"Magician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... withdraw from further appeals to the public, as I mean to do, I cannot pose as a Prospero who breaks his staff. I am only a somewhat sturdy, highly nervous varlet in the sphere of art, who has sought to wear the robe of the magician—and being now disrobed, takes his place quietly where God appointed him, and means to hold his tongue in future, since his proper function ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... by the thrill that sent a tremor through the mighty structure, that he had found the note on which the great cable that upheld the mass, was keyed. He drew his bow across the string of the violin again, and the colossal wire, as if under the spell of a magician, responded with a throb that sent a wave through its enormous length. He sounded the note again and again, and the cable that was dormant under the strain of loaded teams and monster engines—the cable that remained stolid under the pressure of ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... in this volume, "The Wonderful Magician", is perhaps better known to poetical students in England than even the first, from the spirited fragment Shelley has left us in his "Scenes from Calderon." The preoccupation of a subject by a great master throws immense difficulties in the way of any one who ventures to follow in the same path: ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... is easily observed. The custom of making pilgrimages to his tomb, and in the case of Silius Italicus (and doubtless others too), of honouring it with sacrifices, seems to have produced the belief that he was a great magician. Even as early as Hadrian the Sortes Virgilianae were consulted from an idea that there was a sanctity about the pages of his book; and, as is well known, this superstitious custom was ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... transcendental Jacob Boehme for the deeper meaning of things which life gives it to see and feel; but when youth is past, we need all the more to be made to see and feel. It is not a thinker like Boehme who will compensate us for the lost summer of our life; but a magician like John of Halberstadt, who can, at any ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... pan was hung over the fire, and the plates and bowls set; and while Maggie scattered in the meal, and went for the milk, Davie tried to Collect his thoughts, and get from under the spell of the Magician of his age. And though poetry and porridge seem far enough apart Campbell said a hearty "thank you" to the offer of a plate full. He wanted the food, and it was also a delight to watch Maggie spread his cloth, and bring in the hot savory dish of meal, and the bowl of milk. For ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... Evan laid out the notes, and eyed them while dressing. They seemed to say to him, 'We have you now.' He was clutched by a beneficent or a most malignant magician. The former seemed due to him, considering the cloud on his fortunes. This enigma might mean, that by submitting to a temporary humiliation, for a trial of him—in fact, by his acknowledgement of the fact, loathed though it was,—he won a secret overlooker's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... although it is not yet noon, hunger rages in us. The pancakes, the syrup, the toast and the other incidents of breakfast have disappeared the way the rabbit vanishes when the magician waves his hand. The horrid Polyphemus did not so crave his food. And as yet there is no comforting sniff from the kitchen. Scrubbing and other secular matters engage the farmer's wife. There is as yet not a ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... of the Villa P——, we found ourselves in a realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... elbows, and the alert And nimble motion of those restless joints, That never tire, soon fans them all away. Improvement too, the idol of the age, Is fed with many a victim. Lo! he comes— The omnipotent magician, Brown, appears. Down falls the venerable pile, the abode Of our forefathers, a grave whiskered race, But tasteless. Springs a palace in its stead, But in a distant spot; where more exposed It may enjoy the advantage of the North And aguish East, till time shall have transformed ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... cried. "Our king has fallen from his throne. What is to be done now? We have no longer any king. Thou art to be pitied, such a great magician and now so weak and weary! Come, help us to put him again ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... seeming ape is a young prince, son of a powerful sultan, and has been metamorphosed into an ape by enchantment. When I was just out of the nursery, an old lady who waited on me was a most expert magician, and taught me seventy rules of magic. By this science I know all enchanted persons at first sight: I know who they are, and by whom they have been enchanted; therefore do not be surprised if I should forthwith restore this prince, in ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... clanger. Men looked with favour on the long-established supremacy of these great families, and their influence and power were therefore not easily broken. Bute sought to dissolve the spell; but the hand of Bute was not that of a magician, and he signally failed in the attempt. Broken, but not subdued, the aristocracy formed new parties, and acted upon new principles, all calculated, when dictated by the spirit of opposition, to annoy the sovereign, and disarrange the machinery of the state. Cabinets, formed with nice art ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent; but he had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone in England, the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew the sublime secret of believing by "the reason" what "the understanding" had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could still, after Hume and Voltaire had ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... final argument against the undertaking, we were warned that the whole country reeked with fever. But when I told the Governor-General of Albania, General Piacentini, what I wished to do every obstacle disappeared as though at the wave of a magician's wand. ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... the respect to one's auditors, to use upon this subject terms either of mystification or of obscure or indirect allusion. The clouds have been dispelled; the DARKNESS VISIBLE has been cleared away; and the Great Unknown—the minstrel of our native land—the mighty magician who has rolled back the current of time, and conjured up before our living senses the men and the manners of days which have long passed away—stands revealed to the hearts and the eyes of his affectionate ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... with seasonable greeting. (For no excess of consideration is too great to be lavished upon these, who unite within themselves the courage of a high warrior, the expertness of a three-handed magician, and the courtesy of a genial mandarin.) "I seek two, apparelled thus and thus. Did you, by any chance, mark the ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... magician you ought to change her into a nasty black spidah, to pay her back fo' shuttin' me up with them!" Lloyd was delighted with this new play. For the time it seemed as if she really were escaping from a castle prison. Faster ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... same evening rested at Wytham House, belonging to the Earl of Abingdon. There was hardly time to realise that the memories of Alice Lee, the old knight Sir Henry, and the faithful dog Bevis, rivalled successfully the grisly story of Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond. Nay, the magician was still dogging the travellers' steps; for had he not made the little town of Abingdon his own by choosing it for the meeting-place of Mike Lambourne and Tressillian, and rebuilding in its neighbourhood the ruins of Cumnor Hall, on which the dews fell softly? Alas! the wizard would weave no ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... magician of the whole mystery, who had seemed to the boy to be spinning his very brain into dreams, rose, and, drawing near the bed, as if to finish the ruthless destruction, and with her long witch-broom sweep down the very cobwebs of his ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... than thirty years, that he was an author on "the mysteries of the Egyptians," and was bracketed with Porphyry as a professor of the black art. Was then this unpleasant visitor to Fitzroy Square no other than that magician redivivus? ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... god-like in these tales in the sense in which the majestic Manannan of Irish story is, though elsewhere we learn that "deep was his counsel."[346] Though not a magician, he baffles one of the great wizards of Welsh story, and he is also a master craftsman, who instructs Pryderi in the arts of shoe-making, shield-making, and saddlery. In this he is akin to Manannan, the teacher of Diarmaid. Incidents ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... person, this Son of God, a magician, a conjuror, a witch, or one that did, when he was in the world, what he did, by the power and spirit of the devil (Matt 9:34; 12:24,25,&c.; Mark 3:22-30). Now he that has this opinion of this Jesus, cannot be willing to cast himself at his feet for life, or to come to him as the only ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... bunt into something," Thede said, as they clambered up the slope. "I wonder what he'd think if he should be called out of his bed by a blooming magician from the East Indies." ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... Nevertheless, he is a woeful wreck to look at; and the doctor looks at him with the greatest respect, and listens to his querulous plaint patiently. For that great dome of silence, his brain, repository of so many state-secrets, is still a redoubtable instrument: its wit and its magician's cunning have not yet lapsed into the dull inane of senile decay. Though fallen from power, after a bad beating at the polls, there is no knowing but that he may rise again, and hold once more in those tired old hands, shiny with rheumatic gout, and ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... all the marks of want, hungry, almost naked, without any prospect in life of ever bettering their sordid condition; see their eyes kindle, their breathing suspended, their tense absorption; see their tears, hear their laughter, note their excitement as the magician unfolds to them a realm of the imagination in which they are free for the hour to wander, tasting a keen and deep enjoyment that all the wealth of Croesus cannot purchase for his disciples. Measure, if ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Brother Lu. She must have begun to believe that after all the coming of this poor sick brother of hers, who had appeared so forlorn, and with such a dreadful and alarming cough, was gradually emerging from his chrysalis stage, and becoming a full-fledged magician. ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... show with the increasing predominance of short plays. Since they were short, I should not have minded them so much, but they were always so bad! Still, I could go out, when they came on, and return for the tramp magician, or the comic musician, who played upon joints of stovepipe and the legs of reception-chairs and the like, and scratched matches on his two days' beard, and smoked a plaintive air on a cigarette. But when the 'playlets' began following one another in unbroken succession, I did not ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the command of Eurylochus, to see what prospect of hospitality they might find. As they approached the palace, they found themselves surrounded by lions, tigers, and wolves, not fierce, but tamed by Circe's art, for she was a powerful magician. All these animals had once been men, but had been changed by Circe's enchantments into the forms of beasts. The sounds of soft music were heard from within, and a sweet female voice singing. Eurylochus ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... his native town. It is not so very many years since Cooper died, and yet the boatmen and loungers about the lake had only the faintest impression of the man-there was a writer by that name, one of them said, and some of his family lived near the house of the great man already referred to. The magician who created Cooperstown sleeps in the old English-looking church-yard of the Episcopal church, in the midst of the graves of his relations, and there is a well-worn path to his head-stone. Whatever the common ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of Shakspeare, and contained, among other plays, the Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream. Afraid of detection I stole away into the park, and beneath the shadow of the greenwood tree, I devoured with rapture the inspired pages of the great magician. What a world of wonders it opened to my view! Since that eventful hour poetry has become to me the language of nature—the voice in which creation lifts up its myriad anthems to the ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... it Jack Downing is only Van Buren in masquerade." It is a curious fact that the satirist is already the better remembered of the two, although Van Buren was in his day so powerful as to preside over the official patronage of the nation and to be called the "Little Magician." ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... translation of character and functions we hold to have arisen from the circumstance of his maternal grandfather having borne the name of Magus. People in those ages held that a powerful enchanter, exorciser, &c., must have a magician amongst his cognati; the power must run in the blood, which on the maternal side could be undeniably ascertained. Under this preconception, they took Magus not for a proper name, but for a professional designation. Amongst many illustrations of the magical character sustained by Virgil in ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... sacrifices. They only were permitted to act as mediators between God and man. To them alone was the will of God declared. They only could penetrate the future. And they alone predicted the future to those who sought of them therefor. In later days the name Magi became synonymous with sorcerer, magician, alchemist, &c.[24] ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... not because he considered water gruel objectionable, but because he had lost his precious sense of humour, that magician who can transform the dark rye into golden wheat; almighty love, emptying his horn of plenty over his poor home, had vanished. The children had become burdens, and the once beloved wife a secret enemy ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... called upon all good Christians to lodge information with the proper authorities whenever they "heard that any person had familiar spirits, and that he invoked demons in circles, questioning them and expecting their answer, as a magician, or in virtue of an express or tacit compact." It was also their duty to report anyone who "constructed or procured mirrors, rings, phials, or other vessels for the purpose of attracting, enclosing, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Micky could not find his tongue. If he had thought this girl pretty last night with the tears in her eyes he thought her a thousand times prettier now. She looked as if some magician hand had wiped the distress from her face and convinced her that ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... be a magician. Now a magician, in those old times, was one who was supposed to know things beyond the reach of common minds, who pretended to calculate the influence of the stars on a person's destiny, and who understood the effects of poisonous ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Rosario, as if waiting in silence the decision of his Judge. Astonishment on the one part, apprehension on the other, for some minutes chained them in the same attitudes, as had they been touched by the Rod of some Magician. At length recovering from his confusion, the Monk quitted the Grotto, and sped with precipitation towards the Abbey. His action did not escape the Suppliant. She sprang from the ground; She hastened to follow him, overtook him, threw herself in his passage, and embraced ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... an ambitious lad who was quite a wonder at turning rapid cartwheels. Another did some creditable pole balancing. One old man wanted to serve as a magician. All had a chance, but their merit was not distinguished enough to ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... the Persians and the Druids of Britain. Their pretended intercourse with spirits, their powers of magic and divination, and their rites are substantially the same, and point unmistakably to a common origin. The Dakota "Medicine-Man" can do the "rope trick" of the Hindoo magician to perfection. The teepee used for the Wakan Wacipee—or Sacred Dance—is called the Wakan Teepee—the Sacred Teepee. Carvers Cave at St. Paul was also called Wakan Teepee because the Medicine-men or magicians often held ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... launched into the immensity of time and space as you read the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you hung as if suspended by a magician's wand over the illimitable abyss of the past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to civilizations before the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and layer upon layer of the quarries of Montmartre or among ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Pole Antartick' off the 'Land of Devils' in 31 deg. 40' south, northeast of Montevideo. Frightful storms had buffeted the little ships about for weary weeks together, and all hands thought they were the victims of some magician on board, perhaps the 'Italianate' Doughty, or else of native witchcraft from the shore. The experienced old pilot, who was a Portuguese, explained that the natives had sold themselves to Devils, who were kinder masters than the Spaniards, and ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... flames you need not be ashamed of, and you always indulge in an honorable, an ingenuous love. Come, whatever is your case, trust it to faithful ears. Ah, unhappy! in what a Charybdis art thou struggling, O youth, worthy of a better flame! What witch, what magician, with his Thessalian incantations, what deity can free you? Pegasus himself will scarcely deliver you, so entangled, from ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... wondered that they were so few and slight. In health and fortune, prospect and resource, they came back poorer men than they had gone away. But it was home. And though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... Manabozho was walking along the shore of a great lake, weary and hungry, he met a great magician in the form of an Old Wolf, with six young ones, ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... Bradamant," the matron cried, "Know thine arrival in this hallowed hold Was not unauthorized of heavenly guide: And the prophetic ghost of Merlin told, Thou to this cave shouldst come by path untried, Which covers the renowned magician's mould. And here have I long time awaited thee, To tell what ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... fit only for thieves and paupers: "Alpinism" was then unknown. "You come from the mountain" (al-Jabal) means, "You are a clod-hopper"; and "I will sit upon the mountain"turn anchorite or magician. (Pilgrimage i. 106.) ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... the king and all the others seemed struck dumb, and then there arose a mighty shout, and one word was repeated over and over again. It sounded like "Chackalok! Chackalok!" and later Tom learned that it meant wizard, magician or ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... Distinction and a curious charm there may well be in such a pursuit, but this quality is perhaps traceable to affinities and associations with other more substantial interests, or is due to the ingenious temper it denotes, which touches that of the wit or magician. Mathematics, if it were nothing more than a pleasure, might conceivably become a vice. Those addicted to it might be indulging an atavistic taste at the expense of their humanity. It would then be in the position now occupied by mythology and mysticism. Even as it is, mathematicians ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... sit high enough; and not only praising her playing, but also presenting her with his likeness in a medallion. The poet Grillparzer, after hearing her play in Vienna Beethoven's F-minor Sonata, wrote a delightful poem. "Clara Wieck and Beethoven's F-minor Sonata." It tells how a magician, weary of life, locked all his charms in a shrine, threw the key into the sea, and died. In vain men tried to force open the shrine. At last a girl, wandering by the strand and watching their vain efforts, simply dipped ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... power—we must admit, in fact, at the risk of seeming ungracious, that Schubert is diffuse at times—but our senses are so enthralled by the imaginative freedom and by the splendor of color, that all purely intellectual judgment is suspended. The magician works his wonders; it is for us to enjoy. We have from Schubert seven complete Symphonies and the so-called Unfinished in B minor, i.e., the first two movements and the fragment of a Scherzo. Of these the Fourth (Tragic), composed in 1816, foreshadows ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... the Saga, was an apostate Christian, who had "thrown off his faith, and become God's dastard." He was both tall and strong, and had such long black hair that he tucked it under his belt; he had also the reputation of being a magician. The Viking Ospak refused to fight against "the good King Brian," and, touched by some prodigies, became a convert to Christianity, joined the Irish monarch at Kincora, on the Shannon, and received holy baptism.[222] The author of the Wars of the Gaedhil gives a formidable list of the other ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... a new school and setting a fashion for an admiring world. His style, which is quite a part of this singular man, can easily be pulled in pieces and condemned, and it is not a safe one to imitate. No doubt he wrought for effects, for he was a magician, and used exaggeration in high lights and low lights on his crowded canvas. Say what you will of all these defects, of his lack of classic literary training, of his tendency to melodrama, of his tricks of style, even ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... had finished tuning their instruments, a middle-sized, handsome man stept forward with long strides, with a violin in one hand and bow in the other, and began waving the latter up and down, like a magician summoning his spirits. As if he had waved the sound out of his bow, the tones leaped forth from the instruments, and, guided by his eye and hand, fell into a merry measure. The accuracy with which every ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... one of the earliest of these fables, and remained a great favorite with the Germans, being finally immortalized by Goethe. The same author has made us familiar with a personage who figures in an interesting legend of the fifteenth century. Doctor Faust, or Faustus, is a magician who by unlawful arts gains a mastery over nature. This legend became the foundation of a number of stories and dramas, and was put into verse by Christopher Marlowe, the ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... in the dusk and undergrowths, with weasel, heron, rabbit, hare, mouse and coney; which plucked the Flower of Immortality in the Island of Statues and wandered with Usheen in Timanogue. I wanted to know what all that magic-making meant to the magician, but he has kept his own secret, and I must be content and grateful to one who has revealed more of beauty than any ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... theory of a fourth dimension in space, Greif had believed that the scientist was raving mad. Up to the moment when the telegram had arrived, he had been convinced that Rex was a cheat, who had accidentally learned certain facts connected with the Greifensteins and was attempting to play the magician by making an adroit use of what he knew. When brought suddenly face to face with a phenomenon he could not explain, Greif's reason ceased altogether to perform its functions. The news he had just received was ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... On the larboard bow was perceived a darker mass of mist, which after some time resolved itself into the well-known form of the Rock of Lisbon. The wind being light and variable, we drew very gradually inshore, till the mist suddenly lifting, as if at the command of a magician, disclosed to us the splendid and fantastic scenery of those rocky heights, as they rose proudly from the glittering ocean, which was dotted with numerous sails of fishing-boats and coasters, and here and there the canvas of some loftier merchantmen, making for the mouth ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... "Dan is a magician now, and he can show you many miracles going on all round you; for he has two things needful patience and a love of nature. We live in a beautiful and wonderful world, Demi, and the more you know about it the wiser ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... magician journeyed together to Wales. They went to Craig y Dinas, the Rock of the Fortress, at the head of the Neath valley, near Pont Nedd Fechan, and the Welshman, pointing to the stock or root of an old hazel, said: "This is ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... there lived a powerful magician named Merlin, who could appear in any place he chose, could change his looks as he liked, and at will could do wonderful things to help or to harm knights and ladies. So to King Uther came Sir Ulfius, a noble knight, and said, "I will seek Merlin, ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler
... not understand his words, but their tone was sufficient command; besides there was Yussufs pistol, which acted like a magician's wand in ensuring obedience. ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... the most popular Tartar songs, said to be of great antiquity, relates the adventures of "Swan's Wing," a beautiful daughter of a native chief. Her brother had been overpowered by a magician and carried to the spirit laird. According to the tradition the horse he rode came to Swan's Wing and told her what had occurred. The young girl begged him to lead her by the road the magician had taken, and thus guided, she reached ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... knight passionately, "I love you! Do not break your promise to me. Forget what you have seen. I am a powerful magician. I will make you happy. I will give you all you want. ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Mrs. Molesworth
... to them, Behold my wife hath sent to me, saying, Have nothing to do with this just man, for I have suffered very much because of him in the night. But the Jews answered, and said to Pilate, Did we not tell thee that he is a magician? Behold, he hath sent a dream to thy wife." The trial goes on, and Pilate declares the innocence of Jesus, and then confers with him as in John xviii. 33-37. Then comes the question (chaps, iii. and iv.): "Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... What had it to do with her? She looked across at Baroudi's great white boat, which now was turning into a black jewel on the gold of the moving river, and she felt as if, like some magician who understood her nature, he was trying to comfort her to-day by showering gold towards her. It was an absurd fancy, at which, in a moment, she ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... Desire saw that the ribs of the sorcerer's canoe were formed of living rattlesnakes, whose heads pointed outward to guard him from his enemies. Being invited, he had no sooner stepped into the canoe, than they began to hiss and rattle furiously, which put him in a great fright; but the magician spoke to them, when they became pacified and quiet. Shortly after they were at the landing upon the island. The marriage took place immediately; and the bride made presents of various valuables which had been furnished her ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... romance of trade, and casts contempt upon all its sober realities. It renders the stock-jobber a magician, and the exchange a region of enchantment. It elevates the merchant into a kind of Knight-errant, or rather a commercial Quixote. The slow but sure gains of snug percentage become despicable in his eyes: no "operation" is thought worthy of attention, that ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the tribe? No, they are its judges, its legislators and, most important of all, its magicians. Nor is the chief or king the fighter par excellence of the tribe. But he too may be and often is the tribal magician. Through their powers of magic elders and chiefs are responsible for the weather, for the reproduction of plants and animals, for the success of the crops, of hunts and catches, for the health and general welfare of the people. And in war? In war they are the most important personages ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... which you saw before your eyes descend into a man of genius,—all this was Emerson. He invented this style of speaking, and made it express the supersensuous, the incommunicable. Lowell wrote, while still under the spell of the magician: "Emerson's oration was more disjointed than usual, even with him. It began nowhere, and ended everywhere, and yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feeling that something beautiful had passed that way, something more beautiful ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... by,—monk, maiden, priest, knight, lady, and king. In the mirror of the imagination not only the world of to-day but the entire movement of human life moves before the eye as the throngs of living men move on the streets. For the imagination is the real magician, of whose marvels all simulated magic is but a clumsy and mechanical imitation. It is the real power, of which all material powers are very inadequate symbols. Rarely taken into account by teachers, largely ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... excelsior dug from hogsheads and great crates. Aloysius lorded it over a small red-headed satellite who disappeared inside barrels and dived head first into huge boxes, coming up again with a lamp, or a doll, or a piece of glassware, like a magician. Fanny, perched on an overturned box, used to watch him, fascinated, while he laboriously completed a water set, or a tea set. A preliminary dive would bring up the first of a half dozen related pieces, each swathed in tissue ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... for she was busy, but the Scarecrow Bear replied: "Yes; she's something of the sort, and a bird of a magician." ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... the influence of Ormond led to an alliance between that Earl and Sir James, afterwards seventh Earl of Desmond. Sir James was son of Gerald, fourth Earl (distinguished as "the Rhymer," or Magician), by the lady Eleanor Butler, daughter of the second Earl of Ormond. He stood, therefore, in the relation of cousin to the cotemporary head of the Butler family. When his nephew Thomas openly violated the Statute of Kilkenny, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... is that they are all told to King Khufu by his sons; and as the beginning is lost, eight lines are here added to explain this and introduce the subject. The actual papyrus begins with the last few words of a previous tale concerning some other magician under an earlier king. Then comes the tale of Khafra, next that of Bau-f-ra, and lastly that ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... other objects, out of the clear air are the result of this psychic phenomena. That is to say, the creatures and objects are not really produced—they are but astral appearances resulting from the projection of powerful thought-forms from the mind of the magician or other wonder-worker, of whom India has a plentiful supply. Even the ignorant fakirs (I use the word in its true sense, not in the sense given it by American slang)—even these itinerant showmen of psychic phenomena, are able to produce phenomena of this kind which seems miraculous to ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... from the violence of the wind, which Sobieski, in one of his letters to his queen, (his "charmante et bien aimee Mariette,") says, was attributed by the soldiers to the incantations of the vizir, "who is known to be a great magician." From the top of the Leopoldsberg, the king and the Duke of Lorraine reconnoitred the Turkish camp, which lay in all its wide extent before them, from the opposite skirts of the Wienerberg almost to the foot of the ridge on which they stood, with the lofty pavilions and scarlet ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... wonder, because, however the instrument might be turned, the needle always pointed in the same direction. The glass which protected the needle caused even more amazement, and, believing him to be a magician, they took him ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... her powers when her kinsfolk in large numbers were starving, a medicine-lodge, or 'tabernacle' as Lufitau calls it, was built for her, and she crawled in. As is well known, these lodges are violently shaken during the magician's stay within them, which the early Jesuits at first attributed to muscular efforts by the seers. In 1637 Pere Lejeune was astonished by the violent motions of a large lodge, tenanted by a small man. One sorcerer, with an appearance of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... professional magician, Mike was very deliberate in order to be more impressive. The true artist does not overlook the minutest point, and he daintily adjusted the potato, shifting it about until it was poised exactly right. Then he slowly raised his open right hand, with the palm downward, ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... could overlook the crowd, pass the company in review before him through his spectacles. Immediately 'the inner man' of each individual would be displayed before him, like a game of cards, in which he unerringly might read what the future of every person presented was to be. Well pleased the little magician hastened away to prove the powers of the spectacles in the theatre; no place seeming to him more fitted for such a trial. He begged permission of the worthy audience, and set his spectacles on his ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... about a dissolution of the Union, then Hale will be president of the Northern confederacy, Julian, vice-president, and Giddings, I suppose, prime minister. Would not Joshua cut a sorry figure, in that high and responsible office! Prince John, I suppose, would be attorney general. The little magician, John's daddy, would be thrown overboard, for no party, I think, will ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... General's table, in Egypt, in August, 1822, the conversation turned on the belief in magic; and the Consul's Italian Staff propounded the following story, which seemed to have perfect possession of their best belief. They said that a magician of great name was then in Cairo—I think a Mogrebine; and that he had been sent for to the Consul's house, and put to the following proof:—A silver spoon had been lost, and he was invited to point out the thief. On arriving, he sent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... aims. A good little idol, as records attest, When they tell of him lightly appeased in a scream By sweets and caresses: he gave but sign That the heir of a purse-plumped dominant race, Accustomed to plenty, not dumb would pine. Almost magician, his earliest dream Was lord of the unpossessed For a look; himself and his chase, As on puffs of a wind at whirl, Made one in the wink of a gleam. She kisses a locket curl, She conjures to vision a cherub face, When ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... An expression in our faces as we drift by the fastidious ballyhoos of the shop windows. We are waiting for something—actors walking up and down in the wings waiting for their cues to go on. This is intelligible. This magician of a street has created the illusion in our heads that there are adventure ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... rose, the Master Magician waved his wand and Judith, who had seen very few plays, was transported to a land of beauty, romance, and sweet adventure. Helen made a noble Duke, and Catherine an enchanting Viola. Judith had never quite recaptured the thrill of delight she ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... seat, and was one of perhaps two dozen spectators before whom "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" received its first public showing in Western City. The story had to do with a series of murders; we saw them traced by a young man, and fastened bit by bit upon an old magician and doctor. As the drama neared its climax, we discovered this doctor to be the head of an asylum for the insane, and the young man to be one of the inmates; so in the end the series of adventures was revealed to us as the imaginings ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... reader turn to the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus. He will there see that the Magician of Cappadocia on his arrival in Babylon was told that Bardanes had been reigning two years and as many months; Apollonius stopped in the palace of the king twenty months; then he started on a tour to India; he travelled about the Asiatic Peninsula ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... said,] "Whoever attains to the knowledge of astrology for any other explanation than the three aforementioned, then verily he has attained to a branch of magic. An astrologer is a magician, and a magician is a necromancer, and a necromancer is ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... what you mean, good Father," Edgar said, after a pause. "They say that my father is a magician, because he stirs not abroad, but spends his time on his researches. I remember when I was a small boy, and the lads of the village wished to anger me, they would shout out, 'Here is the magician's son,' and I had many a ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... in 1610 Magdalene de Demandouls 'said that that accursed Magician Lewes [Gaufredy] did first inuent the saying of Masse at the Sabbaths, and did really consecrate and present the sacrifice to Lucifer.... She also related, that the said Magician did sprinkle the consecrated wine vpon all ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... since she has partaken of the waters of love, now induces the magician Malgigi to entice her beloved to an island over which she reigns, where she vainly tries to win his affections and to detain him by her side. Still under the influence of the waters of hate, Rinaldo escapes, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... her mortal bane, Whom public Wisdom ever strove to exclude, And but with blushes suffereth in her train? Corruption vaunted her bewitching spoils, O'er court, o'er senate, spread in pomp her toils, And call'd herself the state's directing soul: Till Curio, like a good magician, tried With Eloquence and Reason at his side, By strength of holier ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... whenever I take down that precious book and open it, what a host of friends do troop forth! Cavaliers, princesses, courtiers, damoiselles, monks, nuns, equerries, pages, maidens—humanity of every class and condition, and all instinct with the color of the master magician, Boccaccio! ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... happiness of a people who have fought and won their liberty cannot be got by Reform Acts. Effort and sacrifice are the necessary conditions of real stable emancipation. Liberty unacquired, merely found, will on the test fail like the Dead-Sea-apple or the magician's plenty. ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... in truth a magician, your excellency!" said St. Marsan, gayly, "for you understand both how to take away and give sleep. So long as I am near you, I forget all weariness; and after you have left me I shall, thanks to your words and promises, be able to sleep more quietly than I have done for a long time. You have quieted ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... concerning two sisters in Lucifer who have long been at daggers drawn, and considering their supernatural attributes, it is incomprehensible in a high degree that they have not destroyed one another like the Magician and the Princess of a more credible narrative of wonders in the "Arabian Nights." Diana Vaughan, much heard and little seen, has since become famous by her conversion to the Catholic faith. Honoured with her acquaintance for a considerable period, the doctor invariably testifies ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... and turn stones into bread; endure in the fire without hurting; and all that I will I may do. St. Peter disputed against all these, and disclosed all his malefices. Then Simon Magus, seeing that he might not resist Peter, cast all his books into the sea, lest St. Peter should prove him a magician, by his books, and went to Rome where he was had and reputed as a god. And when Peter knew that, he followed and came to Rome. The fourth year of Claudius the emperor, Peter came to Rome, and sat there twenty-five years, and ordained two bishops as his helpers, ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... so it is. You are the fairy princess, and I am the old magician—or the bear, if you like better, that used to be a prince when he ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... of curiosities whom I had made the arch magician, had been for six years a resident of the place, and had decorated this final nestling-place of his old age with relics and rarities picked up in the course of his life. According to his own account, he had been somewhat of a traveller, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Abenteuer und Schwaenke des kleinen Kerza," is a dwarf magician with a long white beard. With a hair from this beard Kerza binds the magician's wicked wife, who has taken the form of a wooden pillar the better to carry out her evil ends. From that moment it was ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... bed and beaten. Now suppose Mr. Yeats had told Mr. Moore, then moving in this glamorous atmosphere, another story of the same sort. Suppose he had said that the farmer's pigs had fallen under the displeasure of some magician of the sort he celebrates, who had conjured bad fairies into the quadrupeds, so that they went in a wild dance down to the village pond. Would Mr. Moore have thought that story any more incredible than the other? Would he have thought it worse than a thousand ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... magician at whose touch the plainest features take on new aspects. Helen's face had never been plain. Even in its anguish it had produced in beholders the profound commiseration which is more readily given when beauty is sorrowful. Now that a new life at heart was expressing itself, Martine, ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... The old magician waved his wand and whispered a few words; in an instant the fields, the squares, the roads, the quays along the stream, the streets in the city, the courts of the palaces, the rooms of the houses, were cleansed of their croaking guests, and restored ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... before the appointed day, Reed's patient died suddenly of heart-disease, leaving a sealed letter on his desk. The doctor, fully alive to the singular opportunity, put the letter in his pocket and hastened to the medium. The magician took it in his hand and pondered. At last he said: 'This was written by a man now in the spirit world. I cannot sense it. There isn't a medium in the world who can read it, but if you will send it to any person anywhere ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... which more has been written than on the divining-rod, one of the most exhaustive being that of Mr. Baring-Gould in his "Curious Myths of the Middle Ages." The literature, too, of the past is rich in allusions to this piece of superstition, and Swift in his "Virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician's Rod" ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... lived all alone; but he did not mind that, for his thoughts were always on his books and studies, and he seldom showed himself on the surface of the earth. But when he did go out every one laughed at him; for this powerful magician was no taller than my knee, and was very old and wrinkled, so that he looked comical indeed beside ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... studious produce of the holy brotherhood, assembled by years of incessant study was committed to the reckless flames—and doubtless amongst the collection were many works of the learned abbot Aelred; a character from whom we might suppose the "northern magician" had sketched the striking portraiture of the enthusiastic father Eustace, in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... immortal essence of mortal passion, together they are as soul and body, one being; separate them, and the body without the soul is a monster, the soul without the body is no longer human, nor earthly, nor real to us at all, though still divine. Love is the world's maker, master and destroyer, the magician whose word can change water to blood, and blood to fire, the dove to a serpent, and the serpent to a dove—ay, and can make of that same dove an eagle, with an eagle's beak, and talons, and air-cleaving wing-stroke. Love is the spirit of life and the angel of death. He ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... she was about to resume her reading, Paris slowly came into view. Not a breath of wind had stirred; it was as if a magician had waved his wand. The last gauzy film detached itself, soared and vanished in the air; and the city spread out without a shadow, under the conquering sun. Helene, with her chin resting on her hand, gazed on this ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... follies. There was Simon the Magician, founder of gnosticism, father of every heresy, Messiah to the Jews, Jupiter to the Gentiles—an impudent self-made god, who pretended to float in the air, and called his mistress Minerva—a deification, parenthetically, which was ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... amusing anecdote was told of the great chief of the Cossacks, the celebrated Platoff. Pursued by the King of Naples, he was beating a retreat, when a ball reached one of the officers beside him, on which event the hetman was so much irritated against his magician that he had him flogged in presence of all his hordes, reproaching him most bitterly because he had not turned away the balls by his witchcraft. This was plain evidence of the fact that he had more faith in his art ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... great musician Timo'theus, of Thebes, performed on the flute and the lyre, accompanied by a chorus of singers. Such was the wonderful power of his music that the whole company are said to have been swayed by it to feelings of love, or hate, or revenge, as if by the wand of a magician. The poet DRYDEN has given us a description of this feast in a poem that has been called by some "the lyric masterpiece of English poetry," and by others "an inspired ode." Though designed especially to illustrate the power of music, it is based on historic facts. Only ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... at patching up such-like conjugal trifles. He will dispense from his tribunal sage advice, and prescribe remedial measures, which shall have untold efficacy, in dispelling mutual mistrust, restoring mutual confidence, and bringing about a lasting re-union. He will interpose, like some potent magician, to transform a discordant, recriminating, utterly unlovely couple, into a pair of harmless, peaceable, love-consumed doves. There rises before my mind a case for illustration. A couple lived on the Reserve, whose domestic life ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... island and touching into gold a few small, scattered flakes of fleecy cloud that floated high over our mastheads. Then, all in a moment, the small, faintly- gleaming bit of land ahead became transformed, as it might be with a magician's wand, into a block of deepest, richest purple, bristling with rays of burning gold, a throbbing rim of molten gold swept into view from behind it, and in an instant it vanished amid a blinding blaze of sunlight that flashed across the ocean toward ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... toad and the coyote, to make green things spring up and flourish, to carve out homes, to cause trees and flowers and vines to give shade and disseminate fragrance, even as time went on to wring moisture from the lead-gray sky above—it was like being granted the might of a magician to touch the desert with the tip of his wand, bringing ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... whoever wears it knows all things, and will be able to act wisely. Inside the cap you will find a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles. With these on you will see everything as it really is, no matter how it may look to other people. You must, however, be careful, as the Evil Magician has always coveted these treasures and if he finds out that you have them he will do his best to get them from you. Let no one know that you possess them, and always keep them concealed about you. As the Magician will no doubt came back to search ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn
... eye are most useful auxiliaries; but there have been very few great chemists who have preserved these advantages through life; for the business of the laboratory is often a service of danger, and the elements, like the refractory spirits of romance, though the obedient slave of the magician, yet sometimes escape the influence of his talisman and endanger his person. Both the hands and eyes of others, however, may be sometimes advantageously made use of. By often repeating a process or an observation, the errors connected with hasty operations or imperfect views are annihilated; ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... in his performances. Those watches that disappeared and came back to their owners, those endless supplies of treasures from empty hats, and especially those crawling eggs that travelled all over the magician's person, sent many a child home thinking that Mr. Potter must have ghostly assistants, and raised grave doubts in the minds of "professors," that is members of the church, whether they had not compromised their characters by being ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... or turn aside, I consider no slight evidence of that wisdom and political sagacity for which his party give him credit, and which have acquired for him amongst his admirers the familiar cognomen of the Little Magician. ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... the poetic fancy of the Christian priest of the thirteenth century, who brought this romance into its present form. We may compare these statements of the universal presence of the wonder-working magician with those of the gleeman who recites the Anglo-Saxon metrical tale called the Traveller's Song.' No doubt, lands the most distant can be shown to have a common property in many marvellous stories. This is one of the ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... serious things. This evening you must arrange to meet me for a few moments. I shall have a 'scoop' to offer you for the Gleaner. Do not fail me. It will leave you ample time to get on to Downing Street afterwards. You see, I knew you were going to Downing Street to-night! Am I not a magician? I shall wire you. If, when you ring at the door of the house to which you will be directed, no one replies, go away at once. I will then communicate ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... assume the Character of a Magician, in which he acquires a great Share of Reputation, by his Responses to three Females of Distinction, who severally consult the Researches ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Maillardet's conjuror. It had the effect of introducing among the higher order of artists habits of nice and accurate workmanship in executing delicate pieces of machinery; and the same combination of mechanical powers which made the steel spider crawl, the duck quack, or waved the tiny rod of the magician, contributed in future years to purposes of higher import,—the wheels and pinions, which in these automata almost eluded the human senses by their minuteness, reappearing in modern times in the stupendous ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... ushered into an anteroom, where Adorjan left me while he himself went with a man who seemed to be a private secretary, or something of the sort, into the next room. It wasn't long before he came out again and put three cards into my hand. 'There they are,' said he. 'Why, you are a regular magician!' I couldn't but exclaim. 'Oh, no,' he replied, 'I am no Cagliostro; the explanation is simple enough. This is the French embassy, and Monsieur Rossi is an old friend of mine. I have visited his family often. So when I asked him for tickets to all the ceremonies ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... wreck, a chief mighty in stature and in power. In one of his villages was a pit, six feet deep and as wide as a hogshead, filled with treasure gathered from Spanish wrecks on adjacent reefs and keys. The monarch was a priest, too, and a magician, with power over the elements. Each year he withdrew from the public gaze to hold converse in secret with supernal or infernal powers; and each year he sacrificed to his gods one of the Spaniards whom the fortune of the sea had cast upon his shores. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... 'A Zingar wizard.' Cf. Lib. I. section 1. The Magician's name was Klingsohr. He has been introduced by Novalis into his novel of Heinrich Von Ofterdingen, as present at the famous contest of the Minnesingers on the ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... Jucklin, known to all his mates as "Hanky Panky" because of his skill as a magician; Josh Whitcomb, with a bit of the Yankee in his composition; ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow
... wonders which the amateurs of mystery in our age record as facts, a material living agency is always required. On the Continent you will find still magicians who assert that they can raise spirits. Assume for the moment that they assert truly, still the living material form of the magician is present; and he is the material agency by which from some constitutional peculiarities, certain strange phenomena are represented to ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... the West! All that wealth, all that power invest; Thou sprang like magic from the sand, As touched by the magician's wand. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... mental offspring of our illustrious countryman came healthy and vigorous into the world, and promise long to continue. To vary the metaphor—the tree of some other men's fancy bears fruit at the rate of a pint of apples to a peck of crabs; whereas the tree of the great magician bears the sweetest fruit—large and red-cheeked—fair to look upon, and right pleasant to the taste. I shall conclude with the words of Sir Walter, which no man can contradict, and which many can attest: "I never refused a literary person ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... was in the secret. Eve, like the thrifty housekeeper and divine magician that she was, conjured up a few louis d'or from her savings to buy thin shoes for Lucien of the best shoemaker in Angouleme, and an entirely new suit of clothes from the most renowned tailor. She made a frill for his best shirt, and washed and ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... stands Herod, lazy and voluptuous. He, too, finds nothing of evil in Jesus, whom he supposes to be a clever magician. "Cause that this hall may become dark," he says, "or that this roll of paper, which is thy sentence of death, shall become a serpent." He receives Christ in good-natured expectancy, which changes to disgust when he answers him not a word. Herod ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... The magician's wand in the fairy stories of olden days did not present results more bewildering in their changes than did the operations of the Spaniards in Peru. All accounts unite in praising the government of ancient Peru. There ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... decay and death, to another of sleep and rest, after toil, to prepare for a new and brighter awakening. All the glory of dawn and sunset is but etheric waves thrilling the vapory air and impinging on the optic nerve; but behind it all is the magician who sees and knows, who thinks and loves. "It is the mind that makes the body rich." Thoughts take shape and coloring from souls through which they pass; and a free and open mind looks upon the world in the mood in which a fair woman beholds herself in a mirror. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Again and again, I take the book down, and read, and my blood is fired as it used to be in youth. ANDANTE CON MOTO in the VOLUNTARIES, and the thing about the trees at night (No. XXIV. I think) are up to date my favourites. I did not guess you were so great a magician; these are new tunes, this is an undertone of the true Apollo; these are not verse, they are poetry - inventions, creations, in language. I thank you for the joy you have given me, and remain your old friend and ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and stronger and more sensitive than any other living human being, but that doesn't mean I have superhuman powers, or that I'm a magician. And I'm quite certain that you, Colonel, don't credit me with such abilities. You don't believe that I can do in a short time what the combined forces of the Government couldn't do in ten. Certainly you wouldn't rely too heavily ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... 0, great magician, may the life We lead be such a one as thine— A simple life, transcending art, A spirit close to Nature's heart, A soul as strong and ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... overhanging balconies and latticed windows, soaring tier after tier of fanciful architecture, a very mountain of airy and audacious beauty, through a thousand pierced screens and gilded arches. Aladdin's magician could have called into existence no more marvelous an abode, nor was the pearl and silver palace of the ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... New York City gets all the great artists, lecturers, and surely the great fakirs. The New York women support them. The men laugh, but they furnish the money. They take the women to the theaters, but they cut out the reception to a Polish princess, a lecture by an Indian magician and mystic, or a benefit luncheon for a Home for Friendless Cats. The truth is most of our young girls or brides have a wonderful enthusiasm worthy of a better cause. What is to become of their surplus energy, the bottled-lightning spirit so characteristic of modern ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... others lofty and grand as any cathedral; some pretty as women's dens, all decked with jewels and ornament of jasper and walls of the blackest jet. These things I saw; these rooms I passed through. A magician might have conjured them up; and yet he was no magician, but only Duncan Gray, the man I knew for the first time yesterday, but ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... Hiram. I thought so, and that's why I am here. I saw you on Wall Street to-day, and read your difficulty at once in your eyes, and I resolved to help you. I am a magician, and one or two little things have happened of late to make me wish to prestidigitate in public. I knew you were after a show of some kind, and I've come ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... Thy work is that of a noble magician; truly thou hast made thyself to be of our flesh; thou hast made thyself, and ...
— Rig Veda Americanus - Sacred Songs Of The Ancient Mexicans, With A Gloss In Nahuatl • Various
... in her prison to ask her to confide in him, when something happened which led him to fear that after all his dear son was not true to him. This was what made him uneasy. He had a wonderful arrow, set with precious jewels, which had been given to him by a magician, and had the power of hitting without fail whatever it was aimed at from however great a distance. The very day he had meant to visit his ill-treated wife, he missed this arrow from the place in which he kept it concealed. This distressed ...
— Hindu Tales from the Sanskrit • S. M. Mitra and Nancy Bell
... was like being with a magician or like watching a conjuror on the stage. You never knew what he was going to do next. Whatever he suddenly did was never surprising in the sense of being startling, for (this cannot be emphasised too much) nothing her father did was ever surprising to Rosalie; ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... simony takes its name from Simon the magician, of whom we read (Acts 8:18, 19) that "he offered the apostles money" that he might buy a spiritual power, in order, to wit, "that on whomsoever he imposed his hand they might receive the Holy Ghost." But we do not read that ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... go into these rages, but they do not do so much harm. They walk on all fours like beasts. Seeing this, the magician, called oqui, begins to sing; then, with some contortions of the face, he blows upon her, directing her to drink certain waters, and make at once a banquet of fish or flesh, which must be procured although very scarce at the time. When the ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... spread over the entire heavens and illuminated the distant mountains of Lower California. I have never seen anything like that wonderful color, which spread itself over sky, river and desert. For an hour, one could have believed oneself in a magician's realm. ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... just splendid! I have nothing to do but sit around and watch you set the hen and hatch out those big broods and make my living for me. Don't you wish you had somebody to do the same for you?—a magician who can turn steel add copper and Brooklyn gas into gold. I mean to raise your wages again—I begin to feel that I ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... we shall of course raise him, and invite him to cooperate in the business of photographing his own shining face. But we are not so sanguine as to expect that miracle, though almost as great wonders have been done by the power of this magician. But where is the "triple curse" with which, according to this authority, "that gravestone is weighted"? Quite another view of the inscription is given by Lord ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... long as that?" Blanche hugged herself to think that she had been so genuinely wrapped in dreams as to let so much time slip by unheeded. Together they went down the moonlit field, where the arishmows seemed like the pavilions of a long-dead Arthurian host conjured up by some magician's spells. In the last field before the moor Ishmael pulled the corn out lavishly as a throne for her ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Verse 11 leads us to suppose that Simon the magician was already famous in the time ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... the Magician who, with a wave of the hand, made all these to live and move before us. We know he must be there. We "cannot make him dead"; but he can make himself and us alive in the life of the past. A little door, with one shutter of Memory and one of Faith, opens before us, and he ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... him, bewildered. Sand, sand, sand, and nothing else. Then the truth flashed across his memory: the mirage! Towers and water were as unreal as the magician's money in the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments," which turned to paper in the drawer where it was. For the first time Harry was stricken with utter despair; without water, without food, alone in the trackless desert, ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... wise like your Highness's uncle, Khaemuas the mighty magician, whose sandals I used to clean when ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... perhaps not in the state in which we find them in the water, but that their germs or eggs are floating in the atmosphere. How full the air may be of these germs was first shown by Professor Tyndall, when he sent a ray of electric light through a dark chamber, and as if by a magician's wand revealed the multitudinous atomic beings which people the air. It is a beautiful thing to contemplate how one branch of scientific knowledge may assist another; and we would hardly have imagined that the beam of the electric ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... satellites in subordination to the planets, is the ordinance that subjects the negro race to the empire of the white man's will. From that ordinance the snake derives its power to charm the bird, and the magician his power to amuse the curious, to astonish the vulgar, and to confound the wisdom of the wise. Under that ordinance, our four millions of negroes are as unalterably bound to obey the white man's will, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... to discover the secret, not of an elixir to make man's natural life immortal, but of giving immortality to the subtlest and most delicate effects of painting, he seemed to them rather the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the key. What his philosophy seems to have been most like is that of Paracelsus or Cardan; and much of the spirit of the older alchemy still hangs about it, with its confidence ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... sublated by the waking consciousness. Nobody thinks 'the cognitions of which I was conscious in my dream are unreal'; what men actually think is 'the cognitions are real, but the things are not real.' In the same way the illusive state of consciousness which the magician produces in the minds of other men by means of mantras, drugs, &c., is true, and hence the cause of love and fear; for such states of consciousness also are not sublated. The cognition which, owing to some defect in the object, the sense organ, &c., apprehends a ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut |
