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More "Divination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shadowy face. Another of those strange desert prospectors in whom there was some relentless driving power besides the lust for gold! Cameron felt that between this man and himself there was a subtle affinity, vague and undefined, perhaps born of the divination that here was a desert wanderer like himself, perhaps born of a deeper, an unintelligible relation having its roots back in the past. A long-forgotten sensation stirred in Cameron's breast, one so long forgotten that he could not recognize ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... of a division into several classes or sections: Religious Cults, Necromancy, Magic, Second Sight, Divination, Astrology, Palmistry, of which all have their special literatures and bibliographies. Major Irwin recently sold an extensive series of works on these and kindred topics. Cornelius Agrippa, Ashmole, Bulwer, Lilly, Partridge, Gadbury are among the foremost names of older ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... an old superstition. It used to be supposed that the chance words caught from the mouths of passers-by would solve any doubt on questions to which it might otherwise be impossible to obtain an answer. This was called the yufu-ura, or "evening divination," on account of its being practised in the evening. It has been found impossible in this instance to ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... seems to be upon one's first introduction to it, it was not long before I was able to understand much of what was said to me, and to express myself in a vague roundabout way. In the latter operation I was much assisted by a peculiar faculty of divination which the Russian peasant possesses to a remarkably high degree. If a foreigner succeeds in expressing about one-fourth of an idea, the Russian peasant can generally fill up the remaining three-fourths from his own intuition. This may perhaps be readily understood when one considers that ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... Banneker was far less sanguine; he had come to entertain a considerable respect for Marrineal's capacity. And he had another and more immediate complication on his mind, which fact his companion, by some occult exercise of divination, perceived. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... offset to my anecdotes about our being lost through inability to riddle out our name on the part of the police, I must relate an instance where the post-office displayed remarkable powers of divination. One day I received an official notification from the post-office that there was a misdirected parcel for me from Moscow, lying in the proper office,— would I please to call for it? I called. The address on the parcel was "Madame Argot," ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... have been misunderstood by Church writers as much as by their adversaries, for if Francis was particular not to put himself in the attitude of revolt, he would not compromise his independence, and he felt with an exquisite divination that all the privileges which the court of Rome could heap upon him were worth nothing in comparison with liberty. Alas, he was soon forced to resign himself to these gilded bonds, against which he never ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... of canticles! Pison, in his "Natural History of the East Indies," makes use of the word Vates (divine) to designate these insects, and speaks of that superstition, common to both Christians and heathens, that assigns to them the gifts of prophecy and divination. The habit that the mantis has of first stretching out one fore leg, and then the other, and of preserving such a position for some little time, has also led to the belief among the illiterate that it is in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... all the Hellenes, if it be truly ye, whom by a king's ruthless command Jason is leading on the ship Argo in quest of the fleece. It is ye truly. Even yet my soul by its divination knows everything. Thanks I render to thee, O king, son of Leto, plunged in bitter affliction though I be. I beseech you by Zeus the god of suppliants, the sternest foe to sinful men, and for the sake of Phoebus and Hera herself, under whose especial ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... Greatest of all was this; when they fell sick Men had no help, no medicine edible, Potion or ointment, but for lack of cure Wasted away and perished, till my skill Taught them to mix the juice of sovran herbs, With which they now ward off all maladies. Of divination many ways I traced, Laid down the rules for telling which of dreams Would be fulfilled, and of foreboding sounds The mystery unfolded. Then I taught What sights are ominous to wayfarers. I showed which of the birds that wing the heavens Were lucky, which ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... person dies, they think that he or she has been killed by the evil magic of some ill-wisher, and one of the first things to be done is to discover the culprit in order that his life may be taken in revenge. For this purpose the Narrinyeri resort to a form of divination. On the first night after the death the nearest relation of the deceased sleeps with his head on the corpse, hoping thus to dream of the sorcerer who has done the mischief. Next day the corpse is placed on a sort of bier supported on men's shoulders. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... 'As I believe that I see and feel Him.' But I, for my part, think that the intellect has a right to test what the soul only divines, and that it must be a real happiness to see this divination proved by well-founded arguments, and thus transformed to certainty. Did you ever hear of Plato, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Julian, every circumstance contributed to prolong and fortify the illusion; the magnificent temples of Greece and Asia; the works of those artists who had expressed, in painting or in sculpture, the divine conceptions of the poet; the pomp of festivals and sacrifices; the successful arts of divination; the popular traditions of oracles and prodigies; and the ancient practice of two thousand years. The weakness of polytheism was, in some measure, excused by the moderation of its claims; and the devotion of the Pagans was not incompatible with the most licentious ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... a little child before him, and was subsequently a sort of erratic follower of the party unto which Gilgal was allied; but he would at times forsake the assemblies of the faithful, when, it is said, the dark spirit of divination again came over him, and he would wander among the tombs, showing symptoms of a disordered intellect, though not of the same violent ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Aurora since she had lived in foreign lands had been the so often arising necessity to think quickly what it would be proper to give. As the amount of the gratuity did not much matter to her she had felt a desperate wish often for the power of divination, by which to know what would be expected. On some occasions it had seemed to Aurora that it would be more delicate not to offer money; but experience had taught her that if she offered enough no offense would be taken. These singers were all poor young fellows, Clotilde had told her, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... conversation will seldom be taken in exchange for theirs without a large discount,—and this, by the by, eternally driving him into the hands of more equitable brokers, for such conversation as he can find, it requires no great spirit of divination to ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... over one of the doors, asked her companion, in a giggling tone, if she did not think he looked like a conjurer? Peregrine, nettled into spirits by this reception, answered for the other lady, "that it was an easy matter to be a conjurer in those times, when the simplicity of the age assisted his divination; but were he, or Merlin himself, to rise from the dead now, when such deceit and dissimulation prevail, they would not be able to earn their bread by the profession."—"O! Sir," said she, turning full upon him, "without doubt they would adopt new maxims; 'tis no disparagement in this enlightened ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... all five were seated. In that hour, When near the dawn the swallow her sad lay, Rememb'ring haply ancient grief, renews, And with our minds more wand'rers from the flesh, And less by thought restrain'd are, as 't were, full Of holy divination in their dreams, Then in a vision did I seem to view A golden-feather'd eagle in the sky, With open wings, and hov'ring for descent, And I was in that place, methought, from whence Young Ganymede, from his associates 'reft, Was snatch'd aloft to the high consistory. "Perhaps," thought I within ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... worth the money!" shouted Barto Rizzo, with a splendid divination of his thought. "You skulker! are you not paid and fattened to do business which you've only to remember, and it'll honey your legs in purgatory? You're the shooting-dog of that Greek, and you nose about the bushes for his birds, and who cares if any ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was tinged with the most puerile superstition; the influence of the clergy, and the errors of the people, were consecrated by his laws; and the oracles of Leo, which reveal, in prophetic style, the fates of the empire, are founded on the arts of astrology and divination. If we still inquire the reason of his sage appellation, it can only be replied, that the son of Basil was less ignorant than the greater part of his contemporaries in church and state; that his education had been directed by the learned Photius; and that several books of profane and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... poetical quotation, And master derivation, And the science of translation, And complex pagination, And perfect punctuation, And binomial equation, And accurate computation, And boundless permutation, And infinite gradation, And the craft of divination, And Scripture revelation, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... had determined to assume the cowl. At length, however, came the time at which he felt that leave the world he must. 'It was on the 23d of April 1475,' says Villari; 'he was sitting with his lute and playing a sad melody; his mother, as if moved by a spirit of divination, turned suddenly round to him, and exclaimed mournfully, My son, that is a sign we are soon to part. He roused himself, and continued, but with a trembling hand, to touch the strings of the lute, without raising his eyes from the ground.' This would make a picture: ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Nicholas," she said, regarding him, mournfully. "Listen to it, and judge of its effect on me. Thus it is written in Deuteronomy:—'There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.' A witch, Nicholas—do you mark the word? And yet more particular is the next verse, wherein it is said;—'Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... so did Renoir; but the former was impartially impressionistic; the latter, ever ravished by a stray shaft of sunshine flecking the faces of the dancers, set it all down in charming tints. Not so Toulouse-Lautrec. Combined with a chronic pessimism, he exhibited a divination of character that, if he had lived and worked hard, might have placed him not far below Degas. He is savant. He has a line that proclaims the master. And unlike Aubrey Beardsley, his affinity to the Japanese never seduced him into the exercise of the decorative abnormal ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... was closed, and especially during the last three hundred years, may enable us to realize the significance of a most remarkable fact. Even in those early ages, when to all the nations surrounding Israel the heavenly bodies were objects for divination or idolatry, the attitude of the sacred writers toward them was perfect in its sanity ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... carried out, has been, I think, the guiding rule of his life. He had modelled himself on Bewsher; he walked like Bewsher; tried to think like Bewsher—that is, in the less important things of life—and, with the divination that marks his type of man, the little money he had, the little money that as a schoolboy he could borrow, he had spent with precision on clothes and other things that brought him personal distinction; in what people call necessities he starved ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... on her quality and, as perhaps might be said, her value from Lord Mark. She wished him, the wonderful lady, to have no pretext for not knowing what he thought of Miss Theale. Why his judgment so mattered remained to be seen; but it was this divination, in any case, that now determined Milly's rejoinder. "No. She knows you. She has probably reason to. And you all, here, know each other—I see that—so far as you know anything. You know what you're used to, and it's your being ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... had no such scruples. She was more like Esther in nature, with a touch of cynicism curling her dainty lip, arising, perhaps, from an early divination that she was to lack Esther's opportunities. Perhaps it was because she was the pessimist—the quite cheerful pessimist—of the family, that she was by far the cleverest and most industrious at the ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... were on the point of sailing away, when an eclipse of the moon, which was then at the full, took place. Most of the Athenians, deeply impressed by this occurrence, now urged the generals to wait; and Nicias, who was somewhat over-addicted to divination and practices of that kind, refused from that moment even to take the question of departure into consideration, until they had waited the thrice nine days prescribed by ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... rites, ceremonies, tricks and pretensions they closely resemble the Dactyli, Id and Curetes of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Magi of the Persians, and the Druids of Britain. Their pretended intercourse with spirits, their powers of magic and divination, and their rites are substantially the same, and point unmistakably to a common origin. The Dakota "Medicine-Man" can do the "rope-trick" of the Hindoo magician to perfection. The teepee used for the Wakan Wacipee—or Sacred Dance—is called the Wakan Teepee— the Sacred Teepee. Carver's ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... often keep the bodies in coffins above ground for several years, until the priests announce that they have discovered a lucky day and a lucky spot for the interment. This does not generally happen until he—the priest—finds he can extract no more money by divination, and that no more funeral feasts will be given by the friends. We passed through what they call the city of the dead, where thousands of coffins waiting for interment were lying above ground. The coffins are large and massive, but very plain, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... other important matter, the natives used to have recourse to divination by means of little miniature darts made of rushes or reeds, or often of the leaf ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... twenty-four hours," repeated Galeotti firmly, "if there be one sparkle of true divination in those bright and mysterious intelligences, which speak, each on their courses, though without a tongue. I wish your ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Evadne's eye. She winked at me, acknowledging thereby that she had divulged the General's secret. But by what feminine process of divination had she guessed it? Charles came ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... leaped with joy. But the joy was short-lived. No such hope in this world for Bent Wade! This coincidence, however, left him with a strange, prophetic sense in his soul of a tragedy coming to White Slides Ranch. Wade possessed some power of divination, some strange gift to pierce the veil of the future. But he could not exercise this power at will; it came involuntarily, like a messenger of trouble in the dark night. Moreover, he had never yet been able to draw away from the fascination of this knowledge. It lured him on. Always his decision ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... to pass, I know not;* but by ancient and modern example it is evident, that no great accident befalls a city or province, but it is presaged by divination, or prodigy, or astrology, or some way or other. I shall here set down a ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... eyes inspired Joan with a flashing, reviving divination. Back upon her flooded all that tide of woman's subtle incalculable power to allure, to charge, to hold. Swiftly she went close to Kells. She stretched out her hands. One was bleeding from rough contract with the log wall during the struggle. Her wrists were red, swollen, bruised from ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... reason why he should move till the stranger had passed by. The shape resolved itself into a woman's; she was looking on the ground, and walking slowly as if searching for something that had been lost, her course being precisely that of Mr. Melbury's gig. Fitzpiers by a sort of divination jumped to the idea that the figure was Grace's; her nearer approach made the guess ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... begun which has had far reaching consequences. Paul and his company had been but a short time in the city when they came in conflict with the Roman authorities. A damsel, possessed with a spirit of divination, who brought much gain to her masters, testified to Paul and his work; this spirit Paul cast out and in consequence the owners of the girl brought the charge against Paul and Silas that they were Jews who taught customs not lawful for Romans to receive. Notice, the shrewdness ...
— Bible Studies in the Life of Paul - Historical and Constructive • Henry T. Sell
... exhausted) of a penny a piece; especially since they are sure of some proper amusement, and that it is impossible for me to want means to entertain them, having, besides the helps of my own parts, the power of divination, and that I can, by casting a figure, tell you all that will happen before it comes ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... represented himself for the time being, for he claimed the power, as God, to know and reveal the future. This explanation accounts for the fact that the witches always spoke of such animals as the Devil and believed that they could foretell the future by his means. The actual method of divination is not preserved; all that remains of the ceremony are the words and gestures which were used before the appearance of the animal, and these only in few cases. The method was probably such as obtained in other places where auguries by animals and ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... falls, like a pale prophetess, Under the swoon of holy divination: And what had all surpass'd her simple guess, She now resolves in this dark revelation; Death's very mystery,—oblivious death;— Long sleep,—deep night, and an ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Cleopatra or Bilouche. These two animals caught Gazonal's eye in 1845, when in company with De Lora and Bixiou he visited the fortune-teller's. The Southerner, however, asked only a five-franc divination, while in the same year Mme. Cibot, who came to consult her on an important matter, had to pay a hundred francs. According to Bixiou, "a third of the lorettes, a fourth of the statesmen and a half of the artists" consulted Mme. Fontaine. She was ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... not care whether the region they propose to search has been scientifically tested and thought to contain gold. They adhere to the miner's adage, "Gold is where you find it"; and they seem to have some occult power of divination for they have uncovered fabulous fortunes in regions which, like Cripple Creek, had been declared "barren of gold." Yet, as the old settlers say, "Prospectors never get anything out of their finds." Having struck it rich, they take to the trail again, to search ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... any blame to myself for not foreseeing the misprints which our author pleads, because they must have baffled far higher powers of divination than mine. Thus I found [124:2] the author stating that the fourth Evangelist 'only once distinguishes John the Baptist by the appellation [Greek: ho baptistes],' [124:3] whereas, as a matter of fact, he never does so; and comparing ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... divest our patients of nerves, I fancy you have no further need of me than to recommend you not to allow your imagination to take too wide a field." Valentine colored. M. d'Avrigny carried the science of divination almost to a miraculous extent, for he was one of the physicians who always work upon the body through the mind. "No," she replied, "it is for my poor grandmother. You know the calamity that has happened to ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... The Maya codices are made up, for the most part, of the records of the sacred period of two hundred and sixty days, a period called in Nahuatl, tonalamatl, and other numerical calculations. The tonalamatl was used for purposes of divination in order to find out whether good or bad fortune was in store for an individual. It is not necessary at this place to go into the different means taken to record this period of time or its methods of use. It may be well, however, to explain the usual distribution of the pictures ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... of the most ancient, is much less advanced than that of the hieroglyphs. When documents in the old language, or at least written in the primitive ideographic characters, are attacked, the process is one of divination rather than of translation in the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... limits of liberty in a girls' school, and it was manifestly infeasible, as well as very chilly, to attempt to stray out alone at the stroke of twelve, robed merely in a nightgown, and fetch three pails of water to place by one's bedside. Gowan's north country recipe for divination was equally impracticable—to go out at midnight, and "dip your smock in a south-running spring where the lairds' lands meet," then hang it to dry before the fire. They discussed it quite seriously, however, in all ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... the Ozarks, where once she had traveled—true, against her will, but yet through scenes which she now remembered. And always there came up in her mind a question which she found no way to ask. It was Jeanne herself who, either by divination or by ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... decrees and wisdom is to gratify the passions of the flesh at the expense of the spirit. The prophets and those who have stood nearest the fountain of universal knowledge used dreams with more frequency than any other mode of divination. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... believe, and pardonable in the belief, that the Irish and their priesthood were rather prone to be irreverent; but observe, under this exterior, the deep sources of feeling that lie hidden and wait but the wand of divination to be revealed. In a thousand similar ways are the actions and the motives of the Irish understood by those who are careless of them; or worse, misrepresented by those whose interest, and too often business, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... to yield to her desire for rest. The word, however, was to strike him as strangely misapplied, for from the day of their arrival she was in state of perpetual activity. She seemed to have mastered her Paris by divination, and between the hounds of the Boulevards and the Place Vendome she moved at ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... bow myself to this goddess Night,—holy, pure, running her course during this the northern journey of the sun,[1] let my desire be fulfilled." Saying this, she, in a purified condition of body and soul, worshipped the goddess Night. And in the name of her chastity and truth she had recourse to divination.[2] And she asked, "Show me the place where the king of the gods is. Let truth be verified by truth." And it was thus that she addressed the goddess ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... supposed, and has been conquered by implements and weapons very different in precision and power from what they purposed to rely on. But the combination of patient and careful industry, with the courage and divination of genius, in doing what none had done before, makes it equally stupid and idle to impeach ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... chariots, under awnings of purple or of yellow silk. Then came the brehons, the great judges of the land, and the chief bards of the high court of Tara, and the Druids, crowned with oak leaves, and carrying wands of divination ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... a few points in this case upon which Camille wished he could bring to bear those purely intellectual—not magical—powers of divination which he modestly told his clients were the secret of all his sagacious advice. He wished he could determine conclusively and exactly what was the mutual relation of Attalie and her lodger. Out of the minutest corner of one eye he ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... had procured one that would suit me, and by which I should not be obliged to quit her. I exhausted all my conjectures in guessing what this occupation could be, but I must have possessed the art of divination to have hit it on the right. I had money sufficient to make my journey agreeable: Mademoiselle du Chatelet persuaded me to hire a horse, but this I could not consent to, and I was certainly right, for ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... if you mention it to me I'm afraid you WILL mention it to him. You always do speak of things that you have on your mind, and you might get papa all stirred up again about—" Alice paused, a light of divination flickering in her eyes. "Oh!" she cried. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... banished. He recanted in a work called Querelae, and by the intercession of his friends, above all, of Cicero, obtained pardon from Caesar. Caecina was regarded as an important authority on the Etruscan system of divination (Etrusca Disciplina), which he endeavoured to place on a scientific footing by harmonizing its theories with the doctrines of the Stoics. Considerable fragments of his work (dealing with lightning) are to be found in Seneca (Naturales ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... longer I live the more I am impressed with the importance of manners. When we reflect upon their persuasive and cheering force, how they recommend, prepare and draw people together; when we think what keys they are, and to what secrets; what high and inspiring character they convey and what divination is required of us for the reading of this fine telegraphy, we see what ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... which probably accounts for the fact that his literary output has been small. But the same power of analysis and attention to detail have been most effective in his political activities. In these his divination has been prophetic and in his manipulation of contending elements he shows a dexterity that has baffled even ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... with scarce a pause by the "Lewa," a kind of festal revel, in which the dancers move inwards and outwards as they circle round; and this in turn yields place to the "Bondogaya" and two religious figures, the "Damali" and "Chinughi," which are said when properly performed to give men the power of divination. ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... and said: 'Eurymachus, surely the day of my father's returning hath gone by. Therefore no more do I put faith in tidings, whencesoever they may come, neither have I regard unto any divination, whereof my mother may inquire at the lips of a diviner, when she hath bidden him to the hall. But as for that man, he is a friend of my house from Taphos, and he avows him to be Mentes, son of wise Anchialus, and he hath lordship among the ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... was obviously possessed by the idea that numerous premonitions had been vouchsafed to him; and what chiefly moved in him a desire to visit Scotland was, not its scenery, its lakes, its mountains, or its people, but a wish to inquire into the (as he supposed) natural faculty of divination. The dream may be of Jove[19]—Homer is a sound heathen authority upon this point; but Talleyrand was no dreamer. His "presentiments" (for so he loved to call them), were, apparently, sudden intuitions, which he was wholly ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Syria Hadad is hardly to be distinguished from a solar deity. The process of assimilation did not proceed so far in Babylonia and Assyria, but Shamash and Adad became in combination the gods of oracles and of divination in general. Whether the will of the gods is determined through the inspection of the liver of the sacrificial animal, through observing the action of oil bubbles in a basin of water or through the observation of the movements of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Midian would appeal for aid to the God of their enemies instead of to their own divinity, for in those days the principal business of a deity was to wage war in behalf of his worshipers. Balaam was a Midianite, and Balak sent messengers to him "with the reward of divination in their hand," and begged that he would kindly come over and knock the Israelites off the Christmas tree with one of his smooth-bore, muzzle-loading maledictions; "for," said he, with a pious fervor that proves ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to the foot of the terrace, sweetly repeats her wish to adopt the little boy, when Butterfly, emerging from the inner room, comes to look for her long lost husband, whose presence she feels with the divination ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Thomas—as well as the two others—seemed to possess the power of divination. And during the whole of the dinner his manner showed distinct apprehension. The meal concluded, even to the use of the finger-bowl, and all dishes disposed upon the tray, he hung about, puttering with the table, picking up crumbs and pins, dusting ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... that have scarcely yet died out in Scotland. As she told of tricks she had often played, of the apple eaten facing a mirror, of the dripping sheet, of the basins of water, of the nuts burning side by side, and many other such innocent ways of divination, by which laughing, trembling English maidens sought to see the form of their future husbands, if husbands they were to have, then Faith listened breathlessly, asking short, eager questions, as if some ray of hope had entered into her gloomy heart. Lois went on speaking, telling her of all ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... kind of genius, and has developed an art form for expressing goodness in words, is necessarily an exceptional man. And it is unreasonable and unfair in the public to expect a man to get up in the pulpit and, with no costume and no accessories, merely with a kind of shrewd holiness or divination into human nature, present goodness so that we seem to be there. It is small wonder that a man who finds he is expected to be a kind of combination of biograph, brother, spiritual detective, and angel all in one, in order to do his work successfully has days ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... comedie) of an old, rambling, wainscoted, out-of-the-way English country-house, in the age of Goldsmith. Here Mr. Abbey is in his element—given up equally to unerring observation and still more infallible divination. The whole place, and the figures that come and go in it, live again, with their individual look, their peculiarities, their special signs and oddities. The spirit of the dramatist has passed completely into ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... she lamented and wept for. Be that as it may, the next morning she conjured Caesar not to go out that day if he could possibly avoid it, but to adjourn the senate; and, if he had no regard to her dreams, to have recourse to some other species of divination, or to sacrifices, for information as to his fate. This gave him some suspicion and alarm; for he had never known before, in Calpurnia, anything of the weakness or superstition of her sex, though she ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... the old, the young, the coquettish, the virtuous woman opposite, or the caprices of the coxcomb, the inventions of the old bachelor, the color of the furniture, and the cat of the two pair front. Everything furnishes a hint, and becomes matter for divination. At the fourth story, a grisette, taken by surprise, finds herself—too late, like the chaste Susanne,—the prey of the delighted lorgnette of an aged clerk, who earns eighteen hundred francs a year, and who becomes criminal gratis. On the other hand, a handsome ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... either from or through him, Thou conveyedst to me, and tracedst in my memory, what I might hereafter examine for myself. But at that time neither he, nor my dearest Nebridius, a youth singularly good and of a holy fear, who derided the whole body of divination, could persuade me to cast it aside, the authority of the authors swaying me yet more, and as yet I had found no certain proof (such as I sought) whereby it might without all doubt appear, that what had been truly foretold by those consulted was the result of haphazard, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... now ceased, and the attention of the company was riveted upon Flint and his neighbor. Winifred felt herself growing intensely nervous. She had no fear of Miss Wabash's extraordinary power of divination, but she had still less confidence in the delicacy of her perceptions, and she dreaded some remark which would embarrass her through ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... not lived in the family five years when she triumphantly declared that she had heard, or rather overheard, sufficient to enable her to say what had been the former fate of her associates. Could Katy have possessed enough of divination to pronounce upon their future lot, her task would have been accomplished. From the private conversations of the parent and child, she learned that a fire had reduced them from competence to poverty, and at the same time diminished the number of their family to two. There was ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... very little doubt that amongst the various tricks of ancient divination ventriloquism found a place; but I cannot give that direct evidence which MR. SANSOM asks for. I think it very likely that "the wizards that peep and mutter" (Isa. viii. 19.) were of this class; but it is not clear that the [Hebrew: 'obot]—the [Greek eggastrimuthoi] ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... permitted that I send for my priests, who tell by divination, having burnt strange herbs to the gods ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... it is actually impossible. It is almost incredible that men who are themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal preference, belief, or divination. How have they succeeded in so stultifying their sense for the living facts of human nature as not to perceive that every philosopher, or man of science either, whose initiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought, has ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Chinese music is still found. However deficient his knowledge of the art, his passion for music was extraordinary. After hearing a fine performance "he was unable for [Page 92] three months to enjoy his food." A fifth task was the editing of the Yih-King,[*] the book of divination compiled by Wen-wang. How thoroughly he believed in it is apparent from his saying, "Should it please Heaven to grant me five or ten years to study this book, I would not be in danger of falling into great errors." He meant that he would then be ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... be observed in little folks at a very early age. With some children they are not very pronounced, and the child seems like hundreds of others without any particular inclination, artistic or otherwise. It is then that the teacher's powers of divination should be brought into play. Before any real progress can be made the nature of the child must be studied carefully. In the case of other children, the individuality is very marked at an early age. As a rule, the ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... reality which they do not possess, and misconceives the nature of socialism, which is exclusively critical. M. Blanc, therefore, has given us the spectacle of a vivid imagination ready to confront an impossibility; he has believed in the divination of genius; but he must have perceived that science does not improvise itself, and that, be one's name Adolphe Boyer, Louis Blanc, or J. J. Rousseau, provided there is nothing in experience, there is nothing ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Joe took up is one of the oldest—perhaps the oldest—form of alleged human divination, and has been called "mirror-gazing," "crystal-gazing," "crystal vision," and the like. Its practice dates back certainly three thousand years, having been noted in all ages, and among nations uncivilized ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... bear it—to admit that she stood alone, and must judge for herself. What possible bliss or reward could there ever be for her but just this: to be allowed to watch and suffer with Oliver—to bring him the invention, the patience, the healing divination of love? And if it were not to be hers, then what remained was to go down into the arena, where all that is ugliest and most piteous in life bleeds and gasps, and throw herself blindly into the fight. Perhaps some heavenly voice might ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which are naturally, but Conjectures upon the Experience of time past; and supernaturall, divine Revelation; the same authors of the Religion of the Gentiles, partly upon pretended Experience, partly upon pretended Revelation, have added innumerable other superstitious wayes of Divination; and made men believe they should find their fortunes, sometimes in the ambiguous or senslesse answers of the priests at Delphi, Delos, Ammon, and other famous Oracles; which answers, were made ambiguous by designe, to own the event both wayes; or absurd by the intoxicating ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... only look at the practical side of divination, it seems absurd to imagine that events in a man's past life and secrets known only to himself can be represented on the spur of the moment by a pack of cards which he shuffles and cuts for the fortune-teller to lay out in piles according ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... or power of divination might indeed have given me a passing glimpse of the things which lay beyond, through the portals of that day, for I answered him ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... been implanted in Polly, enabling her to pierce straight through John's self-sufficiency or Ned's vapourings, to the real kernel of goodness that no doubt lay hid below. He himself could not get at it; but then his powers of divination were the exact opposite of Polly's. He was always struck by the weak or ridiculous side of a person, and had to dig laboriously down to the virtues. While his young wife, by a kind of genius, saw the good at a glance—and saw ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... that the worshipful Laird of Ellangowan was not so preceese as he might have been in clearing his land of witches (concerning whom it is said, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"), nor of those who had familiar spirits, and consulted with divination, and sorcery, and lots, which is the fashion with the Egyptians, as they ca' themsells, and other unhappy bodies, in this our country. And the Laird was three years married without having a family; and he was sae left to himsell, that it was thought he held ower muckle troking and communing ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... feet high upon the face of the rocks of Behistun; and though the alphabets and the languages in which these long inscriptions were "graven with a pen of iron and lead upon the rocks for ever," had been long dead and unknown, yet, by a kind of philological divination, Archaeology has exorcised and resuscitated both; and from these dumb stones, and from the analogous inscriptions of Van, Elwend, Persepolis, etc., it has evoked official gazettes and royal contemporaneous annals of the deeds and dominions of Darius, Xerxes, and ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... of the latter, while Ashurbanipal is a great example of the magic-ridden kings. Hammurabi apparently strove to put down magic. The eternal struggle between the "science" (falsely so-called) of magic and divination on the one hand and the higher claims of religious duty on the other, is the key to much that is misunderstood in the politics of the time. It would be too much to say that the priestly party were always on the side of morality, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... the steps beneath the shadowing archway, Leigh caught a reflected glow of enthusiasm from his guide's prophetic gaze. He was stirred by an appreciation of the dream so grandly conceived, so imperfectly realized, by a divination of the long struggle ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... professed disciples. The latter confesses, in a well-known passage, that "Ivanhoe" was the inspirer of his "Conquete d'Angleterre," and styles the novelist "le plus grand maitre qu'il y ait jamais eu en fait de divination historique." [45] ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Lord George's stables, which, if he could have laid claim to the powers of divination would have kept him still "Lord Paramount of the Turf." They were the yearlings Surplice and Loadstone, and both were destined to make historic names ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... forms had been close and dancing about him for a time not measurable merely by the hours of a single night, that in a sense they were always there though he had but just discovered them. His earlier glimpses had been a very partial divination of a truth, immense and beautiful, that now dawned quite ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... young and good looking, a dainty morsel that should please the taste of the officiating doctors, and her owner and uncle was a man of no importance: so accordingly he had made known the sin of her name through the divination. ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... skein of life may be proudly and victoriously unloosed; when the secret modulations of the most exquisite tenderness, the most heroic courage, the most sublime simplicity, are known to be subject to his command,—it is most natural that the inquiry should be made if this wondrous divination springs from a sincere faith in the reality of the noble feelings portrayed, or whether its source is to be found in an acute perception of the intellect, an abstract comprehension of ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... ahead. She turned now and smiled serenely. Loder felt no vibration of the arm he held, yet by an instant intuition he knew that the two women were antagonistic. He experienced it with the divination that follows upon a moment of acute suspense. He understood it, as he had understood Lillian's look of recognition when his forehead, eyes, and nose had shown him to be himself; her blank surprise when his close-shaven lip and chin had ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... singly or put together. Such sticks were in early times used by the northern nations for the purpose of ascertaining future events. The sticks were shaken up, and from the figures that they formed a kind of divination was derived. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... convenient materials than wood whereon to write, so that the adaptation of the forms would not have been necessary. That the Germans were familiar with some sort of marks on wood at a much earlier period is shown by Tacitus's Germania, chap. x. There we are told that for purposes of divination certain signs were scratched on slips of wood from a fruit-bearing tree (including, no doubt, tile beech; cp. book, German Buch, and Buchstabe, a letter of the alphabet); the slips were thrown down promiscuously on a white cloth. whence the expert picked them up at random ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... would appeal for aid to the God of their enemies instead of to their own divinity, for in those days the principal business of a deity was to wage war in behalf of his worshipers. Balaam was a Midianite, and Balak sent messengers to him "with the reward of divination in their hand," and begged that he would kindly come over and knock the Israelites off the Christmas tree with one of his smooth-bore, muzzle-loading maledictions; "for," said he, with a pious fervor that proves he was ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... left for home, Kamehameha called his chief priest, and announced he was about to break the tabus and to change his faith. The Kahuna replied that he was the King's servant, but the step was grave, and it would be wiser to proceed by divination. Kamehameha consented. Each built a new heiau over against the other's; and when both were finished, a game of what we call French and English or The Tug of War was played upon the intervening space. The party of the priest ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... DIVINATION BY THE BIBLE AND KEY.—This superstition is very prevalent amongst the peasantry of this and adjoining parishes. When any article is suspected to have been stolen, a Bible is procured; and opened at ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... have put this hope in the human mind; since it is said that many have hastened to death of the body that they might live in the other life; and this also is impossible. Again, we have continual experience of our immortality in the divination of our dreams, which could not be if there were no immortal part in us, since immortal must be the revelation. This part may be either corporeal or incorporeal if one think well and closely. I say corporeal or incorporeal, because of the different opinions which ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... mythology the Sibyls were certain women reputed to possess special powers of prophecy, or divination, and who claimed to make special intercession with the gods in behalf of those who resorted to them. Do you see why their "name" would be used on signs as ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... in most men a sense of quality, a power of divination in regard to value which, on occasions when they are confronted by a stranger whose worth they do not know, informs them immediately of the comparative rarity or commonness of his type. This sense may at first be baffled by ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... to the king a certain wise man, Tremonius, Archbishop of Caerleon, praying him to send for Merlin, and build according to his bidding, since there was none so skilled in counsel or labour, more truthful of word or apter in divination. The king desired greatly to behold Merlin, and to judge by hearing of his worth. At that time Merlin abode near the Well of Labenes. This fountain springs in a hidden place, very deep in Wales, but I know not where, since I have never been. Merlin ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... which was to have his tongue cut out, and hand struck off, previous to his being hanged, was executed with the utmost rigour. He denied the murder with his last breath. "It is," says a contemporary judge, "a dark case of divination, to be remitted to the great day, whether he was guilty or innocent. Only it is certain he was a bad youth, and may serve as a beacon to all profligate persons."—FOUNTAINHALL'S Decisions, Vol. I. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... the present editor records with pride, that Dryden was a decided admirer of old ballads and popular tales.[69] His researches sometimes extended into the vain province of judicial astrology, in which he was a firm believer; and there is reason to think that he also credited divination by dreams. In the country, he delighted in the pastime of fishing, and used, says Mr. Malone, to spend some time with Mr. Jones of Ramsden, in Wiltshire. D'Urfey was sometimes of this party; but Dryden appears to have undervalued his skill in fishing, as much as his attempts at poetry. ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... with a significance that Brodrick himself was not aware of; as if the powers that worked in him obscurely had used him for the utterance of a divination not ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... Etruscan, the son, it is said, of a genius, Jovialis, and grandson of Jupiter, who rose out of the ground as a man named Tarchon was ploughing near Tarquinii, and instructed the auspices in divination. Cf. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... master derivation, And the science of translation, And complex pagination, And perfect punctuation, And binomial equation, And accurate computation, And boundless permutation, And infinite gradation, And the craft of divination, And Scripture revelation, And the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... of ius divinum to keep up the pax deorum; meaning of pax in this phrase. Means towards the maintenance of the pax: sacrifice and prayer, fulfilment of vows, lustratio, divination. Meaning of sacrificium. Little trace of sacramental sacrifice. Typical sacrifice of ius divinum: both priest and victim must be acceptable to the deity; means taken to secure this. Ritual of slaughter: examination and porrectio of entrails. Prayer; the phrase Macte esto and its importance ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... high matter. Even I with my art dare not meddle with it. It is best to heed the injunction to silence. Wagging tongues always have troubles as their children. Now let us proceed with my sacred cock and his divination." ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... mercy might there be gathered together. But Patrick being come forth on the dry land, a multitude of heathens met him who were waiting and expecting his coming; for the magicians and soothsayers, either by divination or by prophecy, had foreknown that the island would be converted by the preaching of Patrick, and had long before predicted his arrival in these words: "One shall arrive here, having his head shaven in a circle, bearing a crooked staff, and his table shall be in the eastern ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... I have already quoted, after admitting that there was not a breath against his character either at school or Trinity, goes on to write that "at Trinity he did not strike us as a very exceptional person," and yet there must have been some sharp eyes at Trinity, for our Don adds with surprising divination: ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... ran into the house Donald's eyes followed her, moodily. And if he had, indeed, possessed the power of divination which he had laid pretence to, the expression in them, and the shadow on his spirit, would have ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... had nothing but contempt for the later Neoplatonism, the theurgic and theosophic apparatus of Iamblichus and his friends. I have said nothing yet about the extraordinary development of magic in all its branches, astrology, necromancy, table-rapping, and other kinds of divination, charms and amulets and witchcraft, which brought ridicule upon the last struggles of paganism. These aberrations of Nature-Mysticism will be dealt with in their later developments in my seventh Lecture. St. Augustine, after ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... that the rod with which popular fancy invests criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel-switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch-twig for the castigation of offenders. It has therefore been my aim in the following pages to direct attention to the best, not to forage for the worst—the small faults which acquire prominence only by isolation—of the poet ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... but they hear not: Yet the heathen kneel and pray, Nor in their madness say: "Thou art no god, and therefore I will fear not; What if I disobey? Thou art but stone or clay." They hear not, but their worshippers impute Them faculties to suit The divination of the prayers they say; And Christ, who understands His children in all lands When from the dark their dying souls have cried, Shrines His great heart of love within the clod The savage calls his god And ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... of art over mere reportage of fact. Of course Rousseau's art of another kind, his mere mastery of style and presentation, does redeem this reportage to some extent; but this would remain if the thing were wholly fiction, and the other art of invention, divination, mimesis—call it what you will—would come in. Yet it is not worth while to be idly unlike other people and claim it as an actual novel. It may be worth while to point out how it displays some of the great gifts of the novel-writer. The first of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the breadth of the original note by a part of the middle-crease which remained, filled out the torn part with blank paper, completed the divided words in the same character of manuscript, and endeavored to guess the remainder, but no clairvoyant power of divination came to my aid. I turned over the letters again, remarking the neatness with which the addresses had been cut off, and wondering why the man had not destroyed the letters and other memoranda entirely, if he wished to hide a possible crime. ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... him daily—how the sturdy Cumbrian yeoman would have rejoiced in so stalwart a son! Thus, with this vague bond of sympathy with a man whom he had never seen, never known, so long ago, so cruelly dead, this intuitive divination of his paternal sentiment, Varney's fatherly attitude grew more definite daily and became accustomed, and he was jealous of the influence of Colannah, who in turn was jealous of ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... you then were, that you were emphatic as to my glorious and rapid restoration. If that system, so to speak, of Tuscan augury which you had inherited from your noble and excellent father did not deceive you, neither will our power of divination deceive me; which I have acquired from the writings and maxims of the greatest savants, and, as you know, by a very diligent study of their teaching, as well as by an extensive experience in managing public business, and ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the consequences of the act of perception in his host of which the two women trained suppos-ably in the art of pleasing had been altogether incapable; and that of some other condition on Newton's part that left his own poor power of divination nothing less than shamed. This last was signally the case on the former's saying, ever so responsively, almost radiantly, in answer to his account of how he happened to come: "Oh then it's very interesting!" That was the astonishing note, after what he had been through: neither Mrs. Folliott ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... from Mordecai's mind the complete ideal shape of that personal duty and citizenship which lay in his own thought like sculptured fragments certifying some beauty yearned after but not traceable by divination. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Isbel had hinted at now possessed Ellen—body, mind, and soul. Disgraced, scorned by an Isbel! Yet loved by him! In that divination there flamed up a wild, fierce passion to hurt, to rend, to flay, to fling back upon him a stinging agony. Her thought flew upon her like whips. Pride of the Jorths! Pride of the old Texan blue blood! It lay dead at her feet, killed by the scornful words of the last ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... why he should move till the stranger had passed by. The shape resolved itself into a woman's; she was looking on the ground, and walking slowly as if searching for something that had been lost, her course being precisely that of Mr. Melbury's gig. Fitzpiers by a sort of divination jumped to the idea that the figure was Grace's; her nearer approach made ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... court; his wife, his daughter, his nephews, his sons-in-law his sister, Agrippa, his kinsmen, his domestics, his friends; Areus, Maecenas, his slayers of beasts for sacrifice and divination: there thou hast the death of a whole court together. Proceed now on to the rest that have been since that of Augustus. Hath death dwelt with them otherwise, though so many and so stately whilst they lived, than it doth use to deal with any one particular man? Consider now the death ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... holden at nine o'clock of the same morning. None of them knew Mr. Sidney, or were known by him. It was arranged that he should meet them, Mr. Conway included, and exhibit his skill, and if he should convince them of his power of divination, he should discuss the genuineness of the signatures of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... has no therapeutic significance. Very few even pretended remedies were administered to the natives and probably never by the professional shaman, who worked by incantation, often pulverizing and mixing the substances mystically used, to prevent their detection. The same mixtures were employed in divination. The author particularly mentions Mandan ceremonies, in which a white "medicine" stone, as hard as pyrites, was produced by rubbing in the hand snow or the white feathers of a bird. The blowing away of the disease, considered to be introduced by a supernatural ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... suddenly and regarded Martin. Then, with a flash of divination, he saw the situation. The expression on his ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... whined queries. Better to be bled of almost any information by the antique little dame than to have her light on it some other way, as she had an amazing knack of doing. Her acted part of things Flora kept untold; but grandma's spirit of divination could unfailingly supply that, and her pencilled brows, stiff as they were, could tell the ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... therefore, he hid the money in the pillar, and instructed his daughter as related. In accordance with the father's prophecy, the man came and lodged in the house on the predicted day, and by the art of divination ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... into her face and flood it and spread up her forehead to the roots of the gold hair that the east wind had crisped round the edges of her hat. She thought, "It'll be awful if he guesses, and if he talks." But when she looked at Greatorex his face reassured her, it was so utterly innocent of divination. And the next moment he went straight to the matter ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... to take rank as a genuine scrap of folk-lore. On the bride alighting from her carriage at her father's door, a plate covered with morsels of bride's cake was flung from a window of the second story upon the heads of the crowd congregated in the street below; and the divination, I was told, consists in observing the fate which attends its downfall. If it reach the ground in safety, without being broken, the omen is a most unfavourable one. If on the other hand, the plate be shattered to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... Etruscans used to say that a little evil spirit named Tages issued one day from a furrow and revealed to the people assembled the secrets of divination. The Etruscan priests who called themselves haruspices or augurs had rules for predicting the future. They observed the entrails of victims, the thunderbolt, but especially the flight of birds (whence their ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... screen these amiable young men, and eventually they made the Janta the scapegoat, and he got seven years, while the murderers could not be touched. Colonel Mackenzie writes that, "Curious to relate, the Jantas, known locally as Bhagats, in order to become possessed of their alleged powers of divination and prophecy, require to travel to Kazhe, beyond Surat, there to learn and be instructed by low-caste Koli impostors." This is interesting as an instance of the powers of witchcraft being attributed by the Hindus or higher race to the indigenous ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... an insight and a foresight which the ancients would have called divination, he saw, in the midst of darkness and obscurity, the logic of events, and forecast the result. From the first, in his own quaint, original way, without ostentation or offense to his associates, he was pilot and commander of his administration. He was one of ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... said it.' Her mockery was not kept for her followers alone, and her voice would become harsh, and her mockery lose phantasy and humour, when she spoke of what seemed to her scientific materialism. Once I saw this antagonism, guided by some kind of telepathic divination, take a form of brutal phantasy. I brought a very able Dublin woman to see her and this woman had a brother, a physiologist whose reputation, though known to specialists alone, was European; and, because of this brother, a family pride in everything scientific ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... Mrs. Burgoyne's history and of Manisty's, his mind trained in the subtleties of moral divination soon reconstructed the whole story. Clearly the American lady now staying with Mrs. Burgoyne—who had showed towards himself such a young and ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... acquainted with the habits of the pretty, the old, the young, the coquettish, the virtuous woman opposite, or the caprices of the coxcomb, the inventions of the old bachelor, the color of the furniture, and the cat of the two pair front. Everything furnishes a hint, and becomes matter for divination. At the fourth story, a grisette, taken by surprise, finds herself—too late, like the chaste Susanne,—the prey of the delighted lorgnette of an aged clerk, who earns eighteen hundred francs a year, and who ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... the money question to stand as agreed. Such step would put this Cho[u]bei in an awkward position. The man is found, and soon will be here. Probably even Kondo[u] Dono will be satisfied."—"Who is he?" asked Kondo[u].—"One Yanagibara Kazuma. He has practised divination at Asakusa...."—"A charlatan! A quack doctor! Cho[u]bei, are you mad?" Rokuro[u]bei pushed back his cushion and his cue in horror. Not a word did he say of Natsume Kyuzo[u]. Cho[u]bei smiled. He had been trapped; but he had detected Kondo[u]. "Don't be alarmed. The ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... before the house of Fouquet, and threw in a large gaping box the fortunate order which, the evening before, he had had so much trouble to recover from the hooked fingers of the intendant. Placed in an envelope, and addressed to Fouquet, it had not even been divined by Planchet, who in divination was equal to Calchas or the Pythian Apollo. D'Artagnan thus sent back the order to Fouquet, without compromising himself, and without having thenceforward any reproaches to make himself. When he ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... process, which probably accounts for the fact that his literary output has been small. But the same power of analysis and attention to detail have been most effective in his political activities. In these his divination has been prophetic and in his manipulation of contending elements he shows a dexterity that has baffled even the ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... spinners be tokens of divination, and of knowing what weather shall fall—for oft by weathers that shall fall, some spin or weave higher or lower. Also multitude of spinners is token of ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... the fatal difference in the color, they were, to all intents and purposes, the same hands—the same size, the same shape, the same texture of skin; no scar or mark on the hand of one to distinguish it from the hand of the other. By what mysterious process of divination had she succeeded in discovering which ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... war or any other important matter, the natives used to have recourse to divination by means of little miniature darts made of rushes or reeds, or often of the leaf of the ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... in inferior bodies, according to the various dispositions of matter. Now it happens at times that the matter in the human conception is not wholly disposed to the male sex; wherefore it is formed sometimes into a male, sometimes into a female. Augustine quotes this as an argument against divination by stars: because the effects of the stars are varied even in corporeal things, according to the various dispositions ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... their truth while refusing to consider them as radiating from a common centre. Each of these was, then, bent on constructing a science out of a simple fact. Hence arose demonology, judicial astrology, the black arts, in short, every form of divination founded on circumstances that were essentially transient, because they varied according to men's temperament, and to conditions that are ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... came the time at which he felt that leave the world he must. 'It was on the 23d of April 1475,' says Villari; 'he was sitting with his lute and playing a sad melody; his mother, as if moved by a spirit of divination, turned suddenly round to him, and exclaimed mournfully, My son, that is a sign we are soon to part. He roused himself, and continued, but with a trembling hand, to touch the strings of the lute, without raising his eyes from the ground.' This would make a picture: spring ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... The people there, when they heard him say that, raised a shout of applause, because his speech chimed in so well with the object presented to him, and murmured, "Ah! a great sage, he knows even about the frog!" Then the king, thinking that this was all due to knowledge of divination, was highly delighted, and gave Harisarman the revenue of more villages, with gold, an umbrella, and state carriages of all kinds. So ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... possessed a mysterious paralyzing power, and various common phenomena all attributable to some unknown common cause, did not greatly increase the sum of actual knowledge of the subject. There was no divination of what the future would bring, and not the least conception of actual and impending possibilities. When, finally, the greatest thinkers of their times began to investigate; when Boyle began to experiment, and ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... was found to be out of his wits. They did not dare to go any further with the lie. To complete their story they should have added that the boy uttered many prophecies. For this we know is the prize of magical incantations, namely divination and prophecy. And this miracle in the case of boys is confirmed not only by vulgar opinion but by the authority of learned men. I remember reading various relations of the kind in the philosopher Varro, a writer of the highest learning and erudition, but there was the following story in ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... character drove him to attempt analysis. He arrived at nothing. Both Baker and Thorne seemed to stand on one ground—each was satisfied, neither felt that lack of the fulfilling content Bob was so keenly experiencing. But the streak of feminine divination Bob had inherited from his mother made him understand—or made him think to understand—that Baker's satisfaction was taken because he did not see, while Thorne was working with his eyes open and a full sense of values. This vague glimpse ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... [2] "Geomancy is divination by points in the ground, or pebbles arranged in certain figures, which have peculiar names. Among these is the figure called the Fortuna Major, which by an effort of imagination can also be formed out of some of the last stars of Aquarius and some of the first of Pisces." These ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... succeeded in reproducing internally, with such exactness, the habits and yearnings of Greek imagination as to provide us with an almost twin sister of the "Antigone" of Sophocles and of the goddesses of Phidias. This exact and demonstrated divination of bygone sentiments has, in our days, given a new life to history. There was almost complete ignorance of this in the last century; men of every race and of every epoch were represented as about alike, the Greek, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... emphasize the significance attached to the cow: but it is difficult to decide whether they contributed in any way to the development of these beliefs or were merely some of the practices which were the result of the divination of the cow. The custom of placing butter in the mouths of the dead, in Egypt, Uganda, and India, the various ritual uses of milk, the employment of a cow's hide as a wrapping for the dead in the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... her as ever so patiently communicative on that score under pressure of my artless appeal. That I should have been so inquiring while still so destitute of primary data was doubtless rather an anomaly; and it was for that matter quite as if my infant divination proceeded by the light of nature: I divined that it would matter to me in the future that "English life" should be of this or that fashion. My father had subscribed for me to a small periodical of quarto form, covered in yellow and entitled The Charm, which shed on the question ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... group at Geneva—the mysterious and vile Madame de S——, the unhappy slave, Tekla, the much-tried Mrs. Haldin, and the very vital anarchist, surely a portrait sur le vif, Sophia Antonovna, are testimonies of the writer's skill and profound divination of the human heart. (He has confessed that for him woman is "a human being, very much like myself.") The dialogue between Razumov, the spiritual bankrupt, and Sophia in the park is one of those character-revealing episodes that are only real when handled by a supreme artist. Its involutions ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... credit, consisteth in three things. First, that men mark when they hit, and never mark when they miss; as they do generally also of dreams. The second is, that probable conjectures, or obscure traditions, many times turn themselves into prophecies; while the nature of man, which coveteth divination, thinks it no peril to foretell that which indeed they do but collect. As that of Seneca's verse. For so much was then subject to demonstration, that the globe of the earth had great parts beyond the Atlantic, which mought be probably ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... her opinion he had won a victory; established a position. Banneker was far less sanguine; he had come to entertain a considerable respect for Marrineal's capacity. And he had another and more immediate complication on his mind, which fact his companion, by some occult exercise of divination, perceived. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... measure; appearing the very gang of Circe;—and in their midst he now observed his son, the brutish looking, cunning, and sensual Narcisse, wine-flushed and loud, and seeming to be the mimic Comus of the crew. As with the power of divination, he at once comprehended the spectacle. He had arrived opposite the equivocal building wherein Narcisse and his companions had disappeared some hours before, and the door of which had just been suddenly flung open, and kindling with wrath he at once advanced upon the bacchants in the midst of their ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... he considered tarnished by his master having been duped by a stripling; when one morning a hand-bill was found in the area, intimating the residence in Town, pro bono publico, of a celebrated professor of the Occult Sciences; to whom was given the sublime art of divination, and who, by astrological and intuitive knowledge, would discover lost or stolen property, with infallible precision. Thady, whose credulity was of no inferior order, elate with the idea of consummating his wishes, communicated to his master the happy opportunity, and was permitted to seek the counsel ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... divination, this sagacity, which is the mother of all science, we may call anticipation. The intellect, with a dog-like instinct, will not hunt until it has found the scent. It must have some presage of the result before it will turn its energies ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the chain showed wear and use, the rest of it was unworn and rusty. What had happened when the well gave out that other time? Without doubt some practical person had come along and mended the leak, and then had come up and told the abbot he had discovered by divination that if the sinful bath were destroyed the well would flow again. The leak had befallen again now, and these children would have prayed, and processioned, and tolled their bells for heavenly succor till they all dried ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that I can tell the Baas whither a white man has wandered. Yet, stay. Mavovo may be able to tell. He is a great doctor, he can see through distance, and even now, this very night his Snake of divination has entered into him and he is looking into the future, yonder, behind the house. I saw him ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... contemporary writer observes, is said to be Zoroaster, thought to be the king of the Bactrians, who flourished about 3,800 years ago, or A.M. 2000. He is supposed to have been well versed in the arts of divination and astrology, and was the origin of the Persian magi. "At his birth," remarks an old writer, "he laughed; and his head did so beat, that it struck back the midwife's hand—a good sign of abundance of spirits, which are the best instruments of a ready wit." The magi in Persia, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... that of the creators; it is intuition, not reasoning. . . . There is nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy, than this mode of thought when it is not checked by natural and good strong common sense. This common sense, which is a kind of natural divination, the stable equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating to the true, like the needle to the north pole, Bacon possesses in the highest degree. He has a preeminently practical, even an ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... incident, and form of fable, on which more phlegmatic persons base measurement and comparison. Whatever of truth there may or may not be generally in the above remarks,—certain it is, that in the novels now in question instinct or divination directed us aright. In the prefaces and notices before us, we find that the Bells were three sisters:—two of whom are no longer amongst the living. The survivor ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... the furrowed, shadowy face. Another of those strange desert prospectors in whom there was some relentless driving power besides the lust for gold! Cameron felt that between this man and himself there was a subtle affinity, vague and undefined, perhaps born of the divination that here was a desert wanderer like himself, perhaps born of a deeper, an unintelligible relation having its roots back in the past. A long-forgotten sensation stirred in Cameron's breast, one so long forgotten that he could ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... the dawn of adolescence she had passed through a long period of abject superstition, largely through the influence of a servant. All the old woman's signs were very dominant in her life. She even invented methods of divination, as, "if the boards do not creak when I walk across the room I shall get through my lessons without trouble." She always preferred to see two rooks together to one and became expert in the black arts. She used to hear strange ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... giants' home). The first of these was Fenris, the wolf; the second was Joermungand, the Midgard serpent; and the third was Hela, death. Very soon did the gods become aware of this evil progeny which was being reared in Jotunheim, and by divination they discovered that they must receive great injury from them. That they had such a mother spoke bad for them, but their coming of such a sire was a still worse presage. All-father therefore despatched certain of the gods to bring the children to him, and ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... beasts; two bear's claws were on his hands; his wand was covered with mouse-skin; when he wished to divine he beat his drum till a black bird appeared and perched on his hut; then the shaman swooned, the bird vanished, and the divination could begin. Similarly the Greenland angekok is said to summon his torngak (which may be an ancestral ghost or an animal) by drumming; he is heard by the bystanders to carry on a conversation and obtain advice as to how to treat diseases, the prospects of good weather and other matters ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... people, that I am not a Sovereign that deceives. I find that, in spite of my commands, many of my people revile the idols and treat divination as a trifle, and worship the Christians' God, and pray, and baptize, and sing—which things I abhor. They are unlawful. I detest them, and they are not to be done, saith Ranavalo-Manjaka. I will not suffer it. Those who dare to disobey my commands shall die. Now, I order that all who are guilty ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... who was therefore regarded not as a foreigner, but as one of themselves: and when he sent and brought his brethren back, and charged them with taking his cup, he said, "Know ye not that a man like me practises divination?" thus assuming the Egyptian of high rank initiated into the Mysteries, and as such conversant with ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... all-pervading sense of riotous fury in the elements, rendered the precaution almost unnecessary. In any case, there was no one near enough to act the part of eavesdropper, and Brett, exercising the rapid decision which frequently impressed others as a gift of divination, determined that to let such a man as the King's messenger into the secret could not possibly be harmful to the interests of his client, whilst his ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... expiate but mournful ceremonies, and even sometimes the effusion of human blood: in fine, those black inventions of magic, those delusions, enchantments, sorceries, invocations of ghosts, and many other kinds of divination. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... in a vague way that he looked trim and strong, and then his heavy lids dropped down again. But he did not fall back into the deep sleep from which he had come. The extra sense, his remarkable power of intuition or divination was at work. Without any effort of his will the mechanism of his brain was moving and gave him a signal. He heard a slight noise and ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... means a boar, and alluding to the prediction of a soothsayer in Gaul, who had told him that he would become emperor after having killed a boar (Vopiscus, in "Hist. Aug."). Diocletian, self-composed and strong-minded in other respects, was all his life an anxious believer in divination, which superstition led him probably to inflict summary punishment upon Aper with his own hands. He made his solemn entrance into Nicomedia in September, 284, which town he afterward chose for his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... Entity, the Unassailable Authority, took concrete form. Even so, the destruction of the treasures of the past, and of all memory of them, did not prevent the spontaneous appearance, now and then, of extraordinary men who, by divination it would seem, perceived a flatness and monotony in society, a sameness of common thought, and who laughed at the estimable uniform flocks; often, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... also weakened, for the important sciences of astrology, miracle, and divination, supported by the cell, have been ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... closely resemble the Dactyli, Ida and Curetes of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Magi of the Persians, and the Druids of Britain. Their pretended intercourse with spirits, their powers of magic and divination, and their rites are substantially the same, and point unmistakably to a common origin. The Dakota "Medicine-Man" can do the "rope-trick" of the Hindoo magician to perfection. The teepee used for the Wakan Wacipee—or Sacred Dance—is called the Wakan Teepee— ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... at the young girl who thus interpreted him to herself. At this rate he saw no end to her powers of divination. There were depths in his life where her innocence could not penetrate, but she had seized on the essential. It had been as she had said. That first draft was the work of the young scholar poet, the adorer ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... chose the now historic words from the 23d verse of the 23d chapter of Numbers—"What hath God wrought!" The whole verse reads: "Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination, against Israel: according to this time it shall be said of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!" To Morse, with his strong religious bent and his belief that he was but a chosen vessel, every word in this verse seemed singularly appropriate. Calmly he seated himself at the instrument and ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... want! No, brother, I will not tell you that. Every one must teach himself that," replied Demosthenes in an ironical tone. "A proprietor, a noble, and not know what to do! You have no faith, or you would have known. No faith and no divination."[A] ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... for the host, to wrack and ruin hurled! O warning of the night, prophetic dream! Thou didst foreshadow clearly all the doom, While ye, old men, made light of woman's fears! Ah well—yet, as your divination ruled The meaning of the sign, I hold it good, First, that I put up prayer unto the gods, And, after that, forth from my palace bring The sacrificial cake, the offering due To Earth and to the spirits of the dead. Too well ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... needed for that. She further seemed to make out that he presented himself to her, that he hovered about her and pressed on her, as moneyless, and that this brought them round by a vague but comfortable transition to a helpful remembrance that her father was not. The remaining divination, silently achieved, was quick and happy: she should acquit herself by asking her father for the sum required and by just passing it on to Mr. Flack. The grandeur of his enterprise and the force of his reasoning appeared to overshadow her as they stood ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... which I walked every time I went into the woods) could possess any such magic power as he ascribed to it, and I was, therefore, not disposed to cumber my pocket with it. I had a positive aversion to all pretenders to "divination." It was beneath one of my intelligence to countenance such dealings with the devil, as this power implied. But, with all my learning—it was really precious little—Sandy was more than a match for me. ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... Mr. Lincoln had a philosophy of his own, which, strange as it may appear, was in perfect harmony with his character in all other respects. He was no dabbler in divination—astrology, horoscopy, prophecy, ghostly lore, ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... so much in the right in guessing you had been ill, but at our age there is little sagacity in such divination. In my present holidays from the gout, I have a little rheumatism, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Divination by the inspection of the entrails of victims, and the study of omens were considered by the Egyptians as important branches of learning. The soothsayers formed a respected order of the priesthood. From the mural paintings at Chichen, and from the works of the chroniclers, we learn that the ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... manner of words at war, in all manner of fact at peace. And Ida, out of the bounty of her nature, gave the two vagabonds a place at her fireside whenever they chose to come. Perhaps, where speech was not given, a gift of divination entered into her instead, and she valued what others found useless, and held aloof from what others found good. She had powers which had ever been the admiration of Guidon Hill. Birds and animals were ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as one of those wondrous monuments of the olden time; one of those Egyptian and Chaldaic piles, storied with hidden wisdom and mystic prophecy, which have been devised in past ages, when man yet enjoyed an intercourse with high and spiritual natures, and when human foresight partook of divination.' ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... foreign lands had been the so often arising necessity to think quickly what it would be proper to give. As the amount of the gratuity did not much matter to her she had felt a desperate wish often for the power of divination, by which to know what would be expected. On some occasions it had seemed to Aurora that it would be more delicate not to offer money; but experience had taught her that if she offered enough no offense would be taken. These singers were all poor young fellows, Clotilde ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... On one occasion the Praja-pati failed to resuscitate the sacrificial animal, owing to his wife, who was pregnant at the time, having clandestinely made away with a portion. Alarmed at this he summoned all the other Praja-patis, and they sought by divination to discover the cause of the failure. At last they ascertained what had occurred, and as a punishment the wife was cursed and expelled from their society. The child which she bore was the first Mochi or tanner, and from that time forth, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... the secret of the communications with Lord Derby, but the intrinsic probabilities of a case often give to the public a trick of divination. In the middle of December (1856) articles actually appeared in the prints of the day announcing that Mr. Gladstone would at the opening of the next session figure at the head of the opposition. The tories, they said, wanted a leader, Mr. Gladstone wanted a party. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... was spoken; for Zeuxippus, taking his hint from what had been said, spake to us: Who will make up that of the discourse which is yet behind? For it hath not yet received its due conclusion; and this gentleman, by mentioning divination and providence, did in my opinion suggest as much to us; for these people boast that these very things contribute in no way to the providing of their lives with pleasure, serenity, and assurance; so that there must be something said to these too. Aristodemus subjoined then and said: As ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... law. Some have taken these Teraphin for images like a man, and there seems a show of reason in it from Micah, Saul's daughter putting one in David's bed to deceive her father's messenger, while he escaped. This, it is possible, alludes to some divination by the Teraphin which she used in his behalf, for Teraphin is the plural number; therefore, could not signify only one image; neither could the gods which Rachel stole from her father, Labon, be one god as big as a man, for she sat on them and hid them. The word is here in the original ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... paid more attention to his personal fads. He had a creditable collection of all works on divination, a similarly inclusive assemblage of works on the theory of government, and an almost complete array of the writings of the Emperors, from the Divine Julius to the Divine Aurelius, whose meditations ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... sometimes celebrate, in a temporary edifice, a sort of worship. Their chief idol is Badhala, but they also worship the sun and the moon, and various minor divinities. They believe in omens, and practice divination. A detailed account is given of the various classes of priests, sorcerers, witches, etc., in which the natives believed; also of the burial rites of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... quite clear that he deserved the title of Proedives, "the over-wealthy," by which he has been so pointedly signalized. It is strange that the most splendid intellects should so often have sunk under the slavery of this meanest vice. In the Bible we read how the "rewards of divination" seduced from his allegiance to God the splendid ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... men are forced to do by fear, requires darkness to conceal it, and light is inimical to them. Moreover men were only wont to wait three days after an eclipse of the moon, or of the sun, as we learn from Autokleides in his book on divination; but Nikias persuaded them to wait for another complete circuit of the moon, because its face would not shine upon them propitiously before that time after its defilement with the gross earthy particles which had intercepted its rays.[3] XXIV. Nikias now put all business aside, and kept offering ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... beneath the shadowing archway, Leigh caught a reflected glow of enthusiasm from his guide's prophetic gaze. He was stirred by an appreciation of the dream so grandly conceived, so imperfectly realized, by a divination of the long struggle and ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... setting eyes on the soil, and the chiefs, people, and all, would believe them; for, as may be imagined, with men unenlightened, supernatural and imaginary predictions work with more force than substantial reasons. Their implement of divination, simple as it may appear, is a cow's or antelope's horn (Uganga), which they stuff with magic powder, also called Uganga. Stuck into the ground in front of the village, it is supposed to have sufficient power to ward off the attacks ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... good-will toward men, and summon us all to go and follow the shepherds and see—what? A little child cradled in a manger. The mountaineer, leaning on his gun by the rail-fence, looked through the driving snow with the lights of divination kindling in his eyes, seeing it all, feeling its meaning as never before. Christ came thus, he knew, for a purpose. He could have come in the chariots of the sun or on the wings of the wind. But He was cradled as a little child, that men might revere humanity for the sake of Him who ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... with the commentaries on them, the writings of the scholars, and all poetical productions; the Master-controller of Infantry, Zan Hwang [4], to examine the Books on the art of war; the Grand Historiographer, Yin Hsien [5], to examine the Books treating of the art of numbers (i.e. divination); and the imperial Physician, Li Chu-kwo [6], to examine the Books on medicine. Whenever any book was done with, Hsiang forthwith arranged it, indexed it, and made a digest of it, which was presented to the emperor. While this work was in progress, ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... letters, the writing of which had seemed changed to her. And noticing the unsteady characters, the breaks in the words, she felt a chill at her heart. He was ill, very ill—she had become certain of this now, by a divination in which there was less of reasoning than of subtle prescience. And the rest of the journey seemed terribly long, for her anguish increased in proportion as she approached its termination. And worse than all, arriving ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... the girl's touch! What power of divination, and of rendering! Ah! she too was floating in passion and romance, but of a different sort altogether from the conscious reflected product of the man's nature. She was not thinking of the past, but of the future; she was weaving her story ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ignorant, since we do not ransack science for the same secrets; and thus, in the selection or preparation of the material employed, mainly consisted whatever may be referrible to natural philosophical causes in the antique science of Rhabdomancy, or divination and enchantment by wands. The staff, or wand, of which you tell me, was, you say, made of iron or steel and tipped with crystal. Possibly iron and crystal do really contain some properties not hitherto scientifically ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion,—when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent. The explicitness of an engagement wears off this finest edge of susceptibility; it is jasmine gathered and presented ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... do, seeing thee so indeed, That tremble at the imagination? 668 The thought of it doth make my faint heart bleed, And fear doth teach it divination: I prophesy thy death, my living sorrow, If thou encounter with the ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... not expect from these efforts, if the genius of investigation and of divination, which has so elevated historical studies in our day, should have an observing and penetrating eye in this direction! How limited was the field on which Guerard erected the scientific monument which he has left us in his Polyptique d'Irminon; and how precious are the lessons ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... of it. I have my own ways of divination, Mr. Corliss. I have gleams." He rose as if to go, but stood looking thoughtfully about the apartment again. "Singular impression," he murmured. "Not exactly as if I'd seen it in a dream; ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... that fruitful mother of crime, she ended by putting to death the young king, her son, and publicly calling her paramour (the court astrologer, in whose thoughts, she believed, were hidden all the secrets of divination) to the throne ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... chicanery and malice? No more than was Paul, when in consequence of a vision he had seen at Troas, he went over to Macedonia to help the Christians there, and was beaten and imprisoned, because he cast out a spirit of divination from a young damsel which had brought much gain to her masters. Paul was as much a foreign emissary in the Roman colony of Philippi, as George Thompson was in America, and it was because he was a Jew and taught ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke
... case in a written law, but that he frames a law best who takes care to make one thing understood from another. One may urge, too, that in opposition to a ratiocination of this sort, conjecture is no better than a divination, and that it would be a sign of a very stupid framer of laws not to be able to provide for everything which ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... this, fought and routed the others, and recovered a great part of the booty. They cared nothing for Numitor's anger, but collected together many needy persons and slaves, and filled them with a rebellious spirit. While Romulus was absent at a sacrifice (for he was much addicted to sacrifices and divination), the herdsmen of Numitor fell in with Remus, accompanied by a small band, and fought with him. After many wounds had been received on both sides, Numitor's men conquered and took Remus alive. Remus was brought before Numitor, who did not punish him, as he feared ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... care. Carefulness, recklessly carried out, has been, I think, the guiding rule of his life. He had modelled himself on Bewsher; he walked like Bewsher; tried to think like Bewsher—that is, in the less important things of life—and, with the divination that marks his type of man, the little money he had, the little money that as a schoolboy he could borrow, he had spent with precision on clothes and other things that brought him personal distinction; in what people call necessities he starved himself. By the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Prokhorovna, get me married for heaven's sake! I'll buy you an embroidered kerchief in return, the very best in the whole market." The widow comes to pay Melania a visit, and is induced to believe, on the evidence of beans (frequently used for the purpose of divination), that her destined husband is close at hand. At this propitious moment Trofim appears. Melania makes a little speech to the young couple, ending her recommendation to get ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... home.—The Chorus approve, and Cadmus follows on the same side, urging policy: a splendid falsehood making Semele the mother of a god will advance their household. Pentheus shakes off Cadmus's clasp in disgust: bids some of his servants go and overturn the prophet's place of divination, and others seek out the stranger who leads the rebels. Exit to the palace, while Teiresias and Cadmus depart, in horror at his impiety, in the direction of ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... believing she had the power of divination. In the morning they set sail for Gairloch - the black galley was full of the Macleods. It was evening when they entered the loch. They were afraid to land on the mainland, for they remembered that the descendants of Domhnull Greannach ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... judge. Half-way down the zig-zag Vittoria cast a preconcerted signal back to Laura. The soldiers had a pair of prisoners between their ranks; Vittoria recognized the men who had carried Captain Weisspriess from the ground where the duel was fought. A quick divination told her that they held Angelo's life on their tongues. They must have found him in the mountain-pass while hurrying to their homes, and it was they who had led him to Meran. On the Passeyr bridge, she turned and said to Wilfrid, "Help ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... here, as the direct speech of New York has it, I want to pay tribute to the sagacity, the clarity of vision, the sure divination of the truth amidst a fog of deceit, which has characterized almost the whole Press of the United States since those feverish days at the end of July, 1914, when the nightmare of war was so quickly succeeded by its dread reality. Efforts which might fairly be described as stupendous ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... death of the great Persian bard, some of the religious among his countrymen protested strongly against allowing to him the right of sepulture, alleging, as their objection, the licentiousness of his poetry. After much controversy, it was agreed to leave the decision of the question to a mode of divination, not uncommon among the Persians, which consisted in opening the poet's book at random and taking the first verses that occurred. They happened ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... means force, power. Calpay work. Calparicu "one who gives strength," used for a wizard. The Calpa was a ceremony connected with divination.] ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... growth on the roof anything to do with your divination?" asked Vendale, holding his light towards a gloomy ragged growth of dark fungus, pendent from the arches with a very disagreeable and repellent effect. "We are famous for this growth in ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... nymphs or fairies, and was feasted by them; and Hector Boethius, or Macbeth, and Banquo, two Scottish lords, that as they were wandering in the woods, had their fortunes told them by three strange women. To these, heretofore, they did use to sacrifice, by that [Greek: hydromanteia], or divination ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... power of the chief is checked by that of the priest. A supposed skill in medicine, imaginary arts of divination, and an accredited power over the elements are the prerogatives of certain witches and wizards. Thus, when a murrain among the cattle, or the death of an important individual has taken place, the blame is laid upon some unfortunate victim whom the witch or wizard points ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... like divination. A tutor I will never be again; never take a pupil after Henry and yourself; not again will I sit habitually at another man's table—no more be the appendage of a family. I am now a man of thirty; I have never been free since I was a boy of ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... another Servile War broke out in Sicily, and was not brought to an end until after four years of hard fighting. The leaders were Salvius, or Tryphon, an Italian, and Athenion, a Cilician, or Greek. Both showed considerable talent, but owed their leadership, Salvius to his knowledge of divination, and Athenion to his pretensions to astrology. They were often successful, and it was not until a Consul had taken the field against them that the slaves were subdued, the chiefs having successively fallen, and no one arising to make their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... I have to interview you, I shall say that under a mask of apparent incoherency and irrelevance, Miss Hilary conceals a profound knowledge of human nature and a gift of divination which explores the most unconscious opinions and motives of her interlocutor. How would you ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... incident of the moment—it seemed so to some of those who looked back upon it—was a singular test of character, or rather of woman's divination of character. Carmen instinctively flew to Jack and grasped and held his arm. She knew, without stopping to reason about it, that he would unhesitatingly imperil his life to save that of any woman. Whatever judgment is passed upon Jack, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... kloof. Before me squatted the old wizard, Zikali, wrapped up in his kaross—Zikali, the "Thing-that-should-never-have-been-born," whom I had not seen for years. Near him were the ashes of a fire, by the help of which I knew he had been practising divination. He looked up and laughed one ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... confused and grotesque literature made use of the name and authority of Hermes Trismegistus. The doctrines of the planetary spheres and the opposition of the four elements were made to support systems of anthropology and of morality; the theorems of astronomy were used to establish an alleged method of divination; formulas of incantation, supposed to subject divine powers to the magician, were combined with chemical experiments and ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... bolts, the great king and lawgiver, the father of men, and Hera, originally the air, became the protecting goddess of married life; Apollo, the god of light, who shot forth his arrows, not at first identified with Helios, became the god of divination and poetry, who led the choir of the muses; the goddess of light, Athene, became the contentious goddess of wisdom; Aphrodite, born of the foam of the sea, once the symbol of the fruitful power of nature, later, encircled ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... But Isabel's divination, however arrived at, was not at fault. In a few moments Don Luis lightly leaped the hedge, and without a moment's hesitation sought the shadow of the fig-tree. As he approached, Antonia looked at him with a new interest. It was not only that he loved Isabel, but ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... mankind have often found their way into popular speech, and their terms have remained there long after the rejection of the beliefs they embodied: as—lunatic, augury, divination, spell, exorcism: though, to be sure, such words may often be turned to good account, besides the interest of preserving their original sense. Language is a record as well as an index ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... to make the great souls of the past live again, some share of divination and conjecture must be permitted. A great life is an organic whole which cannot be rendered by the simple agglomeration of small facts. It requires a profound sentiment to embrace them all, moulding them into perfect unity. The method of art in a similar subject is a good guide; ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... the head, and tied round with a string of red wampum, its extremities being suffered to fall on either side, as nature or accident might dispose it. When they would intercede with the Great Spirit, or know his will by divination, they assumed other dresses; the skins of bears or buffaloes, or mantles curiously woven of feathers. They usually dwelt together on a sort of consecrated ground, set apart for their special accommodation, and which was as unlike the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... of our great poet are the prism of the universe; all its wonders are there reflected, divided, and recomposed; sounds imitate colours, and colours are blended in harmony; rhyme, sonorous or bizarre, rapid or prolonged, is inspired by this poetical divination; supreme beauty of art! triumph of genius! which discovers in nature every secret in affinity ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... superiority to Shakespeare is fraught with meaning. Two hundred years later, the rising tide of international criticism produced two men, Goethe and Coleridge, who also saw Shakespeare, if only by glimpses, or rather by divination of kindred genius, recognizing certain indubitable traits. Goethe's criticism of "Hamlet" has been vastly over-praised; but now and then he used words about Shakespeare which, in due course, we shall see were illuminating words, the words of one who guessed ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... certain direction; was more or less luminous; was visible during a certain lapse of time, and then disappeared under such and such circumstances. When the Tchurtchun has obtained all the necessary information, he recites a few prayers, opens his book of divination, and finally pronounces his oracle, while the Tartars, who have come to consult him, listen to his words, kneeling, and rapt in profound devotion. Your Grand Lama, he says, is come to life again, in Thibet, at such a distance from your house; you will find him in such a family. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... generally in the religious provinces of New-England, a credulous superstition, of a less active quality, possessed the minds of the most intelligent of the Dutch colonists, and even of their descendants so lately as in our own times. The art of divination was particularly in favor; and it rarely happened, that any inexplicable event affected the fortunes or comforts of the good provincialists, without their having recourse to some one of the more renowned fortunetellers of the country, for an explanation. ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... the studying out of that picture would take so long. The contents of the ball turned out to be a small magnifying-glass, and the picture a maze of written words. I did not decipher it all; I did not decipher the half. I did not need to. A spirit of divination was given me in that awful hour which enabled me to grasp its full meaning from the few sentences I did pick out. And that meaning! It was horrible, inconceivable. Murder was taught; but murder from a distance, and by ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... folk-lore of the place, and soon surpassed Harriet herself in the interpretation of dreams and the reading of signs and tokens. She began to invent methods of divination for herself too, such as, "If the boards don't creak when I walk across the room I shall get through my lessons without trouble this morning," a trick which soon became a confirmed habit into which she was apt to lapse ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Nothing happened. There were no lighted windows, nor had lights appeared and disappeared in any of the windows. Yet it was the central point of his consideration. He rallied to it each time after a divination of ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... and I simultaneously, from different angles of reasoning, had arrived at a conviction of Sampson's guilt. It was not so strong as realization; rather a divination. ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... cotton-bush stumps, and to the frivolous galahs, sweeping in a changeably-tinted cloud over the plain, or studding the trees of the pine-ridge like large pink and silver-grey blossoms, set off by the rich green of the foliage. But outside all possible research or divination lay the occult reason why my bosom's lord sat so lightly on his throne. This will be explained in ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... unwell, and he had to yield to her desire for rest. The word, however, was to strike him as strangely misapplied, for from the day of their arrival she was in state of perpetual activity. She seemed to have mastered her Paris by divination, and between the hounds of the Boulevards and the Place Vendome she moved ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... I, "I have heard that, as a reward for thy ceaseless praying, God hath given thee the gift of divination. ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
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