"Ecstatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... greeting, they bridged over, in one ecstatic moment, the hours of their brief separation. When he finally withdrew his lips from hers, with a deep sigh of momentary satisfaction, she looked up into his eyes with something of the old, capricious mischief dancing ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... who entered the carriage, although with a serene and peaceful countenance, yet with a certain plaintive wistfulness in the shadows of her blue eyes, which betokened no exemption from the ordinary fate of mankind. But now! what unspeakable joy, what ecstatic delight seemed to infuse fresh life and vigour to the fragile, graceful form! For a few moments she crossed her hands on her bosom, and with closed eyes remained silent; then, starting up and pacing backwards and forwards in the ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... from railways. The skirl of an engine was sweeter to his ears than horns of elf-land faintly blowing, and the dream of his life was to be allowed to live in a small whitewashed shanty which he knew of, on the railway-side, where he could spend ecstatic days watching every "passenger" and every "goods" that rushed shrieking, or dawdled shunting, along the permanent way. To him each different train had its own features. "I think," he told Jean, "that the nine train is the most good-natured of the trains; he doesn't ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... ecstatic breath. "Well, for a girl who has always felt that she didn't really belong anywhere, that is a prospect that would just about turn my head if I hadn't found a new chart and compass to steer by. ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... a square-towered grey church seemed to watch over the steep-roofed cottages and creeper-covered vicarage. If she had been a happy American tourist travelling in company with impressionable friends, she would have broken into ecstatic little exclamations of admiration every five minutes, but it had been driven home to her that to her present companion, to whom nothing was new, her rapture would merely represent the crudeness which had existed in contentment in a brown-stone house ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... suspended, hovering flight, like certain of the Finches, and bursts into a perfect ecstasy of song,—clear, ringing, copious, rivalling the Goldfinch's in vivacity, and the Linnet's in melody. This strain is one of the rarest bits of bird-melody to be heard. Over the woods, hid from view, the ecstatic singer warbles his finest strain. In this song you instantly detect his relationship to the Water-Wagtail (Sciurus Noveboracensis),—erroneously called Water-Thrush,—whose song is likewise a sudden burst, full and ringing, and with a tone of youthful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... what a short time we'll have to miss cousin Eloise," said the child. "Day before yesterday she went away, and now to-morrow my mother'll braid my hair." She gave an ecstatic sigh. ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... of Olga's ecstatic welcome, Muriel took her place on the hockey-field that afternoon with a heavy heart. Her long attendance upon Daisy had depressed her. But gradually, as the play proceeded, she began to forget herself and her troubles. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... night was cooling it—a minor image of the final office of death; the choking hunger for Savina was dwindling. He hoped that it wouldn't be repeated. He couldn't answer for himself through many such attacks. Yes, his first love, though just as imperative, had been more ecstatic; the reaching for an ideal rather than the ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... twenty-five years old; you ought to know. And then the life we are leading is no longer possible. You live and you make me live in a constant nightmare, with your ecstatic dreams. I prefer to show you the reality, however execrable it may be. Perhaps the blow which it will inflict upon you will make of you the woman you ought to be. We will classify these papers again together, and read them, and learn from them a ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... some years before this scene at Ludwigsburg, there had been discovered an extraordinary peasant-girl gifted with rare faculties of clairvoyance, thought-reading, ecstatic trances, prophecies, and the rest. An account of her short twenty years of vision-tortured life had been published by the doctor of her village—a crank, and supposed wizard himself. This pamphlet Wilhelmine ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... passion and the enthusiasm for science is less advertised than the passion and the enthusiasm for religion, but it is quite as real, and certainly not less valuable. The state of mind of Kepler on discovering the laws of planetary motion was hardly less ecstatic than that of a religious visionary describing his sense of "spiritual" communion. Only in the case of the scientist, it is emotion guided by reason, not reason checked ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... Miss Martineau; she received it, as she was bound, with a good grace. But I doubt, I doubt, O Ralph Waldo Emerson, thou hast not been sufficiently ecstatic about her,—thou graceless exception, confirmatory of a rule! In truth there are bores, of the first and of all lower magnitudes. Patience ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... I not a clod, intent On being just an earthly thing, I'd be that rare embodiment Of Heart and Spirit, Voice and Wing, With pure, ecstatic, rapture-sent, Divinely-tender twittering That Echo swoons to re-present,— ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... fetch water of love, Give drink to this mamane bud. The birds, they are singing ecstatic, Sipping Panaewa's nectared lehua, 5 Beside themselves with the fragrance Exhaled from the garden Ohele. Your love comes to me a tornado; It has rapt away my whole body, The heart you once sealed as your own, 10 There ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... attempted everything: he has aimed at nothing but the greatest things; he is rich in ideas, a master of splendid imagery, serious, enthusiastic, courageous, a noble writer. How is it, then, that he has not more reputation? Because he is too pure; because he is too uniformly ecstatic, fantastic, inspired—a mood which soon palls on Frenchmen. Because he is too single-minded, candid, theoretical, and speculative, too ready to believe in the power of words and of ideas, too expansive and confiding; while at the same time he is lacking in ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... so he gently steps out. For a moment the room is empty and there is silence. Then AMY has flown from him into the safety of lights. She is flushed, trembling, but rather ecstatic, and her voice has lost ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... up in surprise at the canvas roof over his head as though he beheld some wonderful sight; the colour flowed back into his cheeks and lips, and gradually his face became illumined with a smile of ecstatic joy. ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... retired, and filled the woods with their hideous growling. As soon as we landed, we discovered a foot-path which led down into a hollow, where we were led to suspect that water might be found; and on digging four or five feet, we had the ecstatic pleasure to see a spring rush out. A glad messenger was immediately dispatched to the beach, to make a signal to the boats of our success. On traversing the shore, we discovered a morai, or rather a heap of bones. There were amongst them two human skulls, the bones of some large animals, ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... understanding the weeks preceding the great day have been fraught with a mystery in which I have no share. Earnest conversations which break off guiltily the moment I enter the room; strained whisperings and now and again little uncontrollable giggles of ecstatic anticipation from Joan minor—these are the signs that I have learned to look for, and, being well versed in my part, to ignore with a sublime unconsciousness which should make my fortune in a melodrama of stage asides. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... the adorable little grimace which always carried him swiftly back to a certain summer of ecstatic memories; to a time when her keenest retort had been no more than a playful love-thrust and there had been no bitterness in ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... have changed; a glow of ecstatic beauty has suffused around her; the light of another land is shed on her couch. Recognition ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... Washington and Napoleon. When the big flag went up in the morning to the top of the towering flag-staff, Sam's spirits went up with it, and they floated there, vibrating, hovering, all day; but when the flag came down at night, Sam did not come down. He was always up, living an ecstatic dream-life in the ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... jerk, which would, under ordinary circumstances, break a man's neck, but these creatures are used to it. The dervishes wear their hair long, which adds to their crazy appearance, by covering their faces with it during the jerking process, the hair flying back and forth with each movement. What the ecstatic point is in this ridiculous performance was not apparent, and they did not tumble down overcome by unconsciousness. It is supposed that all travelers visit them, but we came away more punished than entertained or ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Mathesis alone was unconfined, Too mad for mere material chains to bind,— Now to pure space lifts her ecstatic stare, Now, running round ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... back, flapped after him in long, mournful gestures. And when finally, from the couch upon which he had drawn her, Dolly opened upon him her blue eyes, humid as twin stars at dawn, he placed her little scissors in her hand, and with head bowed low, in an ecstatic agony of self-renunciation bade her do her duty. The little scissors could not do it this time, though. It took ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... the hopeful youth grinned a grin something like the triumph of a fool glorying in his shame; then thrusting his hand into his bosom, was for a few moments lost in heavenly bliss, enjoying that most ecstatic of enjoyments, which King Jamie, of clawing memory, says, ought always to be reserved for kings—scratching; then rolled himself down again, to have a little more folding of the arms, and ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... And it is thus that, subduing all things, they live at last in gardens where the flowers are stars, and where the leaves of the trees sing. They exterminate dragons, they raise and appease tempests, they seem in their ecstatic visions to be borne above the earth. Their wants are provided for while living, and after their death friends are advised by dreams to go and bury them. Extraordinary things happen to them, and adventures far more marvellous than those in a work of fiction. And when their tombs are opened ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... Child Jesus to S. Joseph, whose face is most expressive and full of smiling admiration. S. John Baptist stands near, at the sides are S. John Evangelist, S. James, and S. Francis, the latter kneeling in ecstatic admiration. ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... ever there was one; at home in our gardens and hedges, not often farther away than the roadside, abundant everywhere during nearly every month in the year, and yet was there ever one too many? There is scarcely an hour in the day, too, when its delicious, ecstatic song may not be heard; in the darkness of midnight, just before dawn, when its voice is almost the first to respond to the chipping sparrow's wiry trill and the robin's warble; in the cool of the morning, the heat of noon, the hush of evening — ever the ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... reminiscences we get." Farther on, speaking of evening lights and shades on foliage grass, he says, "In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz'd ecstatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them—strength which, after all, is perhaps the last, completest, highest beauty." In another place, he says, "I hold on boughs or slender trees caressingly there in the sun and shade, wrestle with their inmost stalwartness—and ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... him out with suggestions in the same rhetorical vein. 'Or a button-hook,' I said, 'or a blunderbuss or a battering-ram or a piston-rod——' He resumed, refreshed with this assistance, 'Or a curtain-rod or a candlestick or a——' 'Cow-catcher,' I suggested eagerly, and we continued in this ecstatic duet for some time. Then I asked him what it was all about, and he told me. He explained the thing eloquently and at length. 'The funny part of it is,' he said, 'that the thing isn't new at all. It's been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before.'" Mr. Chesterton rejoins in a long ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... it off'? And when he has searched and contrived to 'ask us,' are we responsive to the ecstacy? Has he not—if I may employ an Oriental trope for once—let in the chill breath of cleverness upon the garden of beatitude? No man can be clever and ecstatic ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... of Brother Egidio, appears to be on the whole the most ancient document on the life of the famous Ecstatic that we possess. It is very possible that these stories might be traced to Brother Giovanni, to whom the Three Companions ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... young in years, but to the male in sex, we are precluded from celebrating one who stands in history as perhaps the loveliest human embodiment of all that is more winning and inspiring in youth,—one whose celestial elevation of sentiment, ecstatic ardor of imagination, and power at once to melt the heart and amaze the understanding, will forever associate the saintliest heroic genius with the name of Joan of Arc. But among the crowd of great men in this exalted sphere of influence, let us select one who was the head and heart of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... scene!" he exclaimed at me, giving Martin up as a log accidentally rolled in from the woods. "I thought that after 'Wagram' I could feel nothing more; emotion was exhausted; but then came that magnificent death! It was tragedy made ecstatic; pathos made into music; the grandeur of a gentle spirit, conquered physically but morally unconquerable! ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... one: There where a hero and saint hath died, where a bard breath'd his numbers, Both for our life and our death an ensample of courage resplendent And of the loftiest human worth to bequeath,—ev'ry nation There will joyously kneel in devotion ecstatic, revering Thorn and laurel garland, and all its charms ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... praise upon the gong, Madone! from the garden of our woes: On eves celestial throb the echo long! Ecstatic visions! ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... when Louis gave her the d'Aubigny lands and, with them, the tabouret which had so long dazzled her eyes and eluded her grasp. When the sky in England had at last cleared she paid a visit to her native land. For four ecstatic months the wool merchant's daughter made a triumphant progress through France, acclaimed and feted as a Queen. At her castle of d'Aubigny she held a splendid court and dispensed a regal hospitality to the greatest in the land, who had scarcely ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... England. Our modern country places cannot equal in this respect the colonial country seats near Philadelphia. Woodlands and Bush Hill, the homes of the Hamiltons, Cliveden, of Chief Justice Chew, Fair Hill, Belmont, the estate of Judge Peters, were splendid examples. An ecstatic account of the glories and wonders of some of them was written just after the Revolution by a visitor who fully understood their treasures, the Rev. Manasseh Cutler, the ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... years belied the promise of his brilliant beginnings. Though a member of the Brahmo-Somaj, he split the body in two by his violation of its prohibition of child-marriage, and wasted his strength in attempts to combine Western rationalism with the ecstatic fervors of the East. As the result, the Brahmo-Somaj has declined, until in numbers and influence it has now hardly more than five thousand adherents in all India. Mozumdar was one of its representatives who sought to give Oriental ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... These ecstatic praises of the Convention sounded oddly, as that body had just been discussing a petition from several Parisians who had lately been imprisoned without knowing why or by whom. And the Belfast address ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... said Frank, withdrawing his prick after another ecstatic spend, "do you know what ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... still, after suppressing a faint impulse to ask him if she should hold the motor. She leaned back and gave herself up to the country sights and sounds and scents, gently ecstatic. ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... She checked herself in time; stooped down to gather some flowers to hide her agitation; felt her cheeks flush, her heart beat, her head swim, and then a chill creep through her frame. Helen had unconsciously awoke the hope which Rose had never dared to confess unto herself. The waking was ecstatic; but she knew the depth of Edward's love for Helen. She had been his confidant—she believed it was a jest—how could her cousin do otherwise than love Edward Lynne? And with this belief, she recovered the self-possession which the necessity for subduing her feelings had taught her ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... portraits of the most absolutely mediocre creatures, moral and intellectual, of creatures the most utterly incapable of religious enthusiasm that ever made religion a livelihood. They gather round the dying and the dead St. Francis, a noble figure, not at all ecstatic or seraphic, but pure, strong, worn out with wise and righteous labour, a man of thought and action, upon whose hands and feet the stigmata of supernatural rapture are a mere absurdity. The monks are ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... lowered the lantern and put his head down so that it almost disappeared. He remained in this position for nearly a minute, and the captain gazed at him with a beaming face. His whole system, relieved from the straining bonds of doubt and fear and hope, was basking in a flood of ecstatic content. ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... Samson with a divine anger, which bursts forth in a canticle of prayer and prophecy. There is a flash as of swords in the scintillant scale passages which rush upward from the eager, angry, pushing figure which mutters and rages among the instruments. The Israelites catch fire from Samson's ecstatic ardor and echo the words in which he summons them to break their chains. Abimelech rushes forward to kill Samson, but the hero wrenches the sword from the Philistine's hand and strikes him dead. The satrap's soldiers would come to his aid, but ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... now to wave the paddle, battling for my breath, ecstatic, crazy with excitement, each second like a year to me. Very soon I could make out someone at the bows, leaning well over, looking my way. Something put it into my head that it was Sallitt, and I began an impassioned shouting. 'Hi! Sallitt! Hallo! ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... of the week, on the roof of the Moncrieff Frolic, grape-wreathed and with the ecstatic quivering of the flesh that is Asia's, Folly, robed in veils, lifts her carmined lips to be kissed, and Bacchus, whose pot-belly has made him unloved of fair women, raises his perpetual goblet and drinks that he ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... sound. The tireless ponies bounded ahead at an unbroken gallop. The temperate wind, made fragrant by thousands of acres of blue and yellow wild flowers, roared gloriously in their ears. The motion was aerial, ecstatic, with a thrilling sense of perpetuity in its effect. Octavia sat silent, possessed by a feeling of elemental, sensual bliss. Teddy seemed to be wrestling ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... sculpture in marble, a guardian angel for the Convent at Granada, but this no longer exists. Some of his architectural drawings are preserved in the Louvre. Ford says that his St. Francesco in Toledo is "a masterpiece of cadaverous ecstatic sentiment." ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... But in response to his aunt's questions he only smiled, and with such an ecstatic face that she was more alarmed than ever, and kept crossing first herself and then him.... Aratov, at last, put aside her hand, and, still with the same ecstatic expression of face, said: 'Why, Platosha, what is the matter ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... of good. Such speculative difficulties must be met by a reflective mind, before it can follow out the application of an optimistic theory to particular facts. Now, Browning's creed, at least as he held it in his later years, was not merely the allowable exaggeration of an ecstatic religious sentiment, the impassioned conviction of a God-intoxicated man. It was deliberately presented as a solution of moral problems, and was intended to serve as a theory of the spiritual nature of things. It is, therefore, justly open to the same kind of criticism as that to which a philosophic ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... the stove-couch and started a violent love affair. Chih Neng could not, though she strained every nerve, escape his importunities; nor could she very well shout, so that she felt compelled to humour him; but while he was in the midst of his ecstatic joy, they perceived a person walk in, who pressed both of them down, without uttering even so much as a sound, and plunged them both in such a fright that their very souls flew away and their spirits wandered from their bodies; and it was after the third party had burst out laughing ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... took his milk," said Patsy in an ecstatic whisper, "an' he knew me! 'Is that you, Patsy, ye ould divil?' says he. Sorra a word o' lie in it! An' Shot had twisted himself in unbeknownst to me, an' when he heard the master spakin' he ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... could give undivided time and dignified attention, is it not this committee? If there is one peaceful haven of rest, never disturbed by any profane bill or resolution of any sort, it is the Committee on Revolutionary Claims. It is, in parliamentary life, described by that ecstatic verse in ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Ben, in a highly ecstatic frame of mind. "Now—oh! what'll we do for an envelope?" he asked ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... another thorough scrubbing to cleanse it from the filth accumulated during the night. And thus the negroes were enabled to pass a second day in pure air, to the great improvement of their health and spirits; indeed, the ecstatic delight with which they lingered over their bath, and the cheerfulness with which they afterwards worked at their task of drawing water and scrubbing, chattering almost gaily together all the time, were, to me, most eloquent ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... help liking it," smiled the man, trying to keep from his voice the ecstatic delight that the touch of ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... to say "Thou satisfiest me," I saw myself arrived on the next round,[1] so that my eager eyes made me silent. There it seemed to me I was of a sudden rapt in an ecstatic vision, and saw many persons in a temple, and a lady at the entrance, with the sweet action of a mother, saying, "My son, why hast thou done thus toward us? Lo, sorrowing, thy father and I were seeking thee;" and when here she was silent, that ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... at the pretty sight, it lost reality as things do when too closely scrutinized, and became a visionary confluence of lines and colors, a soft stir of bloom like a flowery expanse moved by the air. This ecstatic effect was not exclusive of facts which kept one's feet well on the earth, or on the roof of one's college barge. Out of that "giddy pleasure of the eyes" business lifted a practical front from ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... land; 'Queen Mab' was written partly in Devonshire and partly in Wales; and from Ireland, where he had gone to regenerate the country, he opened correspondence with William Godwin, the philosopher and author of 'Political Justice'. His energy in entering upon ecstatic personal relations was as great as that which he threw into philanthropic schemes; but the relations, like the schemes, were formed with no notion of adapting means to ends, and were often dropped as hurriedly. Eliza Westbrook, at first a woman of estimable ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... within web involves his larva form, Alike secured from sunshine and from storm; 300 For twelve long days He dreams of blossom'd groves, Untasted honey, and ideal loves; Wakes from his trance, alarm'd with young Desire, Finds his new sex, and feels ecstatic fire; From flower to flower with honey'd lip he springs, And seeks his velvet loves ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... heroine of the 'Nouvelle Heloise.' Even in stubborn England, where Fielding's masculine contempt for the whinings of 'Pamela' was more congenial, the students of Richardson were prepared to receive 'Ossian' with enthusiasm, and to be ecstatic over 'Tristram Shandy.' That Richardson would have agreed with Johnson in regarding Rousseau as fit only for a penal settlement, and that he actually considered Sterne to be 'execrable,' does not relieve him of the responsibility or deprive him of the glory. He is not the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... bulging out at the windows of the high houses. Gerald healed his pride by saying that this was, after all, the real Paris, and that the cookery was as good as could be got anywhere, pay what you would. He seldom ate a meal in the little salons on the first floor without becoming ecstatic upon the cookery. To hear him, he might have chosen the hotel on its superlative merits, without regard to expense. And with his air of use and custom, he did indeed look like a connoisseur of Paris who knew better than to herd with vulgar tourists ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... is recorded, was doing well and seemed to be in a fair way of ultimate recovery, but fell a victim to the quackeries of medical experiment. The galvanic battery was applied, and he suddenly expired in one of those ecstatic paroxysms ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... It is something of this that the wild birds voice, as they greet the sun at dawn, and again as they give sweet and melancholy notes at his sinking in the quiet of evening. Birds are impressed from without. They are reasonless, ecstatic, spontaneous, giving voice as accurately and joyously as they can to the vibrations of peace and harmony—to the Sounds, which they feel from Nature. Animals and birds are conscious of forces and ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... was in love with Esme Falconer. Judging from the violence of the sensation, I must have loved her for quite a while. Probably it had begun that night in the St. Ives restaurant; for when before had I watched any girl with such special, ecstatic, almost proprietary rapture? Yes, that was why, ever since, I had been cutting such crazy capers. From first to last they were the natural thing, the prerogative of a man in my ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... distribution amongst the Esquimaux on the sea-coast. Laced dresses were given to Augustus and Junius. It is impossible to describe the joy that took possession of the latter on the receipt of this present. The happy little fellow burst into ecstatic laughter as he surveyed the different ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... am going to win him back. He thinks that love is an enslaving thing and harmful to the soul, but my dear lovely idealist and dreamer has loved me once and he must love me again. I am so in love with love and almost as fanatical about it as the ecstatic artist is about art: love for love's sake, art for art's sake. I never did—and hope I never shall—get over that feeling of awe at the mystery and beauty and elusiveness of that great force in life—love. And I have always felt so sorry for people, sincere people, who ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... had just returned from his lonely retreat with his mind and nerves in a state of unnatural tension,—a sort of ecstatic clearness and calmness, which he mistook for victory and peace. During those lonely days when he had wandered afar from human converse, and was surrounded only by objects of desolation and gloom, he had passed through as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... tips and his face felt the warm breathing of her voice, 'Soelver, Soelver!' And driven by some mystic power of will, he forced himself under the same hypnotic influence which surrounded her. He compelled himself to leave the clear broad way of reason and to enter the ecstatic, perilous, paths of the sleep walker. He was no longer awake. He sought, he touched, he stood before that after which he had groped. He was himself driven by a magic power, by a marvelous single purpose, which must be attained. This ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... was at that time, I should suppose, fifteen or sixteen years old; and at that period of life he certainly appreciated the general beauty of the composition, and felt the more passionate passages; for his features and exclamations were ecstatic. How often have I in after-times heard him quote ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... times, when man awakes in a world that is newly created, poetry awakes with him. In the face of the marvellous things that dazzle and intoxicate him, his first speech is a hymn simply. He is still so close to God that all his meditations are ecstatic, all his dreams are visions. His bosom swells, he sings as he breathes. His lyre has but three strings—God, the soul, creation; but this threefold mystery envelopes everything, this threefold idea embraces everything. The earth is still almost deserted. There are families, but ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... will grow tired of him?" interrupted Oldbuck,"I fear that's past praying for. But you have forgotten that the ecstatic twelfth of August approaches, and that you are engaged to meet one of Lord Glenallan's gamekeepers, God knows where, to persecute ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... scents which swells, subsides, rises again wave on wave, filling the wide world with invisible sweetness. A whiff of the universe makes us dream of worlds we have never seen, recalls in a flash entire epochs of our dearest experience. I never smell daisies without living over again the ecstatic mornings that my teacher and I spent wandering in the fields, while I learned new words and the names of things. Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived. The odour of fruits wafts me ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... were for those attuned to receive them! Her fingers laced with Bob's, and from the contact a warm, ecstatic glow flooded both their bodies. She looked at his clean brown face, with its line of golden down above where the razor had traveled, with its tousled, reddish hair falling into the smiling eyes, and a queer ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... But if a man drinks wine in order to obtain health, he is trying to get something natural; something, that is, that he ought not to be without; something that he may find it difficult to reconcile himself to being without. The man may not be seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being ecstatic; it is more dazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of being ordinary. If there were a magic ointment, and we took it to a strong man, and said, "This will enable you to jump off the Monument," doubtless he would jump off the Monument, but he would ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... them, as she counselled, or else distilled from it a fiery, intoxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly through those first moments of their doom. For guilt has its moment of rapture too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic sense of freedom. And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) a bliss, or an insanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be well worth the sleepy innocence that was ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... into them the precepts of lunar philosophy. We have insisted upon their renouncing the contemptible shackles of religion and common sense, and adoring the profound, omnipotent, and all perfect energy, and the ecstatic, immutable, immovable perfection. But such was the unparalleled obstinacy of these wretched savages that they persisted in cleaving to their wives, and adhering to their religion, and absolutely set at nought the sublime doctrines of the moon—nay, among ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... canticle of Bernadette, that long, long chant, composed of six times ten couplets, to which the ever recurring Angelic Salutation serves as a refrain—a prolonged lullaby slowly besetting one until it ends by penetrating one's entire being, transporting one into ecstatic sleep, in delicious expectancy of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... produces material ec- 7:18 stasy and emotion. If spiritual sense always guided men, there would grow out of ecstatic mo- ments a higher experience and a better life 7:21 with more devout self-abnegation and purity. A self- satisfied ventilation of fervent sentiments never makes a Christian. God is not influenced by man. The "di- 7:24 vine ear" is not an auditory nerve. It is the all-hearing and all-knowing ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... him." They soon reached the ledge of rock where Okiok had seen the "something," and, looking cautiously over it, Rooney beheld his friend Kajo smoking a long clay pipe such as Dutchmen are supposed to love. Ippegoo was watching him in a state of ecstatic absorption. ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... century, and here, one would say, sculpture touches the ground; at least, it is not easy to see how cheap exaggeration can sink an art more deeply. The only things that at all pleased me were a smiling donkey and an ecstatic cow in the Nativity chapel. Those who are not allured by the prospect of seeing perhaps the very worst that can be done in its own line, need not be at the pains of climbing up to Vispertimenen. Those, on the other hand, who may find this sufficient ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... down, or bend, or anything; just stand with your head up, and glance carelessly at him under your lashes as if nobody was there! Then it will gradually dawn upon him that you know everything, and he'll simply go through the floor." They take some ecstatic turns about the room, Miss Ramsey waltzing as ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... what a plight is yours! How you strive to look as if she were a new Helen, and how hopelessly unconvincing is your weary expression—as unconvincing as one's expression when, having weakly pretended acquaintance with a strange author, we feign ecstatic recognition of some passage or episode quoted by his ruthless admirer. There is this hope in the case of the photograph: that its amorous possessor will probably be incapable of imagining any one insensitive to such a Golconda of charms, and you have always in your power the revenge of showing him ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... himself the high priest of the Grail. It had seemed to Evelyn that she had been carried beyond the limits of earthly things. The thrill and shiver of the dead man's genius haunted the liquid ripple of the river; the moment was ecstatic; the deep, windless night was full of the haunting ripple of the Rhine. And she remembered how she had clasped her hands ... her very words came ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... terms. Human nature has never felt influences more deeply religious than those set at work by missions, recalling the effects of the preaching of the Apostles themselves. Remorse of conscience, loathing for sin, terror at the divine wrath, confidence in God, sympathy for our crucified Saviour, the ecstatic joy of the new-found divine friendship, utter contempt for the maxims of the world, iron determination to love God to the end—these are the sentiments which, by the preaching of missions, are made to dominate entire parishes in ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... a consummation: we have a complete experience: we have a sort of sacrament. For to the intrusion of the world he interposes his own body. In his art, the creator's body would be itself intrusion. The artist is too humble and too sane to break the ecstatic flow of vision with his personal form. The true artist despises the personal as an end. He makes fluid, and distils his personal form. He channels it beyond himself to a Unity which of course contains it. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... the available salvage, the proprietor touched something unusually or unexpectedly hot, which caused him to shake his hand with great energy, and clap the tips of his suffering fingers to his mouth. The act was simple and natural, but the result was wonderful. He rolled his eyes in ecstatic pleasure, his frame distended, and, conscious of a celestial odour, his nostrils widened, and, while drawing in deep inspirations of the ravishing perfume, he sucked his fingers with a gusto he had ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... she want to be in this whispering house for good? Who did she want to be with for good? Not Reddin. Edward? But he had not the passion of the greenwood in him, the lust of the earth. He was not of the tremulously ecstatic company of wild, hunted creatures. If Reddin was definitely antagonistic, a hunter, Edward was neutral, a looker-on. They were not her comrades. They did not live her life. She had to live theirs. She wished she had never seen Reddin, never gone to Hunter's Spinney. Edward's house ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... a thousand close clustering petals. It blossomed with a myriad shifting hues. And instant by instant the flood of varicolored flame that poured into its petalings down from the sapphire ovoids waxed and waned in crescendoes and diminuendoes of relucent harmonies—ecstatic, awesome. ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... footsteps of a country priest going away. Then all was hushed, and the tears which were falling round the dying girl suddenly stopped as though by a miracle. In a few seconds all signs of disease and the anxious look of pain had disappeared from Renee's thin face, and in their place an ecstatic beauty, a look of supreme deliverance had come, at the sight of which her father, her mother, and her friend instinctively fell on their knees. A rapturous joy and peace had descended upon her. Her head sank gently back on the pillow as though she were in a dream. ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... light-hearted as a schoolboy just escaped from drudgery, while Bertie's Nellie, as a matter of course, was overcome with ecstatic giggles. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... came on in April, and the boys got off their shoes for good, there came races, in which they seemed to fly on wings. Life has a good many innocent joys for the human animal, but surely none so ecstatic as the boy feels when his bare foot first touches the breast of our mother earth in the spring. Something thrills through him then from the heart of her inmost being that makes him feel kin with her, and cousin to all her dumb children of the grass and ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... his welcome was necessarily brief. The arriving guest was not to be considered at all with the departed dog. The men told Van Bibber, in confidence, that the general relief among the guests was something ecstatic, but this was marred later by the gloom of Miss Arnett and her inability to think of anything else but the finding of the lost collie. Things became so feverish that for the sake of rest and peace the house-party proposed to contribute to a joint purse for the ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements perhaps appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music, the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... master magician. The eye was promise-crammed, the ears sealed with bliss, and she felt the wet of the waters. She breathed hard as Alberich scaled the slimy steeps; and the curves described by the three swimming mermaids filled her with the joy of the dance, the free ecstatic movements of free things in the waves. The filching of the Rheingold, the hoarse shout of laughter from Alberich's love-foresworn lips, and the terrified cries of the luckless watchers were as real as life. Walhall did not confuse her, for now ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... instant such a ringing cheer burst out as wells spontaneously from the throats and hearts of men, in the first ecstatic moments of victory—a cheer to which our saddened hearts and enfeebled lungs had long been strangers. It was the genuine, honest, manly Northern cheer, as different from the shrill Rebel yell as the honest mastiff's deep-voiced welcome ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We KNOW that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... she was utterly unconscious of any charm that she was exercising, or of being herself subject to any personal fascination. She loved to read the books of ecstatic contemplation which he furnished her. She loved to sing the languishing hymns which he selected for her. She loved to listen to his devotional rhapsodies, hardly knowing sometimes whether she were in the body, or out of the body, while he lifted her upon the wings of his passion-kindled ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... lively description of this dance vide Madame de Sevigne's Letters to her Daughter. That ecstatic lady, who always wrote more or less under the influence of St Vitus, was in her ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... splendid surprise is that they remembered me just at the busiest time, and thanked me in such a lovely way. I shall keep that glass slipper all my life, if I can, to remind me not to despair; for just when everything seemed darkest, all this good luck came," said Jessie, with ecstatic skips as she clanked the brass heels of her boots and thought of the proud moment when she would join in the ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... kneeling shepherds heard, Charmed from their first rude fear, Nor while that music dwelt had stirred Were it a month or year: And Mary Mother drank its flow, Couched with her Babe divine,—and, lo! Ere falls the last ecstatic word ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... John painted upon the cupola of S. Giovanni. The apostles throned on clouds, with which the dome is filled, gaze upward to one point. Their attitudes are noble; their form is heroic; in their eyes there is the strange ecstatic look by which Correggio interpreted his sense of supernatural vision: it is a gaze not of contemplation or deep thought, but of wild half-savage joy, as if these saints also had become the elemental genii of cloud and air, spirits emergent from ether, the salamanders of an empyrean intolerable ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... pauses Taffy heard, faint and far below, the noise of cowhorns blown by the street boys gathered at the foot of the tower and beyond the bridge. Close beside him a small urchin of a chorister was singing away with the face of an ecstatic seraph; whence that ecstasy arose the urchin would have been puzzled to tell. There flashed into Taffy's brain the vision of the whole earth lauding and adoring— sun-worshippers and Christians, priests and small children; nation after nation prostrating itself and arising to join the chant— "the ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and, if possible, our pity. She began to patronize and pity Ansell, and most sincerely trusted that he would get his fellowship. Otherwise what was the poor fellow to do? Ridiculous as it may seem, she was even jealous of Nature. One day her husband escaped from Ilfracombe to Morthoe, and came back ecstatic over its fangs of slate, piercing an oily sea. "Sounds like an hippopotamus," she said peevishly. And when they returned to Sawston through the Virgilian counties, she disliked him looking out of the windows, for all the world as if Nature was ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... that century "liked better to be feared than loved; they inspired mad passions, insensate devotions, ecstatic admirations. The epoch was one in which life counted for little, when balls alternated with massacres; when virtue was befitting only the lowly born and ugly (Brantome recommends the beautiful to be inconstant because they should resemble the sun who ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... friend, her religion, her god, knowing at the same time that he was married. Madame Goethe, a worthy German woman, lent herself to this worship with a sly good-nature which did not cure Bettina. But what was the end of it all? The young ecstatic married a man who was younger and handsomer than Goethe. Now, between ourselves, let us admit that a young girl who should make herself the handmaid of a man of genius, his equal through comprehension, and should piously worship him till death, like one ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... product. Cultured members, on drinking it, were wont to say things about Locusta and Borgia. The commoner sort swore like hell at Freddy Parker. It made you feel squiffy after the sixth glass—argumentative, magisterial, maudlin, taciturn, erotic, sentimental, sea-sick, ecstatic, paralysed, lachrymose, hilarious, pugilistic—according to your temperament. Whatever your temperament it gave you a thundering head next morning, and a throat like Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace. It ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... upon her head (my Panama hat), and a soldier's arm round her waist. She was one of a mob, composed of all the unoccupied riff-raff of Folkestone, who were following the band of the Third Berkshire Infantry, then in camp at Sandgate. There was an ecstatic, far-away look in her eyes. She was dancing rather than walking, and with her left hand she beat time to ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... in one of her ecstatic moods and was deaf to remarks, Irene saved her words to cool her porridge and watched the incoming yawl. She did so at first without much interest. It was merely a sailboat to her city eyes, and her good lines and good management meant ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... Pauline, as Cyrus ran frantically into the room, and leaping upon the couch with ecstatic barks of welcome, threatened again to take the place that belonged by right to Harry. But this time Harry ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... looked with shining eyes of glory at Mrs. Perce. It was the announcement of her dream, a confirmation of her hope. She was for a moment ecstatic. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... fly open; after that a Seventh, and then an Eighth— How long I should have continued I know not. In vain did the Sphere, in his voice of thunder, reiterate his command of silence, and threaten me with the direst penalties if I persisted. Nothing could stem the flood of my ecstatic aspirations. Perhaps I was to blame; but indeed I was intoxicated with the recent draughts of Truth to which he himself had introduced me. However, the end was not long in coming. My words were cut short by a crash outside, and a simultaneous crash inside me, which impelled me ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... has ever reached us across the gulf of death. And while he rhapsodised, with a congregation of honest bread-and-butter citizens under him, trying hard with their blinkered eyes and blunted souls, to glimpse that imaginary glamour of ecstatic "holiness," there surged and rolled around them the stunted, poisoned, ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... her, and seizing her father's black head in her arms, she gave it a quick, impetuous hug. Then, disconcerted by this unusual display of affection, she fled out of the house and up to her seat on the mountainside, overlooking the ruins of the hermit's hut, where she held an ecstatic thanksgiving ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... Mary. The Saviour of men elbowed St. Labre. They were of plaster run into moulds, or roughly carved in wood, and were colored with paint as glaring as the red and blue of a barber's pole, and covered with vulgar gildings. Chins in the air, ecstatic eyes shining with varnish, horribly ugly and all new, they were drawn up in line like recruits at the roll-call, the mitred bishop, the martyr carrying his palm, St. Agnes embracing her lamb, St. Roch with his dog and shells, St. John the Baptist in his ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... ecstatic trial: He, with viny crown advancing, First to the lively pipe his hand addressed: But soon he saw the brisk, awakening viol, Whose sweet entrancing voice he loved the best. They would have thought, who heard the strain, They saw, in Temp's ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick |
