"Rapt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Perched upon the head and shoulders Of the charming Wainamoinen, Sweetly singing to the playing Of the ancient bard and minstrel. And the daughters of the welkin, Nature's well-beloved daughters, Listened all in rapt attention; Some were seated on the rainbow, Some upon the crimson cloudlets, Some upon the dome of heaven. In their hands the Moon's fair daughters Held their weaving-combs of silver; In their hands the Sun's sweet maidens ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... a castle of sand. An hour of understanding so complete that it made the heart melancholy. When he sighed, "Getting late; come on, blessed; we're dry now," it seemed that they could never again know such rapt tranquillity. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... grand head it is!" cried the young enthusiast, gazing rapt upon the complacent marble whisker so delightfully curled ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... to her Lord Skye, the British Minister, "a most agreeable man and not married, as I have the misfortune to be;" and on the other side "I have ventured to place Senator Ratcliffe, of Illinois, whose admirable speech I saw you listening to with such rapt attention yesterday. I thought you might like to know ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... in a tone the intensity of which forced her to lift her eyes to his. Molly did not see the glance, for the infinitude of her own experiences led her to find the moment favorable for gazing out of the window in a sort of rapt admiration for the Insel rose-bushes in the foreground ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... of sounds; again the clear, perfect phrase, followed by melodious little bells. Dunham and Sylvia, motionless, continued to gaze into each other's eyes, and the girl's rapt smile stirred the man, for it was kin to ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... low, wide bedstead of curled maple, with snowy Marseilles quilt, and crisply fluted pillow cases; its book shelves hanging on the wall, surmounted by a copy in oil of Angelico's Elizabeth of Hungary, with rapt face upraised as she lifted ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... brown-skinned girl of the rapt and steadfast gaze remained with him. It was, he explained to himself, the look one finds in the eyes of sailors accustomed to the limitless reach of the monotonous seas; it came from the constant contemplation of desert wastes ending ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... I should say the way to pray," Said Rev. Dr. Wise, "Is standing straight, with outstretched arms, And rapt ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... something weighed on Olive's mind to bring her there at that time. So Olive told her story, without a blush or hesitancy, from the beginning down to the receipt of the letter; and as Mrs. Dering watched her face in the pale light, so clearly expressing its dislike to any lover, and its rapt devotion to her art, she knew well enough what the ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... scientific proofs that Christ's words to 'THIS generation,' namely, this particular phase of creation,—are true. 'Blessed are they which have not seen and yet believed,' He said;—and many there are who have passed away from us in rapt faith and hope, believing not seeing, and with whom we may rejoice in spirit, knowing that all must be well with them. But now—now we are come upon an age of doubt in the world—doubt which corrodes and kills the divine spirit in man, and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... not preach," thought Harry, who was absorbed in a rapt contemplation of his sweetheart's back hair. He came back from a tender revery (by way of a little detour into the furniture business and the establishment that a man of his income could afford) to the church and the preacher and his own sins, to find the strange clergyman ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... And when we consider that thought is the gathering of loose intellectual activity into a fast focus; that creative sensibility is human feeling refined of its dross, stilled of its tumultuousness in the glow of the beautiful; that musical cadence is heard by him who can hearken with such rapt reverence as to catch some sound of the tread in divine movement, we may apprehend that a genuine poem implies, for its conception, an illuminated plenitude of mind, and involves in its production a ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... scant herbage on the flat behind the trapper was a lank, long-limbed horse from which he had just dismounted, and which looked travel-stained and weary like his master. The news the man brought was worthy of consideration, and Ralph listened with rapt attention and with a heart that beat hard and quick, though he said no word and ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... original vein of genius than his own. It is a masculine, clear, elastic, and varied diction, fitted to express all feelings, save the deepest; all fancies, save the subtlest; all passions, save the loftiest; all moods of mind, save the most disinterested and rapt; to represent incidents, however strange; characters, however contradictory to each other; shades of meaning, however evasive: and to do all this, as if it were doing nothing, in point of ease, and as if it were doing everything ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... "There I beheld a Lady glorified," to let you understand that I was certain, and am certain by its gracious revelation, that she was in Heaven; wherefore I, thinking many times how this was possible for me, went thither, rapt, as it were. Then subsequently I speak of the effect of this thought, in order to let you understand its sweetness, which was such that it made me desirous of Death, that I also might go where she was gone. And of this I speak there: "Of whom so sweetly it discoursed to me That the Soul ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... working diligently under the direction of Maria, the housekeeper, and soon begin their usual spinning chorus. Their hands and feet work busily while two verses of the song are sung, and all are remarkably diligent except Senta, who sits with her hands in her lap, gazing in rapt attention at the portrait of the Flying Dutchman, whose mournful fate has touched her tender heart, and whose haunting eyes have made her indulge in many a long day-dream. Roused from her abstraction by the chiding voice of Mary, and by her companions, ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... all about it, Jerry, will you?' urged Alick, to whom the topic of the North Pole expedition was always attractive; and he threw himself back on the mossy ground to listen in rapt attention. ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... resplendent official obeyed. The long cushion, rapt from another compartment, was placed on the knees of the quartette, and the game began. The ticket-collector examined the tickets of Brindley and Edward Henry, and somehow failed to notice that they were of the wrong colour. And at this proof ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... was in the desk; he might find salvation if he could again hide his heart in the heap and litter of papers, and again be rapt by the cadence of a phrase. He threw open his window and looked out on the dim world and the glimmering amber lights. He resolved that he would rise early in the morning, and seek once more for his true ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... four rows back, an aged cottage woman, as upright as a girl, sat with a rapt expression on her carved old face. She never moved, her eyes seemed drinking in the movements of the Rector's lips, her whole being seemed hanging on his words. It is true her dim eyes saw nothing but a blur, her poor deaf ears could not hear one word, but she sat at the angle she was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the speakers, who indeed won the prize, earnestly proposed a grand scheme, and the vast multitudes listened with rapt attention. His speech was short but fiery, and, rising to the occasion, he demanded that all his comrades should unite to destroy the simple voluntary spirit of Christian benevolence so that the church might go begging before the world and even ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... Of Dante's rapt adoration of his lady, the "Vita Nuova" tells. According to that strangest monument of devotion it was not until another nine years had passed that he had speech of her; and then Beatrice, meeting him in the street, saluted him as she passed ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... I remember the initiates, their gesture, their calm glance. I have heard how in rapt thought, in vision, they speak with another race, more beautiful, more intense than this. I could laugh— ...
— Sea Garden • Hilda Doolittle
... animal he always returned to the house, and sat in the porch, where Josephine usually found him awaiting her when she herself returned from a visit to the mill. Coming thence one day she espied him on the mountain-side leaning against a projecting ledge in an attitude so rapt and immovable that she felt compelled to approach him. He appeared to be dumbly absorbed in the prospect, which might have intoxicated a ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... I was rapt in the contemplation of my own ingenuity in having thus brilliantly attained my goal, when a stealthy noise in the next room roused me from my trance and brought up vividly to my mind the awful risks which I was running at this moment. I turned like an animal at bay to see Estelle's beautiful ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the founder of diabolism in French letters. As Sainte-Beuve wrote of Baudelaire: "S'est pris l'enfer et s'est fait diable." The lucubrations of the so-called Satanic School of Byron, Shelley and Hugo were surpassed by Baudelaire's rapt worship of evil as the great power of the world. Take his famous Litany ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... light high up in the sky told that sunrise was very near at hand, and for a few minutes Pen gazed upwards, rapt in wonder by the beauty of the sight. But as he lay and listened to the low murmur of voices, these gradually grew fainter and apparently more distant, while the ruddy specks of light paled and there ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... cried the king, in the midst of the ambassador's discourse; but then, mindful of the rules of etiquette, he mastered himself, still listening, however, with rapt attention. ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... train neared Monte Carlo—the hour was roseate and matutinal—Henry had observed Tom staring at the scenery through the window, his coffee untasted, and tears in his rapt eyes. 'What's up?' Henry had innocently inquired. Tom turned on him fiercely. 'Silly ass!' Tom growled with scathing contempt. 'Can't you feel ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... and a flood of music, grander and more solemn than he had ever heard, filled the whole edifice. He listened with rapt attention and suspended breath till the last note died away, and then sank back upon the richly cushioned seat with a feeling ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... Her voice was a rich contralto, and Warrington, who scarcely knew one tune from another, and who had but one time or bray in his repertoire—a most discordant imitation of God save the King—sat rapt in delight listening to these songs. He could follow their rhythm if not their harmony; and he could watch, with a constant and daily growing enthusiasm, the pure, and tender, and generous creature who made ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... philosophy, and of the freedom which philosophy confers; and expressed his contempt for the vulgar error which sets a value upon wealth and renown and dominion and power, upon gold and purple, and all that dazzles the eyes of the world,—and once attracted my own! I listened with rapt attention, and with a swelling heart. At the time, I knew not what had come over me; my feelings were indescribable. My dearest idols, riches and renown, lay shattered; one moment I was ready to shed bitter ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... the trees no longer hiding it, I looked down the vale, which was the gate of Tuscany. There—high, jagged, rapt into the sky—stood such a group of mountains as men dream of in good dreams, or see in the works of painters when old age permits them revelations. Their height was evident from the faint mist and grey of their hues; their outline was tumultuous, yet balanced; full of accident and poise. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... when she had nothing to do we would wander along the river through the forests, always, I noticed, by a route which took us away from the village. Each day I discovered some new accomplishment. Sometimes I would read Heine or Goethe to her, and she would grow rapt and silent. In the midst of some murmurous stanza I would suddenly stop, only to see her start and look at me as though I had committed a sacrilege, in that I had spoiled some dream of hers. Then again ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... funny volume the reader follows with rapt attention and hilarious delight, the mishaps, mortifications, confusions, and agonizing mental and physical distresses of a self-conscious, hypersensitive, appallingly bashful young man, in a succession of astounding ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... aerial. According to him, then, there are three heavens, the aerial, the starry, and one higher than both these, of which the Apostle is understood to speak when he says of himself that he was "rapt to the third heaven." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... be the tale of him whose love Was sighed between white Deirdre's breasts, It will not lift the heart above The sodden clay on which it rests. Love once had power the gods to bring All rapt ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... impressiveness almost unequalled in modern art. One knows of nothing since the tombs of the Medici that fills one with the same hushed awe as this shrouded, hooded, deeply brooding figure, rigid with contemplation, still with an eternal stillness, her soul rapt from her body on some distant quest. Is she Nirvana? Is she The Peace of God? She has been given many names—her maker would give her none. Her meaning is mystery; she is ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... affairs and being of her husband in particular; her last strength had gone in the hysteria of protracted religious emotion, during which she had become scarcely more to Jasper Penny than an attenuated, rapt ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... passed through the garden gate and walked towards the Spinney, and stood looking in a rapt way at the sunset clouds ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... who said, 'I thank Thee, Father.' For if you rightly grasp the bearing of this text, and mark what follows it in our Lord's heart and thoughts, you will see these deep eyes of solemn joy turned from the heaven to you, filmy with compassion, and those hands, then lifted in rapt devotion, stretched out to beckon you and all the world to His breast, and hear the voice that rose in that burst of thanksgiving melting into tenderness as it woos you, be you wise or ignorant, to come to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... like low-hung clouds The waving woodlands lie; Far in the West the glowing plain Melts warmly in the sky. No accent wounds the reverent air,— No footprint dints the sod,— Low in the light the prairie lies Rapt in a dream of God. ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... strange solemnity about the little scene. Anne and Leslie bowed as those receiving a benediction. Gilbert suddenly brushed his hand over his eyes; Owen Ford was rapt as one who can see visions. All were silent for a space. The little house of dreams added another poignant and unforgettable moment to its ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... His face had a rapt expression. "I'll tell you why your tickler's so popular, Fay," he said softly. "It's not because it backstops the memory or because it boosts the ego with subliminals. It's because it takes the hook out of a guy, it takes ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... an art store in Boston, a crowd of persons stood gazing intently upon a famous piece of statuary. The red curtains were drawn aside, and the white marble seemed almost to speak. A group of girls stood together, and looked on in rapt admiration. One of them said, "Just to think that a woman ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... along the sea, Old chemist, rapt in alchemy, Distilling silence, — lo, That which our father-age had died to know — The menstruum that dissolves all matter — thou Hast found it: for this silence, filling now The globed clarity of receiving space, This solves us all: man, matter, doubt, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the Holy Child, Holding a globe and sceptre, sweet and mild; The Magi bring their gifts with reverent looks, And the rapt Shepherds lean ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... photo-play was gripping in its intensity, and since Mr. Werner had clearly explained the lesson it conveyed, they followed the plot with rapt attention. In the last scene their entrance and exit was transitory, but they were obliged to admit that their features were really expressive of fear. The next instant the wall fell, burying its victims, and this rather bewildered them when they remembered that fully half an hour had ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... moment she did not answer: still sitting, with that strange, rapt, straining gaze, and with an unconscious, mechanical motion, rolling the little sand pebbles down the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... "ah, it is beautiful, wonderful!" He looked up, and Julia, seeing the rapt and humble admiration of his face, forgot that there was something ludicrous in the sight of a young man kneeling on a garden path reverently worshipping a striped flower. It was no abstract admiration of the beautiful, and no cultivated admiration for the new and strange; it was the ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... so, however, does she usurp the throne of our own personal life in those early hours when the sun, the master artist, whose touch has coloured every leaf and tinted every flower, demands her adoration. Then it is, perhaps, that she turns her thoughts from all lesser companionships and, rapt in universal worship, suffers us to pass and repass as unnoticed as the idlers in the cathedral by those who ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... was he Who upon his bended knees Rapt in silent ecstasy Of divinest self-surrender, Saw the vision ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... morning, as she sat at work, absorbed in one of these reveries, she was so far "rapt into future times," that, without perceiving that any body was present, she began to speak her thoughts, and said aloud to herself, "As if my son could ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... wonderful beauty of mouth and chin. It was fortunate that she was not very severely stunned, for Prince Boris was not only ignorant of the usual modes of restoration in such cases, but he totally forgot their necessity, in his rapt contemplation of the lady's face. Presently she opened her eyes, and they dwelt, expressionless, but bewildering in their darkness and depth, upon his own, while her consciousness of things ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... music of children's voices, where she would be safe and sheltered in infinite peace and content. But only for a moment. Swifter than the play of light there flashed before her another scene, a crowded amphitheatre of faces, tier upon tier, eager, rapt, listening, and upon the stage the singer holding, swaying, compelling them to her will. Barney felt her relaxed muscles tone up into firmness. The force of her ambition was being transmitted along those subtle spiritual nerves that ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... in a rapt tone and without looking at her questioner, so intent was she on staring out of the windows, between both of which she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... dare not call thee aloud, nor cry, Thou art so solemn, so rapt in rest, But I will whisper: Dolores, 'tis I: My heart is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... Thus my mind, wholly rapt, was gazing fixed, motionless, and intent, and ever with gazing grew enkindled. In that Light one becomes such that it is impossible he should ever consent to turn himself from it for other sight; because the Good ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and while outwardly still, he seems to move with the slow, almost monotonous swaying beat of this autumnal day. He is more contented with a "homely burden" and is more assured of "the broad margin to his life; he sits in his sunny doorway ... rapt in revery ... amidst goldenrod, sandcherry, and sumac ... in undisturbed solitude." At times the more definite personal strivings for the ideal freedom, the former more active speculations come over him, as if he would trace a certain ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... rapt in these and similar reforms, political, social, and moral, calculated to bestow on the people of the nether world the blessings of a civilisation known to the races of the upper, that I did not perceive that Zee had entered the chamber till I heard a deep sigh, and, raising my eyes, ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... older men, were half afraid of him, though proud to have him of their company. Why this reserve?—they asked, concerning the orderly, self-possessed youth, whose speech and carriage seemed so carefully measured, who was surely no poet like the rapt, dishevelled Lupus. Was he secretly in love, perhaps, whose toga was so daintily folded, and who was always as fresh as the flowers he wore; or bent on his own line of ambition: or ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... wheels, frothing green and white-streaked among mighty boulders in the gorge below. Then as we swung giddily over a gossamer-like timber bridge, the walls of quartz and blue grit fell back on either hand; and, for the first time, I gazed in rapt silence upon the cold unsullied whiteness of eternal snow, undefiled from the beginning by any foot of man. It stretched in a glimmering saw-edge high above us athwart the brightening east, and, below, smooth-scarped slopes of rock polished to a steely luster by endless ages ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... the inner apartments?" said a hen-pecked Chinaman one day to us—and we think he was consoled to hear that viragos are by no means confined to China. One of the happiest moments a Chinese woman knows, is when the family circle gathers round husband, brother, or it may be son, and listens with rapt attention and wondering credulity to a favourite chapter from the "Dream of the Red Chamber." She believes it every word, and wanders about these realms of fiction with as much confidence as was ever placed by western ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... a horrible hallucination To grudge our hymns their halcyon harmonies, When in just homage our rapt voices rise To celebrate our heroes in meet fashion; Whose hosts each heritage and habitation, Within these realms of hospitable joy, Protect securely 'gainst humiliation, When hostile foes, like harpies, would annoy. Habituated to the sound of h In history and histrionic ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... not austere; when you meet him you revere him without shrinking away in awe. His life is purity itself, but he is just as genial; his lash is not for men but for their vices; for the erring he has gentle words of correction rather than sharp rebuke. When he gives advice you cannot help listening in rapt attention, and you hope he will go on persuading you even when the persuasion is complete. He has three children, two of them sons, whom he has brought up with the strictest care. His father-in-law is Pompeius Julianus, a man of great distinction, but whose ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... yet Sheldon was certain, had the two men of them been alone, that the conversation would have been along different lines. Tudor had seen the effect on Joan and deliberately continued the flow of reminiscence, netting her in the glamour of romance. Sheldon watched her rapt attention, listened to her spontaneous laughter, quick questions, and passing judgments, and felt grow within him the dawning consciousness that he ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... of folded paper occupies the side of the little tin box. This he extracts and unfolds with a touch that is almost reverent, and, as his eyes wander over the writing, his every faculty of soul and mind and being is concentrated in rapt love upon each word. For not every day will he suffer his eyes to rest upon them, lest too great familiarity with them should dull them with a mechanical nature when seen so often. They are kept for rare occasions, and now, his waking thoughts sweet ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... hands which were bound with them. For it is more desirable and more glorious to suffer with Christ, than to be honored with him in glory: this is an honor above all others. Christ himself left heaven to meet his cross: and St. Paul received more glory from his chains, than by being rapt up to the third heaven, or by curing the sick by the touch of his scarfs, &c. He desires to feast his heart by dwelling still longer on the chains of this apostle, being himself fettered with a chain from which he would not be separated: for he declares himself to be closer ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... enamoured heart Suffused her cheek with blushes, every glance Increased the ardent transports of her soul. So mild was his demeanour, he appeared A gentle lion toying with his prey. Long they remained rapt in admiration Of each other. At length the warrior rose, And thus addressed her: "It becomes not us To be forgetful of the path of prudence, Though love would dictate a more ardent course, How oft has Sam, my father, ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... author begs leave to thank his readers for the rapt attention shown in perusing these earnest pages, and to apologize for the tears of sympathy thoughtlessly wrung from eyes unused to weep, by the graphic word-painting and fine education shown ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... graphic letter just received enables me to answer this question. "When I first met him, I looked on him with the deepest interest, and realized the charm that everyone felt. He had just gone up to Oxford, and was intensely keen on Ruskin and Browning, and devoted to music. He would listen with rapt attention when we played Chopin and Schumann to him. I used to meet him at dinner-parties when I first came out, by which time he was very enthusiastic on the Catholic side, and very fond of St. Barnabas, Pimlico, and was also deeply ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... not with elation I dwell on Hermione's madness; The result of my rapt contemplation Is sadness, ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... virtue can digest. But how unseemly is it for my sex, My discipline of arms and chivalry, My nature, and the terror of my name, To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint! Save only that in beauty's just applause, With whose instinct the soul of man is touch'd; And every warrior that is rapt with love Of fame, of valour, and of victory, Must needs have beauty beat on his conceits: I thus conceiving, [268] and subduing both, That which hath stoop'd the chiefest of the gods, Even from the fiery-spangled veil ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... hold of Barbara. She sat down by Richard's table, softly laid the dying bird in her lap, and listened with round eyes and parted lips, her rapt soul sitting ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... absorbing; rabid, raving, feverish, fanatical, hysterical; impetuous &c. (excitable) 825. impressed with, moved with, touched with, affected with, penetrated with, seized with, imbued with &c. 82; devoured by; wrought up &c. (excited) 824; struck all of a heap; rapt; in a quiver &c. n.; enraptured &c. 829. Adv. heart and soul, from the bottom of one's heart, ab imo pectore[Lat], at heart, con amore[It], heartily, devoutly, over head and ears, head over heels. Phr. the heart ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Love's rapt sense the heartstrings gently sweep With joy divinely fair, the high and deep, To call her home, She shall mount upward unto purer skies; We shall be waiting, in what ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... moonlight, So holy and so calm; The rapt peace of a summer night, When soft winds ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... branch of service is this more true than in preaching. It is such a glorious thing to be able to gather great congregations; but even this may be done and the messenger fail. It is such a delightful thing to a preacher to watch a multitude waiting spellbound beneath his eloquence in rapt attention, or swept by waves of emotion; but that multitude may disperse, the great end of preaching still unwrought and the whole attempt a splendid failure. It is possible to attract people to your preaching, possible to win the crown ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... low-browed Madonnas, no rapt Cecilias, no holy Johns nor meek Stephens, no reeling Satyrs nor vine-clad Bacchantes relieved the eye, weary of mountain ghylls, red-ribbed ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... comprehensive and penetrating thought. The rhythms, the sweep, the impetuosity of impassioned contemplation not only contain in themselves a great vitality and potency, but they often succeed in engaging the lower functions in a sympathetic vibration, and we see the whole body and soul rapt, as we say, and borne along by the harmonies of imagination and thought. In these fugitive moments of intoxication the detail of truth is submerged and forgotten. The emotions which would be suggested by the parts are replaced by the rapid emotion of transition between them; and this exhilaration ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... be," said the clergyman, going on with his subject, "who would ill use an innocent, helpless kitten!" "Like me, like me," said Fluff, or so it seemed to say, in its piteous way. The people in both aisles fixed their eyes on dear mamma, who in vain pretended to be rapt in the sermon; they knew very well by this time what was wrapped in her muff, and in the end dear mamma had to go. The denunciations of the clergyman against cruel people followed her down the aisle, and were supposed, no doubt, by those who didn't know her, to have a personal application, ...
— Harper's Young People, December 23, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... matters." The girl's voice was rapt and dreamy. Truedale put his hands across the space dividing them and took hold ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... those grand and tremendous objects of uncultivated nature with which his country abounded. His were the hanging precipice, and the foaming cataract. His ear drank in the voice of the tempest; he was rapt in attention to the roaring thunder. When the contention of the elements seemed to threaten the destruction of the universe, when Snowdon bowed to its deepest base, it was then that his mind was most filled with ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... rapt glow suffused her body. Never in all her life had she been so absolutely alone. She might as well have been in her grave. She might have been dead to all earthy things and reveling in spirit in the glory of the physical that ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... had almost reached what he supposed was the spot, when he suddenly stopped. There before him he beheld the real object of his visit. She was seated on the ground before a fire, with several children gathered about her. They were all listening with rapt attention to some story she was telling them. Dane was held spellbound at the pretty scene before him. He could look upon the girl to his heart's content without being seen, for he was sheltered by a cluster of rough, tangled trees. In all his life he had ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... is dim with snow, The light flakes falter and fall slow; Athwart the hill-top, rapt and pale, Silently drops a silvery veil; And all the valley is shut in By flickering curtains gray ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... its banks how sweet to stray, With rod and line, the livelong day, Or trace each rural charm, away From cark of every callin'! There dove-like, o'er my path would brood The spirit pure of solitude; For native each rapt, genial mood ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... this panegyric of praise and his face wore a rapt expression which amounted almost ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... magnificence, in misfortune and success, finally succumbed to the royal will. The day came, and that a drear winter day, when its last mass was sung, its last censer waved, its last congregation bent in rapt and lowly adoration before the altar there; and, doubtless, as the last tones of that day's evensong died away in the vaulted roof, there were not wanting those who lingered in the solemn stillness of the old massive pile, and who, as the lights ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... displayed his conjectural maps, and expounded his theory of a western route to India? It required but another stretch of the imagination to assemble the little conclave around the table; Juan Perez the friar, Garci Fernandez the physician, and Martin Alonzo Pinzon the bold navigator, all listening with rapt attention to Columbus, or to the tale of some old seaman of Palos, about islands seen in the ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... more than my beloved. She became for me the actual embodiment, the incarnate end, aim, and reward of all the strivings of my lonely life, from the night of my flight from St. Peter's Orphanage down to that very day. In my rapt contemplation of her, of the personality which enthralled me far, far more than her beautiful person could, I smiled over recollection of my bitter struggles in London slums, of the heart-racking anxiety and grinding humiliation ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... the door, Where shells and moss o'erlay the floor, And on whose top an hawthorn blows, Amid whose thickly-woven boughs Some nightingale still builds her nest, Each evening warbling thee to rest; Then lay me by the haunted stream, Rapt in some wild poetic dream, In converse while methinks I rove With Spenser through a ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... dream-life here is past, and, face to face with truth, "rapt from the fickle and the frail," for thee the illusion has vanished! Mayest thou also know the fulness of joy in the unbroken and serene activities ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... pleasant excursions, of which she always gives good descriptions, and also enters clearly into any historical details connected with the country. At times she was carried by the beauty and repose of the scene into rapt moods which ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... given him rapt attention. Suddenly he spoke up, forgetting his resolve not to say anything more after Ferguson had called him "innocent." "I think you're wrong, Mel," he said positively. "I was reading a book the other day called 'Lavengro.' It's all about Gipsies. Well, this fellow Lavengro was ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... it, chanting at the same time one of his native songs, I concluded. Gradually he beat faster and faster, accompanying the music, if such it could be called, with his voice. The spectators sat listening in rapt attention, when suddenly one of the women started up and began dancing, keeping capital time to the music. The faster Cudjoe played the faster she danced, till every limb and muscle seemed in movement. Round and round she went in ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... and the lady occupied herself with filling them. While she was doing so her lord left the chamber for a space, and during his absence the King and the lady were clasped in each other's arms. So rapt were the pair in their amorous dalliance that they failed to notice the return of the seneschal, who, when he saw them thus engaged, uttered an exclamation of surprise and wrath. Equitan, turning quickly, saw him, and with a cry of despair leapt into the bath that the lady ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... thin, bearded face. And, as he sipped cautiously of red wine and water, he looked at his little conquered mountain. His kindly, screwed-up eyes, his kindly, bearded lips, even his limbs seemed smiling; and not for the world would we have jarred with words that rapt, smiling man, enjoying the sacred hour of him who has just proved himself. In silence we watched, in silence left him smiling, knowing somehow that we should remember him all our days. For there was in his smile the glamour of adventure just for the sake of danger; all that high instinct ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... began to darken. The tiny threads of which it was composed twisted and shriveled and broke. Bert hunched up his knees, and sat as though rapt in brooding contemplation, while all the time that tiny shaft bored deeper and deeper into the rope like ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... thee in the end." Her eyes looked beyond his into the distance, rapt and shining; she seemed scarcely aware of his presence. "That which will bring thee down—thy hungry spirit of discovery. It will serve thee no better than it served the late Earl. But thee it will lead into paths ending in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... gazing in rapt wonder that was near to worship when the great door began to move. He saw the first hair-line crack, and the thin line of light was like a hot wire across his eyes, so quickly did he respond. Beyond, where he ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... again upon his counter. His face was rapt, and he spread his finger-tips a little, as if something within them stirred to ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... in the City by the new glory that has fallen upon the ninth of November (it is said that Sir PETER LAURIE has been so rapt by the auspicious coincidence, that he has done nothing since but talk and think of "the Prince of Wales"—that on Wednesday last he rebuked an infant beggar with, "I've nothing for you, Prince of Wales")—independently of the lustre ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... turf-edged way Pitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see With scarlet patches tagg'd deg. and shreds of grey, deg.114 Above the forest-ground called Thessaly deg.— deg.115 The blackbird, picking food, Sees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all; So often has he known thee past him stray Rapt, twirling in thy hand a wither'd spray, And waiting for the spark from heaven ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... Milton could not have done. He had none of that sympathy with which Shakspeare embraced all natural and common affections of his brother men. Milton, burning as he did with a consuming fire of passion, and yearning for rapt communion with select souls, had withal an aloofness from ordinary men sad women, and a proud disdain of commonplace joy and sorrow, which has led hasty biographers and critics to represent him as hard, austere, an iron man of iron mould. This want of interest in common life disqualified ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... expression grew rapt, and he spoke in the mystic manner which she knew and now dreaded. Her anxiety for the return of Paul Harley grew urgent—a positive need, as, meeting the gaze of the long, magnetic eyes, she felt again, like the touch of cold steel, all the penetrating force of this ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... sweat for the faithful. No, it was not that, he decided, although by regarding them thus entranced as he was he could easily have brought himself to the point of believing in a supernatural manifestation. He was too well aware of this tendency to surrender to it; so, rousing himself from the rapt contemplation of them and forsaking the hummock of grass, he climbed up into the branches of a yew-tree that stood beside the chapel, that there and from that elevation, viewing the images and yet unviewed by them directly, he could be immune ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... straightway proceed as conscientiously as they can to get up an admiration for it. A friend of mine told me a beautiful example. Two aspiring young women, of the limp-limbed, short-haired, aesthetic species, were standing rapt before the circular Madonna at the Uffizi. They had gazed at it long and lovingly, seeing it bore on its frame the magic name of Botticelli. Of a sudden one of the pair happened to look a little nearer at the accusing label. "Why, this is not Sandro," she cried, with ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... Brighton boys were long to remember was that on which they first watched a new arrival to the airdrome, an experienced flier, loop the loop and nose-dive on one of the fast chasers. The whirling, darting plane seemed so completely at the mercy of the pilot that the boys were rapt in silent wonder. That exhibition of what the birdmen of to-day call real flying was a ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll |
