"Mystic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... medical folk-lore, one of the most interesting relates to amulets and protective charms, which represent an important stage in the gradual development of Medicine as a science. And especially noteworthy among medical amulets are those inscribed with mystic sentences, words, or characters, for by their examination and study we may acquire some definite knowledge of the mental condition of the people who ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... formed the gateway to the town, and the girl recalled, with a wave of self-pity, the feeling of exaltation with which she had first looked upon that splendid purple-walled canyon rising to the west. It had appealed to her at that time as the gateway to a mystic sanctuary. Now it was but the lair of thieves and murderers, ferocious and obscene. Only one kindly human soul dwelt ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... drives on to the Thames. Presently retreating, it meets another pursuing Antarctic wave, which, thus opposed in its straightforward course, recoils into St. Michael's Bay, then plunges, as it were, upon a terrible foe. They twine and strive in mystic conflict, and, in rage of equal power, neither vanquished nor conquering, circle, mad and desperate, round the Channel Isles. Impeded, impounded as they riot through the flumes of sea, they turn furiously, and smite the cliffs and rocks ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Europe" with the remark that Chrestien de Troyes gives only one side of him, and therefore does not give him at all. The Lancelot of board and bower, of travel and tournament, he does very fairly. But of the Lancelot of the woods and the hermitage, of the dream at the foot of the cross, of the mystic voyage and the just failing (if failing) effort of Carbonek, he gives, because he ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... ways, descending, as we go, through an intricate labyrinth. We arrive in a large room, dimly lighted. Ghastly images are before us and around us, the mystic symbols of a horrid religion! The walls are hung with hideous shapes and skins of wild beasts. We can see the fierce visages of the grizzly bear, of the white buffalo, of the carcajou, of the panther, and the ravenous ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... dead and the dying. He walked on—slowly and mechanically back to the scene of the overwhelming cataclysm where all his hopes lay irretrievably buried. He walked on—majestic as he had never been before, in the brilliant throne-room of the Tuileries or the mystic vastness of Notre Dame when the Imperial crown sat so ill upon his plebeian head. . . . He walked on—silent, exalted and great—great through the ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... do not mean that St. John does not trouble about historical accuracy. His history is often more minute than that of the Synoptists. But his purpose is to bring his readers into deeper life through union with the God who is in Christ and is Christ. The true mystic ever desires to maintain the knowledge of this inward union in life with God. It is a knowledge which is made possible by obedience, made perfect by love, and causes not new ecstasies, but a new character. St. John adjusts all his material to this one ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... if you plan it, he Changes organity With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity - Driving your foes to the verge of insanity. Barring tautology, In demonology, 'Lectro biology, Mystic nosology, Spirit philology, High class astrology, Such is his knowledge, he Isn't the man to require an apology Oh! My name is JOHN WELLINGTON WELLS, I'm a dealer in magic and spells, In blessings and curses, And ever-filled purses - In prophecies, witches, and knells. ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... soil for tribal instincts and passions. The passionate loves and hatreds of the clans, their pride of race, their deathless lealty; and more than all, and better than all, their religious instincts, faiths and prejudices; these, with the mystic, wild loveliness of heather-clad hill and rock-rimmed loch, of roaring torrent and jagged crags, of lonely muir and sunny pasture nuiks; all these, and ten thousand nameless and unnamable things united ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... perhaps, unwilling in his own person to attest at once the rival powers of a sham prophecy and a real American bullet, he prudently took a position on an adjacent eminence; and, when the action began, he entered upon the performance of certain mystic rites, at the same time singing a war-song. In the course of the engagement, he was informed that his men were falling: he told them to fight on,—it would soon be as he had predicted; and then, in louder and wilder strains, his inspiring battle-song was heard commingling ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... foolishest love of Ornament, what have they not become! Increased Security and pleasurable Heat soon followed: but what of these? Shame, divine Shame (Schaam, Modesty), as yet a stranger to the Anthropophagous bosom, arose there mysteriously under Clothes; a mystic grove-encircled shrine for the Holy in man. Clothes gave us individuality, distinctions, social polity; Clothes have made Men of us; they are threatening to make Clothes-screens ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... sudden "Haw" and a fresh basin of magnificent primeval forest would open before the travellers. And so the unending ocean of mountain rollers and forest troughs continued. No variation, save from the dead white of the open snowfields to the heavy shadows of the forest. Always the strange, mystic grey twilight; the dazzling sparkle of glinting snow; the biting air which stung the flesh like the sear of a red-hot iron; the steady run of dogs and men. On, on, with no thought of time to harass the mind, only ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... was inspired, and from him came, As from the Pythian's mystic cave of yore, Those oracles which set the world in flame, Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more: Did he not this for France, which lay before Bowed to the inborn tyranny of years? Broken and trembling to the yoke she bore, Till by the voice of him and his compeers Roused up ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... Viking's raven Made that mystic spot his rest; Year by year within the eyot Brooded he as on a nest; And no man would ever venture To invade the lone domain Where in solitary scheming The grim ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... reference to 'something well known' thus suits the highest Self very well; and also the clause which denotes immediate perception ('is seen') appears quite suitable, since the highest Self is directly intuited by persons practising mystic concentration of ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... the wisdom that is eternal, the wisdom in instinct, than themselves. There is always something sacred about children. And he had never lost the sense of it amid the dust of his worldly knowledge. But about these children, about them or within them, there floated, perhaps, something that was mystic, something that was awful and must not be disturbed. Hermione did not feel it. How could she? He himself had withheld from her for many years the only knowledge that could have made her share his present feeling. He could tell her nothing. Yet he could not ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Osiris, King of Egypt, was credited with the invention of writing and hieroglyphics, the drawing up of the laws of the Egyptians, and the origination of many sciences and arts. The Alexandrian school ascribed to him the mystic learning which it amplified; and the scholars of the Middle Ages regarded with enthusiasm and reverence the works attributed to him — notably a treatise on the ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... major already in the hands of an inspector, who was passing all his pieces after carelessly looking into one: the official who received the declarations on board had noted a Grand Army button like his own in the major's lapel, and had marked his fellow-veteran's paper with the mystic sign which procures for the bearer the honor of being promptly treated as a smuggler, while the less favored have to wait longer for this indignity at the hands of their government. When March's own inspector came he was as civil and lenient ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... artistic, Talk a jargon new and strange? Will this feeling, subtle, mystic, Even reach the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 25, 1893 • Various
... secluded cove, in which the sea-maids once had played, no doubt, Marjory and Coleman sat in silence. He was below her, and if he looked at her he had to turn his glance obliquely upward. She was staring at the sea with woman's mystic gaze, a gaze which men at once reverence and fear since it seems to look into the deep, simple heart of nature, and men begin to feel that their petty wisdoms are futile to control these strange spirits, as wayward as ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... Indians were afraid to lay hands upon these dealers in death. Awe held them back from wreaking their sinister designs upon the fearless men who went as ever into the pestilential tepees, that through the mystic drop and sign they might rescue the poor victims from an ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... let Madame de Rambouliet p-ss on.- -And, ye fair mystic nymphs! go each one PLUCK YOUR ROSE, and scatter them in your path,—for Madame de Rambouliet did no more.— I handed Madame de Rambouliet out of the coach; and had I been the priest of the chaste Castalia, I could not have served at her fountain ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... as elsewhere, positively profess themselves to be, a small association of talismanic characters, fraught with such magical and potential influence, in favour of the possessor, that the slightest glance of this mystic charm no sooner saluted the eye of a Sicilian or Neapolitan governor, than he was incapable of regarding any other object except what the bearer presented to his dazzled view, or of hearing any other injunction ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... involuntarily leaned forward; an audible gasp of awe and shrinking, as all instinctively drew back before the sight that confronted them. Across the Prophet's breast, in marks of a cruel laceration, ran the symbolic octagonal figure of the Mystic sect. ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... that life which your love had taught me to prize, I had recourse to means which I trembled at employing. You remember that night which I past in St. Clare's Sepulchre? Then was it that, surrounded by mouldering bodies, I dared to perform those mystic rites which summoned to my aid a fallen Angel. Judge what must have been my joy at discovering that my terrors were imaginary: I saw the Daemon obedient to my orders, I saw him trembling at my frown, and found that, instead of selling my soul to a Master, my courage had purchased ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the mystic regulation Of our dark Association, Ere you open conversation With another kindred soul, You must eat a ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... and imagined herself back in her cruel times. He learned a few things about that mystic period she would never disclose. And he was glad that she had never told him more. He fled from her, for eavesdropping on a delirium has something of the contemptible quality of ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... again, and not visible from the garden below, stood a temple of the "Shingon" sect, the most mystic of the old esoteric Buddhist forms. To the rear of this the broad, low, rectangular buildings of a nunnery, gray and old as the temple itself brooded among high hedges of the sacred mochi tree. This retreat had been famous for centuries throughout Japan. More than ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt, as you first caught sight of that coy, retired place,—surely nothing could happen there, without its full accompaniment of thought or reverie. White-nights! so you might interpret its old Latin name.* "The red rose came first," says a quaint German mystic, speaking of "the mystery of so-called white things," as being "ever an after-thought—the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material—the white queen, the white witch, the white mass, which, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... the two together, and we discoursed on the mystic ways of women, omitting all reference, as men do, to the exceptional paragon of femininity who reigned in our respective hearts. Perhaps we did a foolish thing in thus abandoning saint and hungry convert to their sympathetic intercourse. The saint could hold her own; ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... hence the Hesperides, daughters of the Western Star, had the task of watching the golden apples planted by the goddess Hera in the garden of the gods, on the other side of the river Oceanus. One of the labors of Hercules was to fetch three of those mystic apples for the king of Mycenae. The poet Euripides thus refers to the Gardens of the West, when the Chorus wish to fly "over the ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... as the ghost of buried Denmark But you shall be satisfied. I swear by the mystic gridiron of the fraternity, and by the legs thereof, of which the images are Beelzebub, Mohammed, Johannes Secundus, and so forth—nay, by that memorable volume, so revered in the eyes of the club, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... discoveries of GALILEO was felt almost more in the moral than in the scientific world. The mystic number of the planets was broken up by the introduction of four satellites to Jupiter. That Venus emulated the phases of our moon, overthrew superstition and seated the Copernican theory firmly. The discovery of "an innumerable ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... their thrones were mystic characters engraved, symbol after symbol, line below line—the ancient wisdom of the Egyptians, wherein Moses the man of God was learned of old—why should not he know it too? What awful secrets might not be hidden there about the ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... one of these cutting-exhibitions, Emma was likely to be not quite her usual brisk self. A mystic glow replaced the alert brightness of her eye. Her wide-awake manner gave way to one of ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... fountain of the pre-Socratic philosophy, to whose ancient sages thought had still presented itself with sensuous vividness. The researches of physical science—which, suitably treated, afford even now so excellent a handle for mystic delusion and pious sleight of hand, and in antiquity with its more defective insight into physical laws lent themselves still more easily to such objects—played in this case, as may readily be conceived, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... day what he had seen a couple of Chinamen do in a Californian garden. They had a flower-bed to plant, about forty feet long; and each a basket of seedlings to plant it with, and a slip of wood for a model, with mystic unintelligible signs inscribed thereon: WELCOME HOME in English capitals. One went to one end of the bed and the other to the other, and they began their planting. They made no measurements or calculations; used no rod or line; but just worked ahead till they met in the middle. When that ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... more;—the heart is torn By views of woe we cannot heal; Long shall I see these things forlorn, And oft again their griefs shall feel, As each upon the mind shall steal; That wan projector's mystic style, That lumpish idiot leering by, That peevish idler's ceaseless wile, And that poor maiden's half-form'd smile, While struggling for the full-drawn sigh! - ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... their unknown God by the sacrifice of every moral virtue. There were many who pretended to confess or to relate the ceremonies of this abhorred society. It was asserted, "that a new-born infant, entirely covered over with flour, was presented, like some mystic symbol of initiation, to the knife of the proselyte, who unknowingly inflicted many a secret and mortal wound on the innocent victim of his error; that as soon as the cruel deed was perpetrated, the sectaries drank up the blood, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... was never more to see, While yet his heart was planning his return, Short, sharp and swift the message came, and he Passed to his long home o'er the mystic bourne. ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... the lamps are beginning to burn dimly. It is already twelve o'clock. Twelve strokes from the hall beneath fall upon Tita's ear as she goes hurriedly towards her own room. It is the midnight hour, the mystic hour, when ghosts ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... a Cambridge graduate and Catholic mystic, concludes his poem, The Flaming Heart, with this ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of New England the militia and volunteers poured in, and in three days after the fight, twenty thousand armed men were encamped between the rivers Mystic and Roxburgh, thus besieging Boston. They at once set to work throwing up formidable earthworks, the English troops remaining within their intrenchments across the neck of land ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... the expiration. Both seasons have their equinoxes, both their filmy, hazy air, their ruddy forest tints, their cold rains, their drenching fogs, their mystic moons; both have the same solar light and warmth, the same rays of the sun; yet, after all, how different the feelings which they inspire! One is the morning, the other the evening; one is ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... utility may compel the poor human being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his Babylon of abstractions. Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside. The mystic can live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and those of ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... from the section of one of the metropolitan journals which carries a host of such advertisements as "spirit medium," "psychic palmist," "yogi mediator," "magnetic influences," "crystal gazer," "astrologer," "trance medium," and the like. At once I thought of the sallow, somewhat mystic countenance of Dudley, and the idea flashed, half-formed, in my mind that somehow this clue, together with the purchase of the book on clairvoyance, might prove ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... and suited the gesture to the word. He seized the Eagle and advanced a step and those who watched him so keenly noticed how he trembled. It was to him as if the Emperor were there again. Some mystic aura of his mighty presence seemed to overhang the ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... adapted for the exposition of his thoughts contribute to the difficulty of obtaining a methodical view of Bruno's philosophy. It has, therefore, been disputed whether he was a pantheist or an atheist, a materialist or a spiritualist, a mystic or an agnostic. No one would have contended more earnestly than Bruno himself, that the sage can hold each and all of these apparent contradictions together, with the exception of atheism; which last is a simple impossibility. The fragmentary and impassioned exposition which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... walked through the park, she was conscious—for the first time perhaps—of a certain alloy mixed with her gladness. Yet she loved him—oh, yes! just, just as much as ever. The halo of romance with which she had framed in his mystic personality was in no way dimmed, but in a sense she almost feared him, for at times his muffled voice sounded singularly vehement, and his words betrayed the uncontrolled ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... ways, and all who are interested in it must see to it that their religion does not escape control and wreck fraternity. Even mystic prayer and contemplation, which is commonly regarded as the flower of religious life, may make ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... and sands, seen through the netting of tree branches, were like sweet bursts of laughter in the forests; and the glory of the heather was a wordless song in praise of Scotland. Yet in these flying Galloway landscapes there was an impression of the mystic and melancholy, which reminded Sir S. of "The Twilight of the Gods": strange purple rocks jutting out into water coldly bright as a sheet of mercury, and desolate islands remote and haunted as the place where Gunter and his sister lived in the opera. ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of heart; not so am I; For mine is tender, soft, compassionate, And its delight is doing good to all. In the dim caverns of the gloomy Dis, Where, tracing mystic lines and characters, My soul abideth now, there came to me The sorrow-laden plaint of her, the fair, The peerless Dulcinea del Toboso. I knew of her enchantment and her fate, From high-born dame to peasant ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... grant of land made by the company, after it had got fairly under way, was of six hundred acres to Governor Winthrop, on the 6th of September, 1631, "near his house at Mystic." The next was to the deputy-governor, Thomas Dudley, on the 5th of June, 1632, of two hundred acres "on the west side of Charles River, over against the new town," now Cambridge. The next, on the 3d of July, 1632, was three hundred acres to John Endicott. It is described, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... the task of building a splendid chapel (within the precincts of his palace), begun in 1245, and finished three years later, immediately after which the king set out on his Crusade. The monument breathes throughout the ecstatic piety of the mystic king; it was consecrated in 1248, in the name of the Holy Crown and the Holy Cross, by Eudes de Chateauroux, Bishop of Tusculum and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... will gain At last my triumph over thy disdain. This lofty mountain nigh, Raised to the star-lit palace of the sky, And this dark cavern's gloom, Of two that live, so long the dismal tomb, Are the rough school wherein From magic art its mystic lore I win, And such perfection reach That I can now my mighty master teach. Seeing, that on this day, since I came here The sun completes its course from sphere to sphere, I from my prison cell come forth to view What in the light ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... woman of distinguished manner, with a somewhat oval face and small, delicate features, overcast at times with a shade of melancholy. She had a somewhat distant manner which she redeemed by a gesture of charming welcome, or a gracious phrase. She was pious, but without bigotry, a mystic whose religion was that of St. John, all gentleness and impulse. She read Swedenborg, St. Martin, and Jacob Boehm. She had an ardent and untrammelled imagination, but her character was firm. Her decisions were promptly taken and she knew how ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... feels in the hallowed precincts of a mediaeval temple. The grandeur and mystery of the world throw him into a kind of enchantment: his own soul and that of the universe touch and commune with each other. In his rapt verses we feel some of that mystic thrill felt by a devotee in the open sanctuary of the Almighty. No man ever interpreted Nature in such inspired strains as William Wordsworth. What supremely delights the lover of scenery is that this poet's muse can overwrap the exact and detailed ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... geographical limitation was always important and was one cause of the spread of the decentralized and democratic Baptist faith among the slaves. At the same time, the visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their mystic temperament. To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in membership among Negroes, and has a million and a half communicants. Next in popularity came the churches organized in connection with the ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... should ask the Amulet about that. It's a dangerous thing, trying to live in a time that's not your own. You can't breathe an air that's thousands of centuries ahead of your lungs without feeling the effects of it, sooner or later. Prepare the mystic circle and consult ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... the same; And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame; Live here, great heart; and love, and die, and kill; And bleed, and wound, and yield, and conquer still. Let this immortal life where'er it comes Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms. Let mystic deaths wait on't; and wise souls be The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee. O sweet incendiary! show here thy art, Upon this carcase of a hard cold heart; Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... who read Rabelais and love him, one can offer no better wish than that the mystic wine of his Holy Bottle may fulfil their heart's desire. Happy, indeed, those who are not "unwillingly drawn" by the "Fate" we all must follow! "Go now, my friends," says the strange Priestess, "and may that Circle whose Centre is everywhere and its Circumference ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... like a jewel; Ten heads,—though I sometimes count more; Six mouths that are cubic and cruel; Of mixed arms and legs, twenty-four; Descending in Symbolic glories Of lissome triangles and squares; Oh, mystic and subtle Dolores, Our ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... compass and the opening-up of the Western hemisphere made it possible for the poor to escape from European masters whom they were unable to vanquish; and that the cheapness of books was linking the minds of the masses to the sources of learning and of religious tradition. It cannot but excite our mystic wonder that for nearly one hundred thousand years every new mastery of man over physical Nature was such that it inevitably played into the hands of rulers by strengthening their monopoly of initiative; and that then, at last, and ever since the fifteenth century after Christ, each new mechanical ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... souls who came here 40 years ago are fast passing away across the Mystic River, and those who trod on foot the hot and dusty trail are giving way to those who come in swiftly rolling palace cars, and who hardly seem to give a thought to the difference between then and now. Those who came early cleared the way and started the great stream ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... beckoned to the scarecrow, throwing so much magnetic potency into her gesture, that it seemed as if it must inevitably be obeyed, like the mystic call of the loadstone, when it summons ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... retreat during the beautiful Spring days. If it depended only on me, how soon should I be there beside you! But to the Six Campaigns there is a Seventh to be added, and will soon open; either because the Number 7 had once mystic qualities, or because in the Book of Fate from all eternity the"—... "Jesuits banished from France? Ah, yes:—hearing of that, I made my bit of plan for them [mean to have my pick of them as schoolmasters in Silesia here]; and am waiting ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that she was swayed by a pure and mystic passion. De Seze, on the other hand, believed this mystic passion to be genuine love. Coming to visit her at Nohant, he was revolted by the clownish husband with whom she lived. It gave him an esthetic shock to see that she had borne children to this boor. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... this delightful verification of travellers' tales; she could afford to hold all that in reserve. But just to-day, just at this moment, she only wanted to watch the slender prow, skimming the wonderful opaline waters, drawing ever nearer to those mystic islands floating over yonder like a dream within a dream. She wondered vaguely at May's vivid alertness; for her sister, claiming the privilege of youth, was enjoying the freedom of the gondola, perching here and there as her ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... Incorporated, it would not be Bonbright Foote VII who was master. It would be an automaton, a continuation of other automatons.... It is said the Dalai Lama is perpetual, always the same, never changing from age to age. A fiction maintained by a mystic priesthood supplying themselves secretly with fresh Dalai Lama material as needful—with a symbol to hold in awe the ignorance of their religionists.... Bonbright saw that he was expected to be ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... four years had wrought in him. He remembered only that Duggan had been his friend, that a hundred times they had sat together in the quiet glow of long evenings, telling tales of the great river they both loved. And always Duggan's stories had been of that mystic paradise hidden away in the western mountains—the river's end, the paradise of golden lure, where the Saskatchewan was born amid towering peaks, and where Duggan—a long time ago—had quested for the treasure which he knew was hidden somewhere there. ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... the speculations of human reason.[7] The biographer of Frederick apparently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will, tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is a vast difference between this and the absolutism of the mystic. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... eyes two spirits dwell, The sweetest and the purest That ever wove Love's mystic spell, Or plied his arts the surest: No smile of morn, Though heaven-born, Nor sunshine earthward straying, E'er charmed the sight With half the light That round thy ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... a mystic and lived in the ideal. This deeply religious quality in his nature led him into theology, and he became ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the light that shone On Mohammed's uplifted crescent, On many a royal gilded throne And deed forgotten in the present; He saw the age of sacred trees And Druid groves and mystic larches; And saw from forest domes like these The builder bring his ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... die like a lady! I will not feast like a vampire on her dead body, nor shall you. You have other vials in the casket of better hue and flavor. What is this?" continued Angelique, taking out a rose-tinted and curiously-twisted bottle sealed on the top with the mystic pentagon. "This looks prettier, and may be not less sure than the milk of mercy in its effect. What ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... as one of the household. Once or twice, the week after the funeral, he came in the evening, and asked for a cup of tea. Then Catherine sat by and dozed while Esther talked mysticism with Hazard, who was himself a mystic of the purest water. By this time Esther had learned to look on the physical life, the daily repetition of breakfast and dinner, as the unreal part of existence, and apologized to herself for conceding so much to habit, or put it down to Catherine's account. Her illusions were not ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... at the present day after escaping revolutions and earthquakes, is a true Bethel, one of those rare spots in the world on which rests the mystic ladder which joins heaven to earth; there were dreamed some of the noblest dreams which have soothed the pains of humanity. It is not to Assisi in its marvellous basilica that one must go to divine and comprehend St. Francis; he ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... for my priests—my priests in their linen robes, with great harps, carrying along a mystic skiff ornamented with paterae of silver. No more feasts on the lakes! no more illuminations in my Delta! no more cups of milk at Philae! For a long time Apis has ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... loved, whom she has never seen, than of any number of attractive rivals. In the blind adoration which he yields her, she takes no thought of immediate defection, for her smile always makes him happy—her voice never loses its mystic ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... thereby Unto the All draw nigh? Shall it avail to plumb the mystic deeps Of flowery beauty, scale the icy steeps Of perilous thought, thy hidden Face to find, Or tread the starry paths to the utmost verge of the sky? Nay, groping dull and blind Within the sheltering dimness of thy wings— ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... has been mistaken for the writing of Mr. Martineau; but (as clearly as reviews ever speak on such subjects) it is intimated in the opening that this new article is from a new hand, "at the risk of revealing division of persons and opinions within the limits of the mystic critical We." Who is the author, I do not know; nor can I make a likely guess at any one who was in more than ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... watered the stocks, and finally took up the crystal and looked into it with awe, wondering why the Cobbler could see so much, and she only the distorted reflection of her own face. So interested, however, for once, did she become in the inspection of this mystic globe, that she did not notice the dawn pass into broad daylight, nor hear a voice at the door below,—nor, in short, take into cognition the external world, till a heavy tread shook the floor, and then, starting, she beheld the Remorseless Baron, with a face black enough to have darkened the crystal ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... many things. It seemed to her as if all earth breathed of love; that she was the nucleus around which all flowers and perfume and everything beautiful revolved. And now she was about to open a mystic shrine, into which she would step and see and know and feel with youth's ecstasy a strange development of essential existence. And after wondering and speculating upon the affairs of love, she entered into prayerful thought ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... laid on the sand, and he knew that it was a hen bird, for he saw the male fly to the net, and tear the meshes one by one with its beak, until it had made an opening by which its mate could escape. The holy man watched this incident, and as, by virtue of his holiness, he easily comprehended the mystic sense of all occurrences, he knew that the captive bird was no other than Thais, caught in the snares of sin, and that—like the plover that had cut the hempen threads with its beak—he could, by pronouncing the word of power, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... huge chart on which all the eighty or so elements were arranged in eight groups or octaves and twelve series. Selecting one, he placed his finger on the letters "Au," Under which was written the number, 197.2. I wondered what the mystic letters and ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... a distance out into the floor of the desert there was bunch grass, mesquite, and greasewood, where the cattle might find grazing for the night. Beyond the stretch of grass spread the dead, gray dust, of the desert, desolate in the filmy, mystic haze ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... we sleep these spirits wander off for a brief space on their own mystic errands, and their doings are mirrored in our dreams. Hence the strong and abiding belief of the Manbo in dreams. These strange companions of man have no material wants yet they lead an insecure existence, exposed, as they are, to the insidious attacks of the common foes of mortals. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... the currents of the sea their round in the wonderful system of inter-oceanic circulation. There the aurora borealis is lighted up, and the trembling needle brought to rest, and there, too, in the mazes of that mystic circle, terrestrial forces of occult power, and vast influence upon the well-being of men, are continually at play.... Noble daring has made Arctic ice and waters classic ground. It is no feverish excitement nor vain ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... after all, once she remembered to take off her glasses. The worst quarter-hour when, though the roads were an amethyst rich to the artist, they were also a murkiness exasperating to the driver, yet still too light to be thrown into relief by the lamps. The mystic moment when night clicked tight, and the lamps made a fan of gold, and Claire and her father settled down to plodding content—and no longer had to take the trouble ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... Although Om, in its original sense as a word of solemn or emphatic assent, is, properly speaking, restricted to the Vedic literature, it deserves notice that it is now-a-days often used by the natives of India in the sense of "yes," without, of course, any allusion to the mystic properties which are ascribed to it in the religious works. Monier Williams gives the following account of the mystic syllable Om: "When by means of repeating the syllable Om, which originally seems ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Anti—with an i; and played ponderously on this quip. In Druidism, he observed—I am sure I cannot think why, but it was his hobby—you had a remarkable foreshadowing of Christianity; the idea of the human sacrifice, the Atonement, the Communion of Saints, the mystic Vine, which he clumsily identified with the mistletoe, and what not else. He read portions of his privately-published Tales of Taliessin. In short such happiness radiated from his pink-cheeked face and recovered eyes that ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... and restless circumstance which chanced to occur as its revelator. Then the day uprises as if conscious of his inner life and purpose. Then she gives him breadth after breadth of color, within which is traced her no longer mystic alphabet. How significant are the forms she gives him for the foreground, sweet monosyllables! There are pansies, and rue, and violets, and rosemary. Among these and their companions children walk and learn, and to the child-man, the artist to be, she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... either with his feet or his tongue. In the haze that lay between him and Bangs, the man of the robe seemed to tower and to take on a mystic dignity which had been lacking in the candid light of day. After the silence had continued for some time Bangs spoke again. His new manner showed that his eyes had been reprimanding his tongue. "Excuse me! I didn't mean ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... look from the holiest personages, that is, if we may assume that a monk is such as a matter of course. Certainly we have a right to take it for granted that the late Pope, Pius Ninth, was an eminently holy man, and yet he had the name of dispensing the mystic and dreaded jettatura as well as his blessing. If Maurice Kirkwood carried that destructive influence, so that his clear blue eyes were more to be feared than the fascinations of the deadliest serpent, it could easily be understood why he kept ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to do with this war? asks the practical man, who is the greatest mystic of all, contemptuously. Well, they have everything to do with it. For if we had understood some peace theories a little better a generation or two ago, if we had not allowed passion and error and prejudice instead of reason to dominate our policy, the sum of misery ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... ludicrous, that you forgot the classic griffin in the grotesque conception of the Italian artist. Here was a gibbering monkey, there a grinning pulcinello; now you viewed a chattering devil, which might have figured in the "Temptation of St. Anthony;" and now a mournful, mystic, bearded countenance, which might have flitted in the back scene ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... light that lingers in her eyes— The passing gleam that o'er the shadow flies; Then paint for me the secrets of her soul, That I may read as on some written scroll. If this you cannot do, then talk no more Of nature's wealth of deep and mystic lore— Of waving grass and azure skies; a face Is worth ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... up their credit, not for being just, but because they are laws; 'tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by fools, still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but always by men, vain and irresolute ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the most rational of our modern Platonists, abounds, however, with the most extravagant reveries, and was inflated with egotism and enthusiasm, as much as any of his mystic predecessors. He conceived that he communed with the Divinity itself! that he had been shot as a fiery dart into the world, and he hoped he had hit the mark. He carried his self-conceit to such extravagance, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... available this evening. An "old chum" had asked Miss Kirk out to supper, and Miss Child having snubbed her faithful lion man for reasons which had appeared good at the time, had no one to give her the key to those dozen mystic words which might as well have been written ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... When the mystic midnight passes, the bustle of Fleet Street slackens; but on each side of the thoroughfare hundreds of workers with hand and brain are toiling with eager intensity. In tall buildings here and there the lights glitter on every floor, and throw their long shafts through the gloom; not ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... trees or other marks of cultivation, and rendered almost totally unproductive by the barbarism of the government. In a narrow dell, formed by two lofty precipices, are the ruins of a monastery, being in the neighborhood of that mystic Bethel where Jacob enjoyed his vision of heavenly things, and had his stony couch made easy by the beautiful picture of ministering angels ascending and descending from the presence of ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... of these jugglers generally accompany the armies, when they take the field, feeding the commanders with promises of victory, making the camp the scene of their mummeries and impostures, and dealing in amulets, containing mystic words, written in characters, which none but the marabout who disposes of them can decipher. According to the price of these amulets, they have respectively the power of shielding the wearer from a poniard, a musket shot ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... his own, and in his Father's might, The Saviour comes! While as the Thousand Years Lead up their mystic dance, the Desert shouts! Old Ocean claps his hands! The mighty Dead Rise to new life, whoe'er from earliest time With conscious zeal had urged Love's wondrous plan, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... was word-master enough to make other people hark back to it also. As he writes you cannot help seeing through his eyes, and nothing which his eyes saw or his ear heard was ever dull or commonplace. It was all strange, mystic, with some deeper meaning struggling always to the light. If he chronicled his conversation with a washer-woman there was something arresting in the words he said, something singular in her reply. If he met a man in a public-house ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to peace," he said, "you would be happier. I see that I must take you out with me and teach you the hidden entrance to that mystic roadway." ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... coupling his name with Saturday articles. On the other hand, I distinctly recall having to wait one day in his chambers while Jimmy was shaving, and noticing accidentally a long, bulky envelope on his table, with the Saturday Review's mystic crest on it. It was addressed to Jimmy, and contained, I concluded, a bundle of proofs. That was so long ago as 1885. If further evidence is required, there is the undoubted fact, to which several of us could take oath, that, at Oxford, Jimmy was notorious for his sarcastic pen—nearly ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... spirit's power, So the searcher, bowed in reverence, Left untouched his evening fare As he listened to the voices Of the shadows gathering there. Here no lighted torch or camp fire With its weak and fitful ray, Could illume the mystic journey Of prayer's consecrated way. Here the silence brought its message Of forebodings, vague and deep, In its visions to the dreamer, Through ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... "beautified with comely ornament and girded about with a robe of glory," seemed a high priest fit for the whole world. Upon his head the mitre with a crown of gold engraved with holiness, upon his breast the mystic Urim and Thummim and the ephod with its twelve brilliant jewels, upon his tunic golden pomegranates and silver bells, which for the mystic ear pealed the harmony of the world as he moved. Little wonder that, inspired by the striking gathering ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... Nature-communion which we call physical science, there is the other, artistic phase. Day by day we find that the mystic influence of Nature on our human personality grows more intense and individual. Who can walk alone in your beautiful Druid Hill Park, among those dear and companionable oaks, without a certain sense of being in the ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the end of all science and poetry. Keats said that he sought the principle of beauty in all things, and poems are in a sense simply beautiful generalisations. They subject the unclassified and chaotic facts of life to the order of beauty. The mystic, meditating on the One and the Many, is also in pursuit of a generalisation—the perfect generalisation of the universe. And what is science but the attempt to arrange in a series of generalisations the facts of what we are vain enough ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... the solemn haze that soon will shine, For the beckoning hand I soon shall see, For the fitful glare of the mortal sign That bringeth surcease of agony, For the dreary glaze of the dying brain, For the mystic voice that soon will call, For the end of all this passion and pain, Wilmur is ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... you may not know it, age has no more to do with that statement than it had to do with the one when I hinted that man reached the ripe state of perfection at the mystic age of thirty-five. These are but approximate figures, and are only for use in general practice. They have no bearing on specific cases, when it is always best to ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... that one's ambitions were so limited by the Possible, for I am very much inclined to think that Mystic India is and must remain a sealed ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... concluding wonder of the altar, that then, with the windows suspended around like tablets of jewels, emanating their own glory, then he had arrived. Here the satisfaction he had yearned after came near, towards this, the porch of the great Unknown, all reality gathered, and there, the altar was the mystic door, through which all and everything must move ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... body of that love died, and left you its invulnerable soul? You see, I can give you a spirit love, I have given it you this long, long time; but not embodied passion. See, you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun—as a mystic monk to a mystic nun. Surely you esteem it best. Yet you regret—no, have regretted—the other. In all our relations no body enters. I do not talk to you through the senses—rather through the spirit. That is why we cannot love in the common sense. Ours is not an everyday affection. As yet we are ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... people went a-houseboating! What peace unutterable fell upon the worn and weary soul as it drifted lazily on, far from the noise and the toil and the reek of the world! All times were calm; all waters kind. The days rolled on in ever-changing scenes of beauty; the nights, star-gemmed and mystic, were filled with music and the ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... his race, passed from generation to generation, crowded upon him. Tododaho leaning down from his star surely heard his prayer. Tayoga shivered a little, not from cold or fear, but from emotion. The mystic spell was upon him. Far above him in the limitless void little wreaths of vapor united about a great shining star, taking the shape of a man, the shape of a great chief, wise beyond all other chiefs that had ever lived, and he distinctly saw the wise ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... the fertilizer, to God the ruler, to God the omnipotent over good and evil. Thus, you see, there is no mockery in our services, although to us they bear an inner meaning not understood by others. They worship a personality endowed with principle; we the principle itself. They see in the mystic figure the representation of a deity; we see in it the type of an attribute ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... one suppliant tear Should stay the ever-moving sphere? A sick man's lowly-breathed sigh, When from the world he turns away, And hides his weary eyes to pray, Should change your mystic dance, ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... both Hebrew and Hindu writings, which induced the Musulman to build that number of entrances to his hill-citadel? The coincidence merits passing thought. The second gateway originally bore on either side, at the level of the point of its arch, a mystic tiger, carved on the face of a stone slab, holding in its right forepaw some animal, which the Gazetteer declares is an elephant but which more closely resembles a dog. The tiger on the left of the arch alone abides in its place; the other ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... confess my sins, I am not absolved from them, and my burdened conscience seeks in vain for the helping hand which will ease the too heavy load; if I cannot perform my Easter duties, my spiritual life is a failure; the supreme and sublime act by which it perfects itself through the mystic union of my body and soul with the body, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ, is wanting.—Now, none of these sacraments are valid if they have not been conferred by a priest, one who bears the stamp of a superior, unique, ineffaceable character, through a final sacrament consisting of ordination ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Toorop, is a decided mystic, and there is a vein of mysticism in all his paintings. He is famous for his light effects in glass and pottery, and has especially a wonderful knack of painting choirs in churches ail in ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... so mystic, you cannot guess The strange tales of Ocean it tries to confess. So lady, thine eyelids, as skies shut the sea, Or shells try to whisper, are whisp'ring ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that she knew some mystic arts by means of which she could hold communion with him every night. Every morning when he came out of his room he used to say that his wife had been to him during the night and told him—this—that—and ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... true, that there is no moral excellence in it; but none the less do we admire it. God has made us so that we cannot help loving it; our souls go forth to it with an infinite longing, nor can that longing be condemned. That mystic quality that exists in these souls is a glimpse and intimation of what exists in Him in full perfection. If we remember this we shall not lose ourselves in admiration of worldly genius, but be led by it to a better understanding of what He is, of whom all the glories of poetry and ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... the biblical-critical movement was in progress. The controversy was conducted upon both sides in practically total ignorance of these facts. There are traces upon both sides of that insight which makes the mystic a discoverer in religion, before the logic known to him will sustain the conclusion which he draws. There will always be interest in the literature of a discussion conducted by reverent and, in their ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... then o'er his anointed head, With mystic words, the sacred opium shed. And, lo! her bird (a monster of a fowl, Something betwixt a Heidegger[282] and owl,) 290 Perch'd on his crown. 'All hail! and hail again, My son! the promised land expects thy reign. Know, Eusden thirsts no more for sack ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope |
