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More "Mystical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in a worthy manner the reasons why the republican form of state cannot assist China to maintain her existence; now let me state why it is impossible to restore the monarchical system. The maintenance of the dignity of a monarch depends on a sort of mystical, historical, traditional influence or belief. Such an influence was capable of producing unconsciously and spontaneously a kind of effect to assist directly or indirectly in maintaining order and imparting blessing to the country. In this ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... social instincts. The link is one of feeling, primarily, though it has associated with it, in an indissoluble way, purpose and action. The existence of the social instinct is undisputed; its explanation is varied and ranges from the mystical to the evolutionary. For the mystical (which crops out in Bergson, Butler and even in Galton), the unity of life is its basis, and there is a sort of recognition of parts formerly united but now separate individuals. This does not explain hate, racial and individual. The evolutionary ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... make a tolerable case in favour of the mythological identity of the legend of Ladybird—that is, the sun-chafer, or barn-bie, the fire-fly, "whose house is burnt, and whose bairns are ten," of course the first ten days of the Egyptian year[4]—with the mystical stories of the said black or dark blue lords of radiance, Pan ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... with Venetian and Chinese lanterns of various colours. These had been hung from hooks in the rocks and pillars with infinite good taste at long intervals, so as to illuminate not too brilliantly the mystical darkness of the scene. Looking upon the vague, indefinite vista, as it glimmered away into an indefinable distance, one ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... who are anxious to smoke, but say they are not, to take out their pipes in his drawing-room. It was easy to see the man he was, by a hasty look at his book-shelves. All the philosophers were represented there, from Plato to the present-day mystical Germans. Lang's Odyssey was side by side with the Icelandic sagas and the Song of the Niebelungs. I did not see many books of Systematic Theology; but the Greek tragedians, the Sacred Books of the East, German and French novels, had all a place in the bookcase ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... escape. Instead of uttering in reply to Bear's Meat's question the simple truth, therefore, he rather sought for such an answer as might make the process in which he was engaged appear imposing and mystical. ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... [6316]"the whole Scripture is a message, an exhortation, a love letter to this purpose;" to incite us, and invite us, [6317]God's epistle, as Gregory calls it, to his creatures. He sets out his son and his church in that epithalamium or mystical song of Solomon, to enamour us the more, comparing his head "to fine gold, his locks curled and black as a raven," Cant. iv. 5. "his eyes like doves on rivers of waters, washed with milk, his lips as lilies, drooping down pure juice, his hands as rings of gold ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... was a relaxation of this severity. Besides, communion is not absolutely necessary to salvation, and one may communicate spiritually in reading the word, which is like the body; in uniting oneself with the Church, which is the mystical substance of Christ; and in suffering for Him and with Him, this last communion of agony that is your portion, madame, and is the most perfect communion of all. If you heartily detest your crime and love God with all your ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... universal organism, the assumption of a reciprocal influence of terrestrial bodies could not be foreign, nor did this cease to correspond with a higher view of nature, until astrologers overstepped the limits of human knowledge with frivolous and mystical calculations. ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... especially in their hours of trial. She disliked the idea of leaning for help on something which in her hours of vigor she rejected. A refuge, an explanation,—no, it was not possible! The story of the atonement, the rewards, the mystical attempt to explain the tragedy of life, its sorrow and pain,—no, it was childish! So the word "religious" had something in it repellent, sickly, and self-deceptive.... Suddenly the words stood out sharply in her ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... was assisted by Aeschines himself; and that his mother was priestess of a 'thiasos' or voluntary association of worshippers of Dionysus-Sabazios, among whose ceremonies was doubtless one symbolizing a marriage or mystical union between the god and his worshippers. (Whether the form of 'sacred marriage' which was originally intended to promote the fertility of the ground by 'sympathetic magic' entered into the ritual of Sabazios is doubtful.) Such ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... existence, and think that it should be consulted by whomsoever would pay proper attention to his own outward appearance. The merely useful may possibly make the shape approximate to that of a Quaker's or a jarvey's, but the beautiful has to elevate and modify it into the mystical proportions fit for a man of taste. One other quality, however, which is intimately connected with the useful, has to be noticed. The substance should not be hard and unyielding. Witness, ye reminiscences—ye painful images of bygone headachs, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... desires towards an ideal object." "It must be allowed," says Dr. Mansel,[87-2] "that it is not through reasoning that men obtain their first intimation of their relation to a deity." In writers and preachers of the semi-mystical school, which embraces most of the ardent revivalists of the day, we constantly hear the "feeling of dependence" quoted as the radical element of religious thought.[87-3] In America Theodore Parker, and in Germany Schleiermacher, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... philosophy of government. Your histories, your books on philosophy, your whole literature, glorify the State; and you have accepted the dangerous doctrine that the individual exists to serve the State, forgetting that the State is not the mystical, divine thing you picture it, but a government carried on by human beings like yourselves, most of them reasonably upright, but some incompetent and others deliberately bad, just like any other human government. We believe that the only excuse for the ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson
... rigid Roman Catholic, her son a free-thinker, in the broadest significance of the term, if one might judge from the selections that adorned his library shelves. But deep in his soul was the germination of a mystical creed, which gradually ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... march. It was all a continuous piling up of dross, amidst which he lost himself. Although Fourier had sprung from Saint-Simon he denied him in part; and if Saint-Simon's doctrine ended in a kind of mystical sensuality, the other's conducted to an unacceptable regimenting of society. Proudhon, for his part, demolished without rebuilding anything. Comte, who created method and declared science to be the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... for the Union under the Constitution, but declared, with the prescience of a seer, that the only danger threatening the government arose from its centralizing tendency. It was "the sunset of life which gave him mystical lore." ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute- player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all the thoughts and ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... not far distant when yonder monarch at the window, who had won so many victories, would have a reckoning with the Smalcalds, the allied Protestants of Germany, and his vivid imagination surrounded him with an almost mystical power. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... abounded in spots which tempted one to live out of doors. There was the tall pine with its mystical whispered songs. Thinkright had swung a hammock from one of its branches since Judge Trent's visit. From beneath its shade was no view of the sea, but one could lie there and listen to the rhythmic murmur ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... and I come, my children. Forget not, ye Romans, that I say so much. When the seed needs rain it falls. Sarishan, brothers and sisters all." And with this strange speech, mystical to the last, she rode away into the setting sun, on the gray donkey, looking more like an ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... precedes the flock, and should lead it aright, is the Pope. A mystical interpretation of the injunction upon the children of Israel (Leviticus, xi.) in regard to clean and unclean beasts was familiar to the schoolmen. St. Augustine expounds the cloven hoof as symbolic of right conduct, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... appropriate or equivalent prediction; and it did seem at times sufficiently marvellous that few occurrences should take place which could not be traced to some dark foretokening enveloped in one or other of these mystical revelations. Events happen to ourselves that do occasionally, and not unfrequently, rush back upon our minds with unaccountable and almost appalling force, as though, however novel in reality, they were but facts and feelings with which we had long ago been familiar, yet in what manner we are unable ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... background and environment of seventeenth century Quakerism. There can be little doubt, I think, that I have here found at least one of the great historical sources of the Quaker movement. This volume, together with my Studies in Mystical Religion, will at any rate {vi} furnish convincing evidence that the ideas, aims, experiences, practices, and aspirations of the early Quakers were the fruit of long spiritual preparation. This movement, as a whole, has never been studied ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... after truth, his nature did intuitive reverence to one who appeared to be still more spiritual, who, as he conjectured, at times at any rate, had discovered some portion of the truth. He believed it, although she had never told him so. Indeed that semi-mystical side of Stella, whereof at first she had shown him glimpses, seemed to be quite in abeyance; she dreamed no more dreams, she saw no more visions, or if she did she kept them to herself. Yet to him this woman seemed to be in touch with that unseen which ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... capacities that are more peculiarly human. Even the treatment of instincts has been misleading. For instance, instincts have been discussed under such heads as the "self-preservative instincts," "the social instincts," just as if the child had an inborn, mystical something that told him how to preserve his life, or become a social king. Original nature does not work in that way; it is only as the experience of the individual modifies the blind instinctive responses through learning that these results can just ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... other's characters. The maiden's pure heart knew no distrust, and Jean was faithful and chivalrous as Sir Galahad. They spoke not always of love: words were unnecessary to explain what every look betokened. Jean found her skilled in strange, mystical, lore, but ignorant of all that sways and rules mankind. The history of the selfish struggles of human interests and passions was to her a sealed book. She had been carefully shrouded from the knowledge of evil; but, in order to protect her in ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... mystical water, the Moyle, to have two isles in it like Islay of the pipers and Raghery of the black caves. It was over Moyle that Columkill went in his little coracle to be a hermit in Iona, the gentlest saint that Ireland ever knew. And it was over the Moyle that Patrick came, landing whilst ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... nearly all, the red and the blue, the furious and the tranquil, the puritanical and the licentious, the mystical and the intemperate, those that had voted for the death of kings, and those in which the frauds in the grocery trade had been denounced; and everywhere the tenants cursed the landlords; the blouse was full of spite against broadcloth; and the rich conspired against ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... still popular account, the dark enigmas of Eleusis were borrowed from Egypt;—the drama of the Anaglyph [45]. But, in answer to this theory, we must observe, that even if really, at their commencement, the strange and solemn rites which they are asserted to have been—mystical ceremonies grow so naturally out of the connexion between the awful and the unknown—were found so generally among the savages of the ancient world—howsoever dispersed —and still so frequently meet the traveller on shores to which it is indeed a wild speculation ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... amusement," Basterga replied with a gesture of haughty deprecation. "A parergon, if you please. I take it, a man may dip into the mystical writings of Paracelsus without prejudice to his Latinity; and into the cabalistic lore of the school of Cordova without losing his taste for the pure oratory of the immortal Cicero. Virgil himself, if we may believe Helinandus, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... were before, and yet are changed into another thing:" or, that which Gelasius saith: "The substance of the bread, or the nature of the wine, ceaseth not so to be:" or, that which Theodoret saith: "After the consecration the mystical signs do not cast off their own proper nature; for they remain still on their former substance, form, and kind:" or that which Augustine saith: "That which ye see is the bread and cup, for so our eyes tell us: but that which your faith requireth to be taught, is this: ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... age to do aught but lament over so much wasted ingenuity, when we find the author maintaining that the whole of the one hundred and fifty Psalms were written by King David, and that Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun have only a mystical meaning; that the first seventy represent the Old Testament, and the last eighty the New, because we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ on the eighth day of the week, and so forth. A closer study of the book might perhaps discover in it some genuine ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... significance), began to display even more marked evidence of a sort of monomania. Bast, the cat-goddess, became an obsession with her, and she finally conceived the idea that the attributes of that mystical and partly-understood deity were active within her; that she was Bast, re-born. And, certainly, during one month of every year, her condition closely resembled that which was termed in the ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... Chamber"), by Ts'ao Hsueeh-ch'in, who died in 1763. It describes the downfall of a rich and powerful family from the highest rank of the gentry, and the decadent son's love of a young and emotional lady of the highest circles. The story is clothed in a mystical garb that does something to soften its tragic ending. The interesting novel Ju-lin wai-shih ("Private Reports from the Life of Scholars"), by Wu Ching-tzu (1701-1754), is a mordant criticism of Confucianism with its rigid formalism, of the social ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... been in fact under discussion. When Marius recalled its circumstances he seemed to hear once more that voice of genuine conviction, pleading, from amidst a [90] scene at best of elegant frivolity, for so boldly mystical a view of man and his position in the world. For a moment, but only for a moment, as he listened, the trees had seemed, as of old, to be growing "close against the sky." Yes! the reception of theory, of hypothesis, of beliefs, did depend a great deal on temperament. ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... the crowd has been much studied lately, by Le Bon and other writers in France, by Mr. Graham Wallas in England. I think that Le Bon is in danger of making The Crowd a mystical, superhuman entity. Of course, a crowd is made up of individuals, who remain individuals still. We must not accept the stuffed idol of Rousseau and the socialists, 'The General Will,' and turn it into an evil spirit. There is no General Will. All we have a right ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... army life, his periods of professorship, we can not help but wonder at the amount of writing Mickiewicz did. And his life was not a long one; it did not reach to sixty years. But during the working years allotted him, before a mystical melancholy—which was threatening to degenerate into madness—had impaired his faculties, his mind was unusually brilliant, creative and marvelously disciplined. It obeyed at will. At one time he was professor of Latin in ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz
... naturally gravitated into the company of Sidgwick, Myers, and Gurney, as men busied in an undertaking that appealed to his detective instinct. He was radically different from them in temperament and point of view—not at all mystical, full of animal spirits, fond of all manner of sports, and interested in occult subjects only so far as they furnished working material for his nimble and inquiring mind. The Cambridge trio, however, took kindly ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... bearing organ. A manifest example whereof appeareth in those who, fasting, are not able to carry to their head a great goblet full of wine without a trembling and a shaking in the hand that holds it. This of old was accounted a prefiguration and mystical pointing out of the Pythian divineress, who used always, before the uttering of a response from the oracle, to shake a branch of her domestic laurel. Lampridius also testifieth that the Emperor Heliogabalus, to acquire unto himself the reputation ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... is for crowds. It has discovered that crosses, to common people in common things, seem oriental and mystical. The common people of the western world instead of being born with dreamy imaginations are born with pointed and applied ones. It is not impossible that the comparative failure of the Christian religion in the western world and in the later generations is that it has been trying to be oriental and ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... assembled in the great hall, observing with childish wonder and faith the performances of a new magician, a fresh arrival. His dress was the extreme of the fantastic; as showy and foolish as the sort of thing an Indian medicine-man wears. He was mowing, and mumbling, and gesticulating, and drawing mystical figures in the air and on the floor,—the regular thing, you know. He was a celebrity from Asia—so he said, and that was enough. That sort of evidence was as good as ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... admiration, and therefore quite innocent. I am the only woman he loves, and he never even remembers me when he is in the sacred office. If you could see him come out of the vestry in his white surplice, with his rapt face and prophetic eyes. So mystical! So beautiful! You would not wonder that I ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... the shining acres of floor, the mystical woman and a dentist had ceased singing, and were examining a fresh sheet of music. The dentist coyly poked his finger at her coiffure, and she slapped ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... ways for philosophic purposes by the synthetic principles of comparative anatomy. But even the most important universal laws of organisation—of which the old system of comparative anatomy was one—had to take refuge in mystical ideas of a plan of structure and of creative final causes (causae finales); they were incapable of arriving at a true and clear perception of effective mechanical causes (causae efficientes). This last, most difficult, and grandest problem, Charles Darwin was ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... don't think that could have been so, because the device on it was the Eye of Osiris, and Ti, as you know, was an Aten-worshipper. However, it was a very charming ring, and Uncle John, who had a queer sort of devotion to the mystical Eye of Osiris, commissioned a very clever goldsmith to make two exact copies of it, one for himself and one for me. The goldsmith naturally wanted to take the measurements of our fingers, but this Uncle John would not hear of; the rings were to be exact copies, and an exact copy must be the ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... faced and conquered hard physical jobs that became the men of endurance later." He had seen and shared the devotion of the missionary spirit, and had seen, too, how largely it failed of fruit by being spent on supernatural conversion and mystical emotion. He knew the tropical temperament, common to Hawaiian and negro,—how accessible to transient fervor, how deficient in persistence and continuity. He had watched his father's operations, as minister of public instruction under the Hawaiian king; his experiments in more practical and prosaic ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... whose signatures are appended to the accompanying statement are the best-known of the eight who were present,—men whose testimony in a court of law would be accepted without question. Dr. Frank Collins is, or was, President of the Osteopaths' Association, a Spiritualist, student of Astrology and mystical subjects, and a member of the Council of the California Psychical Research Society. Dr. J. C. Anthony is a well and favorably known physician, who has practised here for many years, also a member of our Council. Dr. Cecil E. Nixon is a Dentist, best known as a Magician, and as ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... century, the Eucharist remained what it had ever been, "the breaking of bread," the commemorative meal. Then there came a change, and men began to read into it a sacrificial meaning and to interpret it as a mystical repetition of the death of Christ. From Cyprian this novel theology apparently passed to Augustine and Ambrose in the fourth century, and thenceforth it became dominant, though by no means universally so, until the eighth and ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... notwithstanding, he perceive devotion to these interests, he calls it desinteresse, and wonders how it is possible to act "disinterestedly." There have been philosophers who could give this popular astonishment a seductive and mystical, other-worldly expression (perhaps because they did not know the higher nature by experience?), instead of stating the naked and candidly reasonable truth that "disinterested" action is very interesting and "interested" ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country by her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and converting the strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions. Thither went also Samuel Gorton, a man of no ordinary power, who proclaimed a mystical union with God in love, thought that heaven and hell were in the mind alone, but esteemed little the clergy and the ordinances. The colony was protected also by the thoughtful and chivalrous Vane, who held that water baptism had had its day, and that the Jewish Sabbath ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to relate how when the human being who has used this mystical ointment betrays his extended vision in some way to a fairy, the latter strikes or stabs him in the eye, thus depriving him not only of the etheric sight, but of that of the denser physical plane ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... on, saying the lines by rote as Phene had learned them—and hard indeed they must have been to learn! For, as Lutwyche had told his friends, it must be "something slow, involved, and mystical," it must hold Jules long in doubt, and lure ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... remarkable, however, is his Geistreiche Sinn-und Schluss-reime (1657), afterwards called Cherubinischer Wandersmann (1674). This is a collection of "Reimsprueche" or rhymed distichs embodying a strange mystical pantheism drawn mainly from the writings of Jakob Boehme and his followers. Silesius delighted specially in the subtle paradoxes of mysticism. The essence of God, for instance, he held to be love; God, he said, can love nothing inferior ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... Kong-foo-tse, born 551 B.C., was as practical in intellect as Laoutse was mystical, and has exerted an extraordinary influence upon the Chinese race. For this reason it seems important to give some account ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... had I heard Beethoven interpreted and understood like this before. I am not a musician, but I suppose even musicians do not know how much there is in that Sonata. I cannot find another word than "oppressiveness" to describe the sensation wrought upon the audience. One had a feeling as if mystical rites were being performed; there rose before me a vast desert, not of this world, weird and unutterably sad, without shape, half lit up by a ghostly moon, in the midst of which hopeless despair waited ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... up her spirits. Says he, I'll go up, and prepare her; but won't tell her of it. So he came up to me, as I have said, and amused me about Mr. Williams, to half prepare me for some surprise; though that could not have been any thing to this: and he left me, as I said, in that suspense, at his mystical words, saying, He would send to me, when they ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... one of a little group of young men who met almost every evening in d'Arthez's room, united by the keenest sympathies and by the earnestness of their intellectual life. They all foresaw a great writer in d'Arthez; they looked upon him as their chief since the loss of one of their number, a mystical genius, one of the most extraordinary intellects of the age. This former leader had gone back to his province for reasons on which it serves no purpose to enter, but Lucien often heard them speak of this absent friend as "Louis." Several of the group were destined to fall by the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... sense is termed Mystical, that is, above sense, supernatural; and this it is, when spiritually one expounds a writing which even in the Literal sense by the things signified bears express reference to the Divine things of Eternal Glory; as one can see in that Song of the Prophet which says that by the exodus of the people ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... shoulders. He was a "pocket. Hercules," and incredible tales, like that about the gates of Khaybar, are told of his strength. Lastly, he was the only Caliph who bequeathed anything to literature: his "Cantiloquium" is famous and he has left more than one mystical and prophetic work. See Ockley for his "Sentences" and D'Herbelot s. D. "Ali" and "Gebr." Ali is a noble figure ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... censurable. This, indeed, was not the limit of my deviations. Deception was often unnecessarily practised, and my biloquial faculty did not lie unemployed. What has happened to yourselves may enable you, in some degree, to judge of the scenes in which my mystical exploits engaged me. In none of them, indeed, were the effects equally disastrous, and they were, for the most part, the result of ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... of great imagery praised as a great mystic. Nevertheless, although a great mystical poet makes images, he does not do so in his greatest moments. He is a great mystic, because he has a full vision of the mystery of realities, not because he has a clear invention ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... by a new spine, with a limited power of modifying its form,—spine on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a right angle; and, between the lines of this mystical quadrant, all animate beings find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, or the snake, as the type of prediction of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the spine, nature puts out smaller ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the request of Dichu (but for what cause I know not), did the saint build the church, having its aspect against the north, and looking toward the southern point. Perchance that by this mystical structure the worshippers of idols might be persuaded from the northern coldness of unbelief unto the meridian fervor of the faith and the charity of Christ—the which to this day is called Sabhall Phadruig, that is, the Barn of Patrick; for in process of time he builded there a fair monastery, ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... health; worried about the death of his brother; broken over the death of his wife; distressed by the death of favorite dogs and horses. Also, he recalls a gypsy saying having to do with the end of the Bismarck family, under strange conditions, in these mystical words: ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... often proves to be insufficient to meet the great variety of conditions and circumstances with which the miracles have been handed down to us.' Very true; but what remedy? 'We find one German writer endeavouring to explain away the miracles on the mystical (mythical) theory; and another riding into the arena of controversy on the miserable hobby-horse of "clairvoyance" or "mesmerism"; each of these, and a host of others of the same class, rejecting whatever ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... mind. But it was keenly alive in Jeff's mind, and he was in the strange necessity which men in the flush of life and health often feel of seeking counsel of those who stand in the presence of death, as if their words should have something of the mystical authority of the unknown wisdom they ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... intimate than the poet; they are more exterior to their work; they are less personally in it; they part with less of themselves in the dicker. It does not change the nature of the case to say that Tennyson and Longfellow and Emerson sold the poems in which they couched the most mystical messages their genius was charged to bear mankind. They submitted to the conditions which none can escape; but that does not justify the conditions, which are none the less the conditions of hucksters because ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... burned also? Do you forget, then, anti-Christ, the Inquisition, and the Saint Bartholomew, and the stakes of Vanini and Bruno, and the tortures of Galileo, and the martyrdom of so many free thinkers? Do not try to distinguish here between use and abuse: for I should reply to you that from a mystical and supernatural principle, from a principle which embraces everything, which explains everything, which justifies everything, such as the idea of God, all consequences are legitimate, and that the zeal of the believer is the sole judge ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... a long time but we didn't come to anything in the end. There's something mystical about the proud man, in your sense. Perhaps you are right from your point of view, but if you take the matter simply, without complicating it, then what pride can there be, what sense can there be in it, if a man is imperfectly ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... admiration of Kant and his prompt recognition of the far-reaching importance of Kant's doctrine, could not be perfectly satisfied with a philosophy which decreed that an arabesque is more beautiful than any woman, and that morality cannot be beautiful at all, except in some mystical poetic sense. Nor could he be content with Kant's sensus communis aestheticus, which seemed to leave the beautiful finally a matter of taste. His mental attitude is clearly brought to view in a letter of February 9, 1793, to the Prince of Augustenburg. After speaking warmly ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Laddie, beware of the day! For, dark and despairing, my sight, I may seal, But man cannot cover what God would reveal; 'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, And coming events cast their ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... Rockies, and a darkness, soft and mystical and silent, stole up the valley, hushing even the noiseless day. Presently the glow of the rising moon burst in ruddy effulgence over the foothills to the east, first with the effect of fire upon their crests, and then as a great, slowly-whitening ball soaring high into the fathomless ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... itself in the environment of Rabbinism, where the mind, though forced into the mould of scholasticism, was yet working at high speed. But such "heretical" thinking was utterly inconceivable in the dominant circles of Hasidism, where the intellect was rocked to sleep by mystical lullabies and fascinating stories of the miraculous exploits of the Tzsaddiks. The era of political and civil disfranchisement was a time of luxuriant growth for Hasidism, not in its creative, but rather in its stationary, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... is generally called a man of religious sensibilities, having long ago discarded belief in the supernatural; and I am not overcome at odd moments by mystical feelings. Furthermore I had been intimate with this particular patch of vegetation for some eighteen hours. I had viewed its decaying state; I had injected life into it; I had seen it in the first flush of resurrection. In spite of all this, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... monarch on his throne owes his mother, and yet this lessens not his authority, nor subjects him to her government.'[20] The monarchical theory ascribes to the King of England two bodies or capacities, a natural body, and a politic or mystical body, and 'from this mystical union of the ideal with the real king, the enquirer after constitutional information is led through childish reasoning and unintelligible jargon, to practical consequences founded on expediency.'[21] ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... on the contrary, how insignificant he was and how insignificant every one is in this world where beings, agitated like grains in a van, are mixed and separated by a shake of the rustic or of the god. This idea of the agricultural or mystical van represented measure and order too well to be exactly applied to life. It seemed to him that men were grains in a coffee-mill. He had had a vivid sensation of this the day before, when he saw Madame Fusellier grinding ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... The mystical unity of the Catholic Church was a thing understood by few in those days. The one party held themselves the true church, and anathematized their baptized and Christian brethren as heretics and outcasts; whilst, ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... relations are handled in a mystical, sensuous way; something of the same kind of treatment occurs ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... un exemplaire), a unique Mallarme. Catholicism being the adopted religion of the Decadence—for its venerable age, valuable in such matters as the age of an old wine, its vague excitation of the senses, its mystical picturesqueness—Des Esseintes has a curious collection of the later Catholic literature, where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find their place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello, the amalgam of a monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... men chatter of such a small matter As Ladies Magnetic, with mystical forces, Whose billiard-cue business strikes with sheer dizziness Muscular Miloes who're game to lift horses. As MITCHELL the bulky was made to look sulky By slight Mrs. ABBOTT, the Georgian Mystery, She is struck silly by Behemoth BILLY, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... her bottom. For some time she played with the hair which thickly covered my mount of Venus—twisting it around her fingers, she then gently divided the folding lips and endeavored to penetrate the interior of the mystical grotto—but she could not effect an entrance but was obliged to satisfy herself with titillating the inside of the lips. Suddenly flows of pleasure shot through my entire body—for her finger had come in contact with the peeping sentinel that guarded the abode of bliss, an article which ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... the second part of the tale of Zayn al-Asnam—the Quest of the Ninth Image—and the Turkish version of which my friend Mr. Gibb has kindly furnished us with a translation from the mystical work of 'Ali 'Aziz Efendi, the Cretan, although no other version has hitherto been found,[FN382] I have little doubt that the story is of either Indian or Persian extraction, images and pictures being ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... your magnum opus. No wonder he "crouches in sphinxlike silence on the curbstone." He prefers it to your company. You once told me that you found humanitarians difficult to live with: I wonder what Jack thinks of mystical philosophers in the domestic relation. It almost brings tears to my eyes. And some day in a similar situation I may be driven to seek the cold ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... building touched depths of feeling and opened gates of wonder. No doubt the men who first balanced one stone over two others must have looked with astonishment at the work of their hands, and have worshiped the stones they had set up. This element of mystical wonder and awe lasted long through the ages, and is still felt when work is done in the old way by keeping close to nature, necessity, and faith. From the first, ideas of sacredness, of sacrifice, of ritual rightness, of magic stability, of likeness to the universe, of perfection ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... more highly specialized poetic genius. What is he like? He is like everything. He is like the soil which holds the germs of a thousand forms of life; he is like the grass, common, universal, perennial, formless; he is like your own heart, mystical yearning, rebellious, contradictory, but ever throbbing with life. He is fluid, generative, electric; he is full of the germs, potencies, and latencies of things; he provokes thought without satisfying it; he is formless without being void; he is both ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... the mystical meaning of the Jewish tabernacle and its vessels, with the garments of the high priest, is taken out of Philo, and fitted to Gentile philosophical notions. This may possibly be forgiven in Jews, greatly versed in heathen learning and philosophy, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Jacob, who was exalted to be a Prince with God, and to prevail by intercession? Yet, you see, he is a shepherd, to image to us that mystical and true Shepherd and Bishop of souls who was to come. Yet there is a second and a third as highly favoured in various ways. The second is Moses, who drove away the rival shepherds and helped the daughters of the Priest of Midian to water their flock, and who, while he was keeping the flock ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... concerning which we wish to be informed. The words of Jesus went forth full-freighted with vitality. They were truly spirit and life, because charged with a virtue that can only come from a soul in submission to the law by his lips enunciated. Hence we see why, in the mystical language with which the Gospel of St. John begins, he is called the Logos, Reason or Word of God, from God and one with God, because he reveals the divine thought concerning man, inherently perfect from the first, but requiring time and space for its outworking. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... their generations, their kinds, sorts and differences; with the description of sundry new Metals or Semi-Metals, and many other things pertaining to Mineral knowledge. As also, the handling and shewing of their Vegetability, and the discussion of the most difficult Questions belonging to Mystical Chymistry, as of the Philosophers Gold, their Mercury, the Liquor Alkahest, Aurum potabile, and such like. Gathered forth of the most approved Authors that have written in Greek, Latine, or High Dutch; With some Observations ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... opened at their feet and she drew herself from him to gather up her skirts for the descent. Then the tension broke with a tremulous "Susan, wait!" She knew what was coming and braced herself to meet it. The mystical hour, the silver-bathed wonder of the night, a girl's frightened curiosity, combined to win her to a listening mood. She felt on the eve of a painful but necessary ordeal, and clasped her hands ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... big seal and ribbon attached. The size of the receipt and seal was proportioned according to the amount paid—if you had a son or a daughter in Purgatory, it was wise to pay a large amount. The certificates were in Latin and certified in diffuse and mystical language many things, and they gave great joy ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... indirect explanation of the course she had followed. Harvey could not question her sincerity, but she seemed to him a trifle morbid. It might be natural reaction, in a temper such as hers, against the monstrous egotism by which her life had been subdued and shadowed. She inclined to mystical views; mentioned Christina Rossetti as one of her favourites; cared little or nothing for the louder interests of the time. Impossible to detect the colour of her thoughts with regard to Cecil; she spoke of him gravely and gently, but without ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... himself. This should by no means be so. Surely the terms which are constantly used and are the sine qua non of their theories should have a definite meaning of some sort, at least to the Freudians themselves. Mystical and metaphysical implications should not continue to find a sheltering place in the province of psychopathology. They should be uprooted and driven forth from the dark and hidden recesses into the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Amersfoort and listen to the wise men dilate on the Bhagavadgita, Psycho-analysis and Religion, Plato, Sufism, and other subjects on the programme; anyway I would have no prepossessions and prejudices in listening to Dr. G. R. S. Meads' course of lectures on The Mystical Philosophy and ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... posited by a primary mystical judgment, man immediately generalizes the subject by another mysticism,—analogy. God, so to speak, is as yet but a point: directly he ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... himself with essays that would have been voted brilliant had they dealt with things less extravagant than Universal Harmony and Fraternal Happiness; with verses that all admitted to be highly polished and melodious, but something too mystical in meaning for the understanding of an every-day world; with music, whereof he was conceded an interpreter of no ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... communication with spirits of another world. For, be it observed, Smith possesses all the qualities and exercises all the tricks of the necromancers during the middle ages. His speech is ambiguous, solemn, and often incomprehensible—a great proof to the vulgar of his mystical vocation. ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... most respectable appearance. Mr. Brassfield bent on him a piercing look, and strove mentally to account for the impression that he had met this man before, wondering again at that hazy association with the mystical, dreamy region of the woman in yellow and black. It was as if he saw everything that evening through some medium capable of imparting this mystic coloring. ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... the one side gave the greatest part of the secular interest, on the other almost the whole of the mystical attraction, to the complete story, had, however, it seems probable, been actually added before Layamon wrote. For the date of the earlier version of his Brut is put by the best authorities at not ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... "The poet whose mystical and somber genius has caused us such profound emotions starts, in a few days' time, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... the Asiatic churches, for that in Colossae is bidden to welcome him. Then comes this mention of him in the text. The fact that Mark was beside Peter when he wrote seems to confirm the view that Babylon here is a mystical name for Rome; and that this letter falls somewhere about the same date as the letters to Colossae and Philemon. Here again he is sending salutations to Asiatic churches. We know nothing more about him, except that some considerable time after, in Paul's last letter, he asks ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... wedding, stood before the mirror. Laying aside her dress, she draped her shimmering cloth about her, dragging her hair down in a heavy mass over ears and neck until she seemed herself a bride. And as she stood there, awed with the mystical union of a dead love and a living new born self, there came drifting in at the window, faintly, the soft sound of far-off ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... possessor? A new Mdlle. de Maupin, with royal lily and aureole, cloud-capped mountains, great gulfs of sea-water flowing up and reflecting as in a mirror the steep cliff's side; the straight white feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is torn, and the pure, strange soul continues its mystical exhortations. Then the radiant vision, a white glory, the last outburst and manifestation, the trumpets of the apocalypse, the colour of heaven, the closing of this stupendous allegory—Seraphita lying dead in the rays of the first sun of the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... It is impossible for me to describe to you the fascination which this man exercises over me. You know that I do not usually exaggerate, although inclined to the mystical and romantic. I have lived too little on land, however, for any ideas of that nature to have taken much hold upon my mind. At sea, the movement of the winds and waves, the unintermitting intercourse with one's fellow-men—the whole ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... is in itself sufficiently mystical, having been pursued by multitudes, who seemed to themselves ever on the eve of consummation, but as constantly baffled when to their own apprehension most on the verge of success. The discovery indeed appears ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... understand her nineteenth century wit; for he did not laugh. Perhaps he had lost his taste for clever women. Anon Dante and Swedenborg came together conversing earnestly about things remote and mystical. Swedenborg said it was very warm. Dante replied that it might ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... his favorite conventional tame man, since, among the shouting heroes, Gunnar whimpers like a Tesman. Here is Ibsen's favorite trick of unrequited self-sacrifice; it is Sigurd, in Gunnar's armor, who kills the mystical white bear, but it is Gunnar who reaps the advantage. It is only fair to say that there is more than this to applaud in The Vikings at Helgeland; it moves on a consistent and high level of austere romantic beauty. Mr. William Archer, who ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... light and lustre simply, and the mystical curve of the lids. For so they could look only because the heart was disengaged from them. They were but ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of these mystical reformers were William Briconnet, Bishop of Meaux, and his disciple, Margaret d'Angouleme, sister of Francis I. Though a highly talented woman Margaret was weak and suggestible. She adored her dissolute brother and was always, on account ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... insulted, let down into some cleft or cave. It is clearly a "Carrying out the Death," though we do not know the exact date at which it was celebrated. It had its sequel in another festival at Delphi called Herois, or the "Heroine." Plutarch[23] says it was too mystical and secret to describe, but he lets us know ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... man have proclaimed the Divinity in Man, its real and eternal existence, in any drama, in any poem, in any glorious splendor of rhetoric with what fervor soever of mystical ecstasy endued—with such deadly effectiveness, such inevitable success, as in this simple way he elected? There are men whose actions seem to spring from a source super-ethical: it is cheap to speak of them as good, great, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Rhode Island greenings; Excellent apples for pies; There are no mystical meanings In fruit of that color and size. They are too coarse and too juiceful; They are too large and too useful. There are the Baldwins and Flyers, Wrapped in their beautiful fires! Color forks up from their stems As if painted by Flora, ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... Hence in this story there is a philosophy of Pan-theism—no "me," no "you," no "it." It is a mystical story, with a storm scene in which is painted a picture that reminds one strongly of "The Fall of the House of Ushur,"—with the frankly added words, "On him were marks of hoofs of a monstrous goat that had ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... hesitated in petulant style to assail Luke's Gospel because therein good and virtuous works are frequently commended to us. Whom did he consult? The Spirit. Theodore Beza has dared to carp at, as a corruption and perversion of the original, that mystical word from the twenty-second chapter of Luke, this is the chalice, the new testament in my blood, which (chalice) shall be shed for you [Greek: potaerion ekchunomenon], because this language admits of no explanation ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... of embodying truth, common, in various degrees, to almost all, if not all, the writers of the New Testament. The attempt to define it thoroughly would require an essay. I will hazard but one suggestion towards it: A mystical mind is one which, having perceived that the highest expression of which the truth admits, lies in the symbolism of nature and the human customs that result from human necessities, prosecutes thought about truth so embodied by dealing ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... unhappy, and I see you have lost all the feeling of romance that you had before the war. You make a great mistake if you think you can be romantic without religion. Sometimes I think that with both of us the secret of success, when we find it, is the mystical element in us: something flows into us that enlarges our personalities, and when it ebbs out our personalities shrink; I should call your last two letters rather shrivelled. Beware of losing yourself in the personality of ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the principles of the Methodists: I have tried to learn them, and have read one of their books. The visible part seems to be nothing but stricter practice than that of our church, clothed in the old exploded cant of mystical devotion. For example, you take a metaphor; we will say our passions are weeds; you immediately drop every description of the passions, and adopt every thing peculiar to weeds: in five minutes a true Methodist will talk with the greatest compunction of hoeing—this catches women ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... recognise that these Africans have often a remarkable mental acuteness and a large share of common sense; that there is nothing really "child-like" in their form of mind at all. Observe them further and you will find they are not a flighty-minded, mystical set of people in the least. They are not dreamers, or poets, and you will observe, and I hope observe closely—for to my mind this is the most important difference between their make of mind and our own—that they are notably deficient in all mechanical arts: they have ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... brought me ambrotypes Of the old pioneers to enlarge. And sometimes one sat for me— Some one who was in being When giant hands from the womb of the world Tore the republic. What was it in their eyes?— For I could never fathom That mystical pathos of drooped eyelids, And the serene sorrow of their eyes. It was like a pool of water, Amid oak trees at the edge of a forest, Where the leaves fall, As you hear the crow of a cock From a far—off farm house, seen near the hills Where the third generation ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... observation, never doubted its truth. At this moment, there are men in every western settlement who have only vague, crude notions of what a city is—who would feel nervous if they stepped upon the deck of a steamboat—and are utterly at a loss to conjecture the nature of a railroad. Upon either of these mystical subjects they will swallow, without straining, the most absurd and impossible fictions. And this is not because of their ignorance alone, for many of them are, for their sphere in life, educated, intelligent, and, what is better, sensible men. Nor is it by any means a national trait: ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... judgment.' In Moscow, during the prepetrean period, performances of nearly the same character, chosen especially from the Old Testament, were also in great favour. Apart from such plays, the world was overflooded with mystical writings, 'verses'—the heroes of which were always selected from the ranks of angels, saints and other heavenly citizens answering to the devotional purposes of the age. The recluses of our monasteries, like the Roman Catholic monks, passed their ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... confirmed in almost every point by the narrative now published. "The imagination of Dee," observes that elegant writer, "often predominated over his science; while both were mingling in his intellectual habits, each seemed to him to confirm the other. Prone to the mystical lore of what was termed the occult sciences, which in reality are no sciences at all, since whatever remains occult ceases to be science, Dee lost his better genius." I shall refer the reader to this popular work instead of attempting an original paper on the subject, which would necessarily ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... best description I have been able to formulate of the development of the Mystical Sense by means of which we can get a view of the Reality through our Window. I will try to give my own experience of this, which will, I know, wake an echo in other hearts, as I have met those who have felt the same. From a ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... of Christ's Burial is the mystical meaning, that meaning which was brought home to the minds of the early Christians by the picturesque and symbolic ritual of baptism. The man who had, by faith, accepted Christ as his Lord and Master, was baptised into ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... Watch tick'd behind the panel'd oak, Inexplicable tremors shook the arras, And echoes strange and mystical ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... every character having been noted for musical utterance, and all the choral effects carefully planned. Besides this he composed what was then called the "Orchestic," whence we have our word orchestra. By orchestic they meant an apparatus of mystical dancing or posturing and marching and certain gestures. We do not know precisely what this famous orchestic was, for no example of it has come down to us in intelligible form. But from the descriptions of it by contemporary writers, it seems to have formed the pantomimic ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... commonplace. Philosophy had become extravagant, eclectic, abstract, devoid of any real content. At length it ceased to exist. It had spread words like plaster over the whole field of knowledge. It had grown ascetic on one side, mystical on the other. Neither of these tendencies was favourable to literature. There was no sense of beauty either in language or in art. The Greek world became vacant, barbaric, oriental. No one had anything new to say, or any conviction ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... inquire into the subject at all; at any rate it was quite evident I was set down as a good subject, from the moment of my appearance. Even the somnambule testified to this, though she would not then consent to be put into a trance in order to give her opinion its mystical sanction. ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... quality of a deep vein of sentiment; and this was now consecrated to Isabel Norris. He had pleasant dreams as he rode home in the autumn evening, under the sweet keen sky where the harvest moon rose large and yellow over the hills to his left and shed a strange mystical light that blended in a kind of chord with the dying daylight. It was at times like that, when the air was fragrant with the scent of dying leaves, with perhaps a touch of frost in it, and the cottages one by one opened red glowing eyes in the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... example which we might all find in Him, as well as promise us immortality with Him. As the minister went on, Annie followed him with the interest which her belief that she heard between the words inspired, and occasionally in a discontent with what seemed a mystical, almost a fantastical, ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long. These were based on the mystical or sacramental principle, and spoke of the various economies or dispensations of the eternal. I understood them to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the outward manifestation of realities ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... contests of the schools a dialectical display of remarkable powers in which great interest was felt, yet but little knowledge was acquired. In one respect the Scholastic doctors rendered a service: they demolished all dreamy theories and poured contempt on mystical phrases. They insisted, like Socrates, on a definite meaning to words. If they were hair-splitting in their definitions and distinctions, they were at least clear and precise. Their method was scientific. Such terms and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... actually giving Himself, as they emphatically say, to be chewed by the poor and humble man and the serf, show them to have been most especially born, abortions though they be, in the mightiest throes of mystical feeling, after the incubation of whole nations, born of the great mediaeval marriage, sublime, grotesque, morbid, yet health-bringing, between abstract idealising religious thought and the earthly affections of lovers and parents—a strange marriage, like that of St. Francis and Poverty, of which ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... quadrangular, taper, high spire or pyramid, raised perpendicularly, and terminating in a point, to serve as an ornament to some open square; and is very often covered with inscriptions or hieroglyphics, that is, with mystical characters or symbols used by the Egyptians to conceal and disguise their sacred things, and the mysteries ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... with so many important affairs which regard the whole Church. I entreat you to give us this cardinal, to whom we may have recourse in our wants, always under your sanction, since it is from you, the Head of the mystical Body, that all power emanates." The Pope granted his request with alacrity, and recommended the cardinal to take great care of the Order. From that time, the Orders of Friars Minor have always had a cardinal protector, whose powers are extended as the Pope shall see fit; the terms of the ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... gazing out with wild eyes at the Pup's mystical performance. "I'll give back them boots to the b'y. I'll give 'em back, Dan! Let me be now, won't 'ee, ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... that when, in 1863-64, the subject of the Duchies cast its shadow on the path, it revealed its importance to Bismarck, as it had done fourteen years previously to Dahlmann, and stood forth distinctly as the initial syllable of the one mystical ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... mighty dungeons where heroes and the brothers of kings, and saints and scientists have died their long death—as one gropes through the black night of the Crypt, where a faint, mysterious glint of light falls aslant the mystical face of the Black Virgin; as one climbs to the light beneath the ogive arches of the Aumonerie, through the wide-lit aisles of the Salle des Chevaliers, past the slender Gothic columns of the Refectory, up at last to the crowning ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the Imperio-Davido-classical school of French art, and the namby-pamby mystical German school, which is for carrying us back to Cranach and Duerer, and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which in her simple mind usually occupied the space that worldly feelings filled in that of Judith, and she was not without an expectation of witnessing some open manifestation of divine power, on an occasion so solemn. Still she was neither mystical nor exaggerated; her mental imbecility denying both. Nevertheless her thoughts had generally so much of the purity of a better world about them that it was easy for her to forget earth altogether, and ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... cellar, a new baby home from the hospital, a word in the newspaper. With many very young children, concern about their own origin seems to arise spontaneously. "Where did I come from, Mother?" It is a natural question, yet it has a certain mystical quality, coming as it does from within and ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... and opinions of men are substituted for the word of God. With Origen was introduced a new mode of interpreting scripture, which afterwards became prevalent. The scriptures, instead of being received in their natural and obvious sense, were regarded as mystical and allegorical. Milner, in his Church History, says: "From the fanciful mode of allegory, introduced by him, and uncontrolled by scriptural rule and order, there arose a vitiated method of commenting on the sacred ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... much affected, his nerves having been weak from childhood, and already so shattered that, in 1846, he was on the verge of insanity. Even at that time he had begun to have attacks by night of that "mystical terror," which he has described in detail in "Humiliated and Insulted," and he also had occasional epileptic fits. In Siberia epilepsy developed to such a point that it was no longer possible to entertain any doubt as to the character ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... to forget the way in which she was led. By slow and painful degrees she was drawn away from the circles of fashion in which once her soul delighted. Then her nature seemed so retiring, and the tone of her piety so mystical, while she dreaded nervously all approach to "religious enthusiasm," that a career of publicity, either in prisons, among rulers, or among the ministers of her own Society, seemed too far away to ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... increasing evil,) should not know that old wounds require rather vinegar than oil, the cautery instead of unguents. As a member of the persecuted Church, I will not allow the declarations of a brother of that holy and mystical body to be overborne and set at naught by an ill liver like this Philip Joy. I say that men have become too free in uttering their licentious imaginations about those who are placed by God's Providence ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... trying rather piteously to remind herself that it was Sunday. Far away in a New England village, the bells were ringing for the evening meeting. Lucy, shutting her eyes, could smell the spring scents in the church lane, could hear the droning of the opening hymn. A vague mystical peace stole upon her, as she recalled the service; the great words of 'sin,' 'salvation,' 'righteousness,' as the Evangelical understands them, thrilled ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what it will. All evil and all good come from your heart. Your heart alone has the key of life and death for you.' I was just about to ask you at this point which of our two authors, our allegorical or our mystical author upon the heart, you like best. But that would be a stupid and a wayward question since you have them both before you, and both at their best, to possess and to enjoy. To go back then to John Bunyan, and to his allegory of the ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... sanctifying grace the justified man becomes a living member (membrum vivum) of the mystical body of Christ. His sins, it is true, did not forfeit membership in the Church, so long as he preserved the faith, but by sinning he became a dead member who can regain life only by returning to the state of grace. Grace is the life of the soul, sin its death. Hence the evil of mortal ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... Virgin most venerable. Virgin most renowned. Virgin most powerful. Virgin most merciful. Virgin most faithful. Mirror of justice. Seat of wisdom. Cause of our joy. Spiritual vessel. Vessel of honor. Singular vessel of devotion. Mystical rose. Tower of David. Tower of ivory. House of gold. Ark of the covenant. Gate of heaven. Morning Star. Health of the sick. Refuge of sinners. Comforter of the afflicted. Help of Christians. Queen of Angels. Queen of Patriarchs. Queen ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... ill-health. Every feature at once strongly cut and delicately alive." There is that femininity in the cast of his features, which Coleridge classed as an attribute of true genius. His beautiful brown hair falls loosely over those eyes, large, dark, glowing, which appeal to all observers by their mystical illumination of rapture—eyes which seem as though they had been dwelling on some glorious sight—which have, as Haydon said, "an inward look perfectly divine, like a ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... name of Nahemah (students will recognize its significance), began to display even more marked evidence of a sort of monomania. Bast, the cat-goddess, became an obsession with her, and she finally conceived the idea that the attributes of that mystical and partly-understood deity were active within her; that she was Bast, re-born. And, certainly, during one month of every year, her condition closely resembled that which was termed in the Middle ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... inexplicable, recondite, cabalistic, inscrutable, secret, dark, mystic, transcendental, enigmatical, mystical, unfathomable, hidden, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... before Shakespeare could have attained to the position of reader for the Burbages. Even some of Greene's earlier reflections, however, seem to be directed against the management of the Shoreditch Theatre. In attacking theatrical managers he writes in, what he calls, "mystical speeches," and transfigures the persons he attacks under fictitious characters and names. In his Planetomachia, published in 1585, he caricatures one actor-manager under the name of Valdracko, who is an actor in Venus' Tragedy, one of the tales of the book. Valdracko is described ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... of the Bible was such that he might have been called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy of the Book of Martyrs are still legible the ill-spelt lines of doggerel in which he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his implacable enmity to the mystical Babylon. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... well as promise us immortality with Him. As the minister went on, Annie followed him with the interest which her belief that she heard between the words inspired, and occasionally in a discontent with what seemed a mystical, almost a fantastical, quality of ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... possesses all the qualities and exercises all the tricks of the necromancers during the middle ages. His speech is ambiguous, solemn, and often incomprehensible—a great proof to the vulgar of his mystical vocation. ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... dervish fraternities may be compared to the regular religious orders of Roman Christendom, while the Ulema (q.v.) are, also with important differences, like the secular clergy. The origin and history of the mystical life in Islam, which led to the growth of the order of dervishes, are treated under [S.][U]FI'ISM It remains to treat here more particularly of (1) the dervish fraternities, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... school of French art, and the namby-pamby mystical German school, which is for carrying us back to Cranach and Duerer, and which is making ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... through this delicious calm. And blame? It is a wild and frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her inmost heart, and you learn her secrets—arcana unintelligible to you in the new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win new color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once charmed away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your motion. Now, at ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... something for which he had no word of God, Matt. iv. 7. That would really have been a tempting of God. Ahaz had no doubt that the miracle would really be performed; but he had a dislike to enter within the mystical sphere. Who knows whether the God who grants the miracle is really the highest God? comp. Is. x. 10, 11, xxxvi. 18-20, xxxvii. 10-12. Who knows whether He is not laying for him a trap; whether, by preventing him from seeking the help ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... temple dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Cybele, built while the Roman Empire was yet heathen, and while Constantinople was still called by the name of Byzantium. It is well known that the superstition of the Egyptians—vulgarly gross in its literal meaning as well as in its mystical interpretation, and peculiarly the foundation of many wild doctrines,—was disowned by the principles of general toleration, and the system of polytheism received by Rome, and was excluded by repeated laws from the respect paid by the empire to almost every other religion, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... emotional intensity of a life, into which has been crowded the stress and storm of a universe, he sits at his desk, every day transcribing to his diary a record of those mystical forces which ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... describes the embalmers, in his time, as cutting open the bodies with "an Ethiopic stone" though they were familiar with the use of metal. Indeed the flint knives which he probably meant may be seen in museums. But this peculiar usage was most likely kept up for some mystical reason, and does not affect the general question. Almost as soon as the Spaniards brought iron to Mexico, it superseded the old material. The "bronze age" ceased within a year or two, and that of ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Here is his favorite conventional tame man, since, among the shouting heroes, Gunnar whimpers like a Tesman. Here is Ibsen's favorite trick of unrequited self-sacrifice; it is Sigurd, in Gunnar's armor, who kills the mystical white bear, but it is Gunnar who reaps the advantage. It is only fair to say that there is more than this to applaud in The Vikings at Helgeland; it moves on a consistent and high level of austere romantic beauty. Mr. William Archer, who admires the play more than any Scandinavian ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... anointed, and had never received the seal of God, as it were, to his commission, was a fact which struck the imagination of the village as of much more importance than many greater things—being at once more visible and matter-of-fact, and of more mystical and spiritual efficacy than any other circumstance ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... this before. I am not a musician, but I suppose even musicians do not know how much there is in that Sonata. I cannot find another word than "oppressiveness" to describe the sensation wrought upon the audience. One had a feeling as if mystical rites were being performed; there rose before me a vast desert, not of this world, weird and unutterably sad, without shape, half lit up by a ghostly moon, in the midst of which hopeless despair waited and sobbed and tore its hair. It was terrible and impressive ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... as well as the waywardness of his nephew, all of which tended to draw him to the spiritual life. The character of Beethoven's work changed from the period of the Mass in D. An altered condition, an altogether new, different strain is apparent thenceforth. The deeply religious, mystical character of the first movement of the Ninth Symphony can be attributed to his previous absorption on the Mass. He worked out of this vein somewhat in the other movements as not being adapted to the uses for which the symphony is designed, but it reappears again in the quartets ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... during which the professors in Koenigsberg are said to have carried firearms into their academic sessions. (Schaff, Creeds 1, 273.) Yet it cannot be regarded as the real cause or even as the immediate occasion, of the conflict, which was really brought about by the unsound, speculative, and mystical views of Osiander on the image of God and, particularly, on justification and the righteousness of faith,—doctrinal points on which he deviated from the Lutheran teaching to such an extent that a controversy was unavoidable. Evidently, his was either a case of relapse ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... treasures of pagan antiquity he loved as intensely as if it were not alien and hostile, as the many thought, to that glow of spiritual piety, that zeal of martyrdom, that white, consuming splendor which for the mystical imagination surrounds the holy cross. Humanism at its best is ordinarily thought to be embodied in the many-sided figure of Erasmus, with his sanity, his balance, his power to see both sides, that of Luther and ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... sacrifices, and he has gone over to Vasava (Indra), and is engaged in performing his sacrifices, do thou therefore have thy sacrifice performed by him. My elder brother has forcibly taken away from me all my household goods and mystical gods, and sacrificing clients, and has now left to me only this physical body of mine, and, O son of Avikshit, as he is worthy of all respect from me, I cannot by any means officiate at thy sacrifice, unless with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... which the Rue du Fouarre was at that time famous throughout Europe. At the moment when Jacqueline's two lodgers arrived at the old School des Quatre Nations, the celebrated Sigier, the most noted Doctor of Mystical Theology of the University of Paris, was mounting his pulpit in a spacious low room on a level with the street. The cold stones were strewn with clean straw, on which several of his disciples knelt on one knee, writing on the other, to enable them to take notes from the Master's improvised ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... They swept him to the rhythm of some haunting music back to the days when his blood had run strong—back to the beauty of the hills at twenty when he had not felt big enough by himself to absorb their full marvel. In a dim mystical way he had realized even then that the keenest edge of their meaning was escaping him. The blue sky above the trees had seemed like the laughing eyes of a woman and the rustle of leaves like the whisper of her skirt. He had laughed back boldly then, feeling in the pride of ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... five Louis had begun by reading the Old and New Testaments; and these two Books, including so many books, had sealed his fate. Could that childish imagination understand the mystical depths of the Scriptures? Could it so early follow the flight of the Holy Spirit across the worlds? Or was it merely attracted by the romantic touches which abound in those Oriental poems! Our narrative will answer ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... unsandy shore. There tossing the ropes from them, the light canoe drawn by the powerful current would dance only a moment on the bounding waves, ere it launched into the misty region surrounding the mystical path, where transition is hid from mortal eye. Slowly drawn by the reluctant girls, the Fawn commenced her death song, a simple address to the Manitou, while her thoughts evidently ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... near the same place, where I am inclined to believe that a "mystical sciencer" worked a trick on two worthy fellows, whom he promised to enrich with silver and gold if they would dig into the hillock for him and find therein a great brass pan which contained the treasure. This they did, and came to the brass ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... man place his paradise beyond their golden peaks. The "Mountains of the Setting Sun," the "Bridge of the World," Thus he has named them, and beyond them the soul first catches a glimpse of that mystical land where the tents are pitched midst everlasting verdure and countless herds and ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... give us the means of completing those parts of it which are not found in them. Considered, then, as a living body, the primitive Christian community was distinguished by its high sacerdotal, ceremonial, mystical character. Which among modern religious bodies was it like? Was it like the Wesleyans? was it like the Society of Friends? was it like the Scotch Kirk? was it like any Protestant denomination at all? Fancy any model Protestant of this day in a state of things so different from his own! ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... bones, dislocations, and burning with gunpowder. The remedies are of three kinds: simples, such as St. John's wort, Clown's all-heal, elder, parsley, maidenhair, mineral drugs, such as lime, saltpetre, Armenian bole, crocus metallorum, or sulphuret of antimony; and thaumaturgic or mystical, of which the chief is, "My black powder against the plague, small-pox; purples, all sorts of feavers; Poyson; either, by Way of Prevention or after Infection." This marvellous remedy was made by putting live toads into an earthen pot so as to half fill it, and baking ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Plebeians that caused the great constitutional struggles of Ancient Rome. Many of the lowest castes are rebelling against Brahmin arrogance. They have waxed rich by growing lucrative staples, and a strong minority are highly educated. Mystical sects have already thrown off the priestly yoke. But caste is by no means confined to races of Indian blood. What is the snobbery which degrades our English character but the Indo-German Sudra's reverence for his Brahmin? ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... way. The meek will he guide in judgment; and the meek he will teach his way." But if men will undertake to explain scripture in their own strength and wisdom, what must we expect but to have them mangled and made havoc of, or explained in a mere mystical or literal sense? "The natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." See ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... Still mystical, still enigma, still woman, she would have it that the stars, the mountains—-the witnesses—and not ourselves, made the wedding. I left it so, sure of nothing so much as that, whatever her way of thought might be, it was ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... sometimes styled "an Italian patriot." In his ambitious endeavor to reinstate the Caesarean power in Italy he appears alternately in the figure of a hero and the character of a charlatan. Believing himself the founder of a new era, he was inflamed by his successes, and ended in "mystical extravagances and follies which could not fail ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... is too mystical; will you tell me what it has done for you? As yet, I only know what you have not done ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... with forms of belief included that were not Puritan. The much largest proportion, after Presbyterians, of whom there were many, and ordinary Independents, of whom there were more, were Sectaries of the fervid and devout sorts, such as Baptists, Old Brownists, and Antinomians, with mystical Millenaries and Seekers, all passionately Scriptural, saturated with the language and history of the Old Testament, and zealously Anti-Romanist and Anti- prelatic; and these, on the whole, were the men after Cromwell's heart. Such, among others, was Harrison—whom ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... beauty, others, weary of shadows, are leaning back, and one girl is standing straight up; and nothing of her is reflected in the pool but a glimmer of white feet. This picture, however, has not the intense pathos and tragedy of the Beguiling of Merlin, nor the mystical and lovely symbolism of the Days of the Creation. Above these three pictures are hung five allegorical studies of figures by the same artist, all worthy of ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... throbbings and burnings That hope unsatisfied brings, The weary longings and yearnings For the mystical better things, Are the sands on which is reflected The pitiless moving lake, Where the wanderer falls dejected, By a thirst he never ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... the exorcist cries out: "Evil spirits from the east, I send back to the east; evil spirits from the south, I send back to the south," and so on. Finally, he goes to the door of the house, and, after making some mystical signs in the air, manoeuvres with his sword, congratulates the owner of the establishment on the expulsion of the ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... bewildered, had retired from the field. And Lilamani, flung back on the God within, had evolved a private creed of her own;—shedding the husks of Christian dogmas and the grosser superstitions of her own faith, and weaving together the mystical elements that are the life-blood of ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... reading of their mysteries. Her father, secretly, perhaps, hoping to bequeath his name to the gratitude of some future Hermes, had in his manuscripts reduced into a system many scattered theories of others, and many dogmas of his own. Over these, for they were simpler and easier than the crabbed and mystical speculations in the printed books, she more especially pored; and she was not sorry at finding fresh reasons for her untutored adoration of the stars and apparitions of ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... but see me once! Could I for one moment pierce the mystical walls that so inexorably rose to separate us, and whisper all that filled my soul, I might consent to be satisfied for the rest of my life with the knowledge of ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... depriving the devil of all that moonshine of dignity which sentimental sceptics have given him. Evil does not mean dignity, any more than it means any other good thing. The stronger caricaturists have, in a sense, fallen back on the medieval devil; not because he is more mystical, but because he is more material. The face of Raemaekers' Satan, with its lifted jowl and bared teeth, has less of the half-truth of cynicism than of mere ignominious greed. The armies are spread out for him as a banquet; and the war which he praises, and which was really ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... preceding the Kan with which the first year of each Ahau began—for, as 24 is divisible by 4, the first year of each Ahau necessarily began with the day Kan. This number was the "ruling number" of the Ahau, and not for any mystical or ceremonial purpose, but for the practical one of at once and easily converting any year designated in the Ahau into its equivalent in the current Kin Katun, or 52 year cycle. All that is necessary to do this is, to add ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... may be said for the experimental novel, however, its primary aim, like that of history, is appreciation and understanding, not generalization and abstract formulas. Insight and sympathy, the mystical sense of human solidarity, expressed in the saying "to comprehend all is to forgive all," this fiction has to give. And these are materials which the sociologist cannot neglect. As yet there is no autobiography ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... his staff and his telescope and his knapsack, Billie sat down in a steamer chair under the trees and began to think. She lifted her eyes to the wall of mountains now mystical and unreal under their mantle of blue shadow. How could treachery and hatred and jealousy exist where there was so much beauty? It seemed to her that she had only to look about her to be inspired and uplifted; but Billie was too young to realize that it takes more than scenery to furnish ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... tale of two maiden sisters of uncertain age who are induced, by their natural longing for a return to youth and its blessings, to pay a large sum for a mystical water which possesses the value of setting backwards the hands of time. No more delightfully fresh and original book has appeared since "Vice Versa" charmed an amused world. It is well written, drawn to the life, and full of the most ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... satisfy ourselves now whether, for instance, Christianity is holding its own? Who can tell what vagary or what compromise may not be calling itself Christianity? A bishop may be a modernist, a chemist may be a mystical theologian, a psychologist may be a believer in ghosts. For science, too, which had promised to supply a new and solid foundation for philosophy, has allowed philosophy rather to undermine its foundation, and is seen eating its own words, through the mouths of some of its accredited spokesmen, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... are thy choristers and thy precentors; and instead of the crosier, the mystical arrow is ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... sum of Greek numeral letters 'Kakoi Episkopoi'—bishops all ill; Strangely I note that those mystical fetters Bind in their number this mystery still— Six hundred threescore and six is the total, Spelling the number and name of a man, Chief of bad bishops and lies sacerdotal, That of all wickedness ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Sergei Nechayeff. Whether admirable or not we shall leave the reader to judge. But, if Bakounin bewilders one, Nechayeff staggers one. And, if Bakounin was the father of terrorism, Nechayeff was its living embodiment. He was not complex, mystical, or sentimental. He was truly a revolutionist without phrase, and he can be described in the simplest words. He was a liar, a thief, and a murderer—the incarnation of Hatred, Malice, and Revenge, who stopped at no crime against friend or foe that promised to advance what he was pleased ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... true that Cranmer held fast to the objective view of the visible church. If the ceremonies were altered with which the Romish church imparts the spiritual consecration, yet in this respect only the mystical usages introduced in recent centuries were abandoned, and the ritual restored to the form used in more primitive times, especially in the African church. But it was surely a violent change, when those who wished to receive consecration were now previously asked, whether their inward call agreed ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... from the old legend, which tells us of the mystical knight Lohengrin, (Veron of Percifal), Keeper ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... his while to communicate to the world, but chose to die the churl of knowledge? The whole of his reasoning turns upon shewing that the Conjunction That is the pronoun That, which is itself the participle of a verb, and in like manner that all the other mystical and hitherto unintelligible parts of speech are derived from the only two intelligible ones, the Verb and Noun. "I affirm that gold is yellow," that is, "I affirm that fact, or that proposition, viz. gold is yellow." The secret of the Conjunction on which ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... written expression of intimate thought or cherished fancy was for your eyes only; it was my first approach to your maidenly heart, a mystical wooing, which neglected no resource, near or remote, for the enhancement of its charm, and so involved all ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... drove back to the Point, I giving up my seat in Mrs. Woodruff's barouche to a lady and joining Frank Woolsey and Thorpe in a dog-cart. We none of us spoke, but smoked incessantly, our eyes upturned to the sky, which was lovely, mystical, wonderful, with the pale after-glow thrilling it with the most beautiful hues. Before we had reached the town a strange yellow moonlight had crept over the landscape, making the trees gloom together in solemn masses, while the sea glimmered in a thousand lines of trembling light away, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... is sexed, like the human that possesses it. It seeks a mystical union with the imaginings of others. The poet, the novelist, the essayist, seek the mind of the reader; the critic seeks the mind of the writer. That we get so much bad reviewing is due to incompatibility of temperament or ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... banners, associated with all that is revered and powerful on earth. The Roman ensign that waved on that mournful day, symbol of highest earthly power, is a thing mouldered and forgotten; and over all the high places of old Rome, herself stands that mystical cross, no longer speaking of earthly anguish and despair, but of heavenly glory, honor, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... everywhere with her own. On some days, instead of staying at home, he would go for luncheon to a restaurant not far off, to which he had been attracted, some time before, by the excellence of its cookery, but to which he now went only for one of those reasons, at once mystical and absurd, which people call 'romantic'; because this restaurant (which, by the way, still exists) bore the same name as the street in which Odette lived: the Laperouse. Sometimes, when she had been away on a short visit somewhere, several days would elapse before she thought of letting him know ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... pulled it with his hands. But far off, westward, there was a broad red band of sunset, and against this the smoke, the tall stacks, the violence and the wealth of that cauldron. One could almost hear the noise. It did arrest one; it was as though someone had painted something unreal, to be a mystical emblem, and to sum up in one picture all those million despairs, misfortunes, chances, disciplines, and acquirements which make up the character of Lancashire men. This vision also many men have seen and ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... the prophets professed any mystical and inexplicable illumination at which a sceptic might reasonably mock; they were prepared with ample reasons for the things they foretold. Now, quite as confidently, they point on to a new series of consequences, high probabilities that follow on all this tremendous development ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... foundation of religion as of ethics. If morals are strengthened and made clear, and Personal Responsibility as Conscience, is recognized and accepted, the Vicarious Atonement will have to go, and Theologians will have to change their mystical and miraculous interpretations from Vicarious Atonement to personal ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... other results of comparative physiology our whole psychology is placed on a new and firm monistic basis. The older mystical conception of the soul, as we find it amongst primitive peoples, but also in the systems of the dualistic philosophers of to-day, is refuted by them. According to these systems, the soul of man (and of the higher animals) is a separate ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... her face slowly, and seemed filled with joy on seeing suddenly the violet stole, no doubt finding again, in the midst of a temporary lull in her pain, the lost voluptuousness of her first mystical transports, with the visions of ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... at the flickering flame in the grate. It occurred to me to get up and go away quietly, as conversation was impossible—for there was too much to say. It came to me that I ought not to leave him alone. Something in him reminded me of the mystical phrases of the transcendent paragraph of his oration on Garfield, picturing the death of the second martyred President, by the ocean, while far off white ships touched the sea and sky, and the fevered face of the dying man felt "the breath ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... was, for the first time, that Fred fully understood his position. It came like a gleam of light on his puzzled intellect, and made that quite clear which had before been so mystical and cloudy, that he had been ready to rub his eyes, and to doubt, almost, the evidence of his senses. He remembered his old and a thousand times repeated theory of "projected images." Here it was. Instead of a fancy, a thought, here was the whole of Annie ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... Wherefore Abraham himself said (Gen. 20:12): "She is truly my sister, the daughter of my father, and not the daughter of my mother," being related to him on his father's side. Jacob's assertion that he was Esau, Isaac's first-born, was spoken in a mystical sense, because, to wit, the latter's birthright was due to him by right: and he made use of this mode of speech being moved by the spirit of prophecy, in order to signify a mystery, namely, that the younger people, i.e. the Gentiles, should supplant ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... created in the image of his God there is this strange mystical susceptibility, this urge to lay all he has upon the altar of the ideal that he feels has the right to demand his uttermost. Nothing else so fully demonstrates man's spiritual nature: it is the one great fact that differentiates us ...
— No. 4, Intersession: A Sermon Preached by the Rev. B. N. Michelson, - B.A. • B. N. Michelson
... Queen Ti, the mother of our friend Amenhotep the Fourth; but I don't think that could have been so, because the device on it was the Eye of Osiris, and Ti, as you know, was an Aten-worshipper. However, it was a very charming ring, and Uncle John, who had a queer sort of devotion to the mystical Eye of Osiris, commissioned a very clever goldsmith to make two exact copies of it, one for himself and one for me. The goldsmith naturally wanted to take the measurements of our fingers, but this Uncle John would not hear of; the rings were to be exact ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... gladsome band of the faithful. Shake the fragrant, berried garland, Myrtle-twined, that crowns thy love-locks, Shedding its odors! Tread the measure, with fearless stamp, Of this our reckless, rapturous dance, In holy rejoicing! Hand in hand, thrice beatified, Lo we thread the rhythmic, fanciful, Mystical mazes! ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... creed, the only creed she held, and it lay darkly in her heart, never expressed even to herself. But when she ran into the night to comfort the little fox, she was living up to her faith as few do; when she gathered flowers and lay in the sun, she was dwelling in a mystical atmosphere as vivid as that of the saints; when she recoiled from cruelty, she was trampling evil underfoot, perhaps more surely than those great divines who destroyed one another in their zeal ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... Bhagavadgita, Psycho-analysis and Religion, Plato, Sufism, and other subjects on the programme; anyway I would have no prepossessions and prejudices in listening to Dr. G. R. S. Meads' course of lectures on The Mystical Philosophy and ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... sculptured with his pencil; and that cold austerity of tone, still more remarkable in his last pictures, as it became mannered, chills the spectator on a first glance. When POPE was a child, he found in his mother's closet a small library of mystical devotion; but it was not suspected, till the fact was discovered, that the effusions of love and religion poured forth in his "Eloisa" were caught from the seraphic raptures of those erotic mystics, who to the last retained a place in his library among the classical ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... a[22] la Charette, Le Chevalier au Lyon, Erec et Enide, Cliges, and a much shorter Guillaume d'Angleterre. This last has nothing to do with the Conqueror (though the title has naturally deceived some), and is a semi-mystical romance of the group derived from the above-mentioned legend of St. Eustace, and represented in English by the beautiful story of Sir Isumbras. It is very doubtfully Chrestien's, and in any case very unlike his other work; but those who think him the Arthurian magician might ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... priest? Is not the sungod Ormuzd himself present? With your majesty's permission, we will place the loving pair upon the upper terrace of Sans-Souci, where they will be baptized in holy fire by the clear rays of the mid-day sun. Then the divine Marianna, Cochois, and Denys will perform some mystical dance, and so the marriage will be solemnized according to ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... amorists? But we that were younger than Messer Brunetto, and simpler, and certainly more ignorant, we found a great pleasure in these verses that were so easy to understand as to their language, if their meaning was sometimes a thought mystical and cryptic. ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... possesses an incomparable Baudelaire (edition tiree a un exemplaire), a unique Mallarme. Catholicism being the adopted religion of the Decadence—for its venerable age, valuable in such matters as the age of an old wine, its vague excitation of the senses, its mystical picturesqueness—Des Esseintes has a curious collection of the later Catholic literature, where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find their place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello, the amalgam of a monstrous ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... verses addressed "To Ida." Paul had rather a pretty knack at turning rhymes, and the tears came to Miss Ludington's eyes as she read these lines. They were an attempt at a love sonnet, throbbing with passion, and yet so mystical in some of the allusions that nothing but her knowledge of Paul's devotion to Ida would have given her a clue to his meaning. She was filled with apprehension as she considered the effect which this infatuation, ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... with the Quakers, who had recently found their way to Bedford. The foundations of the faith, he thought, were being undermined. The Quakers' teaching as to the inward light seemed to him a serious disparagement of the Holy Scriptures, while their mystical view of the spiritual Christ revealed to the soul and dwelling in the heart, came perilously near to a denial of the historic reality of the personal Christ. He had had public disputations with male and female Quakers from time ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... little town lay lit and warm below, and the scene was set to music, a lugubriously sentimental air. For some reason this music had the quality of a barrel organ—though he knew that properly it came from a band—and it associated with itself a mystical formula ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... criticism of the earlier Scriptures, in his tendency to simple forms of doctrine and confessions of faith, Colet struck the keynote of a mode of religious thought as strongly in contrast with that of the later Reformation as with that of Catholicism itself. The allegorical and mystical theology on which the Middle Ages had spent their intellectual vigour to such little purpose fell before his rejection of all but the historical and grammatical sense of the Biblical text. In his lectures on the Romans we find hardly a single quotation from the Fathers or the scholastic ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... lovely creations, so precisely drawn up to a certain point, so elusive beyond it, raised the feeling for pure beauty into a wholly ideal plane. The deepest longings of men were satisfied by the contemplation of a paradise in which we should be even as they. In that mystical portraiture of the invisible world an answer—perhaps the only answer—was found to the demand for an ideal of beauty. That remarkable saying preserved by S. Clement, of a kingdom in which "the two shall be one, and the male with ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... his eyes becoming yellow and fixed. And, as Boyd carelessly repeated the rapid and mystical appeal, "Oh!" he said coolly. "So that is what ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... relation between the extraordinary indications of the period we live in, and the substantial purport of the divine predictions. There unquestionably gleams forth, through the plainer lines, and through the mystical imagery of prophecy, the vision of a better age, in which the application of the truths of religion to men's minds will be irresistible. And what should more naturally be interpreted as one of the dawning signs of its approach, than ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... three caliphs after Muhammad were also legitimate authorities. In modern Islam, Sunnis and Shia continue to have different views of acceptable schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and who is a proper Islamic religious authority. Islam also has an active mystical branch, Sufism, with various ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... pictures—one in particular, the Canterbury Pilgrims, far above Stothard—have great merit, but hard, dry, yet with grace. He has written a Catalogue of them, with a most spirited criticism on Chaucer, but mystical and full of vision. His poems have been sold hitherto only in manuscript. I never read them; but a friend at my desire procured the "Sweep Song." There is one to a tiger, which I ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... for the interests of your lowly servants, the Friars Minor, while you are occupied with so many important affairs which regard the whole Church. I entreat you to give us this cardinal, to whom we may have recourse in our wants, always under your sanction, since it is from you, the Head of the mystical Body, that all power emanates." The Pope granted his request with alacrity, and recommended the cardinal to take great care of the Order. From that time, the Orders of Friars Minor have always had a cardinal protector, whose powers are extended as the Pope shall see fit; the terms of the Rule, ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... the opinions of Southey, Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Mr. Frere, and of men like these in learning and genius, concerning my comparative claims to be a man of letters, were to be received as the criterion, instead of the wretched, and in deed and in truth mystical jargon of the Examiner and ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... for Italy, where his ferocity was aided by a cunning which gives us a deeper insight into his character. Rome, a famous but mystical city to the northern pagans, whose imaginations invested it with untold wealth and splendor, was the proposed goal of the enterprising Norseman, who hoped to make himself fabulously wealthy from its plunder. With a hundred ships, filled with hardy Norse pirates, he swept through ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... worthy manner the reasons why the republican form of state cannot assist China to maintain her existence; now let me state why it is impossible to restore the monarchical system. The maintenance of the dignity of a monarch depends on a sort of mystical, historical, traditional influence or belief. Such an influence was capable of producing unconsciously and spontaneously a kind of effect to assist directly or indirectly in maintaining order and imparting blessing to the country. In this lies the value of a monarchy. But dignity is a thing ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... many ways for philosophic purposes by the synthetic principles of comparative anatomy. But even the most important universal laws of organisation—of which the old system of comparative anatomy was one—had to take refuge in mystical ideas of a plan of structure and of creative final causes (causae finales); they were incapable of arriving at a true and clear perception of effective mechanical causes (causae efficientes). This last, most difficult, and grandest problem, Charles Darwin was ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... verse (a) the new feeling for nature, (b) evidences of wide sympathies, (c) mystical tendencies, and (d) compare his verses relating to children and nature with Wordsworth's poems on the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... legend and it relates how Joseph of Arimathea—that good man and just, who laid our Lord in his own sepulcher, was persecuted by Pontius Pilate, and how he fled from Jerusalem carrying with him the Holy Grail hidden beneath a cloth of samite, mystical and white. ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... best beloved Una, "born again." These were the words upon whose mystical meaning I had so long pondered, rejecting the explanations of the priesthood, until Death itself resolved for ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... explication of the mystical meaning of the Jewish tabernacle and its vessels, with the garments of the high priest, is taken out of Philo, and fitted to Gentile philosophical notions. This may possibly be forgiven in Jews, greatly versed in heathen learning and philosophy, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... nothing, however, of love-making in his talk. His ideas were all of the most serious kind; some were even mystical and profound. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has always operated as a drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodox theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Asia, beyond the pale of Islam, claim or exercise the right of insisting on conformance to particular doctrines, because they are true. The erratic manifestations of the religious spirit throughout Asia, constantly breaking out in various forms and figures, in thaumaturgy, mystical inspiration, in orgies and secret societies, have always disquieted these Asiatic States, yet, so far as I can ascertain, the employment of force to repress them has always been justified on administrative or political grounds, as distinguishable from theological ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... and witches, or of other objects, being so frequently resorted to as a means of destroying baneful influences, the god of fire occupies a rank hardly secondary to Ea. Here, too, the mystical element involved in the use of fire adds to the effectiveness of the method. Water and fire are the two great sources of symbolical purification that we meet with in both primitive and advanced rituals of the past.[366] The fire-god appears in the texts under the double ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... virility, they show us the woman. Some of them, especially those to her family and friends, are of almost childlike simplicity and homely charm; others, among the most famous of their kind, deal with mystical, or if we choose so to put it, with supernatural experience: in all alike, we feel a heart akin to our own, ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... thousand miles (or approximately) of golden foam-topped combers; a State that looks up one clear and unimpeded waterway to the evasive North Pole, and down another clear and unimpeded waterway to the elusive South Pole and across a third clear and unimpeded water way straight to the magical, mystical, mysterious Orient. This sense of amplitude gives the Native Son an air of superiority... Yes, you're quite right, it has a touch of superciliousness—very difficult to understand and much more difficult to endure when you haven't seen California; but completely understandable ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... way acquainted with Greek literature were indebted to the Latin translations of the Arabs; while the Jewish rabbinical learning, whose more useful lore was encumbered with much mystical nonsense, enjoyed considerable reputation at this period. The most distinguished of the rabbis taught in the schools in London, York, Lincoln, Oxford, and Cambridge; and Christendom has to confess its obligations for its first acquaintance with science to the enemies of the Cross.[53] ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practised by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... crisis between 1830 and 1860. On reading this work, one receives the impression that the author has done his task very well. It borders somewhat on hero worship, however, as is evident from the use of the following language: "If one could see a mystical presentation of the epoch, one would see Garrison as a Titan, turning a giant grindstone or electrical power-wheel, from which radiated vibrations in larger and in ever larger, more communicative circles and spheres of agitation, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... was printed first in 1613 in 4to; it has been translated into almost every language. As the ancient AEgyptians presented secrets under their mystical hyeroglyphics, so that an easy figure was exhibited to the eye, and a higher notion couched under it to the judgment, so all the Arcadia is a continual grove of morality, shadowing moral and political truths under the plain and striking emblems of lovers, so ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... Hare of the American indigenes with Osiris Unnefer ("Hare God"). These are the lines upon which investigation should run. And of late years there is a notable improvement of tone in treating of symbolism or idolatry: the Lingam and the Yoni are now described as "mystical representations, and perhaps the best possible impersonal representatives of the abstract expressions paternity and maternity" (Prof. Monier Williams in "Folk-lore Record" vol. iii. part ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... watring places. God warned the wise men of the East by an especial Dream not to return again to Herod; likewise their three Persons, their three Gifts, Presents, or Offerings, and the supernatural Star, have all their peculiar and mystical meaning. ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... of mind, he pursued the track of the mystical divines, and having acquired great reputation in Spain, and being desirous of propagating his sublime mode of devotion, he left his own country, and settled at Rome. Here he soon connected himself with some of the ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... little Mrs. Brinke playing against her. Little Mrs. Brinke! A woman who only the other day had read an original paper entitled: "An Hour with Hegel" before her philosophy class; who had published that dry mystical affair "Light on the Inscrutable in Dante." How could such a one by any possibility be supposed to observe the disgusting action of Mrs. Van Wycke in throwing off on her partner's trump and swooping down on the last trick with her right bower? Melicent ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... both by the Greeks and Romans. He had a magnificent temple at Pylos. Near the river Corellus, in Boeotia, he had also an altar, for some mystical reason, in common with Pallas. His chief festival was in February, and called Charistia, because their oblations were made for the dead. Black bulls were the victims offered up, and the ceremonies were performed in the night, ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... representations of strife among the gods? Shall they listen to the narrative of Hephaestus binding his mother, and of Zeus sending him flying for helping her when she was beaten? Such tales may possibly have a mystical interpretation, but the young are incapable of understanding allegory. If any one asks what tales are to be allowed, we will answer that we are legislators and not book-makers; we only lay down the principles according to which books are to be written; ...
— The Republic • Plato
... gave it to me; rather I paid him for it, the proceeds, two dollars (I think that was the amount), going to some asylum in Camden. In addition, the "good grey poet" was kind enough to add a woodcut of himself as he appeared in the 1855 volume, "hankering, gross, mystical, nude," and another of his old mother, with her shrewd, kindly face. Walt is in his shirt-sleeves, a hand on his hip, the other in his pocket, his neck bare, the pose that of a nonchalant workman—though in actual practice he was always opposed to work of any sort; on his head is a slouch-hat, and ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the waving fields of yellow grain, or as the Chthonian darkness under earth where the seed awaits new life in the new year. The creed is practical as the folk-lore of sympathetic magic, which half expects to bring good harvest luck by various mummeries; and the creed is mystical as the hidden things and words unknown which assured Pindar and Sophocles of secure felicity in this and in ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... it is rendered in the Latin version of the Septuagint, other learned men contend that it hath the meaning of a witch also, and may be understood as denoting a person who pretended to hurt his or her neighbours in life, limb, or goods, either by noxious potions, by charms, or similar mystical means. In this particular the witches of Scripture had probably some resemblance to those of ancient Europe, who, although their skill and power might be safely despised, as long as they confined ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... heart only could now see. At the first sign of his awaking she was on her feet with her hand upon the bell. On the arrival of the lamp Mavra would withdraw to the workroom. At night in her dreams she would continue her spiritual, almost mystical, contemplation of the beautiful fair ...
— The Little Russian Servant • Henri Greville
... the period of youthful faith," and may take its place among the most charming and pathetic of all those numberless effusions of genius in which individual feeling is but the echo of the universal heart. But the poem on "The Ideal and Life" is highly mystical and obscure;— "it is a specimen," says the critic we have just quoted, "of those poems which were the immediate results of Schiller's metaphysical studies. Here the subject is purely supersensual, and does not descend to the earth at all. The very tendency of the poem is to recommend a life ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... from the water, assuming every imaginable and unimaginable shape in the uncertain light; while on the right the eye ranged over the inky lake till it was lost in thick darkness. A thin, transparent night-fog added to the mystical appearance of the scene, upon which I looked with mingled feelings of wonder and awe. The only distinct sound that could be heard was the measured sound of the paddles, which the men plied in silence, as if unwilling to break the stillness of the night. ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... satisfied by his superior. He now wishes Mr. Brien Moon would evince more exactness in holding inquests, and less anxiety for the fees. Mr. Winterflint depends not on his own decisions, where the laws relating to debtors are so absurdly mystical. "Rest here, boy," he says; "I won't be a minute or two,—must do the thing straight." He seeks the presence of that extremely high functionary, the gaoler (high indeed wherever slavery rules), who, having weighed the points with great legal impartiality, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... ordered to be brought, and going round them with a solemn pace, cast in a strong and grateful perfume; then collected in himself, with downcast eyes, and his hands upon his breast, he ran three times about the horse, making as if he pronounced some mystical words. The moment the pots sent forth a dark cloud of pleasant smell, which so surrounded the princess, that neither she nor the horse could be discerned, watching his opportunity, the prince jumped nimbly up behind ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... only upon stone monuments, but also in religious paintings,—especially certain kakemono suspended in temples. These kakemono usually display the footprints upon a very large scale, with a multitude of mystical symbols and characters. The sculptures may be less common; but in Tokyo alone there are a number of Butsu-soku-seki, or "Buddha- foot stones," which I have seen,—and probably several which I have not seen. There is one ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... likely to suggest a brighter view of human existence. With the loss of freedom pessimism increased, and the Greek philosophies of resignation were needed more than ever. Those whom they could not satisfy turned their thoughts to new mystical philosophies and religions, which were little interested in the earthly ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... pen and laid a sheet of paper in place. Once she had begun to write it was as though an unseen power guided her to inspiration. She wondered if somewhere under the stars Tom Gray was seeking, at the same time, to send her a message. Never before had she been so thoroughly imbued with the mystical impression of his nearness to her. It was not a long letter, yet somehow she had managed exactly to convey the meaning she had intended. As she was finishing it, she heard the distant chime of the grandfather's clock downstairs, striking ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... the still, small voice, that murmured her agitated felicity: more than a thousand times, for his heart clenched the idea as a diver grasps a gem, he recalls the enraptured yet gentle embrace, that had sealed upon her blushing cheek his mystical and delicious sovereignty. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... law. It was the kernel of Burke's theory of statecraft. It is the inspiration of the sublimer science, which accepts the hypothesis of evolution as taught by Darwin and Spencer, yet bows in reverence before the unnamed and incommensurable force lodged as a mystical purpose within the unfolding universe. It was the wisdom of that child of Stratford who, building better than he knew, gave to our literature its deepest and most persistent note. If anywhere Shakespeare seems to speak ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Revelator represents the Son of man as saying (Revelation i. 17, 18): "I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead 334:27 [not understood]; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, [Science has explained me]." This is a mystical state- ment of the eternity of the Christ, and is also a reference 334:30 to the human sense ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... and much more abundant.' We shall to-morrow be more of everything that we are to-day, unless by some strong effort of repentance and change we break the fatal continuity, and make a new beginning by God's grace. But let us lay to heart this, as a very solemn truth which lifts up into mystical and unspeakable importance the things that men idly call trifles, that life is one continuous whole, a march ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... after-death, which to him seemed so wonderfully comforting, full of rest, and reassurance, and renewal. He experienced no mystical ecstasies. He was sure of a wonderful kindness in death, a kindness which really reached right through life, though here he could not avail himself of it. Siegmund had always inwardly held faith that the heart of life beat kindly towards him. When he was cynical and sulky he knew that ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... [A mystical work of that title, written in French in 1670 by the Abbe do Villars, and translated into English in 1600. Pope is said to have borrowed from it the machinery of his Rape of the Lock.-H. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the porch for a moment as Captain Prescott was saying good-night. The moonlight was falling weirdly through the big trees, stretching itself over the grass in shapes that seemed to spell unearthly things. And there were mystical lights on the water down there, flitting about with the movement of the stream as ghosts might flit. Because it looked so other-world-like she wondered if it knew what it had just missed. She had never thought ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... in fact, a second stag-luncheon very soon after, at which George Riggs was present and that rare Irish musician, Denis O'Sullivan. It was another choice afternoon, with a mystical quality which came of the music made by O'Sullivan on some Hindu reeds-pipes of Pan. But we shall have more of O'Sullivan presently—all too little, for his days were ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Book. This is his conclusion: "Free Churchmen," he writes, "dissent from much of the teaching of the Book of Common Prayer. In {53} the service of Baptism, expressions are used which naturally lead persons to regard it as a means of salvation. God is asked to 'sanctify this water to the mystical washing away of sin'. After Baptism, God is thanked for having 'regenerated the child with His Holy Spirit'. It is called the 'laver of regeneration,' by which the child, being born in sin, is received ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... the few birds I know that sings through the long midday is the vireo. The vireo sings when otherwise the woods are still. You do not see him; you cannot find him; but you know he is there. And his singing is wild, and shy, and mystical. Often it haunts you like the memory of some former happiness. That day I ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... choosing the perfect stones, the marble of all the churches, to complete His mystical body in Heaven. He thinks only of one Church, made from those true to Him of all the churches here. Civilizations are moving pictures, made by man. Without God they perish. The soul, the spirit, lives. The war is not against externals; the ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... knew that I was in love. It had come like a thought, as it comes upon all men whose souls are attuned to vibrate under the mystical impressions of the beautiful. And well I knew she was beautiful. I saw its unfailing index in those oval developments—the index, too, of the intellectual; for experience had taught me that intellect takes a shape; ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... censure, I am censurable. This, indeed, was not the limit of my deviations. Deception was often unnecessarily practised, and my biloquial faculty did not lie unemployed. What has happened to yourselves may enable you, in some degree, to judge of the scenes in which my mystical exploits engaged me. In none of them, indeed, were the effects equally disastrous, and they were, for the most part, the result ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... symbolic significations of the highest morality. I have myself written a treatise to prove that Puss in Boots is an allegory upon the progress of the human understanding, having its origin in the mystical schools of the Egyptian priests, and evidently an illustration of the worship rendered at Thebes and Memphis to those feline quadrupeds of which they make both religious symbols ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to Marvel the best thing to be done. So he led the maid in green to the other throne, where she had once sat, and after replacing the golden crown upon her brow he whispered a fairy spell of much mystical power. ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... says very pertinently, but in a very mystical vein, that the precious metals combine in a very high degree and yet in a very simple manner, the principal qualities in which man's greatness finds expression: rarity, flexibility, uniformity, mobility, durability ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Lord Findon and on Cuningham the effect was of another kind. The picture seemed to them also a combination of many things, or rather of attempts at many things—Burne-Jones' mystical colour—the rustic character of a Bastien-Lepage or a Millet—with the jewelled detail of a fourteenth-century Florentine, so wonderful were the harebells in the foreground, the lichened rocks, the dabbled fleece of the lamb: but they realised that it was a combination that only a ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... plate which lay upon the breast of the high priest of the Jews. They had a very special feeling of reverence for it—something of the feeling which an ancient Roman might have for the Sibylline books in the Capitol. There are, as you see, twelve magnificent stones, inscribed with mystical characters. Counting from the left-hand top corner, the stones are carnelian, peridot, emerald, ruby, lapis lazuli, onyx, sapphire, agate, amethyst, topaz, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in size the Mysterium is an immense piece of work. In the English edition it occupies the whole of the third quarto volume of 507 pages; and then for its matter it is a still more amazing production. To say that the Mysterium Magnum is a mystical and allegorical commentary upon the Book of Genesis is to say nothing. Philo himself is a tyro and a timid interpreter beside Jacob Behmen. 'Which things are an allegory,' says the Apostle, after a ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... domestic affection. Cromwell was sincerely attached to his children; but, among them, he gave the preference to his daughter Elizabeth Claypole. The meek disposition of the young woman possessed singular charms for the overbearing spirit of her father; and her timid piety readily received lessons on mystical theology from the superior experience of the lord-general.[2] But she was now dying of a most painful and internal complaint, imperfectly understood by her physicians; and her grief for the loss ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... "Edris," was also performed by the Thomas Orchestra. It is based upon Marie Corelli's novel, "Ardath," which gives opportunity for much programmism, but of a mystical highly colored sort for which music is especially competent. It makes use of a number of remarkably beautiful motives. One effect much commented upon was a succession of fifths in the bass, used legitimately enough to express a ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... circulation, while unhappily their character to me was utterly offensive. I shall only mention Heinse's Ardinghello and Schiller's Robbers. The first I hated for its having undertaken to exhibit sensuality and mystical abstruseness, ennobled and supported by creative art: the last, because in it, the very paradoxes moral and dramatic, from which I was struggling to get liberated, had been laid hold of by a powerful though an immature genius, and ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... and foot-hills, under these cloudless skies; the sombre, evergreen boughs interwoven with the brightly colored foliage from the lowlands; this mellow, golden sunlight by day alternating with the white, mystical radiance of ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... assumed a bustling and festive air, securing its friends from less important quarters, engaging in animated discussions of the cases in hand, and exhibiting an astonishing amount of legal knowledge, using the most mystical terms in ordinary conversation, and secretly feeling its importance ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... widen immeasurably as he stood watching them settle for the night. He wanted to call them back, "Helena and Gregory, Gregory!" But he remained quiet, his head a little bent, his heart heavy. The tide of sleep, silent, mystical, recompensing! It wasn't that, exactly, he ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... evening in d'Arthez's room, united by the keenest sympathies and by the earnestness of their intellectual life. They all foresaw a great writer in d'Arthez; they looked upon him as their chief since the loss of one of their number, a mystical genius, one of the most extraordinary intellects of the age. This former leader had gone back to his province for reasons on which it serves no purpose to enter, but Lucien often heard them speak of this absent friend as "Louis." Several of the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... had by this time summoned to his aid the semi-mystical courage given him occasionally by his evangelical faith. If it was the Lord's will that such a thing should happen, why it was the Lord's will; and it was no use whatever for Mr. Melrose or any one else to kick against the pricks. So with much ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... commonwealth, (and this is an ancient and increasing evil,) should not know that old wounds require rather vinegar than oil, the cautery instead of unguents. As a member of the persecuted Church, I will not allow the declarations of a brother of that holy and mystical body to be overborne and set at naught by an ill liver like this Philip Joy. I say that men have become too free in uttering their licentious imaginations about those who are placed by God's Providence above them for their soul's good and bodies' health, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... general, and of Jane's features in particular, he became a convert to the opinion of the German philosopher, who affirms that "The Beautiful is greater than the Good." There have been disputes, we believe, on the subject of this axiom, some critics giving it a deep mystical sense, others, again, attempting to explain it in different ways. Our friend Hazlehurst, though a pretty good German scholar, seemed disposed to adopt the ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... investigations into acoustics, led him further and further, but apart from the exact road of natural science into the nebulous regions of mystic philosophy. Tartini taught that with the problem of harmony would also be solved the mystery of creation, that divinity itself would be revealed in the mystical symbols of the tone relations. In these mystical investigations, the composer believed himself particularly favoured ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... who doubt this. There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future—and that freedom is ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... opportunity of arriving before us in England, not only in the places he touched at abroad, but at home, has blackened us with the greatest calumnies, and by an imperfect narrative, has not only traduced us, but made the whole affair so dark and mystical, that till the captain's arrival the l——s of the a——y will not decide for or against us. But if that unfortunate captain never returns to his country, let us do so much justice to his character, to declare that he was a gentleman possessed of many virtues: He ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... Christ, rather than a heaven of glory for the few and for the many, a hell that never shall be mitigated, then had Cicero anticipated much of Christ's doctrine. That he should have approached the mystical portion of our religion it would of course be absurd to suppose. But a belief in that mystical part is not essential for forming the conduct of men. The divine birth, and the doctrine of the Trinity, and the Lord's Supper, are not necessary to teach ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... ministry of His gospel. I do hope Christ will have the whole of you, and that you will have the whole of Him. When you write, let me know how you like my beloved Fenelon. Still, you may not like him. Some Christians never get to feeding on these mystical writers, and get ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... overlooking the Calder, and used to break the monastic rules by wandering forth at night upon the hills. When he was absent thus one night, accompanied by others of the brethren, I visited his chamber, and examined his papers, some of which were covered with mystical figures and cabalistic characters. These papers I seized, and a watch was set to make prisoner of Alvetham on his return. Before dawn he appeared, and was instantly secured, and placed in close confinement. On the next ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... operatum,[88] almost without any co-operation of one's own, towards the assertion of the higher self. And, in truth, to men of Lamb's delicately attuned temperament mere physical stillness has its full value; such natures seeming to long for it sometimes, as for no merely negative thing, with a sort of mystical sensuality. ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... waves of black hair, a little turned back and bending slightly to one side, is raised to heaven with uplifted eyes and open mouth, as if to receive in every sense the flow of the spirit. The face, in the exquisite sweetness of a surrender to piety, reflects the bliss of Faith, of mystical voluptuousness, and divine ecstasy. The expression is religious, but the Virgin is human, and full of life in the firmness of her lines and the warmth of her flesh-tints. Beneath the suppleness of the drawing and the soft touches we recognize in Mary the Immaculate, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... here every other beyond, Except one: to be bound in the mystical bond Which is woven with throbs of the heart that is true, And the glances of eyes ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... only in the mystical caverns of beauty, poetry, and romance are hidden the graves of buried hopes, but even amid the corn and potatoes of daily life rise the ghostly head and foot stones of aspirations dead and put away out of sight, dead in the body, in daily act, but living yet in spirit, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in life has a numerical signification; and such is the reverence paid to dreams, that a large book exists of several hundred pages, called "Libro dei Sogni," containing, besides various cabala and mystical figures and lists of numbers which are "sympathetic," with directions for their use, a dictionary of thousands of objects with the numbers supposed to be represented by each, as well as rules for interpreting into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... often assert on their own authority that Prajapati was himself sacrificed in order to produce the world, and in fact they usually give other accounts of the creation; but as their authors live in a rarefied atmosphere of mystical allegory in which fact and fancy are completely confused with one another and consistency ceases to have any meaning, none of them would have difficulty in accepting the Rigvedic statement that he was sacrificed. Hence they tell us on the one hand that Prajapati has created the world from ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... time in both cases when these accessory or related provinces of mind can be called into friendly activity to the advantage of each other. In a poetic training this might be at the point where the motive of the poem is of that vague, mystical character—a mere soul-mood—which words express so imperfectly; or, in a course of music, when it is a question of a piece in which the composer has definitely attempted to express a poetical idea—as happens often in dramatic music, occasionally in symphonic poems and elsewhere. Here ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... was the son of King Menkera (Mycerinus), to whom the discovery of part of the Ritual, cap. lxiv. is attributed, and who was the author of a mystical work. ...
— Egyptian Literature
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