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Celt   /sɛlt/  /kɛlt/   Listen
Celt

noun
(Written also Kelt. The letter C was pronounced hard in Celtic languages)
1.
A member of a European people who once occupied Britain and Spain and Gaul prior to Roman times.  Synonym: Kelt.



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"Celt" Quotes from Famous Books



... centre of which was occupied by Captain MacTurk, in the very act of bullying two pseudo Highlanders, for having presumed to lay aside their breeches before they had acquired the Gaelic language. The sounds of contempt and insult with which the genuine Celt was overwhelming the unfortunate impostors, were not, indeed, intelligible otherwise than from the tone and manner of the speaker; but these intimated so much displeasure, that the plaided forms whose unadvised choice of a disguise had provoked it—two raw lads from a certain great manufacturing ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... fascination upon Philadelphians, too. For when we returned we selfishly persuaded a friend of ours to ride with us on the train so that we might imbibe some of his ripe orotund philosophy, which we had long been deprived of. He is a merciless Celt, and all the way over he preached us a cogent sermon on our shortcomings and backslidings. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, and it was nice to know that there was still someone who cared enough for us to give us a sound cursing. Between times, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... and, taking the tumbler, drank its contents gratefully, though their strength made him cough, for the bibulous Celt had mixed it to ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly

... on deck then, and with the wisdom of the Celt she understood. She put her lean hand upon the great head of the Russian and blessed him in Gaelic. Ivan bowed before her, then as she offered him a rosy apple he led her toward Anna, a great Viking leading a withered old woman who walked with ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... customs. Therefore, on a hot Christmas day, with the sun one hundred odd in the shade, Australian revellers sit down to the roast beef and plum-pudding of Old England, which they eat contentedly as the orthodox thing, and on New Year's Eve the festive Celt repairs to the doors of his "freends" with a bottle of whisky and a cheering verse of Auld ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... of California imposes an unlawful mining-tax upon John the foreigner, and allows Patrick the foreigner to dig gold for nothing—probably because the degraded Mongol is at no expense for whisky, and the refined Celt cannot ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... English county of Sussex, have all had their destinies moulded by the geological conformation of the rock upon which they repose. Where human annals see only the handicraft and interaction of human beings—Euskarian and Aryan, Celt and Roman, Englishman and Norman—a closer scrutiny of history may perhaps see the working of still deeper elements—chalk and clay, volcanic upheaval and glacial denudation, barren upland and forest-clad plain. The value and importance of these underlying facts in the comprehension ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... deeply, sometimes muttering curses between his clenched teeth, and sometimes suggesting plans which he thought might be even then available and efficient to redeem the past. These plans were all of a character more or less desperate; but some were exceedingly ingenious. A truer type of a Celt could not easily be found; his very caution was ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny

... intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is capable when his abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent for some seconds, and then stepped back with an ironical bow. "Not literally true, of course," he said; "only really true. An allegory, shall we ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... Poietes much better than the gentleman who at threescore had never seen an eagle. "She has fallen from a great height," quoth the gentleman—"What an extraordinary sight!" he continueth—while we are mute as the oar suspended by the up-gazing Celt, whose quiet eye brightens as it pursues the Bird to her eyrie in the cliff over the cove ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... characteristics. It has been reduced to an absurdity by the abuse Taine made of it. A very good criticism of it will be found in Lacombe (ibid., chap. xviii.), and in Robertson ("The Saxon and the Celt," London, ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... allegations levelled at the KAISER and his countrymen. But it could hardly be expected that so high-spirited and energetic a race could indefinitely pursue a course of inaction. The relentless logic which has always been a distinguishing feature of the Celt has impelled them, since the cessation of formal hostilities, to express their disapproval of a war waged in their interests by indulging in demonstrations—if so harsh a term may be permitted—directed against the regime which has secured ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various

... umbrella. It was inflicted by a dissolute Irish apple-woman, who, on returning from some orgy to her ill-kept apartment, found Lady Hypatia in the bedroom taking down an oleograph, which, to say the least of it, could not really elevate the mind. At this the ignorant and partly intoxicated Celt dealt the social reformer a severe blow, adding to it an absurd accusation of theft. The lady's exquisitely balanced mind received a shock, and it was during a short mental illness that she ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... in England" the trait has not been lost—that, however poor, they are always ready to befriend what seems to them a still poorer neighbour. Those who have lived here some time are glad to see someone from their "own place," and, amid the squalor of an English city, the imaginative Celt—as he listens to the gossip about the changes, the marriages, and the deaths that have taken place since he left "home "—for a brief moment lives once more upon "the old sod," and sees visions of the little cabin by the wood side where dwelt those he loved, of the ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir

... him puzzled for a minute, and then turns to me. "Shorty," says he, "you're a Celt. What do you make ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... entered training for the ministry. His parents had died, owning their chief regret that they could not see their son in the pulpit, and his sister received the bitterest disappointment of her life, when he abandoned the calling. But William was largely Celt by blood and wholly so by nature and had visions. In one of them he had seen himself before the Great White Throne, worthless, sin-stricken. What was he that dared to enter such a holy calling as the ministry? He who was as the dust of ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... something so delightfully fresh and out of the common in having tea at a wayside inn; they felt true pilgrims of the road, and civilization and school seemed to have faded into a far background. The love of travel is in the blood of both Celt and Anglo-Saxon; our forefathers visited shrines for the joy of the journey as well as for religious motives, and maybe our Bronze Age ancestors, who flocked to the great Sun Festivals at Stonehenge or Avebury Circles, derived pleasure from the change of scene as well as a ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... childlike but untruthful negro; who have been the recipient of the brotherly but uncertain ministrations of the South-Sea Islander, and have been proudly disregarded by the American aborigine, only in due time to meet the fate of my countrymen at the hands of Bridget the Celt,—what wonder that I gladly seize this opportunity to sing the praises of my German handmaid! Honor to thee, Lenchen, wherever thou goest! Heaven bless thee in thy walks abroad! whether with that tightly-booted ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... long-line with icily-cold hands and finding no fish. February—Pisces? The fish, before February comes, have left the coast for the warmer deeps, and the zodiac is all wrong. Down here in the Duchy many believe in Mr. Zadkiel and Old Moore. I suppose the dreamy Celt pays a natural homage to a fellow-mortal who knows how to make up his mind for twelve months ahead. All the woman in his nature surrenders to this businesslike decisiveness. "O man!"—the exhortation is Mr. George Meredith's, or would be if ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... dugout, a crude boat made by an Indian, who burned out the center of a pine log which he had felled by girdling with fire. After he had burned out as much as he could, he scraped out the rest with a stone tool called a "celt." The whole operation probably took one Indian three weeks. The Rivadavia which slid down the ways of the Fore River Shipbuilding Corporation in August, 1914, weighed 13,400 tons and had engaged the labor of 2000 men ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery

... Celt flashed, as he sat in the saddle and contemplated the exasperating raid. Nothing would have pleased him better than to dash with several companions after the marauders and force them to a reckoning for the outrage. But eager ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis

... Africa. In America we also have an astonishing mixture of bloods but with the exception of the Bolshevists and other radical uplifters, our population is loyally dedicated to the American flag and the institutions it represents. With us Latin, Slav, Celt, and Saxon have blended the strain that proved its mettle as "Americans All" under the Stars and Stripes in France. We have given succor and sanctuary to the oppressed of many lands and these foreign elements, in the main, have not only been grateful ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... coal-black Celt with the second-sight did not see fit to reply till he had tapped Dan on the shoulder, and for the twentieth time croaked the old, old ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling

... the breed of men quite as much as on the county," said Dr. Mortimer. "A glance at our friend here reveals the rounded head of the Celt, which carries inside it the Celtic enthusiasm and power of attachment. Poor Sir Charles's head was of a very rare type, half Gaelic, half Ivernian in its characteristics. But you were very young when you last saw Baskerville ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle

... does anything to represent to English children the vision and colour, the magic and charm, of the Celtic folk-imagination, this is due in large measure to the care with which Mr. Nutt has watched its inception and progress. With him by my side I could venture into regions where the non-Celt wanders ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)

... he had unduly scorned, he now unduly exalted. Only Time and the woman could lead him into the Middle Way, which is the way of truth. For beneath the surface hardness of the Scot lurked the fire, the imaginative force, the proud sensitiveness of the Celt: a heritage from his Cornish mother, whose untimely death had left her two younger sons in the hands of a bachelor uncle, of red-hot Calvinistic views. Their father—a man of an altogether different stamp—had met his boys on rare occasions, and ardently desired to know more of them: ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... Wellington & Sir Colin Campbell, of the Mutiny. You will have noticed that in S. A., as in the Mutiny, it is usually the Irish & Scotch that are placed in the forefront of the battle.... Sir William Butler said, "the Celt is the spearhead ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... how the sun Changes his lair, and by what secret spell The pale moon is transformed, when her broad eye 90 Gazes not on the interlunar sea: He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs, The tempest-winged chariots of the Ocean, And the Celt knew the Indian. Cities then Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed 95 The warm winds, and the azure ether shone, And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen. Such, the alleviations of his state, Prometheus gave to man, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... getting out of its way for a time. The Highland royalist felt greatly tempted to wait and hail the crew, whom he felt pretty sure to be his own friendly countrymen, and who, like their sires, in the case of prince Charlie, thirty years before, would scorn to betray their brother Celt, even for the gold of Carolina. Still, like the royal outlaw in his wanderings, he also deemed it more prudent to conceal his whereabouts even from his most confidential friends. He at once quits the river, and thus for a good while suspends his navigation. He takes special ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean

... of inaccuracy and negligence which, however trivial in themselves, tend to prove that the author is not always very scrupulous in speaking of things he has not studied. A purist so severe as to write "Kelt" for "Celt" ought not to call Mercury, originally a very different personage from Hermes, one of "the legendary authors of Greek civilisation" (p. 43); and we do not believe that anybody who had read the writings of the two primates ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... a century and a half ago. And the Picard has very little, except his religion, in common with the Irish Celt. But the sentiment of this simple and pleasing little ditty glowed deep in the Picard heart long before the Revolution of 1789. The 'earth hunger,' which has given the act of 'land-grabbing' the first place in the category of human crimes, invented, long ago in Picardy, and especially ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... the strains that were mingled in little Jim; and during his early life from the first glimpse we catch of him upon the back of the unbroken colt, he was torn by the struggle between the wild, romantic, erratic, visionary, fighting Celt, with moods of love and hate, and the calmer, steady, tireless, lowland Scottish Saxon from the North who, far less gifted, had far more power and in the end had mastery; and having won control, built of his mingled heritages a rare, strong soul, so steadfast that he was a tower of strength ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton

... much right to a separate local patriotism to his little Motherland, which rightly understood is no bar, but rather an advantage to the greater British patriotism, {0b} as has a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, or even a Colonial; and that he is as much a Celt and as little of an “Anglo-Saxon” as any Gael, Cymro, Manxman, or Breton. Language is less than ever a final test of race. Most Cornishmen habitually speak English, and few, very few, could hold five minutes’ conversation in the old Celtic speech. Yet the memory ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner

... HIM, the attraction on his part seems equally violent. We do the most shockingly unconventional things together. He tells me that I carry him off his feet—that I've revolutionised his ideas about the "nice English Girl" (useless to protest that I'm not an English girl but a hybrid Celt). He says that I've wiped off his slate the scheme of life he'd been planning for his latter years. A comfortable existence in England—his doctor advises him to settle down in a temperate climate—an appointment on some City Board—rubber shares and that ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... the Rhine has attracted to its banks a succession of races of widely divergent origin. Celt, Teuton, Slav, and Roman have contested for the territories which it waters, and if the most enduring of these races has finally achieved dominion over the fairest river-province in Europe, who shall say that it has ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... wherever found, are not generally tall, and the Black Colonel was a pure Celt in body as well as in nature. He was upstanding, bore himself easily, was clean in line and tough of frame. True, he was long of the leg, among a people who, having to climb and descend hills constantly, ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne

... Irishmen who journeyed to his shrine strength to bear them. I'm not in exile but there are times when I should be journeyin' off, as Kenny says when the brogue is on him, to Black Gartan. The curse of the Celt! Kenny swears there's no homesickness in the world like an Irishman's passionate longing for home and kin. Not that I long for the studio. God forbid! Kenny's ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... of the sum astonished him. He walked silently by Maggie's side until she came to her door-step. He was a heavy-faced Celt; sallow, and dark-eyed; with the impatient look of a selfish greedy man. Maggie's resolute stand at her door-stone angered him, "I'm coming in a wee," he said dourly, "there are words to be ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr

... such peculiarities that they seem to be historical fragments of by-gone days. And apparently they refer to a race which immediately preceded the Celt in the occupation of the country, and with which the Celt to ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... to me, sir," he replied, with that touch of conscious superiority so noticeable in the Celt, "as though Cappy Ricks might have slipped this ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne

... expansive paunch. [Sidenote:—21—] When in shame at this treatment he kept his eyes lowered, the soldiers would prick him under the chin with their daggers, to make him look up even against his will. A certain Celt who saw this would not endure it, but taking pity on him cried: "I will help you, as well as I can alone." Then he wounded Vitellius and killed himself. However, Vitellius did not die of the wound but was haled to the ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio

... Rome, as once before, the story of Christ was brought. In 597, the year in which St. Columba died, St. Augustine landed with his forty followers. They, too, in time reached Northumbria; so, side by side, Roman and Celt spoke the message of peace ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... let every man keep far away from the brotherhood and inheritance he despises. Thousands on thousands of our race have mixed with the Gentiles as Celt with Saxon, and they may inherit the blessing that belongs to the Gentile. You cannot follow them. You are one of the multitudes over this globe who must walk among the nations and be known as Jews, and with words on their lips which mean, 'I wish I had not been born a Jew, I disown any ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... meant that he had no ambition whatever to share the surprise of such a discovery. Although he had done his duty bravely in the war of 1870, he was by no means free from the awe with which these gouffres inspired the country-people, and his soldiering had still left him a Cadurcian Celt, with much of the superstition that he had drawn in with his native air. One morning he found that his donkey had nearly strangled himself over-night with the halter, and Decros could not shake off the impression that ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... And welcome her, welcome the land's desire, The sea-kings' daughter as happy as fair, Blissful bride of a blissful heir, Bride of the heir of the kings of the sea— O joy to the people and joy to the throne, Come to us, love us, and make us your own: For Saxon or Dane or Norman we, Teuton or Celt, or whatever we be, We are each all Dane in our ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson

... a tall and splendid man, a 'black Celt' from Merionethshire, with coal-black hair, and eyes deeply sunken and lined, with fatigue or ill health. Beside him, his comrade, Philip Cuningham, had the air of a shrewd clerk or man of business—with his light alertness of frame, his reddish hair, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... rolls, Enter the gates of the city, and take the waiting throne, And make the heart of a Nation, O Royal Pair, your own. Sons of the old race, we, and heirs of the old and the new; Our hands are bold and strong, and our hearts are faithful and true; Saxon and Norman and Celt one race of the mingled blood Who fought built cities and ships and stemmed the unknown flood In the grand historic days that made our England great When Britain's sons were steadfast to meet or to conquer fate Our sires were the minster builders who wrought themselves unknown The thought divine ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean

... Johnstone at Lockerby. And we find such hybrids as Macalexander for Macallister. There is but one rule to be deduced: that however uncompromisingly Saxon a name may appear, you can never be sure it does not designate a Celt. My great-grandfather wrote the name Stevenson but pronounced it Steenson, after the fashion of the immortal minstrel in "Redgauntlet"; and this elision of a medial consonant appears a Gaelic process; and, curiously enough, I have come across no less than two Gaelic forms: John Macstophane ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... he proceeded with his client down the High Street, where, along under the glimmering lamps, were the usual crowds of loungers, composed of canny Saxon and fiery Celt, which have always made this picturesque thoroughfare so remarkable. Not one of all these had any interest for our two searchers; but it was otherwise when they came toward the Canongate Tolbooth, where, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various

... down the canyon to pull in on the siding beyond the Rosemary. The car was a passenger coach, well-lighted, and from his post on the embankment Adams could see armed men filling the windows. Michael Branagan saw them, too, and the fighting Celt in him rose ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde

... this poem, with regard to that part which deals with the battle of Enthandune, Chesterton says: 'I fancy that in fact Alfred's Wessex was of very mixed bloods; I have given a fictitious Roman, Celt, and Saxon a part ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke

... to win us This land beyond recall— And the same blood flows within us Of Briton, Celt, and Gaul— Keep alive each glowing ember Of our sireland, but remember Our country is Canadian ...
— The Voyageur and Other Poems • William Henry Drummond

... an outspoken man when the prod of his hot temper has loosened his tongue, and Mike Gaynor was a Celt ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser

... Knowledge heretofore been so singularly united under the auspices of the Apostolic See, least of all can we be the men to distrust its wisdom and to predict its failure, when it sends us on a similar mission now. I cannot forget that, at a time when Celt and Saxon were alike savage, it was the See of Peter that gave both of them, first faith, then civilization; and then again bound them together in one by the seal of a joint commission to convert and illuminate in their turn the pagan continent. I cannot forget how it was from Rome that the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... guard against their neighbors, and rigidly preserving their Dorian purity of extraction, contributed neither artists, nor poets, nor philosophers to the golden treasure-house of mind. He took the old race of the Celts, Cimry, or Cimmerians. He compared the Celt who, as in Wales, the Scotch Highlands, in Bretagne, and in uncomprehended Ireland, retains his old characteristics and purity of breed, with the Celt whose blood, mixed by a thousand channels, dictates ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the world has ever heard are as imaginative as that of the Celt, and at this time the imagination of every Celt must have been largely exercised in the direction of the malevolent and the terrible. Even now, after fourteen hundred years of Christianity, the Connaught or Kerry peasant still hears the shriek of his early gods in the sob of the waves ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... were that love of "leg of mutton and turnips" which Mr. Hake and I have so often seen exemplified. The reason why Borrow was so misjudged in Norfolk was, as I have hinted above, that the racial characteristics of the Celt and the East Anglian clashed too severely. Yet he is a striking illustration of the way in which the locality that has given birth to a man influences his imagination throughout his life. His father, a Cornishman of a good middle-class family, had been obliged, owing to a youthful escapade, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... the Rhine-land, From the Shannon, from the Scheldt, From the ancient homes of genius, From the sainted home of Celt, From Italy, from Hungary, All as brothers join and come, To the sinew-bearing bugle And the foot-propelling drum: Too glad beneath the starry flag to die, and keep secure The Liberty they dreamed of by the Danube, Elbe, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... strength had dribbled away before it had rightly begun. But the figure of the Irish politician I accept without reserve. It seems to me grand and mighty in its sorrowfulness. The tall, dark-eyed, beautiful Celt, attainted in blood and brain by generations of famine and drink, alternating with the fervid sensuousness of the girl, her Saxon sense of right alternating with the Celt's hereditary sense of revenge, his dreamy patriotism, his facile platitudes, his acceptance of literature as a sort ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... predictions had long been making a deep impression not on Wales only but on its conquerors. It was to meet the dreams of a yet living Arthur that the grave of the legendary hero-king at Glastonbury was found and visited by Henry the Second. But neither trick nor conquest could shake the firm faith of the Celt in the ultimate victory of his race. "Think you," said Henry to a Welsh chieftain who joined his host, "that your people of rebels can withstand my army?" "My people," replied the chieftain, "may be weakened by your might, and even in great part destroyed, but unless the ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... occurred to me that in ancient times there might have been admixtures between the lost branches of the Celtic race and races like the Laplanders which covered the soil upon their arrival. My ethnical position would in this case be: "A Celt crossed with Gascon with a slight infusion of Laplander blood." Such a condition of things ought, if I am not mistaken, according to the theories of the anthropologists, to represent the maximum of idiocy and imbecility; but the decrees of anthropology are only relative: what it treats as stupidity ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... his sorrowfulness and bitterness he had something of the Celt's spiritual abhorrence of the flesh; and though he loved Vera, after his manner, there were moments when Vera's capacity for everlasting passion left him ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair

... Fenian leaders was killed in the late Frontier Fizzle, yet many of them are reported as being badly wounded—as to their feelings. General O'NEIL'S feelings are dreadfully hurt by the ignominy of a constable and a cell, which was a bad Cell for a Celt. The feelings of General GLEASON (and they must be multitudinous, since he is nearly seven feet high,) were so badly wounded by circumstances over which he didn't seem to have any control, that he retired from the field "in disgust." Mental afflictions, in fact, are so numerous among the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various

... valleys. It is impossible to look at any pile of stones, at any wall, or pillar, or gate-post, without asking one's self the question, Is this old, or is this new? Is it the work of Saxon, or of Roman, or of Celt? Nay, one feels sometimes tempted to ask, Is this the work of Nature ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... there can be no doubt; the child belongs to the Celtic race. He presents the type of a Celt in ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne

... the mixed blood of Saxon and of Celt. We first hear of his ancestors upon this side of the Atlantic at that period of our nation's history which intervened between the speck of war at Lexington and the cloud of ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... have Patrick O'Donnell, an enthusiast, a Celt, a Catholic, setting out for the English mansion of the father of Adiante Adister to find if the girl cannot be pleaded over to reconsider her refusal of his brother Philip. He arrives in the midst of turmoil in the house, the cause of it being ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... Dinks," replied that worthy, a genuine thorough-going Irishman, "from the crown of his head to the sole of his fut," as he would have said himself, and with a shaggy head of hair and beard as red as that of the wildest Celt in Connemara, besides being blessed with a "brogue" as pronounced as his turned-up nose—on which one might have hung a tea-kettle on an emergency, in the hope that its surroundings would supply the requisite fire and fuel for boiling purposes. ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... white men over civilized white men—of Russian (for example) over Pole, where the individualities of two kindred and similarly civilized races clash in undying conflict. The Roman conquest of western Europe resembled neither of these. Celt, Iberian, German, Illyrian, were marked off from Italian by no broad distinction of race and colour, such as that which marked off Egyptian from Italian, or that which now divides Englishman from African or Frenchman from Algerian Arab. ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield

... rude hotch-potch, We natives must forgo this satisfaction, For still the cry is "England for the Scotch" (Or else some other tribe of Celt extraction); That's why I shan't be happy Till Erin's tedious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various

... the matter! When people talk about the Celtic race, I feel as if I could burn down London. That sort of rot does more harm than ten Coercion Acts. Do you suppose a man need be a Celt to feel melancholy in Rosscullen? Why, man, Ireland was peopled just as England was; and its breed was crossed by just the ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw

... recklessly—if I had to face one race-passion, he had to look at another; we were cat and dog—Celt and Saxon, as it was in the beginning: "I am not a traitor to my country." Then I realized with sudden concern that I had probably awakened the old Don. He stirred uneasily in his chair, and lifted ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... Sherwood's story, and laughed to himself wonderingly. Not that any freak of his old partner's—of the man whom he had once regarded as, above all, practical and energetic—could now surprise him; but it seemed astonishing that Godfrey should have persuaded a man of solid means, even a Celt, to pledge himself to such an enterprise Was the story true? Did Milligan really exist? If any doubt were possible on this point, did it not also throw suspicion on the story of Strangwyn, and the ten thousand pounds? Will grew serious at ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing

... dogs of Welshmen!" and the first Celt falls into the stream, transfixed by Hubert's spear, transfixed as ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake

... Number Nine, those who approached the school-house with the rising sun behind them. They were Scotch to a man; what was more, they proclaimed the fact upon the fence-tops and made themselves obnoxious to even the MacDonalds, for after all they were only Lowlanders, and how could the Celt be expected to treat ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith

... definitely Irish. In a few years he became one of the leaders in the Celtic revival. He worked incessantly for the cause, both as propagandist and playwright; and, though his mysticism at times seemed the product of a cult rather than a Celt, his symbolic dramas were acknowledged to be full of a haunting, other-world spirituality. (See Preface.) The Hour Glass (1904), his second volume of "Plays for an Irish Theatre," includes his best one-act ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... to our names; Mrs. Mitchell by no chance prefixed it. The natural manners of the Celt and Saxon are almost diametrically opposed in Scotland. And had Kirsty's speech been in the coarse dialect of Mrs. Mitchell, I am confident my father would not have allowed her to teach me. But Kirsty did not speak a word of Scotch, and although her ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... believe in the materialistic theory that human history is mainly made up of the inevitable antagonism between Aryan and Semite, between Slav and Teuton, between Celt and Anglo-Saxon, then you must also believe that war is the permanent and beneficial factor in human history. For the conflicts of races for supremacy can ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... and dropped it in a quiet cove in a fathom of water. But the stormy inconstancy of Mac's behaviour had no connection with a gill or two of wine; his passions, angry and otherwise, were on a different sail plan from his neighbours'; and there were possibilities of good and evil in that hybrid Celt beyond their prophecy. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... which we can detect electric current is our tongue. An average European can perceive a current as feeble as six micro-amperes, a micro-ampere being a millionth part of the electric unit. Possibly the tongue of a Celt is more excitable, and I have no doubt that my countrymen can easily boast the Celt in this particular test. But the plant mimosa is ten times more excitable than the tongue of ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... race, surpassing in athletic skill the strongest of their subjects, and with the same bonhomie with which their conquering ancestors had mingled with their vassals, they exemplified in their kindly rule the Burgundian device: "Tout par l'amour, rien par la force." The people doubly Celt in origin, added to the Celtic ardor the quick imagination, the gift of playing lightly with life, and a high and passionate idealism expressing itself in an unequaled and valorous devotion to their rulers, together with an arcadian union of simplicity and finesse, the individual mark ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven

... Carr's, on a most beautiful woodland view, undulating, rich, and varied. This part of the country is a sandy soil, and is called the Oak Plains. Here once flourished the Indian. His wars, his glory, his people—where are they? Gone! The Saxon and the Celt have swept off the race, and their memory is as a cloud in a summer's sky, ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... the great purpose underlying the foundation of the industrial arts. The stone axe, or celt, was first made for a distinct service, but, in order to perfect its usefulness, its lines became more perfect and its surface more highly polished. So we might say for the spear-head, the knife, or the olla. Artistic lines and decorative beauty always ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... he loved their humour, and the scenery of "the most beautiful island in the world" had been familiar to him from his early manhood. In one of his youthful rambles he had been struck down by small-pox, and nursed with a devotion which he never forgot. Yet between him and the Celt, as between him and the Catholic, there was a mysterious, impassable barrier. They had not the same fundamental ideas of right and wrong. They did not in very truth worship the same God. But of Froude and the Irish I shall have to speak more at length hereafter. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... been spoken in the British Islands, there is no evidence that any Euskarian-speaking people remained at the time of the Roman conquest. The dark and the fair population of Britain alike spoke Celtic tongues, and therefore the name "Celt" is as applicable to the one as ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... Edinburgh masons that, though regarded as the first of Glasgow stone-cutters, he would find in the eastern capital at least his equals, he attired himself most uncouthly in a long-tailed coat of tartan, and, looking to the life the untamed, untaught, conceited little Celt, he presented himself on Monday morning, armed with a letter of introduction from a Glasgow builder, before the foreman of an Edinburgh squad of masons engaged upon one of the finer buildings at that time in the ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... Hellenes, they are an aggregate of adopted Hellenes gathered round and assimilated to a true Hellenic kernel. Here we see the oldest recorded inhabitants of a large part of the land abiding, and abiding in a very different case from the remnants of the Celt and the Iberian in Western Europe. The Greeks are no survival of a nation; they are a true and living nation, a nation whose importance is quite out of its proportion to its extent in mere numbers. ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... save a few who were doing guard duty over the ammunition stored in a shed on the wharf. One of the battery-men attempted to enter the shed with a lighted pipe in his mouth, but was prevented by the guard. It was more than the Celt could stand to be ordered by a negro; watching for a chance when the guard about-faced, he with several others sprang upon him. The guard gave the Phalanx signal, and instantly hundreds of black men secured ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson

... was inclined to believe, that the Gael was not destined to disappear, that in making the Cross of Cong he had not got as far as he was intended to get. But even Harding had admitted that no race had taken to religion quite so seriously as the Celt. The Druids had put aside the oak leaves and put on the biretta. There had never been a religious revolution in Ireland. In the fifth and sixth centuries all the intelligence of Ireland had gone into religion. "Ireland is immersed in the religious vocation, and ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore

... a public-house, yes! but in a Welsh public-house. Only think of a Suffolk toper repeating the death-bed verses of a poet; surely there is a considerable difference between the Celt and the Saxon. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow



Words linked to "Celt" :   Gael, Kelt, Celtic, European, Briton, Gaul



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