mentions them, it is in the dual number. Preternatural voices are an Homeric tradition: Stentor "spoke loud as fifty other men"; when Achilles roared at the Trojans, their whole army was frightened. In Crete such voices are said to be still common: shepherds carry on conversations at ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... for its untenanted condition, but certain money was supposed to be hidden away, to discover which every attempt had hitherto been in vain. "It was therefore proposed," says the author, "that some person should lodge in the chapel for a night to obtain preternatural information respecting it. Two persons at length complied with the request to do so, and, aided by strong beer, approached about nine o'clock the hallowed walls. They trembled exceedingly at the sudden ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... furniture, the narrow, latticed windows, revealing the dull, grey sky above and the desolate wilderness below, where the dark stone walls and iron gate, the rank growth of grass and weeds, and the hardy evergreens of preternatural forms, alone remained to tell that there had been once a garden,—and the bleak and barren fields beyond might have struck me as gloomy enough at another time; but now, each separate object seemed to echo back my own exhilarating sense of hope and freedom: indefinite dreams of ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... little older, Barbara's French nursery governess left her, and from that hour, almost without knowing it, the child took her education largely into her own hands, and her aunt stood too much in awe of her almost preternatural resoluteness, to interfere in any serious way. She provided masters for the child, but it was the girl herself and not the masters who ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... influence and of silent, unconscious operation to the vast and potent ideas that brooded over this awful Hebrew literature. Too little weight has been allowed to the probable contagiousness, and to the preternatural shock, of such a new and strange philosophy, acting upon the jaded and exhausted intellect of the Grecian race. We must remember, that precisely this particular range of time was that in which the Greek systems of philosophy, having thoroughly completed their evolution, had suffered ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... whim. Mollie's fancy for the maroon silk had struck her as being artistic, and there was not a Crewe among them who had not a weakness for the artistic in effect. Tod himself was imaginatively supposed to share it and exhibit preternatural intelligence upon the subject. In Dolly it amounted to a passion which she found it impossible to resist. By it she was prompted to divers small extravagances at times, and by it she was assisted in the arranging of all her personal adornments. It was impossible to slight the mental ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... home during the days of his wife's weakness than he had yet been since David's tenancy began, he complained to David and spoke his mind to Louie once or twice, and then, suddenly, he ceased to pay any attention to his wife's wails. With preternatural quickness the wife guessed the reason. A fresh terror seized her—terror of the girl's hateful beauty. She dragged herself from her bed, found a room, while Louie was at her work, and carried off baby and husband, leaving ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of human beings— suddenly contract his eye-brows, compress his lips, assume the aspect of an infuriated savage, run back a few steps, then run forward, and, without the slightest previous provocation, hurl a detestably hard ball with all his might straight at Thomas's legs. Stimulated to preternatural activity of body and sharpness of eye by the instinct of self-preservation, Mr. Idle contrived, by jumping deftly aside at the right moment, and by using his bat (ridiculously narrow as it was for the purpose) as a shield, to preserve his life and ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... which shone wisdom preternatural in a horse, opened and looked down upon us with the calm questioning reproach one might expect from a rude awakening of the Sphinx; then the tall ears straightened and the great bulk rose to the full majesty of its seventeen hands; and while slats, hip bones, and shoulder blades were ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out—which might hardly come to pass, so he muttered—then, whoever should do that last office for the ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... said, "that I refuse to accept the factitious aid your thoughts have lately been bringing to me. You see I have preternatural senses. Because I was born in the snows of the mountains I am no whit whiter than those born in the purlieus of the police stations of the cities. We are simply of the same human nature. When I win regard, it must be for no idle fancy, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... torments to which his hero is exposed. He is frightened by a parrot calling him by name, and by the strangely picturesque incident of the footmark on the sand; but, on the whole, he takes his imprisonment with preternatural stolidity. His stay on the island produces the same state of mind as might be due to a dull Sunday in Scotland. For this reason, the want of power in describing emotion as compared with the amazing power of describing facts, 'Robinson Crusoe' is a book for boys rather than men, and, as ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... credited. Though she continued to pit her wits against the secret cunningness of the dreaded old man, Soosie was often preoccupied, seeming to regard herself as one not primarily concerned. Her calmness was preternatural, contrasting strangely with her previous petulant agitation and tragic despair. She avoided Dan, while clinging with profuse demonstrations ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... necessary. When Miss Dickenson and the Hon. Percival did come in, Gwen was at the piano, and Adrian at the right distance for hearing. Nothing could have been more irreproachable. The newcomers, having been audibly noisy on the stairs, showed as hypocritical by an uncalled-for assumption of preternatural susceptibility to the absence of other members of their party acknowledging their necessity to make up a Grundy quorum. There is safety in number when persons are of opposite sexes, which they ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... preternatural lights in a forest, discovered to a Galician peasant, in the beginning of the ninth century, the spot, in which was deposited a marble sepulchre containing the ashes of St. James. The miracle is reported with sufficient ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... rational one, I would prefer to put it thus: that of many kinds of simplification they practise only one—omission, which does not always pay. They are imaginative, but incredibly uninventive. How different from the wily Hindu or Chinaman, with his almost preternatural sagacity in small practical matters! Scorn of theories is one of their chief race-characteristics, and that is why they end in becoming stoics—stoics, that is, as the beasts are, who ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... deserved celebrity, that the process of arriving at new truths by reasoning consists in the mere substitution of one set of arbitrary signs for another; a doctrine which they suppose to derive irresistible confirmation from the example of algebra. If there were any process in sorcery or necromancy more preternatural than this, I should be much surprised. The culminating point of this philosophy is the noted aphorism of Condillac, that a science is nothing, or scarcely any thing, but une langue bien faite; in other words, that the one sufficient rule for discovering ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... expected: great skill in phrase-making, great shrewdness in adapting the meanings of single words to conflicting necessities in discussion, wonderful power in erecting showy structures of argument upon the smallest basis of fact, and a facility almost preternatural in "explaining away" troublesome realities. So striking was his power in this last respect, that a humorous London chronicler once advised a bigamist, as his only hope, to induce Mr. Gladstone to explain away one ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... want to find out my score or two of very dear friends who have eaten ice-cream at our house. I hope I may have a chance to wait on 'em. I'll do it with the air of a princess," she concluded, assuming a preternatural dignity, "and if they put on airs I'll raise the price of the goods, and tell them that since they are so much above other people they ought to pay double price for everything. I don't believe they'll all turn ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... apartment and never would occupy it, but when alone Elizabeth sought it from choice; the darker and drearier the day the more pertinaciously she clung to the old room, where the shadows lay heavy and grim, and every sound was echoed with preternatural sharpness. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... be laughed at; and, on other occasions, when their powers of belief were still further tested, they displayed a courageous resolution which disarms ridicule, and is not the less admirable because shown on an absurd occasion. Among the inferior class of Lamas there are many who pretend to possess preternatural gifts, which are exorcised publicly on solemn occasions, and greatly increase the fame of the saint who exhibits them, and the revenues of the community of which he is a member. M. Huc and his companion being ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... the river had not been able to quench the natural fire of that feature. His upper jaw was furnished with two long white sharp-pointed teeth or fangs, such as the reader may have observed in the chaps of a wolf, or full-grown mastiff, and an anatomist would describe as a preternatural elongation of the dentes canini. His chin was so long, so peaked, and incurvated, as to form in profile, with his impending forehead, the exact resemblance of a moon in the first quarter. With respect ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... one they had ever seen. A tall lank man with rounded shoulders, lean leather-like cheeks, a preternatural length of jaw, drab hair and chin whiskers, and deeply-set china-blue eyes, made up a type uncommon in the Californias, that land of priest, soldier, caballero, and Indian. He was clad in coyote skins, and carried a gun in his hand, a brace of rabbits slung over one shoulder. He did not speak ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... aberrant, variant, preternatural, exceptional, irregular; artificial, affected, feigned, assumed ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... once more inspected the chart for several minutes with the same look of preternatural wisdom as before, to Ned's intense but ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... think he had been born in boots and spurs. Legitimately he only rides with some one leading the pony, but I have my suspicions that by some preternatural means he has been on the pony's back, and round the yard alone, and that papa prudentially concealed it ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... say that he might have been throttled on the spot if the moonshiners could have had a mental vision of the liberties the stalwart integers were taking with their price-current, so to speak, and the preternatural discount that was making so free with their profits. So absorbed in this pleasing intellectual exercise was Nehemiah that he did not observe that any one had left the coterie; but when a stir without on the rocks intimated an approach he was suddenly ill at ease, ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... rough drawing of a preternaturally thin man, with preternatural large eyes, holding a cigarette in a hand joined to an arm which had evidently suffered severe dislocation. It was the type of drawing affected by schoolboys and girls, yet it had a distinct cleverness of its own. Despite ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... in its fleshless fingers a candle, which he knew was made of human fat. That candle, he knew, duly lighted and carried, would enable the witch to walk unseen into any house on earth, yea, through the court of King William himself, while it drowned all men in preternatural slumber. ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... whose example be may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman. Reading other bosoms, with an acuteness almost preternatural, the painter failed to see the ...
— The Prophetic Pictures (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and sorrow had severed for him the last links which bound him to lower things. He had felt that he could do without happiness, that it was no longer essential, and that he could live on, and still love God, and cling to Him. But he is not described as of preternatural, or at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all human tenderness and susceptibility. His old life was still beautiful to him. He does not hate it because he can renounce it; and now that the struggle is over, the battle fought ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... cries of "Good! good!" "That's so!" "Sound doctrine, that!" "The Judge knows what's what!" Only one person, the questioner, a young man with a preternatural ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... for I have always found, that to be informed of their strange peculiarity leaves an awful and painful impression on the real somnambulists—a feeling of being unlike the rest of human beings, of having a sort of preternatural existence, over which their human reason can hold no control. They fear themselves—they fear their own acts—perhaps their own words, when the power is gone from that familiar mind, which is more or less the servant, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... allowed herself to be drawn backwards by Delfina's clinging fingers, and instantly, with preternatural clearness, Andrea saw that smile wipe away all the obscure, delicious pain from her lips, efface every sign that might be construed into an avowal, put to flight the least lingering shadow of uncertainty that he might possibly have converted into a gleam of hope. He sat there ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... scoffing, Ishmaelitish spirit? And yet he has so little real knowledge—there is such a cloud of ignorance and moral stupor resting upon his brain and heart! So much of him is merely animal, foxy, wolfish, and this sharpened intellect only a faculty, an instinct, a preternatural organ pushed out to gain subsistence with. It is a terrible anomaly, and yet, I say, it is none the less an active power, and shows us that, however neglected, the child of the abject poor is not dormant or undeveloped. ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... nobody, and as far as possible contriving that nobody should see her. She hid behind the column of smoke, or sheltered herself at the further side of the great trunk of a tree; from the fire, she said to herself. But her face took on a preternatural gravity at those times, whenever she knew it was safe. She thought she did not look at anybody; yet she knew that Miss Masters had joined none of the groups under the trees, and seemed instead to prefer a solitary post in front ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... divinities necessary for the dispensation of benefits throughout the universe, whose good offices we must secure by acts of attention and worship. I anticipate the circumstance in this place merely to show that the tendency of the human mind, clinging to a variety of preternatural protectors and benefactors, was among the obstacles with which the first preachers of the Gospel had to struggle. In the proper place I shall beg you to observe how hardly possible it would have been for those ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... no efforts which are so efficient and powerful in the accomplishment of their end as those which a faithful wife makes to rescue and save her husband. The heart, generally so timid, seems to be inspired on such occasions with a preternatural courage, and the arm, at other times so feeble and helpless, is nerved with unexpected strength. Every one is ready to second and help such efforts, and she who makes them is surprised at her success, and wonders at the extent and efficiency of ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... house had fallen in, and that, at the same instant, the doors had been burst open, and some robber or assassin had stabbed her husband as he was lying in her arms. The philosophy of those days found in these dreams mysterious and preternatural warnings of impending danger; that of ours, however, sees nothing either in the absurd sacrilegiousness of Caesar's thoughts, or his wife's incoherent and inconsistent images of terror—nothing more than the natural and proper effects, on the one hand, ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... stedfastness at this column, and being naturally led to reflect on his character to whose honour it was erected, felt just admiration of a mind so noble; and retiring to his devotions in a church not far off, began praying earnestly for Trajan's soul: till a preternatural voice, accompanied with rays of light round the altar he knelt at, commanded his forbearance of further solicitation; assuring him that Trajan's soul was secure in the care of his Creator. Strange! that those who record, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... course of this marketing tour. The "dimmocking bags" have been emptied; the accumulations in the sergeant-major's hands have been drawn, and the corporal, freighted with the joint savings, has the task of expending the same in beer. In this undertaking he manifests a preternatural astuteness. He is not to be inveigled into giving his order at a public-house,—swipes from the canteen would do as well as that,—nor do the bottled-beer merchants tempt him with their high prices for dubious quality. No, he goes direct to the fountain-head. If there be a ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... eye could not discover where. From behind the same projection glimmered a strong red light, which, glancing in the waves of the falling water, and tinging them partially with crimson, had a strange preternatural and sinister effect when contrasted with the beams of the rising sun, which glanced on the first broken waves of the fall, though even its meridian splendour could not gain the third of its full depth. When he had looked around him for a ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... depicted by one of their most enlightened poets, who drew his doctrines from their most esteemed philosophers. The region where Virgil locates the entrance to this abode is perhaps the most strikingly adapted to excite ideas of the terrific and preternatural of any on the face of the earth. It is the volcanic region near Vesuvius, where the whole country is cleft with chasms, from which sulphurous flames arise, while the ground is shaken with pent-up vapors, and mysterious sounds issue from the bowels of the earth. The lake Avernus ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... possibly proceed from any cause whatever except that which she had stated—the relaxation of stiffened wood under the influence of the thaw. Nor had all Laurie's arguments prevailed to shake in the smallest degree her resolute conviction that there was nothing whatever preternatural in his ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... never forget the first time I happened to roar out a stave in the presence of noble Mehevi. It was a stanza from the 'Bavarian broom-seller'. His Typeean majesty, with all his court, gazed upon me in amazement, as if I had displayed some preternatural faculty which Heaven had denied to them. The King was delighted with the verse; but the chorus fairly transported him. At his solicitation I sang it again and again, and nothing could be more ludicrous than his vain attempts to catch the air and the words. The royal savage seemed to ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... through Belle Isle, and the earlier weeks in Andersonville, but June, July, and August "fetched him," as the boys said. He seemed to melt away like an icicle on a Spring day, and he grew so thin that his hight seemed preternatural. We called him "Flagstaff," and cracked all sorts of jokes about putting an insulator on his head, and setting him up for a telegraph pole, braiding his legs and using him for a whip lash, letting his hair grow a little longer, and trading him off to the Rebels for a sponge and staff ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... in its complete sense. And this evidence, when subjected to judicious criticism, is trustworthy; for the ancient story-teller and poet reflects the customs and ideas and ideals of his own time, even though the combination of agencies and the preternatural proportions of the actors and their deeds belong to the imagination. The historian must know how to supplement and to give life and interest to the colorless succession of dates, names, and events of the chronicler, by means of these imaginative yet truth-bearing creations ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... indelicacy. When the success of AEneas depended on the favour of the queen upon whose coasts he was driven, his celestial protectress thought him not sufficiently secured against rejection by his piety or bravery, but decorated him for the interview with preternatural beauty. Whoever desires, for his writings or himself, what none can reasonably contemn, the favour of mankind, must add grace to strength, and make his thoughts agreeable as well as useful. Many complain ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... for they are the facts from whence we have reasoned, in discovering the nature and constitution of this earth: Therefore, there is no occasion for having recourse to any unnatural supposition of evil, to any destructive accident in nature, or to the agency of any preternatural cause, in explaining ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... really animated the spirit of the Fathers. Yet all agreed it was a great and good and perfect government,—subject only to the predatory incursions of a Hydra-headed monster known as a "Ring." The Ring's origin was wrapped in secrecy, its fecundity was alarming; but although its rapacity was preternatural, its digestion was perfect and easy. It circumvolved all affairs in an atmosphere of mystery; it clouded all things with the dust and ashes of distrust. All disappointment of place, of avarice, of incompetency ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... the heels, and stirred with his head the mud at the bottom of a stream. Another time he threw him into deep water out of a boat to make him manly. But he was not satisfied by inspiring physical terror. Invoking the aid of the preternatural, he taught his brother that the hollow behind the house was haunted by a monstrous and malevolent phantom, to which, in the plenitude of his imagination, he gave the name of Peningre. Gradually the child discovered that Peningre ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... which it is rather difficult to discuss seriously in the present day, both the personages and their environment being too preternatural for any direct application to be drawn from them, as reflecting modern society, found indiscreet champions as determined as its aggressors. Violently denounced by M. Capo de Feuillide, of the Europe litteraire, it was warmly ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... to seek a "funny man" among the quadrupeds, I should name another dweller of the Southwestern prairies, the jack-rabbit,—John II. let us call him. Nobody ever gets quite accustomed to the preternatural ears of this hare. In proportion they are to those of others of the Leporidae nearly what the ears of the mule are to those of the horse. When this bit of bad drawing, as big as a fawn and weighing ten pounds or so, jumps ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... Sargon died, leaving his crown to the most celebrated of all the Assyrian Monarchs, his son Sennacherib, who began to reign B.C. 705. The long notices which we possess of this monarch in the books of the Old Testament, his intimate connection with the Jews, the fact that he was the object of a preternatural exhibition of the Divine displeasure, and the remarkable circumstance that this miraculous interposition appears under a thin disguise in the records of the Greeks, have always attached an interest to his name which the kings of this remote period and distant ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... fight the battle of the party he had joined. And no man knew so well as did Sir Timothy how to elevate a simple legislative attempt into a good faction fight. He had so mastered his tricks of conjuring that no one could get to the bottom of them, and had assumed a look of preternatural gravity which made many young Members think that Sir Timothy was born to be a ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... hair. How thickly shone the stars! It must be close upon the hour of their waning, yet how big and soft; and how companionable! She stretched her arms up to them, moving as if they drew her down the path. They were more real, indeed, than the dim and preternatural space in which ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... patriot, in his boundless devotion to the Union, seemed to be gifted with almost preternatural foresight; nor did he exhibit greater sagacity in penetrating the motives and purposes of men, than in comprehending the nature and influence of great social causes, then in operation, and destined, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the ships. There was, too, an entire absence of the heavy and continuous work in the wet trenches. The great drawback to the position was, indeed, the absence of excitement and change, and the quiet seemed almost preternatural after the almost continual boom of cannon at ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... His great face was yellow and seemed in that moment of a preternatural flabbiness; his beady ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... lay the dead man's spirit and at the same time to prevent the tiger from doing any further damage. The Baigas believe that the ghost of the victim, if not charmed to rest, resides on the head of the tiger and incites him to further deeds of blood, rendering him also secure from harm by his preternatural watchfulness. [91] ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... slumber the whole of the night, Never a slumber with day in the skies; Nature assumes preternatural light, Set in sharp outlines that dazzle ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... the room a small oilskin packet. This, as it lay on the ground, they both eyed like two deer glowering at a piece of red cloth, and ready to leap back over the moon if it should show signs of biting. But oil-skin is not preternatural, nor has tradition connected it, however remotely, with the Enemy ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... her arms—a wide-eyed mite that stared up into the murk overhead with preternatural solemnity. Their talk, of an inarticulate simplicity, is no concern of ours. The little group has been recorded because of the woman. Mechanically rocking the child in her arms, with her neat clothes and brave little bits of finery, with, above all, her anxious, pathetic smile as she looked ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... wore an air of outraged and offended dignity; and Daisy not only maintained that solemn silence, but she looked grieved and hurt. Our little ones were not accustomed to be snubbed, and took it hard when such an experience did befall them; but there was a preternatural gravity about them ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... There is much inconsistency in the passages of the poem in which the Vanars are spoken of, which seems to point to two widely different legends. The Vanars are generally represented as semi-divine beings with preternatural powers, living in houses and eating and drinking like men sometimes as here, as monkeys pure and simple, living is woods and ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... That is what I am told my knowledge is. But my well-meaning friends come to my defence, and, not content with endowing me with natural first-hand knowledge which is rightfully mine, ascribe to me a preternatural sixth sense and credit to miracles and heaven-sent compensations all that I have won and discovered with my good right hand. And with my left hand too; for with that I read, and it is as true and honourable as the other. By what half-development of human power has the left hand been neglected? ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... high chancellor had done before Queen Miranda; and the lady courtesied, in return, until her pink-satin skirt ballooned out all over the floor. It was quite an affecting tableau. And so Ormiston felt, as he stood eyeing it with preternatural gravity. ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... supozi. Presumption tromemfideco, tromemfido. Presumptuous tromemfida. Pretence preteksto. Pretend (to claim) pretendi. Pretend preteksti. Pretend (to feign) sxajnigi. Pretentious afektema. Preternatural supernatura, preternatura. Pretext preteksto. Pretty beleta. Prevail superi. Prevalent gxenerala, rega. Prevaricate malverigxi. Prevent malhelpi, eksigi. Previous antauxa. Prey kaptajxo. Price prezo, kosto. Price—current prezaro. Priceless (valuable) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... faces, like those of the Seven Sleepers, gradually elongated into preternatural extent. The ecclesiastical councillor, a young man, but already famous throughout Germany for his sermons printed or preached, was especially aggrieved by such offensive personality; Monsieur Flitte rapped out a curse that rattled even in the ears of magistracy; the chin ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Erichthonius, by the favor of Zeus, became the wealthiest of mankind. His flocks and herds having multiplied, he had in his pastures three thousand mares, the offspring of some of whom, by Boreas, produced horses of preternatural swiftness. Tros, the son of Erichthonius, and the eponym of the Trojans, had three sons—Ilus, Assaracus, and the beautiful Ganymedes, whom Zeus stole away to become his cup-bearer in Olympus, giving to his father Tros, as the price ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... Mab something rather too preternatural about this, though she could well believe it, as she looked at the wonderful manner in which the watches turned themselves out. It frightened her, and they proceeded farther on, and came to much artillery, carefully constructed by the higher civilisation for the purpose of turning ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... imaginary distress. His strength, in like manner, is not strength of will or action, of bone and muscle, nor is it coarse and palpable—but it assumes a character of vastness and sublimity seen through the same visionary medium, and blended with the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We need only turn, in proof of this, to the Cave of Despair, or the Cave of Mammon, or to the account of the change of Malbecco into Jealousy. The following stanzas, in the description of the Cave of Mammon, the grisly house ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... character, taking its perfect shape, rounded and smooth and fair. Through long years of sorrow and unrest, she had now to toil back to that golden time,—and there was a sort of sharpness and haggardness about her acting, a singular tone of weariness, broken by starts and bursts of almost preternatural power. Except in scenes and sentiments of pathos, where she had lost nothing, the last, fine, evanishing tints, the delicate aroma of the character, were wanting in her personation. It was touched with autumnal shadows,—it was comparatively ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... of these blemishes are:—Miss Blandford falls in love with a plough-boy at first-sight, which she certainly would not have done, but that some preternatural agent whispered to her, he was a young man of birth. But whether this magical information came from the palpitation of her heart, or the quickness of her eye, she has not said.—A reader will, however, gladly impute the cause ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton
... observers—if there were any "calm observers" in those days—perceive that Shakspeare was labouring under an access of the most confirmed delirium. They listened to Hamlet, and Lear, and Othello, and did not discover that his inspiration was the effect of over-excitement; that his energy was the preternatural strength bestowed on him by convulsion; and that, in fact, instead of being a swan of Avon, he was neither more nor less than a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... consider Christians who believe in the natural birth of Jesus, of whom he implies that there is a respectable minority, to be heretics, though he himself strongly holds the preternatural birth of Jesus and his pre-existence as the "Logos" or "Word." He conceives the Logos to be a second God, inferior to the first, unknowable God, with respect to whom Justin, like Philo, is a complete agnostic. The Holy Spirit is not regarded by Justin as a separate personality, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... had pictured to themselves no precise object. It would be difficult to depict, in words, the ingredients and hues of that phantom which haunted me. An hand invisible and of preternatural strength, lifted by human passions, and selecting my life for its aim, were parts of this terrific image. All places were alike accessible to this foe, or if his empire were restricted by local bounds, those bounds were utterly inscrutable by me. But had I not been told by ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... mass of curls and one rounded olive cheek, the image of his reverie—not shadowy— close and real like water at the lips after the thirsty dream of it. No thought could come athwart that eager thirst. In one moment, before Tito could start back, the old man, with the preternatural force of rage in his limbs, had sprung forward, and the dagger had flashed out. In the next moment the dagger had snapped in two, and Baldassarre, under the parrying force of Tito's arm, had fallen back on the straw, clutching ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... not least, the marvellous Ethiope, Changing his skin by preternatural skill, Whom every setting sun's diurnal slope Leaves whiter than the last, and ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... tempest immediately died away, and a dead calm sullenly succeeded. A white flame still enveloped the building like a shroud, and, streaming far away into the quiet atmosphere, shot forth a glare of preternatural light; while a cloud of smoke settled heavily over the battlements in the distinct colossal ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... it appeared to fire the revolving pillars of mud-coloured cloud beneath, and gave ghastly peeps of river and bank and plain, miles upon miles away. But perhaps its most awful circumstance was the preternatural silence. The distant boom and muttering of thunder had died away, and now the great storm swept on in voiceless majesty, like the passage of a ghostly host, from which there arose no sound of feet or of rolling wheels. Only before it sped the swift angels of the wind, ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... following curious sketch is from Mr W. R. Wilde's Irish Popular Superstitions, printed in M'Glashan's Readings in Popular Literature. It does not refer to a superstition, but to one of those facts which exhibit as much of the preternatural as the wildest excursion of fancy. A portion of the little volume is reprinted from the Dublin University Magazine, and, for aught we know, Lady Betty may have made her appearance originally ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... the French Revolution, inspiring with preternatural energy that gallant people, turned the tide of events so long adverse to French aggrandizement. Still true to her hereditary hostility, England combined all Europe to resist the aggression of republican France. But soon, from ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit "to bend the shows of things to the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... generation and skin-full of occult wisdom in some particular branch of science; but then the big round spectacles, the red dressing-cap, and the cerulean leather slippers of themselves impart an air of owlish and preternatural wisdom. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... costume, and when the hair was invariably cropped, like that of our soldiers, this eccentricity was very striking. His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other countenance. Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the intellectual, for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and especially (though this will surprise many) that air ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... struggling with adversity; by a wise use of events, and with an inimitable presence of mind under difficulties, forcing out a way for himself through the severest trials to which human life can be exposed; with enemies natural and preternatural surrounding him on all sides. The agents in this tale, besides men and women, are giants, enchanters, sirens: things which denote external force or internal temptations, the twofold danger which ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... carrying a pair of pails on a yoke, deposited them upon the edge of the pavement in front of the inn, and straightened his back to an excruciating perpendicular. His remarks had been addressed to a rickety person, wearing a waistcoat of that preternatural length from the top to the bottom button which prevails among men who have to do with horses. He was sweeping straws from the carriage-way beneath the stone arch that formed a passage to ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... appalling deceptions that has ever fallen upon Christendom? The Bible in the plainest terms, declares that in the last days malign influences will be let loose upon the world; false pretensions will be urged upon the minds of men; and deceptions, backed up by preternatural signs and wonders, will develop to such a degree of strength, that, if it were possible, they would deceive the very elect. Is it possible that Spiritualism may be the very development of evil, against which ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... belief in the marvelous—for what I have experienced is marvelous—and I have been forced by extraordinary evidence to credit that which ran counter, diametrically, to all my theories. I have been made the dupe of a preternatural conspiracy." ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... sweet and gentle and soothing is Nature! Who would think that there lurked in her also such vile forces, such odious possibilities! For of course I understand that this dreadful thing which has sprung out at me is neither supernatural nor even preternatural. No, it is a natural force which this woman can use and society is ignorant of. The mere fact that it ebbs with her strength shows how entirely it is subject to physical laws. If I had time, I might ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the land of the present earth being a certain composition of materials, perfectly similar to such as would result from the gradual destruction of a continent in the operations of the inhabited world, this composition of our land could not be explained without having recourse to preternatural means, were there not in the constitution of this earth an active cause necessarily, in the course of ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... concealed persistent passions and a conscience of marble. Before even Evelyn suspected it, I was aware that he had resolved on subduing her to his own designs, for I seemed in all things relating to her to be gifted with preternatural intuitions. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... has been taught that there are times and circumstances when religious and ethical standards may or must be set aside, and he arrogates to himself the right of determining them. Without examining into stories of preternatural meanness and perfidy which have come into vogue since the outbreak of the war, it is fair to say that dirty tricks, destructive of all social intercourse, formed part of the German commercial procedure in France, Britain and Russia, the only proviso ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... simplicity and openness of scientific experiment; and even if he profess to tread a step or two across the boundaries of the spiritual world, yet carries with him the laws of our actual life and extends them over his preternatural conquests. Twelve or fifteen years ago, on the contrary, all the arts of mysterious arrangement, of picturesque disposition, and artistically contrasted light and shade, were made available, in order ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stranger's form had been swallowed by the flood of misty light, which, by this time, rolled along the sea like drifting vapour, semi-pellucid, preternatural, and seemingly tangible. The ocean itself appeared admonished that a quick and violent change was nigh. The waves had ceased to break in their former foaming and brilliant crests, but black masses of the water were seen lifting their surly summits against the eastern horizon, no longer relieved ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... about her tending the sick—the pievano had come down to milk his cow, and had suddenly caught sight of Romola pausing at the parted way. Her pleading words, with their strange refinement of tone and accent, instead of being explanatory, had a preternatural sound for him. Yet he did not quite believe he saw the Holy Mother: he was in a state of alarmed hesitation. If anything miraculous were happening, he felt there was no strong presumption that the miracle would be in his favour. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... I felt certain that I had been face to face with something unexplainable by the ordinary laws of nature. I was as well as usual. I had read nothing of late that could have conjured up such a figure. As to preternatural manifestations of such a kind—I had but that very day, and but an hour or two ago, passed supercilious judgment on what I thought the credulity of ignorant rustics. And yet here I was, the victim to some such hallucination—unless ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... intellect in cases of that class is altogether morbid— forced on, in fact, by the mere stimulation of the disease. I would, however, suggest, as a possibility, the very opposite order of relation between the disease and the intellectual manifestations. Not the disease may always have caused the preternatural growth of the intellect; but, inversely, this growth of the intellect coming on spontaneously, and outrunning the capacities of the physical structure, may ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... without expecting to encounter some one of the departed uneasily wandering among graves, or commissioned to reveal somewhat momentous and deeply affecting to the survivors. Fairies danced in the moonlight glade; and something preternatural perpetually occurred to fill the living with admiration ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... It has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous features of his preternatural character. How then, it may be asked, does this moral phantom, that has never been, bear any resemblance to the poet himself? Must not, in this instance, the hypothesis which assigns to Byron's heroes his own sentiments and feelings be abandoned? I think ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... the distance, on a wooded eminence, sat a huge grizzly bear. The size of Victor's eyes when he looked back at his comrades was eloquently suggestive, even if he had not drawn back and descended the slope toward them on tiptoe and with preternatural caution. ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... it was a heartless, melancholy relaxation of features, a mere muscular movement, with which the eye had no sympathy; for its wild and dreamy expression, the preternatural lustre, without transparency, remained unaltered, as if rebuking, with its cold, strange glare, the mockery around it. He sat before me like a statue, whose eye alone retained its stony and stolid rigidity, while the other ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... an imperative rapping with the head of a stout walking-stick. He set his teeth, and, drawing back his lips with a horrible smile in the dark, breathed noiselessly. The rapping grew more and more imperative and urgent, and then came a preternatural silence, with an undercurrent of distant sound in it, and the sudden blare of a cornet in the street, which sounded to his nerves like the trumpet of the herald of the day of judgment He heard the hurrying feet plunge down the steps again, and cross the quadrangle, and ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... intimacy in that quarter, if it ever existed, had been broken up, and that, in consequence, this ill turn had been done to Marner by somebody it was quite in vain to set the constable after. Why this preternatural felon should be obliged to wait till the door was left unlocked, was a question which did not ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... face is in shadow, but the large, bright black eyes beam upon Gladys, with preternatural lustre, and the raven hair shines against the white pillow that supports her head. The broad, massive figure of the father, in its rough work-a-day clothes, is also in shadow. One elbow rests upon the arm of Netta's sofa, one hand smooths mechanically the head of his grandchild, ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... of Commons were laymen. Was it not absurd to say that laymen were incompetent to examine into a matter which it was acknowledged that laymen must in the last resort determine? And could any thing be more opposite to the whole spirit of Protestantism than the notion that a certain preternatural power of judging in spiritual cases was vouchsafed to a particular caste, and to that caste alone; that such men as Selden, as Hale, as Boyle, were less competent to give an opinion on a collect or a creed than the youngest ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is to make the book in its English dress not only absolutely literal in text but Oriental in tone and colour. He knows the tales almost by heart, and used to keep the Bedouin tribes in roars of laughter in camp during the long summer nights by reciting them. Sheiks to whom a preternatural solemnity of demeanour is usual were to be seen rolling on the ground in paroxysms of uncontrollable mirth. It was also Burckhardt's custom to read the stories aloud, but the Arabs would snatch the book from his hand because his pronunciation was so bad. Captain Burton is ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... frankly and in such majesty, finding its own aptest words by its unconscious instinct, that the aged minister was presently aware of a preternatural power at his side. Was this woman a witch, genius, demon, or the very priestess of ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... one direction. He managed to rise and lean against the pedestal of the statue, and its shade by this time protected him. Then an intense desire came upon him to get home, and that desire gave him a temporary preternatural strength. It came upon him as a duty to leave Sicca for his cottage, and he set off. He had a confused notion that he must do his duty, and go straight forward, and turn neither to the right, nor the left, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... examined his mouth without having discovered any defect or disease, though another veterinary surgeon was of opinion that the difficulty or inability manifested in mastication, and the consequent cudding, arose from preternatural bluntness of the surfaces of the molar teeth, which were, in consequence, filed, but without beneficial result. It was after this that I saw the horse, and I confess I was, at my first examination, quite as much at a loss to offer any satisfactory interpretation as others had been. While meditating, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... his attention anew to the enemy. There was a sudden increase of the firing in front. The clouds and vapors rolled back, and the dancing figures in the thickets took on more semblance of reality. Suddenly Henry uttered a cry. His eyes of almost preternatural keenness had recognized ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... apparition—robed in mysterious splendour, and vanishing the moment its errand was fulfilled—gave additional effect to the words it had uttered. The whole character of that bold address became invested with a something preternatural and inspired; to the minds of the vulgar, the mortal was converted into the oracle; and, marvelling at the unhesitating courage with which their idol had rebuked and conjured the haughty barons,—each of whom they regarded in the light ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... out the heart of my mystery,' as Hamlet says, do you not, my friend?"—and he smiled—"Well, so you shall, if you can discover aught in me that is not already in yourself! I assure you there is nothing preternatural about me,—my peculiar 'eccentricity' consists in steadily adapting myself to the scientific spiritual, as well as scientific material, laws of the Universe. The two sets of laws united make harmony,—hence I find my life ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... subtle chemistry had volatilized it into gas. Indeed, among the various conjectures which were put forward in the public Press, there were some which seriously asserted that supernatural, or, at least, preternatural, agencies had been at work, and that the deformed Monsieur Caratal was probably a person who was better known under a less polite name. Others fixed upon his swarthy companion as being the author of the mischief, but what it was exactly which he had done could ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... confronted by your own reflection. Being human, you have had, presumably, ambitions, envies, appetites, prejudices, vanities, and other human ills of which the face before you gave no indication. And so, feeling the preternatural excellence of that face a lie, you have tried to live up to it; that is, to avoid being a humbug. In short, your life has been a strenuous endeavor to be unnecessarily ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... made great proficiency in literature, could not be more than nine years old. Strafford went to govern Ireland in 1633, and was put to death eight years afterwards. That he was sent to Caen, is certain: that he was a great scholar, may be doubted. At Caen he is said to have had some preternatural intelligence ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... encountered the victorious monarch, and boldly denounced the indignation of heaven against the oppressors of the earth; but the saint himself was confounded by the solemn asseveration of Alaric, that he felt a secret and preternatural impulse, which directed, and even compelled, his march to the gates of Rome. He felt that his genius and his fortune were equal to the most arduous enterprises; and the enthusiasm which he communicated to the Goths insensibly removed the popular, and almost superstitious, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... were seen approaching, and the people, who now saw the absolute uselessness of further resistance broke away to the hills. The game was up; the banner of Irish independence had again sunk to the dust; and O'Brien, who had acted throughout with preternatural coolness, and whose face gave no more indications of emotion than if it had been chiseled in marble, turned from the scene with a broken heart. For a length of time he resisted the entreaties of his friends and refused to leave the spot; at last their solicitations prevailed, and ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... of delirious applause. Men laughed and shouted, and cries of "Vive le Roi!" rolled forth like thunder. Andre-Louis waited, and gradually the preternatural gravity of his countenance came to be observed, and to beget the suspicion that there might be more to follow. Gradually silence was restored, and at last Andre Louis was ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... child before this, it might have ended in her completely finishing me; but she was roused up from her state of half syncope by a vigorous attack from my teeth, which, in the agony of suffocation, I used with preternatural force of jaw from one so young. I bit right through everything she had on, and as my senses were fast departing, my teeth actually met with my convulsive efforts. My granny, roused by the extreme pain, rolled over on her side, and then it was that my mother and aunt, who supposed that I had ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... Bark. L. E. D.—This bark is a strong astringent; and hence stands recommended in haemorrhagies, alvine fluxes, and other preternatural or ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... the dealers in the preternatural, who in such cases were called in, are termed, did all that in them lay—but in vain. Father Tom came down, and tried what holier rites could do, but equally without result. So little Billy was dead to ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... domestic griefs, and be deprived of his comforts—but he is serene, for the soul triumphs over the body. Now, what motive so grand as to save the immortal part of man. This desire filled the ancient Christian orator with a preternatural enthusiasm, as well as gave to him an unlimited power, and an imposing dignity. He was the most happy of mortals when led to the blazing fire of his persecutors, and he was the most august. The feeling that he was kindling a fire which should never be quenched, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... morning at an hour sufficiently preternatural to deprive us of a portion of our legitimate sleep. We rose early in Kimberley—long before the lark—to our credit be it sung; but four o'clock was too far removed from breakfast time, and four was commonly the hour chosen by the churlish Boers to commence ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... study necessarily boasted its works of divinity and reference; for the children there were only the wild romances of Southey, the poems of Sir Walter Scott, left by their Cornish mother, and "some mad Methodist magazines full of miracles and apparitions and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams and frenzied fanaticism; and the equally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living," familiar to readers of 'Shirley.' To counterbalance all this romance and terror, the children ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... bulky young man had disappeared through the porter's lodge, Uncle Benjy showed preternatural activity for one in his invalid state, jumping up quickly without his stick, at the same time opening and shutting his mouth quite silently like a thirsty frog, which was his way of expressing mirth. He ran upstairs as quick ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... the street-boy—the biricchino, the boy in his natural, unreclaimed state—that I speak. This state is here, in winter, marked by a clouded countenance, bare head, tatters, and wooden-soled shoes open at the heels; in summer by a preternatural purity of person, by abandon to the amphibious pleasure of leaping off the bridges into the canals, and by an insatiable appetite for ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... among the many forms of mediumship which were possessed in the highest form by Christ, was the power of automatic writing, by which He summoned those great forces which were under His control to supply Him with the answer. Granting, as I freely do, that Christ was preternatural, in the sense that He was above and beyond ordinary humanity in His attributes, one may still inquire how far these powers were contained always within His human body, or how far He referred back to spiritual reserves beyond it. When He spoke merely from His human body He was certainly ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... she lifts her eyes,—dark eyes, of preternatural largeness; brilliant, too, but not with the sparkle of the diamond; brilliant as deep clear wells are, in which the mellow moonlight sleeps fathom-deep between black walls of rock; and round them, and round the wide-opened ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... himself to me. He came and went apparently without help or hindrance—as if he had had a master-key to all the recesses of the prison. And yet he seemed no agent of the Inquisition—indeed, he denounced it with caustic satire and withering severity. But what struck me most of all was the preternatural glare of his eyes. I felt that I had never beheld such eyes blazing in a mortal face. It was strange, too, that he constantly referred to events that must have happened long before his birth as if he had actually ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... without fading the smile ceased to be. Under its effulgence the observer unfamiliar with Mr. Rae's smile was moved, to a responsive geniality of expression, but in the full tide of this emotion he found himself suddenly regarding a face of such preternatural gravity as rebuked the very possibility or suggestion of geniality. Before the smile Mr. Rae's face was like a house, with the shutters up and the family plunged in gloom. When the smile broke forth every shutter was flung wide to the pouring sunlight, ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... based upon imperfect evidence, and leading to no definite conclusion, the literary commission, as Llorente informs us, was silent altogether; whereupon Llorente attributing, not unnaturally, this preternatural silence on the part of the three French savans, to the impossibility of finding any thing to say, after the lapse of a year and a half publishes his arguments, and appeals to literary Europe as the judge "en dernier ressort" of this important ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... peace of the room the screaming "Monsieur l'Administrateur" of the frail, hairy Frenchman seemed to acquire a preternatural shrillness. The explorer of the Capitalist syndicate was still enthusiastic. "Ten million dollars' worth of copper practically in sight, Monsieur l'Administrateur. Ten millions in sight! And a railway coming—a railway! They will never believe ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... conclusion. "Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds," said Lord Spencer. "The spectators were now absolutely electrified. The Marquess quietly adds his usual ten" and so there an end. "Mr Evans, ere his hammer fell, made a short pause—and indeed, as if by something preternatural, the ebony instrument itself seemed to be charmed or suspended in the mid air. However, at ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... instance, that a child, as soon as it is undressed, or disencumbered from swaddling clothes, moves its arms and legs, and often makes a variety of strong exertions; yet no reasonable person would suppose that such attempts arise from a preternatural or oppressive state of ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... Great is the enjoyment of passing through a beautiful country on a fine clear day in June. There was no dust—the sun was not too hot—the hedges were in full leaf, and no drawback to our felicity except a preternatural dread of stone heaps by the roadside, on the part of our steed, which: kept us on the alert to try and pull in the proper direction the moment he shied to the side. All other objects in nature or art it passed with the equanimity of a sage; tilted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... danger, it pleased the Divine Mercy to found upon earth a permanent institution of an exceptional, wonderful, almost preternatural character, through which the preservation of the principal doctrines, that form the substance of revealed religion, could be insured to mankind. As seeds of rare and precious plants are preserved with care, that the species ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... first was a burning whirl through drink and rage, with nothing determined and nothing definite. But thought began to shape itself. In a vast vague circle of consciousness his mind seemed to sit in the centre and think with preternatural clearness. Though all around was whirling and confused, drink had endowed some inner eye of the brain with unnatural swift vividness. Far within the humming circle of his mind he saw an instant and terrible revenge on Brodie, acted it, and lived it now. His desires were murderers, and ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... surface, and induce an effect of clearness which, perhaps, the artist has not particularly wished to attain, but which he has found himself forced into, by his reflections, in spite of himself. And the reason of this effect of clearness appearing preternatural is, that people are not in the habit of looking at water with the distant focus adapted to the reflections, unless by particular effort. We invariably, under ordinary circumstances, use the surface focus; and, in consequence, receive nothing ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... introduced in the reign of Francis I. The buttresses are, however, generally, lofty and airy. In the midst of this complicated and corrupt style of architecture, the tower and spire rise like a structure built by preternatural hands; and I am not sure that, at this moment, I can recollect any thing of equal beauty and effect in the whole range of ecclesiastical edifices in our own country. Look at this building, from any part of the town, and you must acknowledge that it has the strongest claims ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... opening of the sixth seal in the book of Revelation, there was 'a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon as blood.' A preternatural and awful darkness broods over nature, preparatory to its final dissolution. Thus Satan darkens the things above to the natural man, so that he cannot discern spiritual things, while those of time and sense are magnified ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... air of preternatural solemnity the duke took two letters from the breast pocket of ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... ———, an artist in Florence, and a sensible man. I talked with him about Home, the medium, whom he had many opportunities of observing when the latter was in these parts. Mr. ——— says that Home is unquestionably a knave, but that he himself is as much perplexed at his own preternatural performances as any other person; he is startled and affrighted at the phenomena which he produces. Nevertheless, when his spiritual powers fall short, he does his best to eke them out with imposture. This moral infirmity is a part of his nature, and I suggested that perhaps ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... peacefulness, good-will, an absence of self-seeking, and an habitual recognition and apprehension of causal sequence, without admixture of animistic belief and without a sense of dependence on any preternatural intervention in the course of events. Not much is to be said for the beauty, moral excellence, or general worthiness and reputability of such a prosy human nature as these traits imply; and there is little ground of enthusiasm for the manner of collective life that would result from the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... will be remembered, did not occur until its members had spent together more than seven weeks of the closest intellectual intimacy. Surely, no mere declaimer however enchanting, no sublime babbler on the rights of man, no political charlatan strutting about for the display of his preternatural gift of articulate wind, could have grappled in keen debate, for all those weeks, on the greatest of earthly subjects, with fifty of the ablest men in America, without exposing to their view all his own intellectual poverty, and without losing the very ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... a supposition I dare not entertain for a moment. I cannot help asking, Why all this pains to clear the British nation of ambition, perfidy, and the insatiate thirst of war? At what period of time was it that our country has deserved that load of infamy of which nothing but preternatural humiliation in language and conduct can serve to clear us? If we have deserved this kind of evil fame from anything we have done in a state of prosperity, I am sure that it is not an abject conduct in adversity that can clear our reputation. Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to have been remarkable. The manner of the orator—downcast, as with the inward oppression of the same solemnity that he, in speaking, cast like a spell on the audience—indefinitely heightened the magical power of the awful conception excited. Not Bourdaloue himself, with that preternatural skill of his to probe the conscience of man to its innermost secret, could have exceeded the heart-searching rigor with which, in the earlier part of the discourse, Massillon had put to the rack the quivering consciences of his ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... thunder and lightning was only to be equalled by her dread of the haunted house with a premature and preternatural darkness in it, stood undecided whether to go in or not, until the question was settled for her by the door blowing upon her in a violent gust of wind and shutting her out. 'What's to be done now, what's to be done now!' cried Mistress Affery, wringing ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... physical science had already attained a height which mere books do not record." "Unpublished MSS. by Leonardo contain discoveries and anticipations of discoveries," says Mr. Hallam, "within the compass of a few pages, so as to strike us with something like the awe of preternatural knowledge." ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... face, which, as he sat, was not visible to his brother. Then with preternatural gravity he ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... earth. The contact seemed to bring to him strength and courage. Doubts fled away. He would succeed in the trial. He could not possibly fail. His great-grandfather, Henry Ware, had been a renowned borderer and Indian fighter, one of the most famous in all the annals of Kentucky, gifted with almost preternatural power, surpassing the Indians themselves in the lore and craft of forest and trail. It was said too, that the girl, Lucy Upton, who became Henry Ware's wife and who was Harry's great-grandmother, had received this same gift of forest divination. His own first ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... has hitherto been printed, is directly opposite to our poet's and his speaker's meaning. As I have stopped it, the sense quadrates with the context: and surely it is one unalterable property of philosophy to make seeming strange and preternatural phenomena familiar and reducible to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... when geometry and mechanics were known in their simplest elements mainly, and considered the marvellous secrets of creation. The absolute rotundity of the pedifacture of the insect must have seemed the result of a sense little less than preternatural, to people who were not accustomed to reason away all recognition of the preternatural. But that which was wonderful to me, the power of weighing so accurately the load he was to propel, must have been not a little amazing to them, less familiar than we have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... alcove on the margin of the basin, and sat down; but had not rested many moments, when to his astonishment he beheld descending from the sky a company of beautiful damsels, whose robes of light green silk floating in the air seemed their only support. Alarmed at such a preternatural appearance, he retired to the end of the alcove, from whence he watched their motions. They alighted on the brink of the water, and having thrown off their robes, stood to the enraptured view of Mazin in native loveliness. Never ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon. |
