"Ecstasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... last. All other emanations he felt to be faint sparks in comparison with the fire of his own. How could it be otherwise, considering the source of his inspiration? As he sang his heart swelled with ecstasy, and when he concluded there lay at his feet a full-blown rose. He was victor of the festival, yet so filled was he with thoughts of his beloved that he remembered not to break the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... his arms, was radiant in the sunshine, its rosebud mouth parting over pearly teeth in dimpling glee, the breeze lifting the light rings of hair that caressed his soft, round throat, the hands waving in childish ecstasy and grace. As they stood, just over the beautiful bust of the "Marconino" which Vittorio had carved upon the prow, child and father were an embodiment of the play of the crested foam over the deep trouble of ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... whose name had been changed to Komyo (Refulgence) in token of her illustrious piety. The daughter inherited all the mother's romance, but in her case it often degenerated into a passion more elementary than religious ecstasy. Shomu, having no son, made his daughter heir to the throne. Japanese history furnished no precedent for such a step. The custom had always been that a reign ceased on the death of a sovereign unless the Crown Prince had not yet reached ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... window. Their heads intercepted the feeble light in the cell, without the wretched being whom they thus deprived of it seeming to pay any attention to them. "Do not let us trouble her," said Oudarde, in a low voice, "she is in her ecstasy; ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... towers in sunset lie, Her face oblivious of all else I'll ponder long. My body thrills with ecstasy! My heart beats with the rhythmic ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... short distance, out on the Bloomfield pike. She found he was from Bloomfield and trilled away in a high, shrill cackle that she loved every stick and stone in that adorable country. And when she found that he was the nephew of Mrs. Mosby, or, rather, Loraine Fawcette, that was, her ecstasy knew no bounds. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... yelled Rumple in an ecstasy of joy. "Mrs. Warner, our wagon is coming, for I can hear my sister Nealie calling to ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... could see this, he would be in ecstasy," I exclaimed. "Yes, replacing books with wines and liquors! What a business for the sons of ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... the dusty, indifferent street a bird's note rang out in one wild, delirious ecstasy of untrammeled springtime. To all intents and purposes the sound might have been the one final signal that Rae Malgregor's jangled nerves ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... of those who can really dance the tarantella there is no room for the smallest sorrow, in their hearts no place for the most minute regret, anxiety, or wonder, when the rapture of the measure is upon them. Away goes everything but the pagan joy of life, the pagan ecstasy of swift movement, and the leaping blood that is quick as the motes in a sunray falling from a southern sky. Delarey began to smile as he watched them, and their expression was reflected in his eyes. Hermione glanced at him and thought what a boy he ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin'; to a tender human affection: 'And now he lives in Abraham's bosom: whatever that be which is signified by that bosom, there lives my Nebridius, my sweet friend'; and from that to the saint's rare, last ecstasy: 'And sometimes Thou admittedst me to an affection, very unusual, in my inmost soul, rising to a strange sweetness, which if it were perfected in me, I know not what in it would not belong to the life to come.' And even self-analysis, of which there is so much, becoming at times a kind of mathematics, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... curtains, and a few shelves laden with brightly-bound books, which had been prepared for Lizzie immediately on her marriage. It looked out upon the sea, and she had almost taught herself to think that here she had sat with her adored Florian, gazing in mutual ecstasy upon the "wide expanse of glittering waves." She was lying back in a low arm-chair as her cousin entered, and she did not rise to receive him. Of course she was alone, Miss Macnulty having received a suggestion that it would be well that she should do ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... laughter, in which all the five appeared to have joined, and which they had some difficulty in stopping. No. 4, who was a biggish girl, had giggled till the tears were running over her cheeks; and No. 8, in sympathy, was leaning back in his tiny chair in a sort of ecstasy ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... this? can you mean it?" exclaimed Rosa, in something like an ecstasy of surprise ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... explanation; but with the tarag gone I lost no time in hastening to Dian's side. With a little cry of delight she threw herself into my arms. So lost were we in the ecstasy of reunion that neither of us—to this day—can tell what became of ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... no going; going is our sense of a succession of small impediments or deadlocks; it is a succession of cutting Gordian knots, which on a small scale please or pain as the case may be; on a larger, give an ecstasy of pleasure, or shock to the extreme of endurance; and on a still larger, kill whether they be on the right side or the wrong. Nature, as I said in "Life and Habit," hates that any principle should ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... not at all dislike being dressed up with one of the boy's caps with three ostrich feathers, to accompany her aunt in hood and cloak, and be challenged by Hal, who had, together with the bow and papa's old regimental sword, been borrowed to personate the robber of Hexham. Everybody screamed with ecstasy except Fergus, who thought it very hard that he should not have been Prince Edward instead of ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... exquisite. The eyes were those of an angel, the mouth was that of a virgin; but in those heavenly eyes there was a terrestrial look and on that virginal mouth was the smile of a woman. In that place, at that hour, on that tapestry, this mingling of divine ecstasy and human voluptuousness had something at once ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... dismay, for the flower-seller was wizened and unsteady of foot, and she had sent him spinning about in a dizzy fashion. She put out a steadying hand. "Oh . . . !" This time it was in ecstasy; she had spied the primroses in the basket just as the sunshine splashed over the edge of the corner building straight down upon them. Margaret MacLean dropped to one knee and laid her cheek against them. "The happy things—you ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... never was such a ride! As we swept by the second mile stone I stole a look at Miss Plinlimmon. She sat in an ecstasy, with closed eyes. She was, as she put it, ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... man like medicine. A part of this the Stoics call artificial, as the inspection of entrails and birds' oracles, lots, and signs. All of these they call in general artificial. But what is not artificial, and is not acquired by learning, are trances and ecstasy, Homer knew, too, of these phenomena. But he also knew of seers, priests, interpreters of dreams, and augurs. A certain wise man in Ithaca he tells of (O. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... who were identified with the Sauades and nymphs of the heavenly host. Men heard them passing in the night, heralded by the piercing notes of the flute provoking to frenzy, and by the clash of brazen cymbals, accompanied by the din of uproarious ecstasy: these sounds were broken at intervals by the bellowing of bulls and the roll of drums, like ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... child in ecstasy as she hurried up the hill. "That's the first time a lady ever kissed me, except Mrs. Carson. It is so nice to have friends! And Mrs. Vane is right, it does feel good when you've told folks you are sorry. I wonder—there's Dad—I sassed him and stole his watermelon. ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... we poor mortals know the verities of things, so blind are we to things thrust before our eyes, that she understood more in that moment of ecstasy than in all the reasoning that preceded and followed it. ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... the day for afternoon service at Uphill, so the sisters had to hurry away to eat their luncheon in haste, and then to introduce Sophy to the Sunday School, where she was to teach a class of small ones, a matter of amazing importance and ecstasy. ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Berton, Boieldieu, and Kreutzer, in honor of the christening of the Duke of Bordeaux. Of the part written by Cherubini he speaks in the warmest praise, and says quizzically of the composer: "His squeaky sharp little voice was sometimes heard in the midst of his conducting, and interrupted my state of ecstasy caused ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... tell how long a time I lay, Dreaming the ecstasy of joys Elysian, Within my marble shrine. It fled away— The rapture of that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Speechless for the moment, but not blinded, Plutarch withdrew his optics from the imperious dame, and took an instantaneous brain-picture of her companion, a light-footed, quick-glancing girl about eighteen years of age, whose arrival put little Harman into an ecstasy, and gave manifest delight to the servants. Her blithe manner and cheerful voice won Byle's complete approbation, and led him to describe her as one who "'peared not to know there was a valley of the shadder of ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... Press, it indulged in an ecstasy of enthusiasm over the perpetration, combined with intense disgust "at the miscarriage of justice" of my having escaped without hurt or more than very temporary inconvenience. On my departure, one eloquent writer compared me to 'Macduff taking his babes and bandboxes ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... rounded flesh Beats the active ecstasy. In the sudden lifting my eyes, it is clearer, The fascination of the quick, restless Creator moving through the mesh Of men, vibrating in ecstasy through the ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... most divine inflection, "This is a great and noble undertaking, and will do much for us here." And then he rolled his orbs upon me in that majestic way of his, which, when it melts into loveliness as it sometimes does, so takes captivity captive. In short, he was quite in an ecstasy with you and your notions. [Probably drawings illustrating auxiliary verbs.] He inquired very particularly for you, and showed me all the new books he had just received from England, which he thought ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... he sits and sits thinking of her, gazing up at those lonely ancient stars; the air is still bright with her presence, sweet with her thoughts, warm with her kisses, and as he turns to the shut piano, he can still see her white hands on the keys and her girlish face raised in an ecstasy—Beata Beatrix—above the music. ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... trials can be graphically described, but happiness and the causes of happiness either cannot be or are not. A grand new branch of literature opens to my view: a drama in which people begin in a poor way and end, after getting gradually happier, in an ecstasy of enjoyment. The common novel is not the thing at all. It gives struggle followed by relief. I want each act to close on a new and triumphant happiness, which has been steadily growing all the while. This is the real antithesis of tragedy, where things get blacker and blacker and end in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... draughty as Italian rooms commonly are. He infinitely prefers to rub his blue little hands and wait till this inscrutable mystery of bad weather be overpast. But it is only the thought of what he suffers during the winter, short as it is in comparison with our own, that enables us to understand the ecstasy of his joy at the reappearance of the spring. Everybody meets everybody with greetings on the warmth and the sunshine. The mother comes down again to bask herself at every doorstep, and the little street ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... have done had he been properly helped. Besides, the world would have been free from the reproach of accepting the fruits of his bright genius while condemning the worker to a life of misery, relieved only by the beauty of his own thoughts and the ecstasy awakened in him by the harmony and ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... tower at Nettesheim—gave him a vision of the time when men would be as glad as nature, when the "snuffler of psalms" would sing for joy, when priests and Quakers would talk together kindly, when pillory and gallows should be gone. Poor Keezar! In ecstasy at that prospect he flung up his arms, and his lapstone rolled into the Merrimack. The tired mill-girls of Lowell still frequent the spot to seek some dim vision ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... knowledge or rule of life than supernatural or direct revelation. To this system belong the doctrines of Patanjali, which teach that man must emancipate himself from metempsychosis through contemplation and ecstasy to be attained by the calm of the senses, by corporeal penance, suspension of breath, and immobility of position. The followers of this school pass their lives in solitude, absorbed in this mystic contemplation. The forests, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... looking up in ecstasy a Lower Normandy peasant came up to me and told me the story of the great quarrel between Saint Michael ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... him, strengthened and exalted. He began to write sonnets in Dante's manner, striving to body forth in words the new piety which illumined his life. Whereas love had been to him of late a glorification of the senses, he now cleansed himself from what he deemed impurity and adored in mere ecstasy of the spirit. Adela soon became rather a symbol than a living woman; he identified her with the ends to which his life darkly aspired, and all but convinced himself that memory and imagination would henceforth suffice ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... shrieked Dot, removing her hands from his eyes and clapping them in ecstasy; "look at him! See where he stands before you, healthy and strong! Your own dear son! Your own ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... were unlocked, and then like a small whirlwind Pat scrambled out, rushed to Dick's feet and grovelled there in an ecstasy of joy. "Hum, considering you say this boy only stole him this morning, they've got uncommon fond of one another! Call him and see if he'll come to you." But the showman's wiles were in vain. Pat would ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... the piano and her slim, nervous hands wandered soundlessly a moment above the keys. Then a wailing minor melody grew beneath them—unsatisfied, asking, with now and then an ecstasy of joyous chords that only died again into the querying despair of the original theme. She broke off abruptly, humming ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... has been given to me, perhaps as a compensation for all I have undergone and that is still left for me to undergo, to grasp a more enduring end than that of earthly ecstasy: for I can look forward with a confident assurance to the day when we shall embrace upon the threshold of the Infinite. Do not call this foolish imagination, or call it imagination, if you will—for what is imagination? Is it ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... beside her. She put her hand upon his hair and caressed it with a clinging touch that sent a thrill through him. Like this they remained for long minutes, and the communion was to him the sweetest he had ever known. Strange that this complete ecstasy should come to him at the very moment when he was shocked to the depths of his being by the disclosure of the vile crime ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... mute narration they were about to make to themselves of the murder, caused them keen and intolerable apprehension. The strain on their nerves threatened an attack, they might cry out, perhaps fight. Laurent, to drive away his recollections, violently tore himself from the ecstasy of horror that enthralled him in the gaze of Therese. He took a few strides in the room; he removed his boots and put on slippers; then, returning to his former place, he sat down at the chimney corner, and tried to talk on matters ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... is a difference, and it is just what I suggested. The Eastern mysticism is an ecstasy of unity; the Christian mysticism is an ecstasy of creation, that is of separation and mutual surprise. The latter says, like St. Francis, "My brother fire and my sister water"; the former says, "Myself fire and myself ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... him majestic and impassive, clothed in robes of white, with a golden coronet around his brows, listening to the music of the spheres, or seeking relaxation in the more humble hymns of Homer, Hesiod, and Thales; lost in the contemplation of Nature, or rapt in ecstasy in his meditations on God; manifesting his descent from Apollo or Hermes by the working of miracles, predicting future events, conversing with genii in the solitude of a dark cavern, and even surpassing ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... neglected fields of humanity which he tilled for the Common Master, we judge him to be one of the chief and most serviceable figures of the Victorian age; and well deserving from his own followers the ecstasy of grief and veneration which is being manifested, and from contemporary notice the tribute of a hearty recognition of pious and noble objects zealously pursued, and love of God and of humanity made the passion and the purpose of ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... There was ecstasy so supreme in the bird's note that it had become calm again, like great heat that affects the senses, as with frost, or a flooded river that runs swift and smooth ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... lady who could not bear to be told of deaths. 'Psha! Pshaw!' she would exclaim. 'Bring me no tales of funerals! Talk of births and of those who are likely to be blest with them! These are the joys which gladden old hearts and fill youthful ones with ecstasy! It is our own reproduction in children which makes us quit the world happy and contented; because then we only retire to make room for another race, bringing with them all those faculties which are in us decayed; and capable, which we ourselves have ceased to be, of taking our parts ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... at least," said Robin, jumping in ecstasy, but yet speaking in a subdued voice. "I would know the neigh of that black steed amid a thousand; its tone is like that of a trumpet, mightiest among its kind. I feel as if the weight of a hundred stone was off ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... departure from routine, and opened a morose machine-gun fire which skimmed the top of the parapet and covered Second-Lieut. St. John with earth from shattered sandbags. He went on firing Verey lights in a sort of bland ecstasy till his supply ran out, when he went to his Company Commander's dug-out for more. He filled his pockets with fresh ammunition, went back to his post, and began firing again. The first light was mauve. He almost clapped ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... Discomfort could hardly be greater, For home-staying fogies of mollyish mood, But think of the joy of the Skater! Gr-r-r-r-! Nose-nipped antiquity squirms in the street, When the North-Easter sounds its fierce slogan; But oh, the warm flush and the ecstasy fleet Of the fellow who rides a toboggan! FISH SMART's on the job in the ice-covered fens, And at Hampstead and Highgate they're "sleighing." There is plenty of stuff for pictorial pens, And boyhood at ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... between the sobs of cares! O thought within all thought that is; Trance between laughters unawares! Thou art the form of melodies, And thou the ecstasy ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... text "Sima'a," lit. hearing, applied idiomatically to the ecstasy of Darwayshes when listening to ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... enough, and, as the Christmas bells came chiming through the frosty air, we turned out bags of gold, piles of silver and priceless jewels warranted to redeem Dacrepool Grange twice over if necessary, and sending Jack into a very ecstasy of joy. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... and spread it out so that every individual pebble became visible. These would be swept off the board and the former process repeated. But before I got half-way through the heap my heart leaped to my throat, and I almost swooned with ecstasy there in the middle of the spread-out gravel glittered a diamond. It was very small, not much more than half a carat in weight, still, it was most indubitably ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... to love again—all that was lost to me, For I had felt love's fear and pain, as well as ecstasy; I closed my heart, and locked the door, and tossed ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... enough of bitter-sweet despair for the last chords of that ineffable, passionate strain—the swoon of sorrow ending that brief, palpitating ecstasy, the proper, dirge-like close to that triumphant hymn of love and youth and beauty. All the frantic rushing and tortured writhing and uproar of noisy anguish of the usual stage ending seemed utter desecration to me; but Garrick was an actor, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... suddenly perceiving the little animal which was clinging close to their brother, in alarm at the tumult of voices, shouted in ecstasy: ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... rapid reel and strathspey might have made Neil Gow himself envious. So beautiful and inspiriting were they, that Mr Bain and our host, who were both genuine Highlanders, jumped simultaneously from their seats, in an ecstasy of enthusiasm, and danced to the lively music till the very walls shook; much to the amusement of the two ladies, who, having been both born in Canada, could not so well appreciate the music. Indeed, the musician himself looked a little astonished, being quite ignorant of the endearing recollections ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... pistol the rope parted, the great globe bounded and shot up into the air; a tumult of harsh shouts arose; the crazed horses backed, plunged, and scattered, some falling, some bolting into the undergrowth, some rearing and swaying in an ecstasy of terror. ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... easy to believe, while painting on the very spot where St. Francis was in ecstasy, led a life much to his liking. He dwelt within the monastery, and his pure mind, open only to the good, was blind to the dissolute ways of monks who became a scandal to the district. When the fresco ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... business in a modern nation, then there is no other choice except anarchy, or rather an insane atomism. Not merely every party, but every household and, in last resort, every individual will end as a Provisional Government. Separatism of this type is a very ecstasy of nonsense, and none of my readers will think so cheaply of his own intelligence as to stay to discuss it. It is in other terms that we must ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... of supernatural fervor? Is there, and can there be, a perpetuity in mortal charms without the recognition or the supposition of a moral beauty connected with them, which alone is pure and imperishable, and which alone creates the sacred ecstasy that revels in the enjoyment of what is divine, or what is supposed to be divine, not in man, but in the conceptions of man,—the ever-blazing glories of goodness or of truth which the excited soul doth see ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... fanciful fruits and foliage, and Cupids, and creatures of a now extinct species. The rainbow had been the painter's palette; genius his brush; fancy-gone-mad his attendant; the total temporary stagnation of redskin faculties his object, and ecstasy his general state of mind, when he executed this magnificent chef d'oeuvre in the centre of the ceiling of the reception hall at the ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... am! Take me—ah, take me I don't care where as long as it is with you!" cried the Girl in an ecstasy of delight. ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... other was a Walloon, the best shot among six hundred foreigners of various nations, all of whom, though with little encouragement, joined in the national sport on these pleasant spring afternoons. The first contest threw out the Walloon, at which there were cries of ecstasy; now the trial was between Barlow and Stephen, and in this final effort, the distance of the pole to which the popinjay was fastened was so much increased that strength of arm told as much as accuracy of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sat meditatively in his skiff, having done his best to give the liner a good send-off by paddling round her in circles, the pleading face of a twenty-dollar bill peered up at him. Mr. Swenson was not the man to resist the appeal. He uttered a sharp bark of ecstasy, pressed his Derby hat firmly upon his brow and dived in. A moment later he had risen to the surface and was gathering up money ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... been at Plymouth? If you have, your eye must have dwelt with ecstasy upon the beautiful property of the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe: if you have not been at Plymouth, the sooner that you go there, the better. At Mount Edgcumbe you will behold the finest timber in existence, towering up to the summits of the hills, and feathering ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd, Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre: ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... to waist-cloth with writhing patterns of red and blue devils, holds the eye first. It is a wicked back. Beyond it is the flicker of a Malay kris. A blue, red, and yellow macaw chained to a stanchion spreads his wings against the sun in an ecstasy of terror. Half-a-dozen red-gold pines and bananas have been knocked down from their ripening-places, and are lying between the feet of the fighters. One pine has rolled against the long brown fur of a muzzled bear. His owner, a bushy-bearded Hindu, kneels over the animal, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... guide future thought and action, the plea that at first seemed so powerful is likely to be forgotten. The preacher whose sermons are all persuasion may, for a time, have many converts, but it will take something besides emotional ecstasy to keep them ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... She was crazy with delight over her little friend's good fortune, so she took several steps forward and cried in an ecstasy, 'O Brownie, ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... high pulse of twenty-one, all combined to stimulate his sense of existence, which, as he looked around him at the beautiful objects and listened to the delicious sounds, seemed to him a dispensation of almost supernatural ecstasy. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... terrible story in an ecstasy of alternating joy and fury, according to the nature of the episode related. It was like living again the glorious days of the moonlighters and the rackrenters in dear old Ireland. The tale came ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... MRS. ROBERTS, in an ecstasy of satisfaction: 'Willis! Oh, you've come in time to see him just as he is. Look at him, Willis!' In the excess of her emotion she twitches her husband about, and with his arm fast in her clutch, presents him in the disadvantageous effect of having ...
— The Garotters • William D. Howells
... of the eyes that had opened to her, listened anxiously. An ecstasy drifted like a cloud over her senses. He had touched her. His hands had passed over her head as she had dreamed they might. His eyes were smiling with intimacy at her face. But he had warned her never to speak. She must not spoil it by speaking. ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... were living intensely. John was alive. Mary Hutchinson was at Sockburn. Coleridge was still Coleridge, not the bemused and futile mystic he was to become. As for Dorothy, she lives a thing enskied, floating from ecstasy to ecstasy. It is the third of March, and William is to go to London. "Before we had quite finished breakfast Calvert's man brought the horses for Wm. We had a deal to do, pens to make, poems to be put in order for writing, to settle for the press, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... the old man's ecstasy. It was the one occasion when he opened his heart to me; and that flash of joy, swift though it was, will never be effaced ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... book in cover of yellow paper, which, for the sum of one penny, purported to give an exhaustive description of 'Charms, Spells, and Incantations;' on the back was the picture of a much-bejewelled Moorish maiden, with eyes thrown up in prophetic ecstasy; above ran the legend, 'Wonderfully mysterious and peculiar.' The work included, moreover, 'a splendid selection of the best ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... says the legend, the ghosts of the many long-dead kingdoms buried in oblivion and the relentless sands; when the whistling of the wind is as the shouting of men and the thunder of your horse's hoofs as the rolling of many drums, calling you through the power of past centuries and the ecstasy of the solitude in your heart, out to the mystery of ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... this solitary tree With clover, whose round plat, reserved a-field, In cool green radius twice my length may be — Scanting the corn thy furrows else might yield, To pleasure August, bees, fair thoughts, and me, That here come oft together — daily I, Stretched prone in summer's mortal ecstasy, Do stir with thanks to thee, as stirs this morn With waving of ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... be going to take us back to the old plantation, where Daddy Bob used to sing so. Then I shall see mother-how I do want to see her!" she exclaims, her little heart bounding with ecstasy. Three years or more have passed since she prattled ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... suffered for love of his. He brought in everlasting righteousness, That he might cover all our nakedness; He wept and wash'd his face with brinish tears That we might saved be from hellish fears; Blood was his sweat, too, in his agony, That we might live in joyful ecstasy; He apprehended was and led away, That grace to us-ward never might decay. With swords, and bills, and outrage in the night, That to the peace of heav'n we might have right. Condemned he was between two thieves to die, That we might ever in his bosom lie; Scourged with whips ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... fugitive, when will it fly with me? Whenever it does,—and something assures me that one day it will,—then the new heavens and new earth! Meanwhile the intimation of it puts to the lip some unseen cup, out of which, in a soft ecstasy of pain that is better than pleasure, I quaff peace, peace. It is not always nor often that one is open to this supreme charm; but it comes at times, and then to hope all and believe all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... blind—she felt Gwynplaine above her; Gwynplaine never cold, never absent, never obscured; Gwynplaine sympathetic, helpful, and sweet-tempered. Dea quivered with certainty and gratitude, her anxiety changed into ecstasy, and with her shadowy eyes she contemplated on the zenith from the depth of her abyss the rich light of his goodness. In the ideal, kindness is the sun; and ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... slaughter these disciples of the Lamb of God passed to those of devotion. Bareheaded and barefooted, clad in a robe of pure white linen, in an ecstasy of joy and thankfulness mingled with profound contrition, Godfrey entered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and knelt at the tomb of his Lord. With groans and tears his followers came, each in his turn, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... stormy face in an ecstasy of delight. Here was a creature different from anyone she had ever known; almost her own age, too, full of the fire and spirit and daring which she longed to possess and knew she did not; beautifully straight ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... her stoop flushed and sparkling from above him; the sun caught her shining hair; a loose white smock revealed so much of her neck as to picture him the snowy rest. Snow and rosebuds—O ye little gods! As he stood in ecstasy she saw him at the end of the lane, and blushing drew back with a finger in her mouth, to thrill and giggle at ease. She saw a great gentleman stare; he saw a rosy goddess stoop and laugh, then blush and hide. Vitas hinnuleo me similis, Chloe! Away he went, his heart ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... cutlet and a pint of Moselle in the plain downright fashion of a man so democratic that he is practically a revolutionary socialist, and doesn't mind saying so; and the young rector of St. Asaph's was sitting opposite to him in a religious ecstasy over a salmi ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... ecstasy: she had never heard anything so delightful in her life, and forgetting that both of us were but wretched individuals—she a slave, I the most destitute of beings—we did and felt as if all that surrounded us was our own, ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... Olympus we never brightened, for we never flagged; we never waited for a pang to subside, nor felt it throbbing less and less poignantly, nor, as if we were watching an enemy from a distance, hugged ourselves in a breathless ecstasy as it faded altogether; this exquisite experience was unknown to us, for we never ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... was beyond the dream of poet. I trembled in an ecstasy of pain. From the next cell there came to us softly the voice of a poor condemned Appin Stewart. He was crooning that most tender and heart-breaking of all strains. Like the pibroch's mournful sough he wailed it out, the song that cuts deep to a Scotchman's ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... revery, which soothes and lulls, one gazes with ecstasy on the fanciful details of the sculptures which vanish in the groined roof above, and on the quaint pipes of the organ with its hundred voices. The beliefs of childhood piously inculcated in your heart suddenly reawaken; a vague perfume of incense again penetrates the air. The stone pillars ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... captivity. BLONDEL, a favourite Minstrel of King Richard, as the story relates, faithfully seeking his Royal master, went singing it outside the gloomy walls of many foreign fortresses and prisons; until at last he heard it echoed from within a dungeon, and knew the voice, and cried out in ecstasy, 'O Richard, O my King!' You may believe it, if you like; it would be easy to believe worse things. Richard was himself a Minstrel and a Poet. If he had not been a Prince too, he might have been a better man perhaps, and might ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... great "trial" scene, which was coming. In that scene the wonderful variety of his acting completed his triumph. Trembling with excitement, he resumed his half-dried clothes, and, glad to escape, rushed home. He was in too great a state of ecstasy at first to speak, but his face told his wife that he had realized his dream—that he had appeared on the stage of Drury Lane, and that his great powers had been instantly acknowledged. With not a shadow of doubt as to his future, ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... voice of all nameless dreads. The nervous candle-flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose to a shriek, and the little flame jumped in a panic, and nearly left its white column. Out of the corners of the room swarmed the released shadows. Black spectres danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love fresh air, but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate body of my little friend the candle-flame, the comrade who ventures with me into the solitudes beyond midnight. I shut ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... indistinct, Vague, meaningless—seemed to resolve themselves Into a language I could understand; I felt my frame pervaded with a glow That seemed to thaw my marble into flesh; Its cold hard substance throbbed with active life, My limbs grew supple, and I moved—I lived! Lived in the ecstasy of new born life; Lived in the love of him that fashioned me; Lived in a thousand tangled thoughts of hope, Love, gratitude, thoughts that resolved themselves Into one ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... soul! not only passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks, and secret ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs! ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... this frenzy of emotion, his own excitement was making him shake from head to foot like a leaf, and that tears were streaming down his cheeks. The swaying crowd hid Marco from him, and he began to fight his way towards him because his excitement increased with fear. The ecstasy-frenzied crowd of men seemed for the moment to have almost ceased to be sane. Marco was only a boy. They did not know how fiercely they were pressing upon him and ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... at love devilry, Or, disdaining his divine gift and art, Like an inimitable poet Who captivates the world's heart And don't know it. Hear him lilt! See him tilt! Then suddenly he stops, Peers about, flirts, hops, As if looking where he might gather up The wasted ecstasy just spilt From the quivering cup Of his bliss overrun. Then, as in mockery of all The tuneful spells that e'er did fall From vocal pipe, or evermore shall rise, He snarls, and ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... last degree, however strictly the police have enforced it; and we know that only the man that forged with clenched teeth after Atalanta, tenderly hungry for all her uncaptured whiteness, brutally driving the pace till her heart burst in her side if need be, tasted the supremest ecstasy of the fighting that lifts us that one tantalising step above the savage—the fight for joy. I am convinced that it is after some one of those red glimpses that a certain proportion of us every year of the world's life throws his chest weights ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... to the voluntary race again; The very kine that gambol at high noon, The total herd receiving first from one That leads the dance a summons to be gay, Though wild their strange vagaries, and uncouth Their efforts, yet resolved with one consent To give such act and utterance as they may To ecstasy too big to be suppressed— These and a thousand images of bliss, With which kind Nature graces every scene, Where cruel man defeats not her design, Impart to the benevolent, who wish All that are capable of pleasure pleased, A far superior happiness to theirs, The comfort of ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... the place was the rear room of a saloon in that part of Chicago known as "back of the yards." This information is definite and suited to the matter of fact; but how pitifully inadequate it would have seemed to one who understood that it was also the supreme hour of ecstasy in the life of one of God's gentlest creatures, the scene of the wedding feast and the joy-transfiguration of ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... ingenious, and sailors so expert! He then told me of the arrangements he would make for her reception, of the new habitation he would build for her, of the pleasures and surprises which each day should bring along with it when she was his wife? His wife! That hope was ecstasy. 'At least, my dear father,' said he, 'you shall then do nothing more than you please. Virginia being rich, we shall have a number of negroes, who will labour for you. You shall always live with us, and have no other care than to amuse and rejoice yourself:' and, his heart throbbing with delight, ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... England; she could not distinguish. Yet she stood beside Mr. Carleton with all her usual quiet dignity, though her eye did not leave the ground, and her words were in no higher key than was necessary, and though she could hardly bear the unchanged easy tone of his. The birds were in a perfect ecstasy all about them; the soft breeze came through the trees, gently waving the branches and stirring the spray wreaths of the roses, the very fluttering of summer's drapery; some roses looked in at the lattice, ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... opened and Nancy came in. At the sight of Pitcairn she stopped on her way toward me, and her black brows came together in an ecstasy of rage. Putting her little body directly in front of him she looked him full ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... faith in his brother and his passion for dreams, the mad arrogance of the declaration was lost. The ecstasy with which Ham spoke tinged the promise with a fire of conviction—so that ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... country ecstasy, this season at once stimulating and enervating, tortured me. It disturbed my bibliophilist labors, and gave a twang of musty nausea even to the sweet scent of old binding-leather. I was as a man caught in the pangs of removing, unattached to either home; and I bent from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... guests were strolling about here. Priscilla's eyes sparkled at the sight of the lovely flowers. She forgot herself and made eager exclamations of ecstasy. Helen, who up to now had thought her a dull sort of girl, began to take an interest ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... was summed in one expression - tenderness. In her view of the universe, which was all lighted up with a glow out of the doors of hell, good people must walk there in a kind of ecstasy of tenderness. The beasts and plants had no souls; they were here but for a day, and let their day pass gently! And as for the immortal men, on what black, downward path were many of them wending, and to what a horror of an immortality! "Are not two sparrows," ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whispered, in a fit of ecstasy, for my beautiful unknown in rising had recognized me, and given me another thrilling ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the sweetness of their fate, nor to any without courage and wisdom; for this world in itself is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, and lasting happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only from within. Now Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gone. As the car, gathering speed, hummed down the street. Sally was at the telephone listening to the sleepy voice of Ginger Kemp, which, as he became aware who it was that had woken him from his rest and what she had to say to him, magically lost its sleepiness and took on a note of riotous ecstasy. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... and shy, humiliated expression: he had heard the coarse jokes that had been thrown at the boy, jokes which were met with silence and a faint shuddering tremor. During certain revolutionary utterances he had seen the boy's soft brown eyes light up with the chimerical ecstasy of the future happiness,—a happiness which, even if he were ever to realize it, would make but small difference in his stunted life. At such moments his expression would illuminate his ugly face in such a way as to make its ugliness forgotten. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... seemed that this non-resistance was unconditional surrender and through him in a current of fluid fire, ran the fierce ecstasy of victory. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... abhorrent to Shelley, both because poetry ought not to do what can be done better by prose, and also because, for him, the pleasure and the lesson were indistinguishably one. The poet is to improve us, not by insinuating a moral, but by communicating to others something of that ecstasy with which he himself burns in contemplating eternal ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... allowed his cigar to go out. He lighted it again and turned to his neighbour with an apology, as the voice ceased and then seemed to revive with a last sob of ecstasy. ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... Cecil, and other ladies of the time were mentioned, and then came the counting up of their eight living representatives,—the two Misses Faulkner, Caroline, yes, and Clara herself, who started and danced with ecstasy, then glanced entreatingly at her mother, who looked doubtful; Marian, two cousins of the Faulkners, who were always ready for anything, and a Miss Mordaunt, were reckoned up, and their dresses quickly discussed; but all the time Marian said not a word. She was thinking of the waste of ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Middle Ages, suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate priests who, whether under the pressure of fear of Chaumette, or in a very superfluity of folly and ecstasy of degradation, hastened to proclaim the charlatanry of their past lives, as they filed before the Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... be bewildered by the ecstasy of his joy. He grasped the hand of Augustus, who was so pleased that he forgot to use any high-flown speech. The gentleman who had come in the boat with Bessie's father was introduced to the party as the ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic |
