"Ecstatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and she turned back; but then returned and threw a handkerchief over the dead man's face, which while they spoke had assumed that quiet, ecstatic expression of joy which often is observed to overspread the faces of those who die of gunshot wounds, however fierce the passion in which the spirits took their flight. With this strange, grand, awful joy did the dead man gaze upward into the very eyes and hearts, as it ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Cricket, arrived to spend a long time with the dingy Somers family, much to their enjoyment. After various adventures, their ecstatic friend, the lively Hilda Mason, came to spend a few days. To entertain her, one day, they took her out in a wizened boat to sail over the garrulous bay. They dragged their silent auntie" [a howl] "with them, promising ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... material ecstasy, and emotions. If spiritual sense always guided men at such times, there would grow out of those ecstatic moments a higher experience and a better life, with more devout self-abnegation, and purity. A self-satisfied ventilation of fervent sentiments never makes a Christian. God is not influenced by man. The "divine ear" ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is not a rare thing to see spectators go into raptures on these occasions, for I have seen few places where nature and art so harmonize and unite in producing scenes of enchanting beauty and creating feelings of ecstatic delight, as here on Champs Elysees. The atmosphere of Paris, too, is preeminently soft and balmy, and the temperature so even that ladies may sit in the most brilliant attire all evening in the open air under the trees of this pleasure-garden without the least danger of ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... rebuff the hopeful youth grinned a grin something like the triumph of a fool glorying in his shame; then thrusting his hand into his bosom, was for a few moments lost in heavenly bliss, enjoying that most ecstatic of enjoyments, which King Jamie, of clawing memory, says, ought always to be reserved for kings—scratching; then rolled himself down again, to have a little more folding of the arms, ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... that she sees a round white object moving upward in the room. But the night being gloomy, her taper having gone out, she must have been standing in a dense darkness. How then could she see this object? Her evidence, it was argued, must be designedly false, or else (as she was in an ecstatic condition) the result of an excited fancy. But I have stated that such persons, nervous, neurotic even as they may be, are not fanciful. I therefore accept her evidence as true. And now, mark the ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... Eighth— How long I should have continued I know not. In vain did the Sphere, in his voice of thunder, reiterate his command of silence, and threaten me with the direst penalties if I persisted. Nothing could stem the flood of my ecstatic aspirations. Perhaps I was to blame; but indeed I was intoxicated with the recent draughts of Truth to which he himself had introduced me. However, the end was not long in coming. My words were cut short by a crash outside, and a simultaneous ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... many are the volumes which proceed upon the literalness of the Bible descriptions. I suppose there are phases of faith which can not reach beyond literalness, and hence do not rightly interpret the splendid imagery of St. John. Such we must leave to the blessed surprise and ecstatic awakening of Paradise. ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... was probably completed about 1416, in Donatello's thirtieth year. Vasari was enthusiastic in its praise. Bocchi wrote a whole book about it,[34] in which we might expect to find valuable information; but the interest of this ecstatic eulogy is limited. Bocchi gives no dates, facts or authorities; nothing to which modern students can turn for accurate or specific knowledge of Donatello. Cinelli says the St. George was held equal to the rarest sculpture of Rome,[35] and well it might be. The St. ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... folded her arms again, turned half-aside, and, lifting her eyes to the ceiling, simply remarked, with an ecstatic smile:— ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... a man who had been studying birds in the Park. Berkeley was written all over him. A thin, pure type. He was dressed in field glasses and a bag full of green weeds and stout walking boots. There was an ecstatic glint in his eye which meant that he had discovered a long-billed, yellow-tailed Peruvian fly-catcher, "very rare in ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... having fallen into his hands, he applied to a Baptist missionary for instruction. How much he learned may be inferred from the fact that he gave his followers a new form of baptism, requiring them to wash the bosom as a sign for cleansing the heart. He had ecstatic visions, and preached a crusade against idolatry and the Manchus. The ease with which the Manchus had been beaten by the British in 1842 had revealed their weakness, and the new faith supplied the rebels ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... Palace is small but very select. The pictures are hung with judgment, and well taken care of. The Magdalen, which is considered one of Guido's masterpieces, charmed me most: the countenance is heavenly; though full of ecstatic and devout contemplation, there is in it a touch of melancholy, "all sorrow's softness charmed from its despair," which is quite exquisite: and the attitude, and particularly the turn of the arm, are perfectly graceful: but why those odious turnips and carrots in the foreground? They certainly ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... including a Prayer, among his writings; and there can be little doubt, in spite of Condorcet's incredible account of the circumstances of its composition, that it is the expression of what was at the time a sincere feeling.[17] It is, however, rather the straining and ecstatic rhapsody of one who ardently seeks faith, than the calm and devout assurance of him who already possesses it. Vauvenargues was religious by temperament, but he could not entirely resist the intellectual influences of the period. The one fact ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... hovered near. He was not sad, nor was he joyous. There was a deep quiet reigning such as he had never before experienced. He seemed to be moving into a new faith; a serenity of softest light lingered around his spirit—a mild delight into which one would sink until it blossomed into ecstatic joy. ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... was doing well and seemed to be in a fair way of ultimate recovery, but fell a victim to the quackeries of medical experiment. The galvanic battery was applied, and he suddenly expired in one of those ecstatic paroxysms which, occasionally, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... shade of a banyan tree, fresh cigars and abandoned stumps surrounding him like the little hills that climb the mountain, he nodded and fell asleep, still puffing lustily at a panatella, sweet and black. Now the poet's beard was long and his sleep deep, and as the weed grew shorter with each ecstatic puff, the little brand of fire drew closer and closer to the beautiful hairy mantle that fell from the poet's chin. That day the Island was wrapped in a light gauze of blue mist, an exotic smoke that was a blessing ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... leapt from his chair of state, he hurried to Yolande in her gallery, took her by the hand, and in another moment Ferry had sprung from his horse, and on the steps knight and lady, in their youthful glory and grace, stood hand in hand, all blushes and bliss, amid the ecstatic applause of the multitude, while the Dauphiness shed tears of joy. Thus brilliantly ended the first tournament witnessed by the Scottish princesses. Eleanor had been most interested on the whole in Duke Sigismund, and had exulted in his successes, and been sorry to see him defeated, but ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I must give you up to Mrs. O'Connor now," he goes on, presently, when an ecstatic thought or two has had time to come and go. "But, before going, ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... lovely! What fun!" they cried, running down to join Morgan and be received by Curly Q. with ecstatic barks. ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... black man, with the pride of possessed eternity, with the feeling of might. Snatch him up in his arms and pitch him right into the middle of salvation... The black soul—blacker—body—rot—Devil. No! Talk-strength—Samson.... There was a great din as of cymbals in his ears; he flashed through an ecstatic jumble of shining faces, lilies, prayer-books, unearthly joy, white skirts, gold harps, black coats, wings. He saw flowing garments, clean shaved faces, a sea of light—a lake of pitch. There were sweet scent, a smell of sulphur—red ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... you have borne it admirably. I see you will make an apt scholar; now you will have nothing but the most ecstatic raptures from the action of two pricks at once. Now, Charles, it is for you to work, and for your most charming sister to continue only the exquisite pressures she is already at this moment so rapturously ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... saw the bitter disappointment a quiet wedding would be to the prospective groom, she had not the heart to insist. For years Jimmie had buoyed up his sorely-tried courage by the ecstatic picture of himself and Kirsty dancing on their wedding night, he the envy of all the MacDonald boys, she the pattern for all the girls; and though neither he nor his bride were any longer young, he still cherished his youthful dream. And then Long Lauchie's girls came over ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... an ecstatic sigh. Then a thought crossed his mind. It was a thought which frequently ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... so I would appeal for an explanation of something. Generally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear Ingo strive to make the meaning plain. What a puckering of his bright boyish forehead, what a grave determination to elucidate the fable! What a mingling of ecstatic pride in having a grown man as pupil, with deference due to an elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest transports of glee never forgot his manners! I would make some purposely ludicrous shot at the sense, and he would double up with innocent ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... into itself all the true poetry of his life as regarded the past, and gave him new aspirations and hopes as regarded the future. To Lycidas the remembrance of his poetical triumph in the Olympic arena, the plaudits which had then filled his soul with ecstatic delight, was little more than to a man is the recollection of the toys which amused his childhood. The Greek had been brought face to face with life's grand realities, and what had strongly excited his ambition once, appeared ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... father should come home early from work and make faces at mother from the road. Mother, too, was willing to join in the fun, for she knelt down among the wet flowers, and as her head drooped lower and lower it looked, for one ecstatic moment, as though she were going to turn head over heels. But she lay quite still on the ground, and father came half-way through the gate, and then turned and ran off down the hill towards the station. Jack stood in the window, clapping his hands and laughing; it was ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... were poorer than the cure of Maigre, who formed a syndicate to sell at a scutcheon a gross such souls as were too insignificant to sell singly. A man can always find a chance for doing nothing as amply and with as ecstatic a satisfaction as the world allows, and so to me (whether it was there before I cannot tell, and if it came miraculously, so much the more amusing) appeared this thicket. It was to the left of the road; a stream ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... always counted their chief, though he was born near Tavistock. 'Could my pen as ably describe his worth as my heart prompteth to it, I would make this day-star appear at noon-day as doth the full moon at midnight,' is Risdon's ecstatic exclamation. ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... and goblin changes ring As left him doubtful whence the murmurs came, Now here, now there, as they were winged things— Such trick plays Echo upon hapless wight Chance-caught in lonely places where she dwells, Anon a laugh rang out, melodious, Like the merle's note when its ecstatic heart Is packed with summer-time; then all was still— So still the soul of silence seemed to grieve The loss of that sweet laughter. In his tracks The man stopped short, and listened. As he leaned And craned his neck, and peered into the ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... philosophic mystic assumes the role of a docile child. He feels that all vital truth transcends his powers of discovery. He looks to the Infinite and Eternal Mind to reveal it to him through the prophets of old, or in moments of ecstatic communion with the Divine Intelligence. To the mystic all that concerns our deeper needs transcends logic and defies analysis. In his estimate the human reason is a feeble rushlight which can at best cast a flickering and uncertain ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... hymn of glory Earthly sounds cannot compare; Oh! 'twas grand! it breath'd of heaven, As the angels sung it there. Ravished by the strains ecstatic, Raptured by the vision grand, Gazed the pilgrim on the altar, ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... the Benedictus from the first word in the Latin version. It is an ecstatic expression of gratitude to God for his boundless goodness. The poem possibly may be divided into five stanzas of four lines each; but there is a definite pause after the third of these stanzas when the thought turns from the work of Christ to ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... also, like Perugino, could detach his figures from the background, and send the line of hills receding back to the horizon. Signorelli owes to him, besides, certain superficial characteristics, such as the fluttering scarfs and ribbon-like draperies, and the upturned face with ecstatic eyes which belongs to the Umbrian painter as much as the ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... is not due to the mere fact that his emotion is painful. Joyous emotions about the self also stop the association of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless and irresponsive and one-idea'd as a melancholiac. And, without going as far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask young people returning from a party or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what it was. "Oh, it was fine! it was fine! it was fine!" is all the information you are likely to ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... on me, and lifted her hands with a gesture of ecstatic gratitude. A lovely, angelic brightness flowed like light from heaven over her face. For one moment she stood enraptured. The next she clasped me passionately to her bosom, and whispered in my ear: "I am Mary Dermody! I made ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... quiet way. Yes, I well may like him! And I am sure he likes me!' said another whisper of the heart, which, veiled as was the lady in the mirror, made Phoebe put both hands over her face, in a shamefaced ecstatic consciousness. 'Nay—I was the first lady he had seen, the only person to speak to. No, no; I know it was not that—I feel it was not! Why, otherwise, did he seem so sorry I was not poor? Oh! how nice it would be if ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shock of her ecstatic surprise she was helpless to resist him longer, and he held her close and passionately, his lips on her hair, her face crushed against his heart. She could hear it beating, feel it throb under her cheek. His wife? Then he ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... ecstatic trial: He, with viny crown advancing, First to the lively pipe his hand addrest: But soon he saw the brisk awakening viol Whose sweet entrancing voice he loved the best: They would have thought who heard ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... a singing whisper, "I am so glad——" A great sheet of lightning unrolled across the Tigmore hills and held steadily magnificent for a moment, revealing everything to everybody, so it seemed to Sally Madeira. She crept into bed shaking, ecstatic, afraid. ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... place, had not Berenger been here, there, and everywhere, directing, commanding, exhorting, cheering, encouraging, exciting enthusiasm by word and example, winning proud admiration by feats of valour and dexterity sprung of the ecstatic inspiration of new-found bliss, and watching, as the conscious defender of his own most beloved, without a moment's respite, till twilight stillness sank on the enemy, and old Falconnet came to relieve him, thanking him for ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... appellation of love. Well, at twenty-nine I saw Valentine; for two years I have loved her, for two years I have seen written in her heart, as in a book, all the virtues of a daughter and wife. Count, to possess Valentine would have been a happiness too infinite, too ecstatic, too complete, too divine for this world, since it has been denied me; but without ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... tall sunflowers, the myriad voices of gleeful bobolinks, the chirp and gurgle of red-winged blackbirds swaying on the willows, the meadow-larks piping from grassy bogs, the peep of the prairie chick and the wailing call of plover on the flowery green slopes of the uplands made it all an ecstatic world to me. It was a wide world with a big, big sky which gave alluring hint of the still more ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... phrases still more strange and barbaric. When she caught the amused glances of Anthony and Gloria she acknowledged them only with a faint smile and a half-closing of her eyes, to indicate that the music entering into her soul had put her into an ecstatic and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... before her, with the ecstatic smile of madness. Oh! I was so frightened that even now my mind wanders ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... body was burned, and milks her breasts into the air. This is accompanied by plaintive mourning and weeping and piteous calling upon her little one to return, and sometimes she sings a hoarse and melancholy chant, and dances with a wild, ecstatic swaying ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... is a poet—and a highly-gifted one too. He sings beautiful songs of his own invention to the lyre; his ecstatic and versatile mind works him up into any frame of feeling; but his soul is perverted; it is soaked in wickedness as a sponge drinks up water. He is a vessel full of beautiful gifts, but he has forfeited all that was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... human animals, and of the women who follow them, produce a wonderful nervous effect upon the listening multitudes. All feel that they are about to enter into the ecstatic spiritual condition of departed souls, and are to be joined by the shades of the dead heroes and warriors of tradition ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... consequence, and his welcome was necessarily brief. The arriving guest was not to be considered at all with the departed dog. The men told Van Bibber, in confidence, that the general relief among the guests was something ecstatic, but this was marred later by the gloom of Miss Arnett and her inability to think of anything else but the finding of the lost collie. Things became so feverish that for the sake of rest and peace the house-party ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... if some day on the heavenly stair A wild ecstatic moment we should stand, And I, all hungry for your eyes and hair, Should meet instead your great accusing gaze, And hear, instead of welcome into heaven: 'Ah! hadst thou but been true! but manfully Borne the high pangs that all high souls must bear, Nor fled to low nepenthes for your pain! Hadst ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... cried, in a glow of ecstatic feeling. "I desire it so. I wish you to be my master. Your service will be sweet; your savage strength ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... you can tower over him. Don't sit down, or bend, or anything; just stand with your head up, and glance carelessly at him under your lashes as if nobody was there! Then it will gradually dawn upon him that you know everything, and he'll simply go through the floor." They take some ecstatic turns about the room, Miss Ramsey waltzing as gentleman. She abruptly ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... and the gods as I thought of it. What brought him out of those great deserts where his youth was spent, where his soul grew vast knowing only of two changes, the blaze of day and night the purifier, blue, mysterious, ecstatic with starry being? Were not these enough for him? Could the fire of the altar inspire more? Could he be initiated deeper in the chambers of the temple than in those great and lonely places where God and man are alone together? This was my doing; resting in his tent when ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... theme. Fed by the world he can help to mould it, and his insight is a kind of wisdom, preparing him as science might for using the world well and making it more fruitful. He can then be happy, not merely in the sense of having now and then an ecstatic moment, but happy in having light and resource enough within him to cope steadily with real things and to leave upon them the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... fainting pink and fallen to the ground, and the laburnum was weeping golden tears which would soon drop to the pavements and blacken there; the red and white hawthorns were all out, and Henrietta's daily walks had been punctuated by ecstatic halts when she stood under a canopy of flower and leaf and drenched herself in scent and colour, or peeped over garden fences to see tall tulips springing up out of the grass; but to-day ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... "Ecstatic?" repeated Tatiana Markovna anxiously. "Why do you say that, especially just at night? I shan't sleep. The ecstasy of a young ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... Louis gave her the d'Aubigny lands and, with them, the tabouret which had so long dazzled her eyes and eluded her grasp. When the sky in England had at last cleared she paid a visit to her native land. For four ecstatic months the wool merchant's daughter made a triumphant progress through France, acclaimed and feted as a Queen. At her castle of d'Aubigny she held a splendid court and dispensed a regal hospitality to the greatest in the land, who had scarcely deigned to notice ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... lotion"—in soft ecstatic tones Madeline rehearsed the flowery language of the recipe—"though not so instantaneously startling in its effect as our inestimable dyer and setter, yet forms a most essential part of the whole process, opening, as it does, the dry and lifeless pores of the scalp, imparting to them new life ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... last. The same thing occurs almost invariably in the case of spontaneous, and generally in that of artificial, somnambulism; certainly the Pythia, as is well known, used to announce the date of her next ecstatic state. In like manner the curative instinct displays itself in somnambulists, and they have been known to select remedies that have been no less remarkable for the success attending their employment than for the completeness with which they have run counter to received professional opinion. ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... in the apartments of the Empress Josephine, Asker-Khan, whom the music evidently did not entertain very highly, at first applauded by ecstatic gestures and rolling his eyes in admiration, until at last nature overcame politeness, and the ambassador fell sound asleep. His Excellency's position was not the best for sleeping, however, as he was standing with his ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... hug thet gurl fer me!" sang Blinky, with ecstatic upward gaze. "Shore she's put the devil in you. An' this heah outfit is ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... broke in, with the smile ecstatic, almost dancing on his chair. "There's no use in compromise. Compromise is and always has been the curse of this country. The unintellectual drahma is dead—dead. Naoobody can deny that. All the box-offices in ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... devil-worship and human sacrifice in the fact that the blood is not shed formally on the altar, but by a sort of assassination among the crowd. The gongs beat with a deafening din as the doors of the shrine open and the monkey-god is revealed; almost the whole congregation rivet ecstatic eyes ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... ringing cheer burst out as wells spontaneously from the throats and hearts of men, in the first ecstatic moments of victory—a cheer to which our saddened hearts and enfeebled lungs had long been strangers. It was the genuine, honest, manly Northern cheer, as different from the shrill Rebel yell as the honest mastiff's deep-voiced welcome is from the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... tell her poems of a sort about the creation of the world, about the earth, and the history of humanity. His lectures about the primitive peoples and primitive man were more interesting than the Arabian Nights. Liza, who was ecstatic over these stories, used to mimic Stepan Trofimovitch very funnily at home. He heard of this and once peeped in on her unawares. Liza, overcome with confusion, flung herself into his arms and shed tears; Stepan Trofimovitch wept too with delight. But Liza soon after went away, and only Dasha ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... that evil is a form of good. Such speculative difficulties must be met by a reflective mind, before it can follow out the application of an optimistic theory to particular facts. Now, Browning's creed, at least as he held it in his later years, was not merely the allowable exaggeration of an ecstatic religious sentiment, the impassioned conviction of a God-intoxicated man. It was deliberately presented as a solution of moral problems, and was intended to serve as a theory of the spiritual nature of things. It ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... of these baseless contentions they cite the ecstatic joy with which, to the limit of the supply gathered from all parts of the African deserts, he day after day, on the sands of the arena, delightedly clubbed ostriches, alleging that killing an ostrich with ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... is drawn to a close embrace, and there are ecstatic moments with only throbbing eyes ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... treated the matter from the viewpoint of the cat, predatory, philosophic, ecstatic. One o'clock in the morning saw the final revision, for he had become enthralled with the handling of his subject. It was only a scant five pages; less than a thousand words. But as he wrote and rewrote, other schemata rose to the surface ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Macrina, was celebrated for her saintly life; his second brother was the famous Gregory of Nyssa; his youngest was Peter, bishop of Sebaste; and his eldest brother was the famous Christian jurist Naucratius. There was in the whole family a tendency to ecstatic emotion and enthusiastic piety, and it is worth noting that Cappadocia had already given to the Church men like Firmilian and Gregory Thaumaturgus. Basil was born about 330 at Caesarea in Cappadocia. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... 'Soelver, Soelver!' And driven by some mystic power of will, he forced himself under the same hypnotic influence which surrounded her. He compelled himself to leave the clear broad way of reason and to enter the ecstatic, perilous, paths of the sleep walker. He was no longer awake. He sought, he touched, he stood before that after which he had groped. He was himself driven by a magic power, by a marvelous single purpose, which must be attained. This whole transformation took place in ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... and hostility the influence they might have otherwise been able to exert over their fellow-countrymen in the hour of stress. The Extremists boldly threw the whole responsibility for the movement on British rule and combined with a perfunctory and dubious condemnation of the crimes themselves an ecstatic admiration for the heroism which had driven the youth of India to follow the example of the Russian intelligentsia in its revolt against an autocracy as brutal and as odious as that of Russia. Mere measures of repression under the ordinary law were clearly incapable of coping with a ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... only in play with the children.[300] It would seem that she also took a dislike to working in the fields, and especially to herding the flocks. From early childhood she had shown signs of piety. Now she gave herself up to extreme devoutness; she confessed frequently, and communicated with ecstatic fervour; she heard mass in her parish church every day. At all hours she was to be found in church, sometimes prostrate on the ground, sometimes with her hands clasped, and her face turned towards the image of Our Lord or of Our Lady. ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... brides are beautiful, more or less, but this one was more. Isaiah, who had been favored with a peep at the rehearsal on the previous evening, was found later on by Shadrach in the kitchen in a state of ecstatic incoherence. ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... think of it,' she said, with ecstatic resentment. 'I think it's just shameful! Why should the Countess of Chell want to rob a lot of respectable young ladies of their living? I can tell you they're just as respectable as the Countess of Chell ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... through Aunt Belle! Accomplishment! A career like a man! Aunt Belle had said it and Aunt Belle would do it! A career like a man! Oh, ecstatic joy! "Lombard Street" had been brought with her in her week-end suitcase. Directly she could get to bed she rushed up to it and took it out and read, and read. It was all underlined. She underlined it ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... beheld the same man, who, a few minutes before, had fallen back on his bed, almost insensible. Hardly had Rodin finished reading, than he uttered a cry of stifled joy, saying, with an accent impossible to describe: "ONE gone! it works—'tis well!" And, closing his eyes in a kind of ecstatic transport, a smile of proud triumph overspread his face, and rendered him still more hideous, by discovering his yellow and gumless teeth. His emotion was so violent, that the paper ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... hard to tell how such strength was given in such slight sentences,—but from the time when he contemptuously tossed out his tune-fooleries, through the hour when with moonlight fancies "a serene ecstatic serenade was rippling silently beneath his pen," to that when the organ burst upon his ear in thunders quenchless and everlasting as the sea's, he is still Beethoven, gigantic in pride, purity, and passion. "I dream now," said Rodomant; "like the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... stooped down to gather some flowers to hide her agitation; felt her cheeks flush, her heart beat, her head swim, and then a chill creep through her frame. Helen had unconsciously awoke the hope which Rose had never dared to confess unto herself. The waking was ecstatic; but she knew the depth of Edward's love for Helen. She had been his confidant—she believed it was a jest—how could her cousin do otherwise than love Edward Lynne? And with this belief, she recovered the self-possession which the necessity for subduing her feelings had ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... reading, I make bold to tell you," says Trollope, "is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasures that God has prepared for His creatures. Other pleasures may be more ecstatic; but the habit of reading is the only enjoyment I know, in which there is ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... love that conquers self, That binds us to our kind, That raises us to heaven and God, And purifies the mind! Ecstatic, sweet, rekindling power, Bright altar-fire sublime, Most precious gift to mortals given, That will ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... beautifully; For the girls i' tumbled ranks Alang Eurotas' banks Like wanton fillies thrang, Frolicking there An' like Bacchantes shaking the wild air To comb a giddy laughter through the hair, Bacchantes that clench thyrsi as they sweep To the ecstatic leap. ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... Mac called, light-hearted as a schoolboy just escaped from drudgery, while Bertie's Nellie, as a matter of course, was overcome with ecstatic giggles. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... rich and costly food had been sadly medium—like the wines. But these turkeys were a genuine triumph. Even Mildred gave them a look of interest and admiration. In a voice that made General Siddall ecstatic Presbury cried: ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... thought that the proper time had come, the widow went to confession and, one Sunday morning she partook of communion with an ecstatic fervor. Then, putting on men's clothes and looking like an old tramp, she struck a bargain with a Sardinian fisherman who carried her and her dog to the other ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... masters." He relates the case of a young Provencal musician, who blew out his brains at the door of the Opera after a second hearing of Spontini's "Vestale," having previously explained in a letter, that after this ecstatic enjoyment, he did not care to remain in this prosaic world; and the case of the famous singer Malibran, who, on hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for the first time, at the Conservatoire, "was seized with such convulsions that she had to be carried ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... system. He had learnt that neither the doctrines nor the austerities of the Brahmans were of any avail for accomplishing the deliverance of man, and freeing him from the fear of old age, disease, and death. After long meditations, and ecstatic visions, he at last imagined that he had arrived at that true knowledge which discloses the cause, and thereby destroys the fear, of all the changes inherent in life. It was from the moment when he arrived at this knowledge, that he claimed the name of Buddha, the Enlightened. At that moment we may ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... idleness this morning by the comfortable realisation that he was falling desperately in love. He shook his head at himself and smiled. He was not ill pleased with himself. He would return to a perfectly regulated life later on. In the meanwhile he would give a free rein to these ecstatic moods, these wild emotions. When he had given a free rein to them they ambled round a little paddock, and brought him back to his own front door. It was delicious. He had thoughts of chronicling the ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... and ecstatic while he offered his apologies to Michael for the lack of hospitality, that Michael knew that he was visualizing and enjoying far greater luxury and affluence than had ever been the lot of the richest Mameluke ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... them on the saints below,—a new and graceful motif: on the other side sits John the Baptist as a boy about twelve years of age. The attendant saints below are St. Peter, St. Andrew, St. Thomas holding the girdle,[1] St. Francis, and St. Clara, all looking up with ecstatic devotion, except St. Clara, who looks down ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... may we learn the charm of innocence. To play Rosalind a woman must have had more than one lover, and if she has been made to wait in the rain and has been beaten she will have done a great deal to qualify herself for the part. The ecstatic Sara makes no pretence to virtue, she introduces her son to an English duchess, and throws over a nation for the love of Richepin, she can, therefore, say ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... ago we walked in the jangling city Together . . . . forgetful. One by one we crossed the avenues, Rivers of light, roaring in tumult, And came to the narrow, knotted streets. Thru the tense crowd We went aloof, ecstatic, walking in wonder, Unconscious of our motion. Forever the foreign people with dark, deep-seeing eyes Passed us and passed. Lights and foreign words and foreign faces, I forgot them all; I only felt alive, defiant of all death ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... entertained a clear notion of a living bond between himself and men of like sort in the ancient world. Greek and Roman civilization was to him no dead and buried antiquity, but its poets and thinkers lived again as if they were his neighbors. His love for the past amounted almost to an ecstatic enthusiasm. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Saviour, head downwards. So remarkable is the vigor of the drawing and the power of light in this picture that you can imagine you see the resplendent crucifix suddenly thrust into the shadow by the strong hands of invisible spirits, and swayed for a moment only before the dazzled eyes of the ecstatic solitary. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... my gosh!" barked the ecstatic bridegroom-apparent. "How did you happen to think of such ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... speaks with a sort of ecstatic surprise of the fact that the Princess was "affable—even gay," and that she "laughed and chatted like other little girls." And yet she must early have perceived that she was not quite like other little girls, but set up and apart. Though reared with all the simplicity practicable ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... were aroused. While assuaging her own thirst she had neglected the dog. She took a carafe of water from its wooden stand near the table, and poured some of the contents into a tumbler. Joey's thanks were ecstatic. He yelped with delight at the mere thought of ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... our river-side villa, my eldest brother, at the sudden gathering of clouds, repeated aloud some stanzas from Kalidas's "Cloud Messenger." I could not, nor had I the need to, understand a word of the Sanskrit. His ecstatic declamation of the sonorous rhythm ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... he bent before the Body of his Lord, and the voices behind him rose and exulted up the aisles, the women's and children's voices soaring passionately up in the melody, the mellow men's voices establishing, as it seemed, these ecstatic pinnacles of song on mighty ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... till he finds himself at Rome, and in front of St. Peter's Church. He sees the interior without entering. It swarms with worshippers, packed into it as in the hollow of a hive. All there is breathless expectation, ecstatic awe; for the mystery of the mass is in process of consummation, and in another moment the tinkling of the silver bell will announce to the prostrate crowd the actual presence of their Lord; will open to them the vision of the coming heavenly day. Here, too, is faith, though obscured in ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... emphatically decline to be called a prophet? A prophet in some true sense he certainly was, a prophet who, within his own range, has not been surpassed. He means this—that he is no mere ecstatic enthusiast or "dervish,'' whose primary aim is to keep up the warlike spirit of the people, taking for granted that Yahweh is on the people's side, and that he is perfectly free from the taint of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... seem dimmed in comparison. The moon, in Holbein's deliberate audacity, seems but a disc as she bows her face, too, in worship. Shining by some compulsion of purest Nature, the divine radiance glows on the ecstatic Mother; and away above and beyond her—"How far that little candle shines," and shines, and shines again amid the shadows! It illumines the beautiful face of the Virgin, touches the reverent awe of St. Joseph, plays over marble arch ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... interesting bird songs we have. I fancy that the persons who hear and recognize it in the April or May twilight are few and far between. I myself have heard it only on three occasions—one season in late March, one season in April, and the last time in the middle of May. It is a voice of ecstatic song coming down from the upper air and through the mist and the darkness—the spirit of the swamp and the marsh climbing heavenward and pouring out its joy in a wild burst of lyric melody; a haunter of the muck and a prober of the mud suddenly transformed ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... by instinct to everything that was not rustic, felt in her narrow soul a kind of hatred for the ecstatic extravagances of the old girl. She had found a phrase by which to describe her, I know not how, but a phrase assuredly contemptuous, which had sprung to her lips, invented probably by some confused and mysterious travail of soul. She said: 'That woman is a demoniac.' This phrase, as uttered ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... stables I heard ecstatic sounds—a whinny of equine delight and the blandishments of a human voice. Through the open door I caught a glimpse of Driver Hawkins with his back turned towards us. His left arm was round Tommy's neck and the left side of his face rested upon Tommy's head; ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... ahead of him, his gray eyes pensive, the short pipe shifted to the corner of his mouth. Finally he glanced down amusedly at his ecstatic companion. ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... Scotch bur was delightfully apparent, as it was when he was either very angry or very happy, an elderly woman pushed her way through the throng and seizing the hand that ruled the Oliver Plow Works in both of her own, said in ecstatic tones: "Oh! it is such a joy to see you again. Twenty years ago I used to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... absence but it is desolation without him. This is the sweetest place—I really cannot bear to leave it. My scholars drew flowers, this morning. Mr. Emerson and Ellery Charming passed along; and Mr. Emerson asked Julian to go with the children to Fairy Land [in Walden woods]. He went, in a state of ecstatic bliss. He brought me home, in a basket, cowslips, anemones, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... the sharp stones made me ask him if they did not hurt his feet. 'Oh no!' he replied; 'they are used to it.' It is indeed astonishing what feet are able to get used to. The boy's joy at the few sous which I gave him was almost ecstatic. He had hardly thanked me when he set off running homeward to show how he had been rewarded—for his sharpness in thinking that I should lose my way, and allowing me to do ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... officer threw herself on one knee in an attitude of ecstatic admiration, and laid a hand upon ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... brief moments of complete and ecstatic surrender. Or tried to recall them. She was very tired. Perhaps she might dream about them, but at the moment they seemed as far away ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Jong, the latest commentator on this passage, seems inclined to take it as a mere ecstatic vision, but the vision was certainly caused by a dramatic scene in the course of which hell and heaven were shown in the dark.—The Egyptians represented them even on the stage; see Suetonius, Calig., 8: "Parabatur et in mortem spectaculum quo argumenta inferorum per Aegyptios ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Scott's habitats, with various radiations; while in the spring of 1803 he and Mrs. Scott repeated their visit to London and extended it to Oxford. It is not surprising to read his confession in sad days, a quarter of a century later, of the 'ecstatic feeling' with which he first saw this, the place in all the island which was his spiritual home. The same year saw the alarm of invasion which followed the resumption of hostilities after the armistice of Amiens; ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... me," when I saw The other round was gain'd, and wond'ring eyes Did keep me mute. There suddenly I seem'd By an ecstatic vision wrapt away; And in a temple saw, methought, a crowd Of many persons; and at th' entrance stood A dame, whose sweet demeanour did express A mother's love, who said, "Child! why hast thou Dealt with us thus? Behold thy sire and I Sorrowing have sought thee;" and so held her peace, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... was no time for more conversation, for at that moment they turned a corner, bringing Betty's house to sight, and what should be going up the drive at that particular and ecstatic moment but the graceful, low-bodied ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... lisped, 'when I actually saw Lady Mary eat cabbage?' At another time he is said to have induced some deluded young creature to elope with him from a ball-room, but managed the affair so ill, that the lovers (?) were caught in the next street, and the affair came to an end. He wrote rather ecstatic love-letters to Lady Marys and Miss ——s, gave married ladies advice on the treatment of their spouses and was tender to various widows, but though he went on in this way through life, he was never, it would seem, in love, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Saints' Day) and "Wakefulness" (The Annunciation) are reminiscences of Charles Coleridge Pode, a little nephew of Mr. Yonge, and his ecstatic joy on the first night of being out of doors late enough to see the glory of the stars. A few months later, on a sister being born, he hoped that her name would be Mary "because he liked the Virgin Mary." And ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... of the lawn on which the shadows of trees and shrubbery fell motionless. The air was balmy and sweet with the fragrance of spring flowers. The mocking-birds were in full ecstatic song, their notes scaling down from bursts of melody to the drollery of all kinds of imitation. The wounded men on the far end of the piazza were either sleeping or talking in low tones, proving that there was ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... of the women transcendentalists, MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850), a distinguished early pleader for equal rights for her sex, believed that when it was fashionable for women to bring to the home "food and fire for the mind as well as for the body," an ecstatic "harmony ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... to us that you have a call, that I find it hard to realise that you yourself are uncertain. But the very fact that you have been 'counting the cost,' and that you have no ecstatic joy at the prospect before you, encourages me. I am glad you realise the difficulties beforehand. What you don't fully see is the strength upon which you will be able to draw. I often think of ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... and she was perhaps a little, a very little, delightfully, charmingly, proud of herself. The doctor, beguiled by professional vanity, feeling what a feather she was in his cap, quite confident that she would reach her hundredth birthday, and with an ecstatic hope that even, by grace of his admirable treatment and her own beautiful constitution, she might (almost) solve the problem and live forever, gave up troubling about the will which at a former period he had taken so much interest in. ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... hither?" He hugged her fiercely to his bosom. He felt a throb of ecstatic delight; for the first time she had surrendered to his arms; for the first time he held her close to him; death—for the moment—lost its terrors—he felt that he would be willing to die, in that storming darkness, with her heart ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... Mercedes was the central prize and treasure. Mrs. Forrester was incapable of a pang of jealousy or emulation; she was always delighted yet never eager. When, in the first flow of intimacy with Mercedes, Miss Scrotton had actually imagined, for an ecstatic and solemn fortnight, that she stood first with her, Mrs. Forrester had met her air of irrepressible triumph with a geniality in which was no trace of grievance or humiliation. The downfall had been swift; Mercedes had snubbed her one day, delicately ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... one piece of sculpture in marble, a guardian angel for the Convent at Granada, but this no longer exists. Some of his architectural drawings are preserved in the Louvre. Ford says that his St. Francesco in Toledo is "a masterpiece of cadaverous ecstatic sentiment." ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... alleged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature. It is true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory—e.g., sex-deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Savior in a few Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive function, and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist? Religious ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... in my old fairy-tale book. Oh, yes, I see!" and Babie went off again in an ecstatic ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wholly unable to feel the force of the above. Strauss says that Paul's vision was ecstatic—subjective and not objective—that Paul thought he saw Christ, although he never really saw him. But, says Strauss, he uses the same word for his own vision and for the appearances to the earlier Apostles: it is plain therefore that he did not suppose the earlier ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... the stove-couch and started a violent love affair. Chih Neng could not, though she strained every nerve, escape his importunities; nor could she very well shout, so that she felt compelled to humour him; but while he was in the midst of his ecstatic joy, they perceived a person walk in, who pressed both of them down, without uttering even so much as a sound, and plunged them both in such a fright that their very souls flew away and their spirits wandered ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... was a benediction—an ecstatic surety that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know. For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal—then there was a bumping, scraping sound as the ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... girl's hair was yellow, another that it was of the glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned. Let us rather use the mythus as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... inexperienced hearts, before they begin to suspect what is going on within them. It transports them to the seventh heaven; and if you ask what brought them thither, they neither can tell nor care to learn, but cherish an ecstatic faith that there ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Then, the consummation! In ecstatic words John tells of the one final and overmastering proof, in the thought of the ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... then I understood that an instant of such contemplation is the whole of life.' And still more continuous, still more vibrant, is at times his emotion, as when the bow draws out to the utmost a long ecstatic tone from a sensitive violin. 'What joy is this perpetual thrill in the heart of Nature! That same horizon of which I had watched the awakening, I saw last night bathe itself in rosy light; and then the full moon went up into a tender sky, ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... romance which feathers the nest of purity in which the hermit soul delights to dwell! Is it not that bizarre silence of the Algerian waste which leads many a Trappist to his fate, rather than the strange thought of God calling his soul to heavenly dreams and ecstatic renunciations? Is it not the wild poetry of the sleeping snows by night that gives to the St. Bernard monk his holiest meditations? When the organ murmurs, and he kneels in that remote chapel of the clouds ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... "In this rapt, awed, ecstatic state I gazed—till lo! I was aware A fisherman had joined her there— A weary man, with halting gait, Who toiled beneath a basket's weight: Her father, as I guessed, for she Had run to meet him gleefully And ta'en his burden to herself, That perched upon her shoulder's ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... Maurice, let's go out behind the barn after supper and talk! Maurice, did she bring her harp? I want to see her play on it! I saw her wedding ring," she ended, in an ecstatic whisper. ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... bosom of the Church—then comes away with her conscience lightened, not a whit the less a Puritan than before. If the book contained nothing else noteworthy but this admirable scene, and the pages describing the murder committed by Donatello under Miriam's eyes, and the ecstatic wandering, afterwards, of the guilty couple, through the "blood-stained streets of Rome," it would still deserve to rank high among the imaginative ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... "That's right," cried ecstatic Belle. "Honest confession is good for the soul. I'll admit that most men and women are made of dust—street dust at that—but Roger Atwood is pure gold. He has the quickest brain and steadiest hand ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... through Clarissa; Camilla could quote; Knew the raptures of Werter and Charlotte by rote; Thought Smith and Sir Walter ecstatic; And as for the novels of Miss Lefanu, She dog's-eared them till the whole twenty looked blue; And studied 'The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various
... the world and thus minister to religious communion differs in different persons. The Islamic fast of Ramadan is said to produce irritability and lead to quarrels. In general, fasting tends to induce a nonnatural condition of body and mind, favorable to ecstatic experiences, and favorable or not, as the case may be, to ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... village, where children played on the green and a square-towered grey church seemed to watch over the steep-roofed cottages and creeper-covered vicarage. If she had been a happy American tourist travelling in company with impressionable friends, she would have broken into ecstatic little exclamations of admiration every five minutes, but it had been driven home to her that to her present companion, to whom nothing was new, her rapture would merely represent the crudeness which had existed in contentment in a brown-stone house on a noisy thoroughfare, through a life ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... had trouble recently. I told you of it in the letter which you did not receive. A person whom you know, whom I love greatly, Celimene, [Footnote: Madame Arnould-Plessy.] has become a religious enthusiast, oh! indeed, an ecstatic, mystic, molinistic religious enthusiast, I don't know what, imbecile! I have exceeded my limits. I have raged, I have said the hardest things to her, I have laughed at her. Nothing made any difference, it was all the same to her. Father Hyacinthe ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... from them so recently, grasped their hands in an ecstatic, brimming, joyful manner, as if she had not seen them for years. ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... obedience Against the genial laws of natural sense, Whose wide, self-dissipating wave, Prison'd in artful dykes, Trembling returns and strikes Thence to its source again, In backward billows fleet, Crest crossing crest ecstatic as they greet, Thrilling each vein, Exploring every chasm and cove Of the full heart with floods of honied love, And every principal street And obscure alley and lane Of the intricate brain With brimming rivers of light and ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... fill out the comparison? Not for you, elders, who have seen the struggle of "tacking ship," and have felt the ecstatic swell of delight when it was accomplished! Not for the younger, who must learn for themselves the seamanship that is to carry them safely over the mysterious ocean on whose shore they have lingered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... held up as a monster of moral depravity; for my daring to question the exactitude of Liszt's biographical facts, I have been severely sermonised; for my inability to regard Chopin as one of the great composers of songs, and continue uninterruptedly in a state of ecstatic admiration, I have been told that the publication of my biography of the master is a much to be deplored calamity. Of course, the moral monster and author of the calamity cannot pretend to be an unbiassed judge in the case; but it seems to him that there ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... its best. It sank to despair, it leaped to lyric passion, it caressed a low note of ecstatic pain, and then, like a dew-delighted bird, it fled up and hovered on a timid note of appeal. The girl giggled. As the voice died on a long, soft note, she laughed aloud, and swallowed. She looked around and caught my eye. It seemed that ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... scene within the temple when he had lain stretched upon the sacrificial altar, while La, with high-raised dagger, stood above him, and the rows of priests and priestesses awaited, in the ecstatic hysteria of fanaticism, the first gush of their victim's warm blood, that they might fill their golden goblets and drink to the glory of their ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... American. She forgot that nobody had any business doing anything but minding one's own business. She fairly burned to have a part in the work of assimilation. Her eyes glowed with eagerness, her cheeks flushed a vivid scarlet, her lips trembled with the ecstatic passion ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... I seem'd By an ecstatic vision wrapt away: And in a temple saw, methought, a crowd Of many persons; and at the entrance stood A dame, whose sweet demeanor did express Another's love, who said, 'Child! why hast thou Dealt with us thus? ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... ecstatic granddaughters' necks she gravely clasped her pearl or diamond chains, as they stood at the foot of the stairs in her brownstone house long after midnight; in each grandson's hot, astonished palm lay a glittering ring or bracelet, "For your ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... duties with his barrowful of stones and dirt, feeling for the first time that the curse of Adam was upon him. Other men bereft of a pleasure might have recourse to other delights, but Burney had only two comforts in life. One was his pipe, the other was an ecstatic hope that there would be no Speedways to build on the other side ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... was angelically kind; she could not be ruffled; she would never criticize, never grasp, never exhibit selfishness. She was a unique combination of the serious and the sensuous. He felt the passionate, ecstatic clinging of her arm as they walked under the interminable chain of lamp-posts on Chelsea Embankment. Magical hours!... And how she could absorb herself in her work! And what a damned shame it was that rascally ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... chamber of torment. Humanity about was joyous, however. Laughter and banter and song came from the cabins that lined the big ravine and the little ravines opening into it. A banjo tinkled at the entrance of "Possum Trot," sacred to the darkies. We moved toward it. On the stoop sat an ecstatic picker and in the dust shuffled three pickaninnies—one boy and two girls—the youngest not five years old. The crowd that was gathered about them gave way respectfully as we drew near; the little darkies showed their white teeth in jolly ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... Fourier had at his side the Virgin Mary. The Saviour of men elbowed St. Labre. They were of plaster run into moulds, or roughly carved in wood, and were colored with paint as glaring as the red and blue of a barber's pole, and covered with vulgar gildings. Chins in the air, ecstatic eyes shining with varnish, horribly ugly and all new, they were drawn up in line like recruits at the roll-call, the mitred bishop, the martyr carrying his palm, St. Agnes embracing her lamb, St. Roch with his dog and shells, St. John the Baptist ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... Godefroid dumb with admiration and also with sadness. This melody, which greatly resembles the long drawn out melancholy airs of Brittany, is one of those poems which vibrate in the heart long after the ear has heard them. As he listened, Godefroid looked at Vanda, but he could not endure the ecstatic glance of that fragment of a woman, partially insane, and his eyes wandered to two cords which hung one on each side of ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac |
