"Preternatural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... overhead was of a sultry blue, yet above the coast-line of Naples, standing out with preternatural distinctness, uncouth, livid clouds straggled chaotically to the upper sky, here and there reaching lank, shadowy films, like gigantic arms, far into the zenith. Flocks of sea-birds were uneasily flying landward; screaming, they wheeled round the sphinx-like rocks, and disappeared by degrees ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... by cries of "Good! good!" "That's so!" "Sound doctrine, that!" "The Judge knows what's what!" Only one person, the questioner, a young man with a preternatural head, was unappeased. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... leap to the conclusion. "Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds," said Lord Spencer. "The spectators were now absolutely electrified. The Marquess quietly adds his usual ten" and so there an end. "Mr Evans, ere his hammer fell, made a short pause—and indeed, as if by something preternatural, the ebony instrument itself seemed to be charmed or suspended in the mid air. However, at last down dropped ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... of arriving at new truths by reasoning consists in the mere substitution of one set of arbitrary signs for another; a doctrine which they suppose to derive irresistible confirmation from the example of algebra. If there were any process in sorcery or necromancy more preternatural than this, I should be much surprised. The culminating point of this philosophy is the noted aphorism of Condillac, that a science is nothing, or scarcely any thing, but une langue bien faite; in other words, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... displayed the other part of the card he had received. The door was shut, and the carriage rolled away. When the lady raised her veil, Eliphas Levi saw that she was of mature age; and beneath her grey eyebrows were bright black eyes of preternatural fixity.' ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... of which shone wisdom preternatural in a horse, opened and looked down upon us with the calm questioning reproach one might expect from a rude awakening of the Sphinx; then the tall ears straightened and the great bulk rose to the full majesty of its seventeen hands; and while ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... disordered lungs. Every biography of the intellectual great records the dangers they have encountered, often those to which they have succumbed, in overstepping the ordinary bounds of human capacity; and while beckoning onward to the glories of their almost preternatural achievements, register, by way of warning, the fearful penalty of disease, suffering, and bodily infirmity, which Nature exacts as the price for this partial and inharmonious grandeur. It cannot be ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity—soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life—and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... oilskin packet. This, as it lay on the ground, they both eyed like two deer glowering at a piece of red cloth, and ready to leap back over the moon if it should show signs of biting. But oil-skin is not preternatural, nor has tradition connected it, however remotely, with ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... court the centre of vice and cruelty and imbecility: the misery of the time is touched but lightly, and the Maid of Arc herself is invested with a certain faint degree of mysterious dignity, ultimately represented as being in truth a preternatural gift; though whether preternatural, and if so, whether sent from above or from below, neither we nor she, except by faith, are absolutely ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... a kind of fierce disgust; it seemed the sinister counterpart of Christina's preternatural mildness at Madame Grandoni's tea-party. She had been too plausible to be honest. Without being able to trace the connection, he yet instinctively associated her present rebellion with her meeting with ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... president, so I shall await with interest more news from my little bird." Selma felt that she was talking to greater advantage than almost ever before. Her last remark banished every trace of a smile from her adversary's face, and he stood regarding her with a preternatural gravity, which should have been appalling, but which she welcomed as a sign of serious feeling on his part. She felt, too, that at last she had got the better of the ironical doctor in repartee, and that he was taking ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... watching the excited speaker; but as he regretfully added those last words I turned again, and Robert's eyes met mine,—those melancholy eyes, so full of an intelligence that proved he had heard, remembered, and reflected with that preternatural power which often outlives all other faculties. He knew me, yet gave no greeting; was glad to see a woman's face, yet had no smile wherewith to welcome it; felt that he was dying, yet uttered no farewell. He was too far across the river to return or linger ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... meaning of the doctrine of the general resurrection and judgment and eternal life, as a natural evolution of history from within, and it will spread to the minds of all men; and the misinterpretation of that doctrine so long prevalent, as a preternatural irruption of power from without, will be set aside forever. For there is a providential plan of God, not injected by arbitrary miracle, but inhering in the order of the world, centred in the propulsive heart of humanity, which beats throb by throb along the web of events, removing obstacles ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the whole life of Christ, and the early propagation of the religion, it must be borne in mind that they took place in an age, and among a people, which superstition had made so familiar with what were supposed to be preternatural events, that wonders awakened no emotion, or were speedily superseded by some new demand on the ever ready ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit "to bend the shows of things to ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... historians, like portrait painters, feel it to be their duty to impart to the characters whom they are describing a glamour, which in many cases is more or less superhuman or super-diabolical as the case may be, and to represent circumstances as they happened in the light of the preternatural. Now and then there arises a writer who is gifted with the quality to see things as they really are, and who, to use a current phrase, 'calls a spade a spade.' In an age of pretence, it is to many more or less shocking to have such persons take up ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... brings us into fellowship with the Holy Spirit, a correspondent degree of wickedness may effect a communion with evil intelligences? These are mere speculations which I advance for as little as they are worth. My serious belief amounts to this, that preternatural impressions are sometimes communicated to us for wise purposes: and that departed spirits are sometimes ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... universe, whose good offices we must secure by acts of attention and worship. I anticipate the circumstance in this place merely to show that the tendency of the human mind, clinging to a variety of preternatural protectors and benefactors, was among the obstacles with which the first preachers of the Gospel had to struggle. In the proper place I shall beg you to observe how hardly possible it would have been for those early Christian writers, to whom I have referred above, to express themselves in so strong, ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... pretensions is not at all surprising. It was to be expected that those who assumed a power so preposterous as that of prolonging the life of man for several centuries, should pretend, at the same time, to foretell the events which were to mark that preternatural span of existence. The world would as readily believe that they had discovered all secrets, as that they had only discovered one. The most celebrated astrologers of Europe, three centuries ago, were alchymists. Agrippa, Paracelsus, Dr. Dee, and the Rosicrucians, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... to seek a "funny man" among the quadrupeds, I should name another dweller of the Southwestern prairies, the jack-rabbit,—John II. let us call him. Nobody ever gets quite accustomed to the preternatural ears of this hare. In proportion they are to those of others of the Leporidae nearly what the ears of the mule are to those of the horse. When this bit of bad drawing, as big as a fawn and weighing ten pounds or so, jumps up before you and bounds away at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... their husbands can deserve, and the men are fond enough of wine; yet the number of both who can afford such expenses is so small, that the major part must refuse gratifying themselves, and the duties will rather be lessened than increased. But, allowing no force in this argument; yet so preternatural a sum as one hundred and ten thousand pounds, raised all on a sudden, (for there is no dallying with hunger,) is just in proportion with raising a million and a half in England; which, as things now stand, would probably bring that ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... i. 303).] Treaty of Seville; a part to be acted on the world-theatre, with applauses, with envies, almost from the very demi-gods? Great Kaisers, overshadowing Nature with their Pragmatic Sanctions, their preternatural Diplomacies, and making the Terrestrial Balance reel hither and thither;—Kaisers to be clenched perhaps by one's dexterity of grasp, and the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... without a creature to love me. I looked round the room for help; I saw the tables, the chairs, the places where she stood or sat, empty, deserted, dead. I could not stay where I was; I had no one to go to but to the parent-mischief, the preternatural hag, that had "drugged this posset" of her daughter's charms and falsehood for me, and I went down and (such was my weakness and helplessness) sat with her for an hour, and talked with her of her daughter, and the sweet days ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... acquires a kind of preternatural power over the future lot of his fellow-creatures. When the legislator has once regulated the law of inheritance, he may rest from his labor. The machine once put in motion will go on for ages, and advance, as if self-guided, toward a given point. When framed in a particular ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... whose zeal and sanctity were respected by the Barbarians themselves, encountered the victorious monarch, and boldly denounced the indignation of heaven against the oppressors of the earth; but the saint himself was confounded by the solemn asseveration of Alaric, that he felt a secret and preternatural impulse, which directed, and even compelled, his march to the gates of Rome. He felt that his genius and his fortune were equal to the most arduous enterprises; and the enthusiasm which he communicated to the Goths insensibly removed the popular, and almost superstitious, reverence of the nations ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... no efforts which are so efficient and powerful in the accomplishment of their end as those which a faithful wife makes to rescue and save her husband. The heart, generally so timid, seems to be inspired on such occasions with a preternatural courage, and the arm, at other times so feeble and helpless, is nerved with unexpected strength. Every one is ready to second and help such efforts, and she who makes them is surprised at her success, and wonders at the extent and efficiency ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... reeled, grasped the arm of a page, and at last, closing his eyes for a moment, as if to escape the horrible fascination of that unearthly glare (the Englishman's eyes were observed by all the guests, from the moment of his entrance, to effuse a most fearful and preternatural luster), exclaimed, "Who is among us?—Who?—I cannot utter a blessing while he is here. I cannot feel one. Where he treads, the earth is parched!—Where he breathes, the air is fire!—Where he feeds, the food is poison!— Where he turns his ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the last links which bound him to lower things. He had felt that he could do without happiness, that it was no longer essential, and that he could live on, and still love God, and cling to Him. But he is not described as of preternatural, or at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all human tenderness and susceptibility. His old life was still beautiful to him. He does not hate it because he can renounce it; and now that the struggle is ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the active duties of life to an eager being, of preternatural sharpness, with a shelving forehead and a shabby snuff-coloured coat, who (from the wharf) brought me down with his eye before the boat came into port. He darts upon my luggage, on the floor where all ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... sort, be joined with a want and necessity in the mean people, the danger is imminent and great. For the rebellions of the belly are the worst. As for discontentments, they are, in the politic body, like to humors in the natural, which are apt to gather a preternatural heat, and to inflame. And let no prince measure the danger of them by this, whether they be just or unjust: for that were to imagine people, to be too reasonable; who do often spurn at their own good: nor yet by this, whether ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... he said, "that I refuse to accept the factitious aid your thoughts have lately been bringing to me. You see I have preternatural senses. Because I was born in the snows of the mountains I am no whit whiter than those born in the purlieus of the police stations of the cities. We are simply of the same human nature. When I win regard, it must be for no idle fancy, but ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... around, I saw—as where does one not see?—some fair young faces; girls who might have played with one's little children all the better because they were so nearly children themselves; and boys of preternatural quickness, up to any job, and capable of being useful—ay, and even ornamental—members of society, if only that dreadful Bethnal Green twang could have been eradicated. The abuse of the mother tongue on the part even of these children was simply ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... would argue, not more painful, the evil of the soul is of all evils the most disgraceful; and the excess of disgrace must be caused by some preternatural greatness, or extraordinary ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... precision, appear but half alive. They have frozen each other by their primness; and your faculties feel the numbing effects of the atmosphere the moment you enter it. All those thoughts, so nimble and so apt awhile since, have disappeared—have suddenly acquired a preternatural power of eluding you. If you venture a remark to your neighbour, there comes a trite rejoinder, and there it ends. No subject you can hit upon outlives half a dozen sentences. Nothing that is said excites any real interest in you; and ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the Dabistan that in the 17th century Kashmir continued to be a great resort of Magian mystics and sages of various sects, professing great abstinence and credited with preternatural powers. And indeed Vambery tells us that even in our own day the Kashmiri Dervishes are pre-eminent among their Mahomedan brethren for cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms, etc. (Dab. I. 113 seqq. II. 147-148; Vamb. Sk. of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... a terror fell On the great house, as if a passing-bell Tolled from the tower, and filled each spacious room With secret awe, and preternatural gloom; The petted boy grew ill, and day by day Pined with mysterious malady away. The mother's heart would not be comforted; Her darling seemed to her already dead, And often, sitting by the sufferer's side, "What can ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... tracery of the stranger's form had been swallowed by the flood of misty light, which, by this time, rolled along the sea like drifting vapour, semi-pellucid, preternatural, and seemingly tangible. The ocean itself appeared admonished that a quick and violent change was nigh. The waves ceased to break in their former foaming and brilliant crests, and black masses of the water lifted their surly summits against the eastern horizon, no longer shedding ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... in obedience to her vision, would not eat when she was hungry, nor drink when she was thirsty. However that was, I would risk the event of the prosecution on this single circumstance, that, without the interposition of some preternatural cause, this conduct of the prisoner's must appear to exceed all ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... trust in aphorisms. We do not know what Mrs. Gotfry's ideas are on the subject. Nor can we say how she felt in the face of these strange coincidences. In her religious heart, might there not be some shadow of an ancient superstition, some mystical, instinctive strain, in which the preternatural is resolved? That is a question which neither our Scribe nor his Master will help us to answer. And we, having been faithful so far in the discharge of our editorial duty, can not at this ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... its sole claim to be ever mentioned again by mankind. As there was no performance, nor an intention of any, in that Julich-Berg matter, Excellenz Seckendorf had the task henceforth of keeping, by art-magic or the PRETERnatural method,—that is, by mere help of Grumkow and the Devil,—his Prussian Majesty steady to the Kaiser nevertheless. Always well divided from the English especially. Which the Excellency Seckendorf managed to do. For six or seven years ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... our language, but in the literature of all Europe. We have, certainly, sometimes doubted whether the miraculous destruction of the vessel in the presence of the pilot and hermit, was not an error, in respect of its bringing the purely preternatural into too close contact with the actual frame-work of the poem. The only link between those scenes of out-of-the-world wonders, and the wedding guest, should, we rather suspect, have been the blasted, unknown being himself who ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... God for a blessing on your counsels; though I am not prepared to give you any advice on this important occasion. Even I myself," subjoined he, "when I was lately offering up petitions for his majesty's restoration, felt my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and considered this preternatural movement as the answer which Heaven, having rejected the king, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... with more than the certainty of sense; and as he bows before the altar, or commits himself to the "Mother of God," the real presence and the invisible world are as immediately with him as the breviary and the crucifix. Through the whole Catholic atmosphere is diffused a preternatural medium of clairvoyance, which at every touch of its ritual vibrates into activity, and opens to adoring view ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... sign of distinction, and to write a schoolboy history like "Eginhard's Charlemagne" was a prodigy; when to lead clean lives, and to labor as hosts are doing now for their fellows made a man a saint; the literary and spiritual power of the apostles was nothing less than preternatural. ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... time to prevent the tiger from doing any further damage. The Baigas believe that the ghost of the victim, if not charmed to rest, resides on the head of the tiger and incites him to further deeds of blood, rendering him also secure from harm by his preternatural ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... he spoke they were both startled by a strange clattering noise at the window, which was accompanied by a shrill, odd kind of shriek, which sounded fearful and preternatural ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... Lyell and Hooker (for I shall have to treat of it) and wrote out my arguments in opposition; but you will be glad to hear that neither Lyell nor Hooker thought much of my arguments; nevertheless, for once in my life I dare withstand the almost preternatural sagacity of Lyell. You ask about land-shells on islands far distant from continents: Madeira has a few identical with those of Europe, and here the evidence is really good, as some of them are sub-fossil. In the Pacific islands there are cases of identity, which I ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... read them with a double sentiment. The interest which you express in my thoughts, and their influence over you, I can explain in no other way than as arising from similarity of temperament and of taste, heightened exceedingly by an instinctive tendency— almost preternatural—to reverence whatever approaches, either in Spirit or Form, your standard of the Ideal. Of minds of this class it is impious to ask for tempered expressions. They admire, they marvel, they love. These are the law of their ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... cannot be denied, the aspect of that Parlement is questionable. Already among the Notables, in that final symphony of dismissal, the Paris President had an ominous tone. Adrien Duport, quitting magnetic sleep, in this agitation of the world, threatens to rouse himself into preternatural wakefulness. Shallower but also louder, there is magnetic D'Espremenil, with his tropical heat (he was born at Madras); with his dusky confused violence; holding of Illumination, Animal Magnetism, Public Opinion, Adam Weisshaupt, Harmodius and Aristogiton, and all manner of ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... is persecuted should thrive the more in consequence of persecution, can excite no surprise in any one at all skilled in the history of human nature; but this is altogether inadequate to account for that preternatural eagerness with which men seek after this wonderful plant. In fact, there appears to be some occult charm connected with it—some invisible spirit, which, be it angel, or be it devil, has never yet been, and perhaps ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... universe, and the a priori ideas of an unconditioned Cause and an infinite Intelligence which arise in the mind in presence of these facts, are inadequate to produce the logical conviction that it is the work of an intelligent mind, how can any preternatural display of power produce a rational conviction that God exists? "If the universe could come by chance or fate, surely all the lesser phenomena, termed miraculous, might occur so too."[94] If we find ourselves standing ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... particularly after violent heats; but I do not vouch this upon my own experience, which has been pretty ample. They are preceded by a low rumbling noise like distant thunder. The domestic cattle and fowls are sensible of the preternatural motion, and seem much alarmed; the latter making the cry they are wont to do on the approach of birds of prey. Houses situated on a low sandy soil are least affected, and those which stand on distinct hills suffer most from the shocks because the further ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... he could have imbibed so much fairy lore, but he must have eagerly assimilated and recollected whatever he heard, holding them as tidings from his true kith and kin; and, indeed, when he was running on thus, Mrs. Woodford sometimes felt a certain awe and chill, as of the preternatural, and could hardly believe that he belonged to ordinary human nature. Either she or the Doctor always took the night-watch after the talking mood set in, for they could not judge of the effect it might ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and a preternatural light are thrown in, with a sermon which it were superfluous to quote. In another we have the derangement of clocks and watches. Lord Lyttelton's stepmother believed in the dove. Lady Lyttelton did without a dove, ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... said corporal in the course of this marketing tour. The "dimmocking bags" have been emptied; the accumulations in the sergeant-major's hands have been drawn, and the corporal, freighted with the joint savings, has the task of expending the same in beer. In this undertaking he manifests a preternatural astuteness. He is not to be inveigled into giving his order at a public-house,—swipes from the canteen would do as well as that,—nor do the bottled-beer merchants tempt him with their high prices for dubious quality. No, he goes direct to the fountain-head. If there be a brewery in ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... often lacking even in generals who have served with utmost distinction in high subordinate places, when they are called to the sole and decisive direction of armies: he had that royal mettle, that preternatural decision of character, ever tempered with caution and wisdom, which leads a great commander, when true occasion arises, resolutely to give general battle, or a swing out away from his base upon a precarious but promising campaign. Here you have moral heroism; ordinary valor is more ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... Queen Mab something rather too preternatural about this, though she could well believe it, as she looked at the wonderful manner in which the watches turned themselves out. It frightened her, and they proceeded farther on, and came to much artillery, carefully constructed by the ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... lists and lead-pencils, on the look-out for "bargains," a sprinkling of the ancient race, and an outer fringe of casual, lounging, lookers-on. The gentleman in the rostrum is a voluble personage, with a rapidly roving eye, of preternatural quickness in picking up "bids." Attendants, shaggy men, in soiled shirt-sleeves, with saw-dusty whiskers, and husky voices. A pleasant-faced Paterfamilias, and his "Good lady," are discovered inspecting a solidly-built, well-seasoned, age-toned ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 21, 1891 • Various
... heighten each other. There is yet another feat in this kind, which Shakespeare has performed;—he has personified malice in his Caliban; a character kneaded up of three distinct natures, the diabolical, the human, and the brute. The rest of his preternatural beings are images of effects only, and cannot subsist but in a surrounding atmosphere of those passions from which they are derived. Caliban is the passion itself, or rather a compound of malice, servility, and lust, substantiated; ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... an evident decline of the hot stage, the skin becoming more natural and soft. The pulse is more compressible and less frequent, the kidneys act freely, respiration is natural, the pains subside, although there remains languor, lassitude, and weariness, a preternatural sensibility to cold, an easily excited pulse, and a pale and sickly aspect of the countenance. The appetite has failed and the powers of ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... he opened his mouth I realised that for once Yamba had gone too far in proclaiming my prodigious valour. He said he had heard about my wonderful "flying-spears," and declined to fight me if I used such preternatural weapons. It was therefore arranged that we should wrestle—the one who overthrew the other twice out of three times to be declared the victor. I may say that this was entirely my suggestion, as I had always loved trick wrestling when at school, and even had a special tutor for that purpose—M. ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... by Mr. M'Combie, in a simple unassuming little volume—not to be read without many thoughts, perhaps not rightly without tears. Mr. M'Combie has been wise enough not to attempt panegyric. He is all but prolix in details, filling up some half of his volume with letters of preternatural length from Alexander to his publishers and critics, and from the said publishers and critics to Alexander, altogether of an unromantic and business- like cast, but entirely successful in doing that which a book should do—namely, in showing the world that here was a man of like passions with ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... this criticism appears perfectly just and appropriate; but, from the concluding paragraph, Whewell evidently imagines that by "creation" Lyell means a preternatural intervention of the Deity; whereas the letter to Herschel shows that, in his own mind, Lyell meant natural causation; and I see no reason to doubt (The following passages in Lyell's letters appear to me ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... impressive, and it is to be feared that they waited for the precentor's weekly performance with a delighted expectation that never flagged and that was never disappointed. It was only the flash of the minister's blue eye that held their faces rigid in preternatural solemnity, and forced them to content themselves with winks and nudges for the expression ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... remote notion—that he is bound to love something hidden and terrible, something that looks at him from the blank sky when he is alone among the garden beds, something which haunts empty rooms and the dark brake of the woodland. Moreover, a child, with its preternatural sensitiveness to pain, its bewildered terror of punishment, learns, side by side with this, that the God Whom he is to love thus tenderly is the God Who lays about Him so fiercely in the Old Testament, slaying the innocent with the guilty, merciless, harsh, inflicting the irreparable stroke ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... morning at an hour sufficiently preternatural to deprive us of a portion of our legitimate sleep. We rose early in Kimberley—long before the lark—to our credit be it sung; but four o'clock was too far removed from breakfast time, and four was commonly the hour chosen by ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... front, just in time for a sensation. Two troopers, two of the men who had ridden back with Donovan, came lurching into the lighted space before the main entrance. At sight of the paymaster one of them stiffened up and with preternatural gravity of mien executed the salute. The other, with an envelope in his hand, reeled out of saddle, failed to catch his balance, plunged heavily into the sand and lay there. Corporal Murphy sprang eagerly ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... allows a large range of influence and of silent, unconscious operation to the vast and potent ideas that brooded over this awful Hebrew literature. Too little weight has been allowed to the probable contagiousness, and to the preternatural shock, of such a new and strange philosophy, acting upon the jaded and exhausted intellect of the Grecian race. We must remember, that precisely this particular range of time was that in which the Greek systems of philosophy, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... small black door, studded with iron nails, which was standing open, guarded only by a black dwarf of preternatural ugliness. He turned as the beautiful fairy came floating towards him, and led the way silently through dark long passages, and up narrow winding stairs to his master's chamber. It was a small dark room, lighted only by a silver lamp of great brilliancy, which stood on a table by the fire-place, ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker
... hanging nigh together like unto a piece of flesh that a child had suckt. And each of the said teats was about an inch in length.'[321] Bridget Bishop, one of the New England witches, was tried in 1692: 'A Jury of Women found a preternatural Teat upon her Body; But upon a second search, within 3 or 4 hours, there was no such thing to be seen.'[322] Elizabeth Horner, another Devon witch, tried in 1696, 'had something like a Nipple on her Shoulder, which the Children [who gave ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... which the colonies probably anticipated. His success, in the end, was glorious and unequivocal; but none other than he could have secured it, and not he, even, unless he had been sustained by a loftiness of character almost preternatural. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... venous system of the head, an embarrassment that disturbs the function of the brain and concurs to produce somnolence. The probability of this explanation is strengthened by the flowing of the blood from the nose to the ears, spontaneous haemoptysis, also by preternatural redness of the viscera, engorgements of the cerebral vessel, and bloody effusion, all of which conditions have been found ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... these things matter, as seen from those enchanted gardens in Padua where the weird Rappaccini tends his enchanted plants, and his gorgeous daughter fills us with the light and magic of her presence, and saddens us with the shadowy allegoric mystery of her preternatural destiny? But my wife represents the positive forces of time, place, and number in our family, and, having also a chronological head, she knows the day of the month, and therefore gently reminded me that ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... still, the hopes that elevated and beguiled them, were however, destined to experience a sudden interruption—of a character so strange and mysterious as to baffle all inquiry and to throw over the events themselves a shadow of preternatural horror. ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... produced by our consent, which enters into the vessels, the seat of the vital spirits. This we see in the sea; it is in a serene calm when nothing disturbs it, but is in motion when a violent preternatural wind blows upon it, and then it rageth and is circled with waves. After this manner it is in the body of man; when the blood is in a nimble agitation, then it falls upon those vessels in which the spirits are, and there being in an extraordinary heat, it fires the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... in shadow, but the large, bright black eyes beam upon Gladys, with preternatural lustre, and the raven hair shines against the white pillow that supports her head. The broad, massive figure of the father, in its rough work-a-day clothes, is also in shadow. One elbow rests upon the ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... comparison! It should seem that the artist had worked with alternate dissolutions of amethyst, topaz, ruby, garnet, and emerald. Look at the first three windows, to the left on entering, about an hour before sun-set:—they seem to fill the whole place with a preternatural splendor! The pattern is somewhat of a Persian description, and I should apprehend the antiquity of the workmanship to be scarcely exceeding three hundred years. Yet I must be allowed to say, that these exquisitely sparkling, if not unrivalled, specimens of stained glass, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... a supposition I dare not entertain for a moment. I cannot help asking, Why all this pains to clear the British nation of ambition, perfidy, and the insatiate thirst of war? At what period of time was it that our country has deserved that load of infamy of which nothing but preternatural humiliation in language and conduct can serve to clear us? If we have deserved this kind of evil fame from anything we have done in a state of prosperity, I am sure that it is not an abject conduct in adversity that can clear our reputation. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... closed. He muttered something inaudible to Mrs. Thornburgh and whipped up his horse again. The cart started off, and Mrs. Thornburgh was left staring into the receding eyes of 'Jim the Noodle,' who, from his seat on the near shaft, regarded her with a gaze which had passed from benevolence into a preternatural solemnity. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... itself, though since that time it has been many times revised and altered, we may say that it is substantially the Bible with which we are familiar. The peculiar genius which breathes through it, the mingled tenderness and majesty, the Saxon simplicity, the preternatural grandeur, unequaled, unapproached, in the attempted improvements of modern scholars, all are here, and bear the impress of the mind of ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... these blemishes are:—Miss Blandford falls in love with a plough-boy at first-sight, which she certainly would not have done, but that some preternatural agent whispered to her, he was a young man of birth. But whether this magical information came from the palpitation of her heart, or the quickness of her eye, she has not said.—A reader will, however, gladly impute the cause of her sudden passion to magic, rather than ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton
... French Revolution, inspiring with preternatural energy that gallant people, turned the tide of events so long adverse to French aggrandizement. Still true to her hereditary hostility, England combined all Europe to resist the aggression of republican France. But soon, from the raging elements of that awful convulsion, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... together by a loose desert growth. Only an abandoned well-curb here and there cast its blue shadow on the yellow bled, or a saint's tomb hung like a bubble between sky and sand. The light had the preternatural purity which gives a foretaste of mirage: it was the light in which magic becomes real, and which helps to understand how, to people living in such an atmosphere, the boundary between fact ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... it may safely be concluded that that of the public has been previously vitiated. The truth is evident in the wretched state of dramatic taste in England at this moment, where, corrupted by the spectacles and mummery of the Italian opera, by the rage for preternatural agency acquired from the reading of ghost novels and romances, and by the introduction of German plays or translations, the people can relish nothing but melo-drame, show, extravagant incident, stage effect and situation—goblins, demons, fiddling, capering and pantomime, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... had a dreadful dream. She had dreamed that the roof of the house had fallen in, and that, at the same instant, the doors had been burst open, and some robber or assassin had stabbed her husband as he was lying in her arms. The philosophy of those days found in these dreams mysterious and preternatural warnings of impending danger; that of ours, however, sees nothing either in the absurd sacrilegiousness of Caesar's thoughts, or his wife's incoherent and inconsistent images of terror—nothing more than the natural and proper effects, on the one hand, of the insatiable ambition ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... say that laymen were incompetent to examine into a matter which it was acknowledged that laymen must in the last resort determine? And could any thing be more opposite to the whole spirit of Protestantism than the notion that a certain preternatural power of judging in spiritual cases was vouchsafed to a particular caste, and to that caste alone; that such men as Selden, as Hale, as Boyle, were less competent to give an opinion on a collect or a creed than the youngest and silliest chaplain who, in a remote manor house, passed his ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in him, which no one, not even excepting himself, did—had no very sure prospects of comfort, to say nothing of wealth. It is curious, too, that his first adventure in literature was thus connected with his interest in the preternatural, for no man ever lived whose genius was sounder and healthier, and less disposed to dwell on the half-and-half lights of a dim and eerie world; yet ghostly subjects always interested him deeply, and he often touched them in his stories, more, I think, from the strong ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... visit to Laxton. The incessant demand made upon me by Lady Carbery for solutions of the many difficulties besetting the study of divinity and the Greek Testament, or for such approximations to solutions as my resources would furnish, forced me into a preternatural tension of all the faculties applicable to that purpose. Lady Carbery insisted upon calling me her "Admirable Crichton;" and it was in vain that I demurred to this honorary title upon two grounds: first, as being one towards which I had no natural aptitudes ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... destroy the surface, and induce an effect of clearness which, perhaps, the artist has not particularly wished to attain, but which he has found himself forced into, by his reflections, in spite of himself. And the reason of this effect of clearness appearing preternatural is, that people are not in the habit of looking at water with the distant focus adapted to the reflections, unless by particular effort. We invariably, under ordinary circumstances, use the surface focus; and, in consequence, receive nothing more than ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... round to the well to wash off the blood. He did not attempt to renew the combat, as the other boys had hoped he might. He preferred to undergo the ignominy of being worsted in fight by a little boy rather than take the risk of being pounced upon again with such preternatural fury. When he entered school, having washed his face, he was quite pale, and walked with shaking knees. Rather physical than moral courage had 'Lisha Robinson, and it was his moral courage, after all, which had been tested, as it is in ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in dim recesses of the soul, at long distances from the flesh, each recognised the other. And it was an evening, too, in which to take care of other things than the ways and speech of every day. The heat, the hush, and the stillness appeared well-nigh preternatural. A sadness breathed over the earth; all things seemed new and yet old; across the spectral river the dim plains beneath the afterglow took the ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... forget the first time I happened to roar out a stave in the presence of noble Mehevi. It was a stanza from the 'Bavarian broom-seller'. His Typeean majesty, with all his court, gazed upon me in amazement, as if I had displayed some preternatural faculty which Heaven had denied to them. The King was delighted with the verse; but the chorus fairly transported him. At his solicitation I sang it again and again, and nothing could be more ludicrous than his vain attempts to catch the air ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... births; one, natural, when I came into the world; one, supernatural, when I entered into the ministry; and now, a preternatural birth, in returning to life, from this sickness. In my second birth, your Highness' royal father vouchsafed me his hand, not only to sustain me in it, but to lead me to it. In this last birth, I myself am ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous features of his preternatural character. How then, it may be asked, does this moral phantom, that has never been, bear any resemblance to the poet himself? Must not, in this instance, the hypothesis which assigns to Byron's heroes his own sentiments and ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted, most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity,—soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life,—and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The almost preternatural solemnity induced by this injunction was at once put to flight by Sammy, at whom the whole family flew with one accord and a united shriek—pulling him down on a chair and embracing ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... and they could not cross a receptacle for the dead, without expecting to encounter some one of the departed uneasily wandering among graves, or commissioned to reveal somewhat momentous and deeply affecting to the survivors. Fairies danced in the moonlight glade; and something preternatural perpetually occurred to fill the ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... occasionally in a ridiculous light; that he has little of the romantic glamor and none of the narrative energy of Scott; that Shelley's lyrical flights leave him plodding along the dusty highway; and that Byron's preternatural force makes his passion seen by contrast pale and ineffectual. All this and more may freely be granted, and yet for his influence upon English thought, and especially upon the poetic thought of his country, he must be named after Shakespeare and Milton. The ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... his cabinet of specimens from the marvellous in human nature. But certainly in modern times, any historian, however little affecting the praise of a philosophic investigator, would feel himself called upon to remove a little the taint of the miraculous and preternatural which adheres to such anecdotes, by entering into the psychological grounds of their possibility; whether lying in any peculiarly vicious education, early familiarity with bad models, corrupting associations, or other plausible key to effects, which, taken separately, and ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... worn, dingy furniture of the room seemed to the little clerk with the shining face to be strangely new. The chief clerk, sitting at a dusty old roll-top desk in the corner, looked up at Mr. Neal sharply as he entered. The chief clerk always looked up sharply. There was a preternatural leanness about the chief clerk which was accentuated by his sharp hawk's nose, and when he looked up quickly from his position hunched over his desk, his sharp little eyes pierced his subordinate through and through, and his glasses, perched halfway down his nose, trembled ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... body than a frame of mind, and it required no considerable amount of liquor to work the change. Whisky, even in small quantities, served to suspend certain of his mental functions; it paralyzed one lobe of his brain, as it were, while it aroused other faculties to a preternatural activity and awoke sleeping devils in him. The more he drank the more violent became his destructive mood, the more firmly rooted became his tendencies and proclivities for evil. The girl well knew that this was an hour when he needed careful watching and when ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... In the chase he husbands all his strength, carrying his head low, and almost grazing the ground with his hoofs, so that he is not a showy animal. Constant use, or the slow cumulative process of natural selection, has served to develop a keenness of sense almost preternatural. The vulture's eye, with all the advantage derived from the vulture's vast elevation above the scene surveyed, is not so far-reaching as the sense of smell in the pampa horse. A common phenomenon ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... hues,— E. sits in a mystery calm and intense, And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense; C. shows you how every-day matters unite With the dim transdiurnal recesses of night,— While E., in a plain, preternatural way, Makes mysteries matters of mere every day; C. draws all his characters quite a la Fuseli,— Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy, 600 He paints with a brush so untamed and profuse, They seem nothing but bundles of muscles and thews; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... often as he said this, or "Chante, Adrienne, chante!" Adrienne would switch her tail and chante lugubriously, setting the whole neighborhood in commotion. So adroitly had he trained the creature—with her thigh-bones sticking in peaks through her hide, and a visage of preternatural solemnity—that when her master but lifted his finger Adrienne would go through her part with admirable gravity, thus helping her lord to get his daily bread. I laughed till the bonne came with my coffee, and was glad to see the pannier gradually ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... "medium," the exhibitor affects the simplicity and openness of scientific experiment; and even if he profess to tread a step or two across the boundaries of the spiritual world, yet carries with him the laws of our actual life and extends them over his preternatural conquests. Twelve or fifteen years ago, on the contrary, all the arts of mysterious arrangement, of picturesque disposition, and artistically contrasted light and shade, were made available, in order to set ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the actor was human. This divine Principle is discerned in Christian Science, as we advance in the spiritual under- [25] standing that all substance, Life, and intelligence are God. The so-called miracles contained in Holy Writ are neither supernatural nor preternatural; for God is good, and goodness is more natural than evil. The marvellous healing-power of goodness is the outflowing life of Chris- [30] tianity, and it characterized and dated ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... He then retired to an alcove on the margin of the basin, and sat down; but had not rested many moments, when to his astonishment he beheld descending from the sky a company of beautiful damsels, whose robes of light green silk floating in the air seemed their only support. Alarmed at such a preternatural appearance, he retired to the end of the alcove, from whence he watched their motions. They alighted on the brink of the water, and having thrown off their robes, stood to the enraptured view of Mazin in native loveliness. Never had he beheld ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... image of his reverie—not shadowy— close and real like water at the lips after the thirsty dream of it. No thought could come athwart that eager thirst. In one moment, before Tito could start back, the old man, with the preternatural force of rage in his limbs, had sprung forward, and the dagger had flashed out. In the next moment the dagger had snapped in two, and Baldassarre, under the parrying force of Tito's arm, had fallen back on the straw, clutching the hilt with its bit of broken blade. The pointed ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... was a woman. How did you find the other planets this morning, my dear? Is it true that Saturn has lost one of his rings? and has the Sun recovered from his last attack of spots? I really fear," he would add, turning to Hilda, "that this preternatural activity in your comet-parent portends some alarming change in the—a—atmospheric phenomena, my child. I would have you on your guard!" and then he would look at her and sigh, shake his head, and apply himself to the cold chicken ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... deprived of his comforts—but he is serene, for the soul triumphs over the body. Now, what motive so grand as to save the immortal part of man. This desire filled the ancient Christian orator with a preternatural enthusiasm, as well as gave to him an unlimited power, and an imposing dignity. He was the most happy of mortals when led to the blazing fire of his persecutors, and he was the most august. The feeling that he was kindling a fire which should never be quenched, even that which was to burn up all ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... had not only his authors, he had his contributors. "A' contributors," says the before-quoted Shepherd, in a moment of such preternatural wisdom that he must have been "fou," "are in a manner fierce." They are—it is the nature and essence of the animal to be so. The contributor who is not allowed to contribute is fierce, as a matter of course; but ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... That would be a good thing, though,—to be wiser and sharper and clearer-sighted than all the rest of the world! He would like that advantage. And why might he not have it? Already he perceived a marked difference from his usual sensuous condition. It was unnatural, preternatural,—and yet, a state which could be produced at will. It was easily done. Just homoeopathy, in fact. A little sniff, a minute dose, and he could see and hear with a miraculous clearness; but people would take a dozen, and then ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... seven faces, like those of the Seven Sleepers, gradually elongated into preternatural extent. The ecclesiastical councillor, a young man, but already famous throughout Germany for his sermons printed or preached, was especially aggrieved by such offensive personality; Monsieur Flitte rapped out ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Lucilla's taste, and her nephew was not a flattering specimen. He had the whitened drawn-up appearance of a child who had spent most of his life in a London cellar, with a pinched little visage and preternatural-looking black eyes, a squeaky little fretful voice, and all the language he had yet acquired decidedly cockney. Moreover, he had the habits of a spoilt child, and that a vulgar one, and his grandmother expected ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she fell back. Her soft hands were torn by the jagged rock; her dress was in shreds; her golden hair fell down upon her shoulders. She might have been some preternatural dweller of ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... using common words as in making common words express uncommon things. Swift, Addison, Goldsmith, not to mention others, wrote with as much simplicity; but the style of neither embodies an individuality so complex, passions so strange and intense, sentiments so fantastic and preternatural, thoughts so profound and delicate, and imaginations so remote from the recognized limits of the ideal, as find an orderly outlet in the pure English of Hawthorne. He has hardly a word to which Mrs. Trimmer would primly object, hardly a sentence which would call forth the frosty anathema of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... was certainly as free from "superstition" as the protector could desire. It was reserved for Robespierre hereafter to make the sanguinary painter believe in the Etre Supreme. The boy was early sensible of his ugliness, which was almost preternatural. His benefactor found it in vain to reconcile him to the malice of Nature by his philosophical aphorisms; but when he pointed out to him that in this world money, like charity, covers a multitude of defects, the boy listened ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... to speak, mentally photographed all the little details of the house in front of which I was standing with what almost amounted to a gleam of preternatural perception. An instant before, the world swam before my eyes. I saw nothing. Now I saw everything, with a clearness which, as it were, ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only indistinct and imperfect forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural state of excitement. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... perfect shape, rounded and smooth and fair. Through long years of sorrow and unrest, she had now to toil back to that golden time,—and there was a sort of sharpness and haggardness about her acting, a singular tone of weariness, broken by starts and bursts of almost preternatural power. Except in scenes and sentiments of pathos, where she had lost nothing, the last, fine, evanishing tints, the delicate aroma of the character, were wanting in her personation. It was touched with autumnal shadows,—it was comparatively hard and dry, not from any inartistic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... of Lelia, which it is rather difficult to discuss seriously in the present day, both the personages and their environment being too preternatural for any direct application to be drawn from them, as reflecting modern society, found indiscreet champions as determined as its aggressors. Violently denounced by M. Capo de Feuillide, of the Europe litteraire, it was warmly defended by M. Gustave Planche, in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The war ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... of many kinds of simplification they practise only one—omission, which does not always pay. They are imaginative, but incredibly uninventive. How different from the wily Hindu or Chinaman, with his almost preternatural sagacity in small practical matters! Scorn of theories is one of their chief race-characteristics, and that is why they end in becoming stoics—stoics, that is, as the beasts are, who suffer without ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... good deal more of this kind of thing, and we were beginning to feel rather out of it, when presently the preternatural gravity of the party was broken by a laugh, and ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... annual gathering after the festival of Saint Dodekanus. To-morrow, you know. Quite an informal little affair. I may count on you, Bishop? You'll all come, won't you? You too, Mr. Keith. But no long words, remember! Nothing about reflexes and preternatural and things like that. And not a syllable about the Incarnation, please. It scares me. What's the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... he must have been the wreck which he seems to suppose. Opium gives and takes away. It defeats the steady habit of exertion, but it creates spasms of irregular exertion; it ruins the natural power of life, but it developes preternatural paroxysms of intermitting power. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... presented himself to me. He came and went apparently without help or hindrance—as if he had had a master-key to all the recesses of the prison. And yet he seemed no agent of the Inquisition—indeed, he denounced it with caustic satire and withering severity. But what struck me most of all was the preternatural glare of his eyes. I felt that I had never beheld such eyes blazing in a mortal face. It was strange, too, that he constantly referred to events that must have happened long before his birth as if he had actually ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... this period was remarkable—I might almost say preternatural. When the fight of the 4th of June commenced, numbers were seen with drawn swords rushing towards cantonments, but when they saw Sepoys falling, and others running away, they shrank back into the city. A great dread fell on the entire population. I was told by natives ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... apartment and never would occupy it, but when alone Elizabeth sought it from choice; the darker and drearier the day the more pertinaciously she clung to the old room, where the shadows lay heavy and grim, and every sound was echoed with preternatural sharpness. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... For, all the land of the present earth being a certain composition of materials, perfectly similar to such as would result from the gradual destruction of a continent in the operations of the inhabited world, this composition of our land could not be explained without having recourse to preternatural means, were there not in the constitution of this earth an active cause necessarily, in the course of ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... the good blacksmith must be explained. Possessed of great practical wisdom and sagacity, he was yet easily affected by preternatural influences. He was subject to very strong "impressions of mind", as he called them, by which he was urged to pursue one course of conduct instead of another; to follow out one plan of business in preference to another, even when there seemed to be no ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... certain sense of pain in the thought that they could in any thing stand apart. Happily the theoretical fire-eater had faith superior to his own arguments;—faith in a woman's insight as finer than his own;—and he is let off with a gratified rebuke for preternatural submissiveness and for arraying her in pontifical garments of authority which hang loose upon so small a figure. The other application of his doctrine of resisting evil was even more trying to her feelings and the preacher was instant certainly out of season. Not the least important personage in ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... thought it was a trifle colder than usual. It might have been imagination, but he fancied her whole manner was less cordial than before. And he said to himself, "She has heard I am going, and she is annoyed, and is not glad to see me." There was a preternatural solemnity about their conversation which neither of them could break through, and in a few minutes they both looked as though they had not ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... under no light apprehensions about his life. He had himself examined his mouth without having discovered any defect or disease, though another veterinary surgeon was of opinion that the difficulty or inability manifested in mastication, and the consequent cudding, arose from preternatural bluntness of the surfaces of the molar teeth, which were, in consequence, filed, but without beneficial result. It was after this that I saw the horse, and I confess I was, at my first examination, quite as much at a loss ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... bulky young man had disappeared through the porter's lodge, Uncle Benjy showed preternatural activity for one in his invalid state, jumping up quickly without his stick, at the same time opening and shutting his mouth quite silently like a thirsty frog, which was his way of expressing mirth. He ran upstairs as quick as an old squirrel, and went to a dormer ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... due to her desire to avert suspicion from her lover. And now that he was at length face to face with the man whom in his lonely woe he had cursed as the falsest friend, his ear was keen to detect every note of treachery, his eyes read Egremont's countenance with preternatural keenness. Walter could not sustain such proof; his agitation spoke against him. Only when he at length passed from uncertain argument and pleading to scornful repudiation of the charge, did his utterances awake in the hearer the old associations of sincerity and nobleness. How ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... of entertainments planned in their honor. All the notable people of the neighborhood were represented at it. The scandalized divine returned to partake of it, and, seeing Sir Robert in a dress-suit, dignified, polished, of preternatural respectability, not to say distinction, looking the pillar of Church and State that he was, and talking with due gravity of the tariff, free trade, and the like ponderous subjects, concluded to overlook the mad behavior of the morning, and, joining him, gave him ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... last, not least, the marvellous Ethiope, Changing his skin by preternatural skill, Whom every setting sun's diurnal slope Leaves whiter than the last, ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... encountered a terrible and ominous apparition,—a form connected with dreary associations of fate and woe. The figure had raised itself upon a pile of firewood on the other side of the fence, and hence it seemed almost gigantic in its stature. It gazed upon the pair with eyes that burned with a preternatural blaze, and a voice which Maltravers too well remembered shrieked out "Love! love! What! thou love again? Where is the Dead! Ha, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Holdenough," said Colonel Everard; "I do not deny the existence of such preternatural visitations, because I cannot, and dare not, raise the voice of my own opinion against the testimony of ages, supported by such learned men as yourself. Nevertheless, though I grant the possibility of such things, I have scarce yet heard of an instance ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... works, as no critic has failed to note, rests on his genius as an orator. For oratory he was rarely endowed. The composition of a speech was for him a matter of a few hours; with almost preternatural mental activity he organized and sifted the material, commonly as he paced up and down his garden or his room; then, the whole ready, nearly verbatim, in his mind, he would pass to the House of Commons to hold his colleagues spell-bound during several hours of fervid eloquence. Gladstone testified ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... viscera protrude through the umbilical aperture. This rarely requires operation, as it may generally be returned with ease, and even cured by a proper bandage and compress. Ventral hernia, commonly called umbilical, is generally a protrusion of viscera through a new preternatural aperture in the fibrous tissues close to the navel, may often attain a large size, is liable to strangulation, and is not easily ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... the gaieties of my earliest and boyish acquaintance with mails. But alike the gayest and the most terrific of my experiences rose again after years of slumber, armed with preternatural power to shake my dreaming sensibilities; sometimes, as in the slight case of Miss Fanny on the Bath road, (which I will immediately mention,) through some casual or capricious association with images originally gay, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of this was the development of the soul through the experience of sin. There is a haunting mystery thrown about the story, like a soft veil of mist, veiling the beginning and the end. There is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the preternatural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as original as Shakspere's Caliban, or Fouque's Undine, and yet quite on this side the border-line of the human. Our Old Home, a book of charming papers on England, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the greater into the smaller channel. Like some huge and sable-feathered condor, we were slowly drifting down towards the Bridge of Sighs, when a thousand flambeaux flashing from the windows, and down the staircases of the Ducal Palace, turned all at once that deep gloom into a livid and preternatural day. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... hope, or idle exultation, or pious fear, or panic terror, in the hearts of the leading spectators of that awful drama, according to the prejudices or principles they maintained. Over all the three kingdoms there was a preternatural calm, resembling that physical stillness which in other latitude precedes ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... that men pause to regard him as a miracle of conceit and assurance rather than as a prophet; and that his commonplaces about "olive leaves," "calumets," "universal brotherhood," "fatherland," etc., have no more influence than the maudlin rigmarole of the madman whose preternatural force is lost in senility. It is time for Elihu Burritt to go back to his shop: the world wants a ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... at the countenance of Maurice Dawson would have suspected he was extracting the keenest enjoyment from these proceedings, yet such was the fact. There was something so intensely ludicrous in the whole business, that only by assuming preternatural gravity could he refrain from breaking into merriment. His policy was to egg on the discussion until the company were ready for a decision, when he would interpose with the proposal to wipe out the whole matter and begin over again. The earnestness of Wade Ruggles, however, threatened ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... regarded Eustace, when he opened the door, with a look of such preternatural sharpness, that it almost frightened him. The beginning of that eagle glance was full of inquiring hope, and the end of resigned despair. The child had thought that Eustace might be a client come to tread the paths which no client ever ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... her failure. She understood very well the position in which I seemed to stand. To Miller I was a dupe, the victim of a trickster. He himself afterward confessed that at the time he almost regretted his preternatural acuteness, and was ready to take himself away in order to let the show go on. But he didn't, and from time to time I encouraged our psychic by saying: "Never mind, Mrs. Smiley, there are other evenings to ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... is Nature! Who would think that there lurked in her also such vile forces, such odious possibilities! For of course I understand that this dreadful thing which has sprung out at me is neither supernatural nor even preternatural. No, it is a natural force which this woman can use and society is ignorant of. The mere fact that it ebbs with her strength shows how entirely it is subject to physical laws. If I had time, I might ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 'Mollsey to her Babe' and 'The Canary' might not be passed on to Friendly Leaves. And as to Flinders, when I went to the G.F.S. Conference at Darminster I met the man full in the street, and, of course, I inquired afterwards how he came there. So there's nothing preternatural ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by weak eyes and unexpectedness of forehead, may tend to make the Evil One but languid in his desire for the capture of its human exemplar. This may help account for the otherwise rather curious coincidence of frightful physiognomy and preternatural goodness in this world of sinful beauties[B]. Under such a theory, Mr. DIBBLE'S easy means of frightening the Arch-Tempter into immediate flight, and keeping himself free from all possible incitement to be anything ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... condition, but certain money was supposed to be hidden away, to discover which every attempt had hitherto been in vain. "It was therefore proposed," says the author, "that some person should lodge in the chapel for a night to obtain preternatural information respecting it. Two persons at length complied with the request to do so, and, aided by strong beer, approached about nine o'clock the hallowed walls. They trembled exceedingly at the sudden appearance of a white owl that flew from a broken ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... the earth.' And after an attempt to reply to some of Lyell's arguments, which it would be cruel to reproduce, the writer continues:—'When, therefore, upon such slender grounds, it is determined, in answer to those who insist on its universality, that the Mosaic Deluge must be considered a preternatural event, far beyond the reach of philosophical enquiry; not only as to the causes employed to produce it, but as to the effects most likely to result from it; that determination wears an aspect of scepticism, which, however ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... horrible complaint jaundice. Even then if the causes of grief and wrong had ceased he might perhaps have had no dangerous attack. But everything was against him; constant grief, constant worry and constant preternatural exertions to sustain others while drooping himself. Even those violent efforts of will by which he thrust back for a time the approaches of his malady told heavily upon him at last. The thorough-bred horse ran much ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... an instinct that he must move, and move in one direction. He managed to rise and lean against the pedestal of the statue, and its shade by this time protected him. Then an intense desire came upon him to get home, and that desire gave him a temporary preternatural strength. It came upon him as a duty to leave Sicca for his cottage, and he set off. He had a confused notion that he must do his duty, and go straight forward, and turn neither to the right, nor the left, and stop nowhere, but move on steadily for his true home. But next ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... disreputable intimacy in that quarter, if it ever existed, had been broken up, and that, in consequence, this ill turn had been done to Marner by somebody it was quite in vain to set the constable after. Why this preternatural felon should be obliged to wait till the door was left unlocked, was a question which ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... the belief in, and the claim to be able to use, a certain range of forces neither natural, nor, technically, supernatural, but more properly to be called preternatural—often, though by no means always, for evil or selfish ends. Some extend the term occultism to cover mysticism and the spiritual life generally, but that is not a legitimate use of either word. Occultism seeks to get; mysticism to give. The one is audacious ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... herself placed in a bare chill garret; she has not a scrap of carpet on the floor, and very likely she is bitterly cold at nights. She is expected to be astir and alert from six in the morning until ten or later at night; she is required to show almost preternatural activity and intelligence, and she is not supposed to have any of the ordinary human being's desire for recreation or leisure. When her Sunday out comes—ah, that Sunday out, what a tragic farce it is!—she does not know exactly where to go. If she is near a park or heath, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... "This information is preternatural," said Lady Randolph. "You are astonished, Lucy. Mademoiselle is a sorceress. I am sure that Jock thinks so. Nothing save an alliance with something diabolical could have made her so well instructed, she who has ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... heart to observe how the children fled from his approach, breaking up their merriest sports while his melancholy figure was yet afar off. Their instinctive dread caused him to feel more strongly than aught else that a preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black crape. In truth, his own antipathy to the veil was known to be so great that he never willingly passed before a mirror nor stooped to drink at a still fountain lest in its peaceful bosom he should be affrighted by himself. This was what gave plausibility ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... than Grando's. In the fables of Ridendiabola, this is to be found. 'A fresh-water Polyp, despising its marine existence; longed to live upon air. But all it could do, its tentacles or arms still continued to cram its stomach. By a sudden preternatural impulse, however, the Polyp at last turned itself inside out; supposing that after such a proceeding it would have no gastronomic interior. But its body proved ventricle outside as well as in. Again its arms went to work; food was tossed in, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... they all had mothers, and brothers, and kindred. In the assemblage of the Apostles (already referred to) at the Death of Ananias, we look upon men whom the effusion of the Spirit has equally sublimated above every unholy thought; a common power seems to have invested them all with a preternatural majesty. Yet not an iota of the individual is lost in any one; the gentle bearing and amenity of John still follow him in his office of almoner; nor in Peter does the deep repose of the erect attitude of the Apostle, as he deals the death-stroke ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... a burst of delirious applause. Men laughed and shouted, and cries of "Vive le Roi!" rolled forth like thunder. Andre-Louis waited, and gradually the preternatural gravity of his countenance came to be observed, and to beget the suspicion that there might be more to follow. Gradually silence was restored, and at last Andre Louis was ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... very horrible question. Having come twice, in spite of all my precautions—and exactly on the same spot, too—it shows a confirmed disposition to habituate itself to its quarters, to effect a parochial settlement upon me; there is something awful and preternatural in it. I assure you that there is not a part of me that has not gone cr-cr-cr!—that has not crept, crawled, and forficulated ever since; and I put it to you what sort of a chapter I can make after such a—My good little girl, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... construction of history in its complete sense. And this evidence, when subjected to judicious criticism, is trustworthy; for the ancient story-teller and poet reflects the customs and ideas and ideals of his own time, even though the combination of agencies and the preternatural proportions of the actors and their deeds belong to the imagination. The historian must know how to supplement and to give life and interest to the colorless succession of dates, names, and events of the chronicler, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner |
