"Mystic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... babbles prettily of green fields, but it is a long, long summer and one is hardly sorry to see its close. In some of his writings he affects one unpleasantly, gives an uncanny feeling; one divines the invalid as well as the mystic back of them; there is a hectic flush, perhaps a neurotic taint. Beautiful, yes, but not the beauty of health and sanity. It is the same indescribable feeling I get in reading that pathetically beautiful book, "The Road-Mender," by "Michael Fairless"—the gleam ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... with fear, the young poet found fresh meanings in Petrarch's sonnets. He had now seen Laura, a delicate, delightful figure, pure and glowing like a sunray, intelligent as an angel, feeble as a woman. His twenty years of study found their meaning, he understood the mystic marriage of all beauties; he perceived how much of womanhood there was in the poems he adored; in short, he had so long loved unconsciously that his whole past now blended with the emotions of this glorious night. Gabrielle's resemblance ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... What treasures were then to be picked up by such a man—for Wicar died not long after the Revolution of July 1830! Where he found his Masaccios, Robert Browning told me that he knew; but where did he find that incomparable bust in wax which charms with all the mystic feminine grace and more than all the feminine beauty of the Mona Lisa? Possibly M. Carolus Duran may be able to throw light upon this; for he was one of the earliest beneficiaries who profited by the fund which the Chevalier Wicar founded for the purpose, as he says ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... never recollects these taboo days, wherever one may be, till one's pulled up short by them in the course of one's travels. Now, what on earth am I to do? A box, it seems, is the Open, Sesame of the situation. Some mystic value is attached to it as a moral amulet. I don't believe that excellent Miss Blake would consent to take me in for a second night without the guarantee of ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... when the child was born he seemed nothing but skin and bone and fixed idea. She watched him dying, nursed him, nursed the baby, but really took no notice of anything. A darkness was on her, like remorse, or like a remembering of the dark, savage, mystic ride of dread, of death, of the shadow of revenge. When her husband died, she was relieved. He would no longer dart ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... a quiet life. But in that moment of bodily weakness and mental confusion I was shaken with a longing to follow them, to find what lay beyond the farthest cloud-topped mountain, to cross the wide rivers, and haply to come to the infinite and mystic Ocean of the West. ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... fallen in the morning and falling again at night only to fall again the next day. I am cold now as I speak to you of that cavern without an opening, cold, sombre, in which I lived. I, poor little thing that I was! brought up in a convent like a mystic rose, knowing nothing of marriage, developing late, I was happy at first; I enjoyed the goodwill and harmony of our family. The birth of my poor boy, who is all me—you must have been struck by the likeness? my hair, ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... perhaps, interest MR. SANSOM to be informed that the appearance described to him is mentioned as a known fact in one of the works of the celebrated mystic, Jacob Behmen, The Three Principles, chap. 19. "Of the going forth of the Soul." I extract from J. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various
... not see how it could be destroyed, because the believers of it, invariably, believe it to be established on such mysterious supernatural principles; and I expect but very few, comparatively, will ever have sufficient strength of mind to throw off the mystic veil. ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... of Mystic Regions Where souls of artists are fitted for birth Gathered together their lovely legions And fashioned a woman to shine on earth. They bathed her in splendour, They made her tender, They gave her a nature both sweet and wild; They gave her emotions ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and the opening-up of the Western hemisphere made it possible for the poor to escape from European masters whom they were unable to vanquish; and that the cheapness of books was linking the minds of the masses to the sources of learning and of religious tradition. It cannot but excite our mystic wonder that for nearly one hundred thousand years every new mastery of man over physical Nature was such that it inevitably played into the hands of rulers by strengthening their monopoly of initiative; ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... The first verse of the chorus of the Spirits of the Old Manse should be sung off stage in the indoor production. The stage should be darkened: footlights low. With the next verse the spirits enter, four from right, and four from left, mystic, half-seen figures. As they enter the lights gradually begin to come up, until with the middle of the second verse there is full strong daylight. If the eight voices are not enough a hidden augmented chorus can be behind the scenes. If the ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... reasonable caution and conventional distrust began to give way a little under the priest's magnetic voice, his flaming eyes, his positive and triumphant certainty of truth. He burned with his inspiration, and she felt herself powerless to oppose any argument founded on facts against the mystic enthusiasm of such religious faith. His honesty and fervor could not, however, abate Mary's acute fear. Her father had entirely gone over to the side of the devotee ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... temperament was aroused by his personality; and she did not forget she had a living to earn; but still her chief concern was his satisfaction, not her own, and her overmastering sentiment one of dutiful, nay religious, surrender. French gratitude of the English fighter, and a mystic, fearful allegiance to the very clement Virgin—these things ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... Renewed such legendary strain; For thou hast sung how he of Gaul, That Amadis so famed in hall, For Oriana foiled in fight The necromancer's felon might; And well in modern verse hast wove Partenopex's mystic love: Hear, then, attentive to my lay, A knightly tale of ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... divisions, based upon the kind of thoughts associated with them. These divisions may be designated as significant and non-significant, the term significant referring not to the mere identification of a device with an original form or to its office as an ornament, but to its symbolism, to its mystic relation with the vessel and its uses. But I have to do here with the forms taken by motives, with their morphology rather than with their signification, as the latter must, with reference to archaeologic material, ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... his brother Ivan was in his twenty-fourth year at the time, while their elder brother Dmitri was twenty-seven. First of all, I must explain that this young man, Alyosha, was not a fanatic, and, in my opinion at least, was not even a mystic. I may as well give my full opinion from the beginning. He was simply an early lover of humanity, and that he adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... car. Up sprang the rude gods of the North and the resuscitated Druidism, passing from its earliest templeless belief into the later corruptions of crommell and idol. Up sprang, by their side, the Saturn of the Phoenicians, the mystic Budh of India, the elementary deities of the Pelasgian, the Naith and Serapis of Egypt, the Ormuzd of Persia, the Bel of Babylon, the winged genii of the graceful Etruria. How nature and life shaped the religion; how the religion ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and dialectical power, the Philebus falls very far short of the Republic in fancy and feeling. The development of the reason undisturbed by the emotions seems to be the ideal at which Plato aims in his later dialogues. There is no mystic enthusiasm or rapturous contemplation of ideas. Whether we attribute this change to the greater feebleness of age, or to the development of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry in Plato's own mind, or perhaps, in some degree, to a carelessness about artistic effect, when he was absorbed in ...
— Philebus • Plato
... printed in black letter with red capitals, that had been used to line the binding. A corner of it had crept out, through the injuries of time, and on that, in Bell's "crame" (for it is more a crame than a shop), I had caught the mystic words Runjt macht Gunjt. ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... support. He is a realist with too romantic a sense, perhaps, of the mystery which surrounds existence to pry into it. And, like modern civilisation itself, he is the creature of West and North, of atmospheres, climates, manners of life which foster neither inertia, reverence, nor mystic meditation. Essentially man of action, in ideal action he finds his only true comfort; and no attempts to discover for him new gods and symbols will divert him from the path made for him by the whole ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... history of the church of Christ in the United States without giving honor to the body which for so long a time and over so vast an area bore the name and testimony of Jesus almost alone; and no man can read the journeys and labors of John Woolman, mystic and ascetic saint, without recognizing that he and others like-minded were nothing less than true apostles of the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... dark hours men struggled under the drenching showers of bitter spray. When dawn broke, throwing a pale mystic light over the acre-wide Atlantic swell, each one knew that life depended on the coming of a ship before the light of day ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... translation of these mystic chants I offer it with the utmost reserve. It would be the height of temerity in me to pretend to have overcome difficulties which one so familiar with the ancient Nahuatl as Father Sahagun intimated were beyond his powers. All that I hope to have achieved is, by the aid ...
— Rig Veda Americanus - Sacred Songs Of The Ancient Mexicans, With A Gloss In Nahuatl • Various
... in respect of their dramatic culture, seem more like one who enjoys Shakspeare in the closet; the Greeks, like those who are tolled off to the theatre to see him acted. The Greeks would have contrived a pair of bellows to represent the whirlwind; mystic, vast, inaudible, it passes before the imagination of the Jew, and its office is done. The Jew would be shocked to see his God in a human form; such a thing pleased the Greek. The source of the difference is to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Jones. "I shouldn't have vaunted my poor French. But must I really take my little friends all the way back? You suggested to the mystic voice within that I might be ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense for three weeks that he remained there, 'fluttering the proud Salopians like an eagle in a dove-cote'; and the Welsh mountains that skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have heard no such mystic sounds since ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... in the green fields where the purple fritillaries, so reminiscent of the lotus, blossom in the early spring. In the curious formal pattern of their petals I see a symbol of the Oxford manner—something archaic, rigid, severe. The Oxford Don may well be a reversion to some earlier type, learned, mystic, and romantic as those priests of whom Herodotus has given us so vivid a picture. The worship of Apis, as Mr. Frazer or Mr. Lang would tell us, becomes then merely the hieroglyph for a social standard, a manner of life. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... beyond which is the retro-choir, or so-called Lady Chapel. The nave and choir have aisles, but the transepts have not. While strict orientation has been secured in the main building, it will be noticed that the chancel is slightly deflected towards the south, in supposed mystic allusion to the drooping head of the Saviour upon the Cross, a piece of symbolism very frequent in Gothic churches, and here rendered peculiarly appropriate ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... Among this class of customers there was still a demand for certain comfortable little nostrums (delicately sweet and pungent to the taste, cheering to the spirits, and fragrant in the breath), the proper distillation of which was the airiest secret that the mystic Swinnerton had left behind him. And, besides, these old ladies had always liked the manners of Dr. Dolliver, and used to speak of his gentle courtesy behind the counter as having positively been something to admire; ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thrill when the dying sunset glows Through the heart of a mystic wood, To drink the sweetness of some wild rose, And to find the whole ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... had gradually been eliminating the Neo-Platonic, mystic element, and returning to pure Aristotelianism. In Averroes, who professed to be merely a commentator on Aristotle, this tendency reached its climax; and though he still regarded the pseudo-Aristotelian works as genuine, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... anise and the rest; but he also employed certain mineral remedies, which he almost always indicates by their ancient symbols, or by a name which should leave them a mystery to the vulgar. I am now prepared to reveal the mystic secrets of the Governor's beneficent art, which rendered so many good and great as well as so many poor and dependent people his debtors,—at least, in their simple belief,—for their health ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... man. Strong, massive, not at all elegant; he stands there, firm and resolute, on his own legs, grasping a Bible in a muscular hand. There is plenty of animalism—a source of power as well as of weakness—in the thick neck; an iron will in the square chin; eloquence on the full, loose lips; a mystic, dreamy tenderness and sadness in the steadfast eyes— altogether a true king and a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... a sign," Nance nodded. "I found, up in Mystic Canyon this afternoon, all that was left of a deer. The lions had killed it and stripped all the best flesh from the deer. So it's plain enough that the cats are hanging around. I thought we'd come up with some ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... some persons "supposed" to be made of "sweet almond oil," and by others to be a mystic combination of sweet and bitter almonds, ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... the good Old Year Before his death-hour struck; and on the night When he, on twelve's last stroke must pass away, Room making for his heir, great PUNCHIUS-MERLIN Left the Old King, and passing forth to breathe, Then from the mystic gateway by the chasm Descending through the wintry night—a night In which the bounds of year and year were blent— Beheld, so high upon the wave-tost deep It seemed in heaven, a light, the shape thereof An angel winged, and all from head to feet Bright with a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... tangible charm of the sense-apprehended, that life for him became life. Rodney attained to his real by looking through the manifold veils of the phenomenal, as through so much glass; Peter to his by an adoring delight in their complex loveliness. He was not a symbolist; he had no love of mystic hints and mist-veiled distances; he ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... the mystic Book of Changes, that is to say, the eight changes or combinations which can be produced by a line and a broken line, either one of which is repeated twice with the other, or three times ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... coupling his name with Saturday articles. On the other hand, I distinctly recall having to wait one day in his chambers while Jimmy was shaving, and noticing accidentally a long, bulky envelope on his table, with the Saturday Review's mystic crest on it. It was addressed to Jimmy, and contained, I concluded, a bundle of proofs. That was so long ago as 1885. If further evidence is required, there is the undoubted fact, to which several of us could take oath, that, at Oxford, Jimmy was notorious ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... swimming naked in the bath, or motionless on his back lying and floating, The female form approaching, I pensive, love-flesh tremulous aching, The divine list for myself or you or for any one making, The face, the limbs, the index from head to foot, and what it arouses, The mystic deliria, the madness amorous, the utter abandonment, (Hark close and still what I now whisper to you, I love you, O you entirely possess me, O that you and I escape from the rest and go utterly off, free ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... faintly illuminated a cloudless, serene heaven, and a foaming, plunging ocean. The slender, dark outlines of the sailless upper masts were leaning sharply over to leeward, and describing what seemed like mystic circles and figures against the lighter sky. The crests of seas showed with ghostly whiteness as they howled themselves to death near by, or dashed with a jar and a hoarse whistle over the bulwarks, slapping against the sails and pounding upon the decks. The waves which ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Greeks playing newsboy right here in the mysterious land where the giants and genii of the Arabian Nights once dwelt—where winged horses and hydra-headed dragons guarded enchanted castles—where Princes and Princesses flew through the air on carpets that obeyed a mystic talisman—where cities whose houses were made of precious stones sprang up in a night under the hand of the magician, and where busy marts were suddenly stricken with a spell and each citizen lay or sat, or stood with weapon raised or foot advanced, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this geographical limitation was always important and was one cause of the spread of the decentralized and democratic Baptist faith among the slaves. At the same time, the visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their mystic temperament. To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in membership among Negroes, and has a million and a half communicants. Next in popularity came the churches organized in connection with the white neighboring ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... her excitement, and stood upon her feet. Suddenly she flushed a rosy red, and a strange light shone in her eyes. The sun had sunk behind the hills, and it had grown dark. As the shadows gathered in the room a strange, mystic light fell on the wall before her. A picture—dim, ghostly, gigantic, and surpassingly beautiful—met her astonished eyes. She gazed at it with a beating heart, awed into silence by its mystery and its unearthly ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... a third argues that he is really a disguised romanticist. This debate is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, but out of it has come a valuation by Lawrence Gilman[29] which perhaps strikes very close to the truth. He is, says Mr. Gilman, "a sentimental mystic who employs the mimetic gestures of the realist." This judgment is apt in particular and sound in general. No such thing as a pure method is possible in the novel. Plain realism, as in Gorky's "Nachtasyl" and the war stories of Ambrose Bierce, simply wearies us by its vacuity; ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... refused him the title of federalist considered himself to be mortally insulted. People addressed each other in the streets with the words: 'Long live the federal republic!' After which the praises were sung of the mystic virtue of the absence of discipline in the army, and of the autonomy of the soldiers. What was understood by the 'federal republic?' There were those who took it to mean the emancipation of the provinces, institutions ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... three or four days since the papers had reported the strange kidnapping of Gennaro's five-year-old daughter Adelina, his only child, and the sending of a demand for ten thousand dollars ransom, signed, as usual, with the mystic Black Hand—a name to conjure ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... thousand harps attune the mystic throng, Ten thousand thousand saints the strain prolong. 'Worthy the Lamb, omnipotent to save! Who died, Who ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the dismal and yet, in his hands, the impressive scenery of his native salt-marshes. His method of description suits the country. His verses never become melodramatic, nor does he ever seem to invest nature with the mystic life of Wordsworth's poetry. He gives the plain prosaic facts which impress us because they are in such perfect harmony with the sentiment. Here, for example, is a fragment from the 'Village,' which is simply a description ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... awful other world ... over which, this time-world, with its Florences and banishments, flutters as an unreal shadow." Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into "mystic unfathomable song," and this, his "DIVINE COMEDY" (q. v.), the most remarkable of all modern Books, is the result. He died after finishing it, not yet very old, at the age of 56. He lies buried in his death-city Ravenna, "shutout from my native shores." The Florentines begged back his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... day in India. Carried away by a spirit of innovation, anxious to keep himself prominently before the world, and realising no doubt that since churches and sects do not flourish on intellectual pabulum only, certain mystic rites and gorgeous ceremonials were necessary to the success of the new Dispensation, Keshub introduced into his Church various observances which attracted a good deal of attention and did not escape criticism. On one occasion he went with his disciples in procession, singing ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... in ten minutes I had recouped my losses and won $20,000 besides," Karl cried with growing enthusiasm. "I remember indeed. Your money seemed to possess mystic luck. When you put it in my hands it glowed, and I thought it was hot. It seemed ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... c. 15. But such pantheistic language is common in Orphic and other mystic literature. See the fragments of the Orphic Diathekai (pp. 144 ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... would mean rather more climbing than I had bargained for. But the pines—the grim silence of their slender frames and gently swaying summits—fascinated me. They spoke of possibilities few could see or appreciate as I could; possibilities of a sylvan phantasmagoria enhanced by the soft and mystic radiance of the moon. An owl hooted, and the rustling of brushwood told me of the near proximity of some fur-coated burrower in the ground. High above this animal life, remoter even than the tops of my beloved trees ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... winds the emotions roused in me by the sight and thoughts of the Grass, much as LvB took a mistaken idealization of his youth as a startingpoint for Opus 55; but just as no man is an island, so no theme stands alone. There is a cord binding the lesser to the greater; a mystic union between all things. The Grass is not an entity, but an aspect. I thought I was writing about my country, conceived of myself in a reversed snobbishness, a haughty humility, a proud abasement, as a sort of superior Smetana. (Did you know that as a boy I dreamed of the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... more at ease than ever. Turning about he put his back against the rail comfortably. "All this fits with marvellous aptness," he continued to think. "The brilliance of my reputed exploit is no longer darkened by the fate of my supposed colleague. The mystic Ziemianitch accounts for that. An incredible chance has served me. No more need of lies. I shall have only to listen and to keep my scorn from getting the upper hand ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... had temporarily deprived himself of his virility by an application of hemlock. The torches having been extinguished, the pair descended into a murky place, while the throng of worshippers awaited in anxious suspense the result of the mystic congress, on which they believed their own salvation to depend. After a time the hierophant reappeared, and in a blaze of light silently exhibited to the assembly a reaped ear of corn, the fruit ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... judgment as emissaries of Satan. It necessarily follows that, for him, the attainment of faith, not the ascertainment of truth, is the highest aim of mental life. And, on careful analysis of the nature of this faith, it will too often be found to be, not the mystic process of unity with the Divine, understood by the religious enthusiast; but that which the candid simplicity of a Sunday scholar once defined it to be. "Faith," said this unconscious plagiarist of Tertullian, "is the power of saying you believe ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... aside ground for their convent, and they first erected an altar and celebrated Mass. Pere Dolbeau was the officiating priest. The people, most of whom came from curiosity, knelt around on the earth, while cannon from the ramparts announced the mystic services. The Giffards joined in them reverentially, but Rose was full of wonderment. Indeed, her joy was so great at seeing Destournier again that she could give ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... it seems to me; for not otherwise can I explain the fact that, like my beloved R.L.S., I have always enjoyed waiting at railway junctions. I love not merely the marching phrases, but also the commas and the semi-colons of a journey,—those mystic moments when "we look before and after" and need not "pine for what is not." I have never done much waiting in America, which is in the main a country of express trains, that hurl their lighted windows through the night like what Mr. Kipling calls "a ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... has justly been praised, for its serious and penetrating quality as an historical study of the great mystic and great man of science, who had realised, before most people, that "matter is the visible body of the invisible God," and who had been the Luther of medicine. But the historical element is less important than ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... white Christmas Eve, Thor's priests held their winter rites beneath the Thunder Oak. Through the deep snow of the dense forest hastened throngs of heathen folk, all intent on keeping the mystic feast of the mighty Thor. In the hush of the night the folk gathered in the glade where stood the tree. Closely they pressed around the great altar-stone under the overhanging boughs where stood the white-robed priests. Clearly ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... fairy prince than ever in knickerbockers. Whenever Narcissus turned his gleaming spokes along some mapped, but none the less mysterious, county—road, he thought of Lohengrin in his barge drawn by white swans to his mystic tryst; he thought of the seven-leagued boots, the flying carpet, the wishing-cap, and the wooden Pegasus,—so called because it mounted into the clouds on the turning of a peg. As he passed along by mead and glade, his wheel ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... was quartered in the Pavilion of Flora, led the life of an anchorite, with all the modesty and piety of an old monk, fasting every day as in his convent, and edifying even the impious by the nimbus that shone around his pale and mystic face. It was impossible to approach this worthy Vicar of Christ without a filial feeling of tenderness. The crimes of the French Revolution—the massacre or the execution of the priests, the profanation ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... certain John Wesley that the spirits had made known to him Wesley's desire to meet him, and that he would be glad to receive a visit at any time. In reply came word that the great evangelist had indeed wished to make the great mystic's acquaintance, and that after returning from a six months' circuit he would give himself the pleasure of waiting upon Swedenborg. "Too late," was the aged philosopher's comment as the story goes, "too late; for on the 29th of March I shall be in the world ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... a great and burning seal of love Like a dark rose, a mystery of rest On the slow bubbling of your rhythmic heart. Nay, I persist, and very faith shall keep You integral to me. Each door, each mystic port Of egress from you I will seal and ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... street front is devoted to the reception and departure of the mails. The street is generally filled with wagons bearing the mystic words, "U.S. Mail." Some are single-horse vehicles, used for carrying the bags between the main office and the numerous stations scattered through the city; others are immense wagons, drawn by four and six ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... the lesson, I think, of what we call folklore or anthropology, which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull. It may become the most attractive and serious of the sciences; certainly it is rich in strange curiosities, like those mystic stones which were fingered and arrayed by the pupils in that allegory of Novalis. I am not likely to regret the accident which brought me up on fairy tales, and the inquisitiveness which led me to examine the other fragments of antiquity. ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... for ambition's strife, Some to love's banquet hurrying on, Like pilgrims on the hills of life We cross each other, and are gone. But though our lives are little drops, Welled from the infinite fount above, Our deaths are but the mystic stops In the great melody ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... being called Life in Death. This personage crosses the oceans of the world in pursuit of a living skeleton called Death in Life—I recollect at the time very few people, among the guests of a certain elegant translator of English poetry, understood the mystic meaning of a fable as true as it was fanciful. Myself alone, perhaps, as I sat buried in silence, thought of the whole generations which as they were hurried along by life, passed on their way without living. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... that men through all the ages have sought fools and charlatans to tell their fortunes, when a little wine is clearer than the most mystic ball of crystal. Before the bottle the priests of Egypt and the Delphic oracle seem as faint, my son, as the echoes in a snail shell. Palmistry and astrology—let us fling them into the whirlpool of vanity! But give a man wine enough, and any observer can tell his possibilities. A touch of it—and ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... dark corners shouting with laughter. They talked about adventures in the cave, to them of course the great phenomenon of the whole world; but it did not seem, as far as we could hear, that they associated with it any recollections of the old Aztec divinities and the mystic rites performed ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... adequate education similar to that which he had enjoyed in his own native country. For James McGill seems to have been a combination of the practical Scottish business man and the dreaming Scottish mystic. Like the other early Canadian pioneers of his race he was a hard-fisted man battling by necessity in a hard-fisted new world, but he kept in that new world the spiritual vision born of Scottish glens and mists and hills. He worked like ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... statement I feel it is impossible to say more than to quote the opinion of a modern mystic to whom I submitted the original; which was to the effect that it contains a little nonsense, a good deal of truth, and a not intolerable admixture of superstition. He added further that Sir John must not be judged hardly; for he was limited by an inadequate vocabulary and an ignorance ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... cheat my brain with airy vanishings And mystic glories of the world beyond. A whole enchanted town ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... and beyond that ridge, and only some ten miles distant, the white towers and buildings of Panama nestling beside a river which discharged into its harbour, the harbour itself dotted with a few ships, and beyond it again the great, boundless, mystic Southern Sea, at the sight of which George and his crew, like the pious Christian mariners that they were, incontinently fell upon their knees and gave God thanks, vowing at the same time that by His grace ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... Greeks, of all ages and of both sexes. The men flourished torches, and were shouting a song with unbridled vehemence; the women, wearing garlands, kept up with them. What they carried in the baskets on their heads could not be seen, nor did Alexander know; for so many religious brotherhoods and mystic societies existed here that it was impossible to guess to which this ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... members, but it is of a much commoner and less striking type than either of the above, consisting only of a solemn and impressive strain of dirge-like music, which is heard apparently floating in the air three days before the death takes place. Our member, having himself twice heard this mystic sound, finding its warning in both cases quite accurate, and knowing also that according to family tradition the same thing had been happening for several centuries, set himself to seek by occult methods for the cause underlying so strange a phenomenon. The result ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... and mine become a series of concatenated influences and compound reflexes. Play with words like the concentration reflex when you mean idea, and the symbolic reflex when you mean language. But your most rigid nomenclature will never abolish the mystic personal purpose in the equation, no matter how low the step in the animal series to which you descend. The declaration that a man is dominated by certain glands within his body should not be taken to ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... "To this mystic pool herdsman and monarchs alike receive summons and admission. The most Christian King must, for his own sake, accomplish his own sanctification; his sanctification provides ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and beautiful abbey. Many pilgrims there were who came to worship at the shrine of St. Joseph; to drink from the holy well which sprang from the foot of Chalice Hill where the Holy Cup lay buried; and to watch the budding of the mystic thorn, which, year after year, when the snows of Christmas covered the hills, put forth its holy blossoms, "a symbol of God's promise, ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... long ends streaming downwards, with the light airiness of morning. Her chaplet, wound about her right arm, had beads of a milky whiteness, whilst the links and the cross were of gold. And on her bare feet, on her adorable feet of virgin snow, flowered two golden roses, the mystic roses of this divine ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... but no writer of any standing would dream of building up a theory of violence in vindication of a claim to culture. It may be said, in fact, that the leaders of Russian public opinion are pacific, cosmopolitan, and humanitarian to a fault. The mystic philosopher Vladimir Solovieff used to dream of the union of the churches with the Pope as the spiritual head, and democracy in the Russian sense as the broad basis of the rejuvenated Christendom. Dostoyevsky, a writer most sensitive to the ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... understanded of the people. Man faced his God and his fate without any intervention of Pope or priest. Even the very earth beneath his feet began to move. Instead of a universe with dimensions known and circumscribed with Dantesque minuteness, the mystic glow of the unknown had settled down on the whole face of Nature, who offered her secrets to the first comer. No wonder the Elizabethans were filled with an exulting sense of man's capabilities, when they had all these realms of ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... as grandmothers that our mothers come into the fullness of their grace. When a man's mother holds his child in her gladdened arms he is aware (with some instinctive sense of propriety) of the roundness of life's cycle; of the mystic harmony of life's ways. There speaks humanity in its chord of three notes: its little capture of completeness and joy, sounding for a moment against the silent flux of time. Then the perfect span is shredded away and is ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Trismegistus, counsellor of Osiris, King of Egypt, was credited with the invention of writing and hieroglyphics, the drawing up of the laws of the Egyptians, and the origination of many sciences and arts. The Alexandrian school ascribed to him the mystic learning which it amplified; and the scholars of the Middle Ages regarded with enthusiasm and reverence the works attributed to him — notably a treatise on the ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... work upon the earth, -not as upon the waters of infidelity, by preaching and speaking by miracles, and Sacraments, and mystic words; wherein ignorance, the mother of admiration, might be intent upon them, out of a reverence towards those secret signs. For such is the entrance unto the Faith for the sons of Adam forgetful of Thee, while they hide themselves from ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... from its confines as his own family generation had broken from that forest, and sought a larger hemisphere; yet, wherever the mystic Hat proceeded, his truant fancy had also been led by his ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... clouds seventy miles away. No Western visitor whom I took to Abiko failed to be moved by that room, designed by Yanagi himself in every detail, wherein East meets West in harmony. I have made note of his Western books but not of the classics and strange mystic writings of Chinese and Korean priests in piles of thin volumes in soft bindings of blue or brown. I have not mentioned a Rembrandt drawing and next to it the vigorous but restful brush lines of an artist priest of the century that brought Buddhism to Japan; ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... insane would deserve a special study, that would be lengthy, because there is no form of imagination that insanity has not adopted. In no period have insane creations been lacking in the practical, religious, or mystic life, in poetry, the fine arts, and in the sciences; in industrial, commercial, mechanical, military projects, and in plans for social and political reform. We should, then, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... rightly, they hold that just as in dreams the unconscious self gets possession of one's personality and the consciousness is for a certain time deposed or exiled, the same thing may happen, and does happen in our waking hours. Therefore isolement must not be regarded as anything wonderful or mystic, but merely as a day-dream. I admit that this seems at first sight a plausible explanation. Yet I can say with Gibbon, "this statement ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... black cliffs had become visible—surely some spur of the Iron Mountains, making to southward at the eastern edge of the plain. This line of crags faded, in remote distance, into the brown vapors that ringed the mystic horizon. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... dance is determined by the Snake Priest, and announced from the housetops nine days before it takes place. The underground "kivas" are filled with the various secret orders, corresponding to our lodges, going through their mystic ceremonies. From the top of the ladder that extends above the kiva opening, a bunch of turkey feathers hung, notifying outsiders that lodge was in session and that no ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... an open field and alight near a rock-strewn hill. Candles are given us and we grope our way through narrow passages till we come to the centre of the hill. Here is a chamber some twenty feet in height. On the great stones which support the roof are mystic emblems. On the floor is a large stone hollowed out in the shape of a bowl. It suggests human sacrifices. My guide did not encourage this suggestion. There was, he thought, no historical evidence for it. But it seemed to me that ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... silvery beams, while closer at hand broad, irregular wastes of blackness sailed over the dry plateau as the clouds that caused them drifted across the dazzling face. Harsh and unlovely as were the surroundings by day, they lost something of their asperity under the softening shimmer of that mystic light. Far down by the stables she could hear the ringing watch-call of the sentries proclaiming half-past twelve o'clock and all well, and then—and then as a cloud floated away and the bright beams poured down in unhindered radiance, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... long silence. Julius von Hartrott appeared lost in reverie. The very thought of the accumulated strength of his race submerged him in a species of mystic adoration. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... seeming block of stone, was a figure, with elbows, as it were glued to its sides, and hands crossed, altogether stone-coloured and monumental, and with the true Sphynx head, surrounded with beetles, lizards, and other mystic creatures (very chocolate-coloured). And beside her stood the Herr Professor, in a red fez, long dark gown, and spectacles, a flowing beard concealing the rest of his face. How delightful to see such an Egyptologist! Even though one perfectly knew the ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the world with no {pou sto} but his own two feet, and no lever but his own long forecast. A strange hybrid, indeed, did circumstance beget, here in the New World, upon the old Puritan stock, and the earth never before saw such mystic-practicalism, such niggard-geniality, such calculating-fanaticism, such cast-iron-enthusiasm, such unwilling humour, such close-fisted-generosity. This new Graeculus esuriens will make a living out of any thing. He will invent new trades as well as tools. His brain is his capital, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... if we go to sleep each day before the cells are entirely depleted. That is the significance of the old teaching that sleep before midnight is more efficacious than sleep after midnight. It is not that there is any mystic virtue in the hours before twelve, but that in the early part of the evening the cells are not so nearly exhausted as they are later in the evening, and it is much easier to repair them in the partially exhausted stage than it is in the completely exhausted stage. For this reason, ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... Mah[a]y[a]na, or Greater Vehicle, and the Hin[a]y[a]na, as it is somewhat contemptuously styled, or Lesser Vehicle. The latter was the nearer of the two to the Buddhism of Sh[a]kyamuni, and exhibits rather the mystic and esoteric sides of the faith. The former, which spread northwards and on to Nepaul, Tibet, China, Mongolia and Japan, leaving southern India, Burma and Siam to its rival, began early to lean towards the deification of Buddha as a personal Saviour. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... spirit; so that the “U.S.” (abbreviation of United States) which he pencilled on all provisions that had passed his inspection became in the eyes of officers and soldiers a guarantee of excellence. Samuel’s old friends, the boys of Troy (now enlisted in the army), naïvely imagining that the mystic initials were an allusion to the pet name they had given him years before, would accept no meats but “Uncle Sam’s,” murmuring if other viands were offered them. Their comrades without inquiry followed this example; until so strong ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to be able to read another's thoughts it is necessary there should be a mystic relation established between them. As I walked beside your horse when you carried my daughter before you after saving her life, I felt that this relation had commenced, and that henceforward our fates were connected. It was necessary that you should have confidence in me, and it was ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty |
