"Rapture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from south and by east. We hailed its appearance with shouts of joy, and rested on the spot to enjoy the view. I likened it to the Mississippi as it appears before the impetuous, full-volumed Missouri pours its rusty brown water into it. A secret rapture filled my soul as I gazed upon the majestic stream. The great mystery that for all these centuries Nature had kept hidden away from the world of science was waiting to be solved. For two hundred and twenty miles I had ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... and he, at any rate, on that occasion was a happy lover. For a few minutes,—perhaps for an hour,—he did allow himself to believe that he was destined to enjoy that rapture of requited affection, in longing for which his very soul had become sick. As she walked back with him to the vicarage her hand rested heavily on his arm, and when she asked him some question about ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... renown as a singer as Handel in his as a composer, with the difference—which is in Frau Lind's favor to boot—that Handel's works weary many people and do not always succeed in filling the coffers, whereas the mere appearance of Frau Lind secures the utmost rapture of the public, as well as that of the cashier. If, therefore, we place the affairs of the Musical Festival simply on the satisfying and commercial debit and credit basis, certainly no artist, and still less any work of Art, could venture ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... thrilling and magnificent," says one officer, "and I was filled with rapture at the spectacle of the first fight in the clouds. The German maneuvered for position and prepared to attack, but our fellow was too quick for him, and darted into a higher plane. The German tried to circle round and follow, and so in short spurts they fought for mastery, firing ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... of its changeful sky— What rainbows of rapture floated by! Of a mother's love, that no words could speak When parting the ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... what this love may be That cometh to all but not to me. It cannot be kind as they'd imply, Or why do these gentle ladies sigh? It cannot be joy and rapture deep, Or why do these gentle ladies weep? It cannot be blissful, as 'tis said, Or why are their eyes ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... her voice gathered strength, and then poured full volume to the end, where it weakened again. He knew that she was taking refuge from him in the song, and in the magic of her voice he escaped from the disappointment he had been suffering. He let his head drop and his eyelids fall, and in the rapture of her singing he got back what he had lost; or rather, he lost himself again to the illusion which had ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... judge from what they said, they belonged no longer to this world; all their thoughts were in heaven, and they considered themselves either on the borders of eternity or on the eve of the day of the Last Judgment. The truly devout Madame Napoleon spoke with rapture of martyrs and miracles, of the Mass and of the vespers, of Agnuses and relics of Christ her Saviour, and of Pius VII., His vicar. Had not her enthusiasm been interrupted by the enthusiastic commentaries of her mother-in-law, I saw every mouth open ready to cry out, as ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... for it is not cruel in me to say so, as had you loved him you would have wed, and had he lived he would have eaten his heart out in loneliness, for I have been told he loved you. Say on, my own, though I care not to know, save that you wish to speak. I am in a perfect rapture of bliss, and shall listen, if only to hear your voice, the sweetest ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... disturbed by the extreme loquacity of two opposite parties: and listening attentively, they heard from one side, "My angel! fairest of creatures! goddess of my heart!" uttered in accents of rapture; while from the other, the vociferation was so violent ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... Love to touch them, for the nestling lips To trouble them as a warm lifting wind Murmurs between two swelled and ripening grapes Whispering of future wines of mad delight. Ah, let me learn of this! A rapture fills My limbs, and in my womb there stirs a craving For life ... life! Oh, wonderful, the vision that glows About me in such radiance, the light, the strife Of music, hue and perfume of the rose. Oh garden of desire, where one awaits My coming with the sudden ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... affected by the spectacular incidents of warfare nor by the grandeur of the natural scenes through which he passed. The reason may be that his intellect was absorbed in the contemplation of men and motives, of means and ends. We cannot conceive of his ever having been carried out of himself by the rapture of inspiration. Such clearness of mental perception is naturally accompanied by a certain coolness of temperament. A man of superlative greatness must live more or less alone among his fellows. With his immense grasp of the relations of things in the world, Caesar cannot have ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... go to a concert as a conductor with a single musical friend. By conductor I do not mean escort, but a magnetic conductor, rapture conductor, a fit medium through which to convey away his delight, so that he shall not become surcharged and explode. He does not take you for your pleasure, nor for his own, but for use. He desires some one to whom he can from time to time express his opinions and his enthusiasm, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... undesigned, but all the more spontaneous and authentic, biography of a very rare spirit. It contains the record of a short life, into which was crowded far more of keen experience and high aspiration—of the thrill of sense and the rapture of soul—than it is given to most men, even of high vitality, to extract from a life of twice the length. Alan Seeger had barely passed his twenty-eighth birthday, when, charging up to the German trenches on the field of Belloy-en-Santerre, his "escouade" ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... Godolphin were rather like lovers for the first time united, than like those who have dragged on the chain for years. Their perfect solitude, the absence of all intrusion, so unlike the life they had long passed, renewed all that charm, that rapture in each other's society, which belong to the first youth of love. True, that this could not have endured long; but Fate suffered it to endure to the last of that tether which remained to their union. Constance was not again doomed to the severe and grating ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... between the two men, turned swiftly first to one, then to the other, and with woman's infallible eye knew her own flesh and blood in that half-moment. She uttered a cry of love and rapture that went through every heart that heard it; and she flung herself in a ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... and an underlying note of pathos give his work a peculiar and genuine character; but he is just not of the greatest. Not so great really as Luca Signorelli, for example, whom few visitors to the galleries rush at with gurgling cries of rapture as ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... drawing-room, which she had been so near calling a parlor, she continued to bubble over with delight in herself and her apartment. "Now, isn't it about perfect?" she urged, and I had to own that it was indeed very convenient and very charming; and in the rapture of the moment she invited ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... spirit bloomed in leafy rapture— I loved; and once I looked death in the eyes: So, suddenly made wise, Spoke of such beauty as ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... country, thee, Land of the noble free, Thy name I love; I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills; My heart with rapture ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... idea, and Mr. MILNE meant me to feel like that. Miss BARBARA HOFFE'S Melisande—a difficult part, because she was the only other-worldly person in the play and the only one in desperate earnest—was very cleverly handled. In her most exalted moments of poetic rapture she was never too precious, and when called upon for a touch of corrective humour ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... mountain-top, and his name is sung at night round the pine-fires by the lips of the bard; and the bard himself hath honour in the hall. But I, who belong not to the race of kings, and whose limbs can bound not to the rapture of war, nor scale the eyries of the eagle and the haunts of the swift stag; whose hand cannot string the harp, and whose voice is harsh in the song,—I have neither honour nor command, and men bow not the head as I pass along; yet do I feel within me the consciousness of a great power that should ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... bend of your angelic head, and the trip of the tiny boots? And when the Heaven-sent moment came for the tongue to tell what the heart had so long cherished in silence, was there not a partner before you who dealt out words which filled your soul with rapture, and helped you to win the dearest prize that earth affords,—a mutual love? And look farther on into the distant future, when the tiny boots shall have long been cast aside, and the flowing silks shall have sunken into inexpansive, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... sit and hear my nun read; to watch the charming play of her mouth, and the occasional flush of a smile when she came to something exciting or humorous; to look into the blue of her eyes, as she raised them to me while I considered an alteration, was to me an overwhelming rapture,—I could call it nothing less. But by the end of the third morning of reading my good sense told me that this sort of thing could not go on, and it would be judicious for me to begin again my dictation, and to let my secretary confine herself to her ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... her dark smiling eyes and her caressing voice and her gentle movements—then this resolution of passive silence was exchanged for a determination to fight desperately against discovery. In the glow of his soul, in the stir of youth and spring in his veins, in the melting rapture of his mood, that first sight of a beautiful girl's face bent smilingly to greet her father's guest had sufficed to set his heart aflame with a new emotion, sweet, riotous, sacred. What a merry supper-party was that; each dish eaten with the sauce of joyous memories! How ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Artist and Architect. The inspiration which filled the soul of Bezalel or Hiram may not be so elevated or elevating as that which enabled Isaiah to soar to the throne of the Eternal in speechless rapture, or which enabled Michael Angelo to represent in form and colour his vast conceptions of the beautiful and sublime; but it was as real, and in some aspects as serviceable in suggestion and realisation, ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... a Grecian Urn' does not perhaps quite reach this divine thrill: but its second and third stanzas have a rapture that comes very near to it (I will speak anon of the fourth stanza): and I should not quarrel with one who preferred these two stanzas even ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was that Jeb worked himself into a frenzy of oratory which convinced in spite of logic. He was pleading desperately for Jeb, for Jeb's hide, for Jeb's life. Having no suspicion of this the two old gentlemen listened with rapture expressed in their moistening eyes, and when he concluded, out of breath but defiant, they sprang up ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... samovar, there will be in progress a discussion which warms the heart and soul, or else a reading aloud of a brilliant page of one of those inspired Russian poets with whom God has dowered us, while the breast of each member of the company is heaving with a rapture ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... adopted: her swoon at some painful news, and the very slight knowledge the elder female had of her partner in mystery. Then, more than a year afterwards, the acquaintanceship of her own father with this his first love; the awakening of the passion, his acts of devotion, the unreasoning heat of his rapture, her tacit acceptance of it, and yet her uneasiness under the delight. Then his declaration amid the evergreens: the utter change produced in her manner thereby, seemingly the result of a rigid determination: and the total concealment of her reason by herself and her parents, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... something. But this particular point of psychology does not arise at all in the modern cases of mere public discomfort or inconvenience. The causes of Miss Pankhurst's cheerfulness require no mystical explanations. If she were being burned alive as a witch, if she then looked up in unmixed rapture and saw a ballot-box descending out of heaven, then I should say that the incident, though not conclusive, was frightfully impressive. It would not prove logically that she ought to have the vote, or that anybody ought to have the vote. But it would prove this: that there was, ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... breast; only his dress was different: Instead of a white, loose robe he wore a yellow mantle lined with fur, and on his head, instead of the turban, a yellow Tibetan felt cap, as I have seen some Bhootanese wear in this country. When the first moments of rapture and surprise were over, and I calmly comprehended the situation, I had a long talk with him. He told me to go no further, for I should come to grief. He said I should wait patiently if I wanted to become an accepted Chela; that many were those who offered themselves as candidates, but that ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... God! the Bridegroom will step out upon the balcony of heaven and look at us and speak to us in a tone inaudible to all but ourselves, and our souls will bound with rapture and the earthen vessel will crumble and we will spread snowy pinions and wing our flight up to the presence ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... memory drew aside the curtains of twenty years. He beheld again the sweet-faced wife glorified with the blessed halo of motherhood. He thrilled at the remembrance of her intense rapture as she clasped her babe in moments of vivid ecstasy, or held it tenderly in her arms as she sang the slumber song. The man was lost in revery—the sweet voice of the mother had suddenly grown weak and drifted into silence—a silence which would have been intolerable save for the ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... counsel. Against its shadow Fay's figure in her white gossamer gown showed more ethereal and exquisite even than in memory. She seemed at one with this wonderful, passionate southern spring, which trembled between rapture and anguish. The red roses and the white irises were everywhere. Even the unkept grass in which her light feet were set was ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... things connected with it—the wandering among the loveliest scenery—the full enjoyment of the sweetest weather—the learning the innumerable and all-wondrous attributes and instincts of animated nature—all these are what make up to me the rapture I derive from woodcraft! Why, such a scene as this—a scene which how few, save the vagrant sportsman, or the countryman who but rarely appreciates the picturesque, have ever witnessed—is enough, with the pure and tranquil thoughts it calls up in the heart, to plead a trumpet-tongued apology, ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... the singing of his little prattler which filled Richard Ashton with strange awe. As she lisped out "I am so glad," with note as clear as the carolling of a lark, the look of seraphic rapture which overspread her face evinced that she had entered into the spirit of the piece and that her little heart was glad. As he looked into the face of his wife he saw, intuitively, her thoughts were as his, and he whispered to her: "Ruth, dear, she seems too fair, too sweet, ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... With rapture the Queen gathered him into her arms, and the father kissed him with a vehemence that made him awake and cry. St. Victor had thought it safer that his other attendants should come in by degrees in the morning, and thus Miss Woodford was the only actually effective nursery attendant ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the dusk, as they sauntered over the old bridge, she flung out gibe after gibe at her lover. Her cheeks grew hotter and hotter; it was like tearing her own flesh. The shame of it! The rapture of it! It hurt her so that the tears stood in her eyes; so she did it again, and yet again. "I don't pretend to live ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... who have gone before. The ones departing may whisper this vision, name the face that smiles on them and the 76:3 hand which beckons them, as one at Niagara, with eyes open only to that wonder, forgets all else and breathes aloud his rapture. ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... crowded and we succeeded in getting reservations only by the skin of our teeth. Also the hotels at Agra were jammed and many people were being turned away, while the procession of carriages jogging out toward the Taj Mahal was like an endless chain. Upon all sides as you paused in spellbound rapture before the most beautiful building in the world, you heard the voice of the tourist explaining the ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... from first to last by perceptions which came to the Beachcomber—perceptions which lead, mayhap, to a subdued and sober estimate of the purpose and bearing of the pilgrimage of life. Doubts become exalted and glorified, hopes all rapture, when long serene days are spent alone in the contemplation of the splendours of sky and sea, and the enchantment of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... pen or rod may be beyond one, but there is the pleasure of the pursuit, the rapture of endeavour, the delight of an impossible chase, the joys of nature—sky, trees, brooks, and birds. Happiness in these things is the legacy to us of the barbarian. Man in the future will enjoy bricks, asphalte, fog, machinery, "society," even picture galleries, ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... Jack, my dear Jack, I will now inform you who the lady really is. Nothing but your passion and violence, you silly fellow, prevented me telling you at first. Prepare, Jack, for wonder and rapture—prepare! What think you of Miss ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... pleasure,—and all at once Paradise dawns!—her cold, innocent life bursts into fiery and odorous bloom; she has found her fate, and its face is keen with splendor, like a young angel's. Poor, deluded, blessed, rapture-smitten woman! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... centre of each pupil he would aim a white brush stroke, a point of light . . . the soul. Then, planting himself before the canvas, he would proceed to classify this soul with his inexhaustible imagination, attributing to it almost every kind of stress and extremity. So great was the sway of his rapture that Julio, too, was able to see all that the artist flattered himself into believing that he had put into the owlish eyes. He, also, would paint souls . ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... that I loved her. But I did do it, I scarcely know how. The softest whisper seemed too loud against her glowing cheek. She trembled from head to foot. I was faint and silent with rapture when she first put her little hand in mine, and suffered me to draw her to my heart. Ah! I am sick with joy yet when I think of it. I—I first, I alone, woke that sweet young heart to life. She is lost, lost to me, but no one else can ever be to ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... that face to knock off a masterpiece. It probably represents precisely how she looked when she finished a chapter. When she was actually at work I think the expression [Pg vi] was more solemn, with the tongue firmly clenched between the teeth; an unholy rapture showing as she drew near her love chapter. Fellow-craftsmen will see that she is looking forward to this chapter all ...
— The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan • Daisy Ashford
... so trying. We can conceive of his previous sorrows, but what imagination can form an adequate conception of his hopefulness and gratitude when the tokens of the neighborhood of land first greeted his senses? What rapture must have been his when the keel of his barque first grounded on the shore of San Salvador, and he planted the royal standard in the soil, as the Viceroy and High-Admiral of Spain in the New World! No matter what chanced thereafter, a king's ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... the mystic maddening beauty of it, the divine darkness and glory of it. She had taken to her heart the rapture and the pain of it. She had stretched out her hands to the unexplored, to the unchanged and changing, the many-faced, incomprehensible, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... then bought a stout chain, escorted the brute to his home, and saw him tethered. The thing was rather getting on me. The following morning he waited for me at the Floud door and was beside himself with rapture when I appeared. He had slipped his collar. And once more I saw him moored. Each time I had apologized to Mrs. Judson for seeming to attract her pet from home, for I could not bring myself to say that the beast was highly repugnant to me, and least ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... freed brooks singing as they ran; the birds darting about here and there seeking materials to build their nests; the heavens benignly smiling over all; the sun glorious; the air intoxicating; mere breath joy; mere life rapture! All nature singing a Gloria in Excelsis! And now while the sisters saunter leisurely on, pausing now and then to admire some exquisite bit of scenery, or to watch some bird, or to look at some flower, taking their own time for passing ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... mortifications, and only then for the first time since he had brooded on the great mystery of love did he feel within him a warm movement like that of some newly born life or virtue of the soul itself. The attitude of rapture in sacred art, the raised and parted hands, the parted lips and eyes as of one about to swoon, became for him an image of the soul in prayer, humiliated and ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... Firouz Schah took advantage of her silence to explain to her all that had occurred, his despair at watching her disappear before his very eyes, the oath he had sworn to follow her over the world, and his rapture at finally discovering her in the palace at Cashmere. When he had finished, he begged in his turn that the princess would tell him how she had come there, so that he might the better devise some means of rescuing her from the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... work of the day, and begging Tharon to sing to them, sometimes with the instrument, sometimes sitting in the deep east window, when the moon shone, and then they turned out the light and listened in adoring rapture. ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... be told in an instant's space, and one schooled to agony not die from the swift change to such rapture of content! ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... meaning of that glance? What was the emotion that gave it birth in the soul? He knew! It told its own story. To their dying day, the actors in that silent drama remembered that glance with rapture and with pain. ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... mystic haze. Strange visions, but half comprehended, took shape and dissolved before her. She believed that she was floating among the mountain-crests with the Infinite all about her. The wonder of it and the rapture were beyond all utterance, beyond the grasp of human knowledge; the joy exceeded all that she had ever known. And so by exquisite phases, she entered at last a great vastness—a slumber-space where all things were forgotten, lost in the radiance of ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... "Pygmalion, why come you not to awaken thy Galatea? Why will you not change this marble statue into a woman of flesh and blood, with heart and soul? These lips are ready to smile, to utter a cry of rapture and delight, and behind the veil of my eyes lies a soul, which one touch of thine will arouse! O Frederick! Frederick! why do you torture me? Do you not know that your wife worships, loves, adores you; that you are her salvation, her god? Oh, ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... drink for rapture, The delirium to drain, All my fellows drank in plenty At the Three Score Inns and Twenty From the mountains to the main! Give me the old drink for ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... Philip Bourke Marston's 'Song Tide' has such an arresting and whole-hearted example of this class of poetry been issued by any English author as the volume which Mr William Luther Longstaff entitles 'Weeds and Flowers.' Passion, tumultuous and unabashed, sensuous rapture openly flaunting its shame, love in maddest surrender risking all, daring all, these are the dominant motives of Mr Longstaff's muse. So wild is the rush of his emotion—all storm and fire and blood—to such white heat does he forge his burning phrases, so subtly varied ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... the girlish charm would fade; She knew the rapture would abate; That years would follow when the maid, Merged in the matron, and sedate With change, and sitting in ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... wretched find Are rapture to the dreary void, The leafless desert of the mind, The waste of feelings unemployed. The ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... appears to our enchanted imaginations an emblem meet of the grand dream of eternity, and our spirits seem on the verge of quitting earth, in thrilling contemplations on the islands of that infinite abyss, and their immortal inhabitants! We gaze in hope, adoration, and rapture on the blue expanse, varied by delicate vapours, sailing calmly, wondrously through it; and then occur to our memories spontaneously, the exquisite lines translated from a morceau, by Gluck, (a German poet;) and our hearts respond as each of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various
... coachman, "a gentlewoman in my coach that is his acquaintance redeemed him and his horse; he would have been here before this time, had not the storm driven him to shelter." "God bless her!" said Adams, in a rapture; nor could he delay walking out to satisfy himself who this charitable woman was; but what was his surprize when he saw his old acquaintance, Madam Slipslop? Hers indeed was not so great, because ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... in the same year he writes, "Oh, my dear, dear sister! With what transport shall I again meet you! With what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight!... I see you in a moment running, or rather ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... there are bounds beyond which passion cannot go without counteracting its own purposes. I am afraid mine goes beyond those bounds. So far as it produces rapture, it deserves to be cherished; but when productive of impatience, repining, agony, on occasions too that are slight, trivial, or unavoidable, 'tis ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... alive and evident in the space between them. He saw her bosom rise and fall, her lips part slightly, and a tremor disturb the high serenity of her self-control, and there came to him the memory of their first meeting at the cross-roads and of the mystery and the rapture of his boyish love. He had found her then the lady of his dreams, and now, after all the violence of his revolt against her, she was still to him as he had first seen her—the woman whose soul looked ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... without ceasing," etc. Beloved saints, I exhort you to a life of prayer. I beseech you in Jesus' name to go often into your closets and there in all earnestness of soul pray until the love of God and light of heaven fill your beings. Pray until a rapture from the skies sweeps over your soul, making the place of prayer the dearest ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... their habit of stolidity by the strangeness of advancing through nothingness toward a waiting foe, a mysterious foe which expanded and grew more menacing. The wolves peered to make out landmarks, they touched gliding arms which did not seem to be attached to a body, they quivered with a rapture of fear. Reality had vanished. A yelping squabble suddenly rose, then Juanita Haydock's high titter, and Guy Pollock's astonished, "Ouch! Quit! You're ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... to visit the mountain that contained his beloved treasure, and to be satisfied of his safety with his own eyes. With what delight did he behold the growing beauties of his son! With what pleasure and rapture did he listen to his sprightly saillies of wit, his smart repartees, and those pretty nothings which a father, in particular, is fond to recollect and to repeat; at which the most rigid gravity may smile, and which are worth all the understanding of riper years. He was perpetually counting ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... touching the mind they issued from; the perhaps unparalleled psychical mechanism, which manufactured such matter, and emitted it to the light of day. Had Teufelsdroeckh also a father and mother; did he, at one time, wear drivel-bibs, and live on spoon-meat? Did he ever, in rapture and tears, clasp a friend's bosom to his; looks he also wistfully into the long burial-aisle of the Past, where only winds, and their low harsh moan, give inarticulate answer? Has he fought duels;—good Heaven! how did he comport ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Rhine is my heart, where affection holds sway! On the Rhine is my heart, where encradled I lay, Where around me friends bloom, where I dreamt away youth, Where the heart of my love glows with rapture and truth! May for me your hearts e'er the same jewels enshrine. Wherever I go is my heart ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... were thrown around her. "I'll save you or I'll die." I clasped her to my bosom, My long lost Hazel Eye. The rapture of that moment Was almost heaven to me; I kissed her 'mid the ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... strengthened those sacred ties by the declarations which the minister plenipotentiary of the United States has made in your name to the National Convention and to the French people. They have been received with rapture by a nation who know how to appreciate every testimony which the United States have given to them of their affection. The colors of both nations, united in the center of the National Convention, will be an everlasting evidence of the part which the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 10. • James D. Richardson
... if startled. Somehow he had concluded from the first that the baby would be dead, and the rapture of finding her still living had driven the thought of everything ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... the two is the difference of their ages and races, not the difference of their artistry. For few composers can match with their own Debussy's perfection of taste, his fineness of sensibility, his poetic rapture and profound awareness of beauty. Few have been more graciously rounded and balanced than he, have been, like him, so fine that nothing which they could do could be tasteless and insignificant and without grace. Few musicians have been more nicely sensible of their gift, better ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... write "ou" as Tibbie said it. With her it was usually a sentence in itself. Sometimes it was a mere bark, again it expressed indignation, surprise, rapture; it might be a check upon emotion or a way of leading up to it, and often it lasted for half a minute. In this instance it was, I should say, an intimation that if Jess was ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... to express what this prospect meant to her was beyond her girlish rapture, but her parted lips and shining eyes told the story to Gale. "And Poleon must go, too. We can't go anywhere without him." The old man smiled down upon her in reassurance. "I wonder what he'll say when he finds the soldiers have come. I ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... The gravity which I have indicated as a ruling quality of all these youthful compositions makes itself felt here in its proper place. We might have wished, perhaps, for more of joyous accent in the ode to "Youth," by Mr. Laurence Binyon, which dwells less on the rapture of youth than on its sadness—the melancholy of Theognis ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... cried Lucia, raising her voice for the first time, so that it could be heard by any others than her nearest neighbor; "right well can I comprehend it; were I a man myself, I feel that I should pant for the battle. The triumph would be more than rapture; and strife, for its own sake, maddening bliss! Heavens! to see the gladiators wheel and charge; to see their swords flash in the sun; and the red blood gush out unheeded; and the grim faces flushed and furious; and the eyes greedily devouring the wounds of ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... such music sweet Their hearts and ears did greet As never was by mortal finger strook— Divinely warbled voice Answering the stringed noise, As all their souls in blissful rapture took: The air, such pleasure loath to lose, With thousand echoes still prolongs ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... faith, of incomplete blessedness, of interrupted praise. Whether the Psalmist looked forward thus we do not know. But for us, the very shortcomings of our joys and of our songs are prophetic of the perfect and perpetual rapture of the one, and the perfect and perpetual music of the other. We know that He who has given us so much will not stay His hand until He has perfected that which concerns us. We know that He who has taught our dumb ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... as much in the dark as any of the questioners. The mystery, however, could not remain a mystery long. It was known to brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins: and they were far too proud and too happy to be discreet. Dr. Burney wept over the book in rapture. Daddy Crisp shook his fist at his Fannikin in affectionate anger at not having been admitted to her confidence. The truth was whispered to Mrs. Thrale: and then it began to ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... lips, oh Nanna Awaken Balder from his dream of rapture; Let him enjoy it; let him read his destiny, His hope, his life, in ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... leads us on our way; We'll boldly vote, our country saving, And bravely conquer while we may. The world is up—for freedom moving, The thunders' distant roar we hear— From land to land the free are calling, And slaves with joy and rapture hear. Vote on! ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... so affect and move other men as to fill them with joy and rapture, and to make them long to touch him and salute him, cannot but appear even to a blind man to possess and enjoy very extraordinary satisfactions in himself. And hence it comes that such men are both indefatigable and undaunted in serving ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... few weeks to try another excursion; though to what end? Let me know, my Baretti, what has been the result of your return to your own country; whether time has made any alteration for the better, and, whether, when the first rapture of salutation was over, you did not find your ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... distance which divides me from my country, whose advantages and blessings this four months' absence has taught me to appreciate more clearly and to prize more deeply than before. With a glow of unwonted rapture I see our stately vessel's prow turned toward the setting sun, and strive to realize that only some ten days separate me from those I know and love best on earth. Hark! the last gun announces that the mail-boat ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... do something; but it suggested no particularly profitable line of action. If she could have done something at the moment, on the spot, she would have stepped upon a European steamer and turned her back, with a kind of rapture, upon that profoundly mortifying failure, her visit to her American relations. It is not exactly apparent why she should have termed this enterprise a failure, inasmuch as she had been treated with the highest distinction for which allowance had been made ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... driving to Ergushovo," said Levin, feeling as if he would sob with the rapture that was flooding his heart. "And how dared I associate a thought of anything not innocent with this touching creature? And, yes, I do believe it's true what Darya Alexandrovna told ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... rejoiced greatly at this marvel, and, reverently raising the three crosses, they bore them into the city, and laid them at the feet of Queen Elene, whose first rapture of joy was speedily turned to perplexity as she realised that she knew not which was that sacred Cross on which the King of Angels had suffered. "For," she said, "two thieves were crucified with him." But even Judas could not clear ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... and a hunk of kebbock. "And they comed from Thrums!" cried Elspeth, while Tommy cried, "Petey and the others got a lot sent from Thrums, and I bought the bridies from them, and they gave me the bannock and the kebbock for nuthin'!" Their mother did not utter the cry of rapture which Tommy expected so confidently that he could have done it for her; instead, she pulled her two children toward her, and the great moment was like to be a tearful rather than an ecstatic one, for Elspeth had begun to whimper, and even ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... Cockayne returned to the Grand Hotel, they found their daughters Sophonisba and Theodosia in a state of rapture. ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... memorable for joy and sorrow, for rapture at receiving its monarch and tearful grief at losing him, when George IV. came and left the maritime resort of the citizens of Dublin, it bore a less genteel name than that which it owns at present, and was called Dunleary. After that glorious event Dunleary disdained ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... Their hearts and ears did greet, As never was by mortal fingers strook; Divinely-warbled voice Answering the stringed noise, As all their souls in blissful rapture took; The air, such pleasure loth to lose, With thousand echoes ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... bird—by preference a mavis—sings outside my window, for a little while after I swim upward out of the ocean of sleep, it seems that I might possibly remember one stanza of the deathless words; or even by chance recapture, like the brown speckled thrush, that "first fine careless rapture" of the ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... realization that he was in love with her frightened him, and yet he was gloriously happy. Exultant joy, a rapture faintly akin to the ecstasy that had thrilled him the first Christmas morning he could remember, gave a buoyancy to his brain, his heart, his soul. He knew that he had loved her from the moment he met her and regardless of what ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... rapture in which all fear and doubting were smoothed away; and when he reached home, at dawn, the rapture had mellowed to contentment serene and full ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... with celestial music. Again he kneels before the altar, from whose tablature beams upon him that loveliest of shapes in which the imagination of man has embodied the spirit of Christianity. The illusion overpowers him. A thrill shakes his frame, and he bows in reverential rapture. No longer a memory, no longer a dream, but a visioned presence, distinct and luminous in the forest shades, the Virgin stands before him. Prostrate on the rocky earth, he adores the benign angel of his ecstatic faith, then turns with rekindled ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... see his mother in his home. Walking fast exhausted him, and he had to rest. How dead his legs felt! In fact he felt queer all over. The old burn and gnaw in his breast had expanded to a heavy, full, suffocating sensation. Yet his blood seemed to race. Suddenly an overwhelming emotion of rapture flooded over him. Home at last! He did not think of any one. He was walking across the railroad yards where as a boy he had been wont to steal rides on freight trains. Soon he reached the bridge. In the gathering twilight he halted to clutch at the railing and look out across where the ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... evolutions of his dreams the Poor Boy never lost grip upon his own personal love-affair. It had become more real, and with the bursting of woods and meadows into carpets of spring flowers more necessary to him than anything in life. It was joy for him, and rapture—a dizzy path into unknown lands where only the footprints of the "True Romance" marked the way. But suddenly sometimes in the very heyday of his ecstasy the tragedy of it smote him, you may say, between the eyes—so that villages vanished, homes, institutions, ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... him in solitary hours,—some seed of wisdom dropped from the lips of teacher, parent, or friend, sinking silently as starlight into the soul, and taking immortal root there, unconsciously, perhaps, even to himself. Now it is the quickening of the spirit at the sight of God's beautiful universe—a rapture of love awakened by a morning in spring, by the blue infinity of the sky, by the eternal loneliness and sublimity of the sea. Or, in some moment of susceptibility, the smiles of dear home faces, the tender trill of a voice, a surge of solemn music, may have power over the young heart ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... eyes to suns and stars. And what does Henriquez say more here than this, 'That though his mistress be obscure by her birth; yet her eyes are so refulgent, they set her above that disadvantage, and make her all over brightness.' I remember another rapture in Shakespear, upon a painter's drawing a fine lady's picture, where the thought seems to me every whit as magnified and dark at ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... accept with rapture. Oh!' cried he passionately, 'what whispered to my heart this morning that this would be the happiest ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... was laden with perfume—the wonderful indescribable essences of spring. Away in the distance, faintly heard, arose the bleating of lambs. Near at hand, throned among the purple flowers above their heads, a thrush was pouring out the rapture that thrilled his tiny life. The whole world pulsed to the one great melody—the universal, wordless song. Only the man and the woman were silent as intruders in ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... his pertinacity; his desire to be an architect and to live the imaginative life, thwarted by his grim old father; and the manner in which Hilda dawned upon him, entered into his experience in a brief rapture of passion, and disappeared, leaving Clayhanger to grope again with the commonplaces. And in this new story we see the life of the girl, the woman; she, too, groping among the commonplaces, with her heart set upon a wider experience, till ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... playing makes it more beautiful still," said Isabel with all the young radiance with which she usually uttered a truthful rapture. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... was gently touched by his major-domo, and, turning round, he beheld in the hands of Alexander ab Alexandro the celebrated cup of Saint Duthac, the Blessed Bear of Bradwardine! I question if the recovery of his estate afforded him more rapture. "By my honour," he said, "one might almost believe in brownies and fairies, Lady Emily, when your ladyship is ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... absolutely take one's imagination. I shall never forget the thrill of picking him up in the Charing Cross Road. You see, I had known the queer old tombstone for years. He's enormously vivid—quite beyond my feebleness to describe, with a kind of French verve and rapture. Unluckily we can't get nearer than two years to his death. I shouldn't mind guessing some last devastating dream swept over him, held him the breath of an instant too long beneath the wave, and he caved ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... of rapture burst from all lips; all shouted exultingly, "War! war! We shall at length bid defiance to the arrogance of the French emperor! We shall have war with France; we shall avenge the wrongs which we have suffered so long, and set bounds ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... would not suffer her mind to be at peace. She might hope every thing from her mother's indulgence, but had not courage to confess her weakness, nor to intimate a wish, which might occasion her separation from a parent whose joy in their reunion still rose to rapture. Chance, that deity which though blind is often a powerful friend, did what she could not ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... by the dog's rapture in having found him again. "Why, Bobby Burns! What on earth made you follow me? Don't you know I'm not ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... a Divine love flowed into this work of the great God—this also thrilled his warm, manly heart with a wondrous love. He felt the inmost of his being vibrating as with an electric touch, to the inmost of the little new-born innocent. But the rapture of the young father was altogether imperfect, until he had sealed his lips in a love-kiss upon those of the fraulein Anna, who lay there so white and beautiful in the new joy of a young mother. Like an innocent maiden, she twined her arms around Gotleib's neck, and grew strong in the influx ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... in his talk, Foker, on the other hand, so bland and communicative on most occasions, was entirely mum and melancholy when he danced with Miss Amory. To clasp her slender waist was a rapture, to whirl round the room with her was a delirium; but to speak to her, what could he say that was worthy of her? What pearl of conversation could he bring that was fit for the acceptance of such a Queen of love and wit as Blanche? ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... largely on the turbot's size, Or raised with such applause his wondering eyes; But to the left (O treacherous want of sight) He poured his praise;—the fish was on the right. Thus would he at the fencer's matches sit, And shout with rapture at some fancied hit; And thus applaud the stage machinery, where The youths were rapt aloft ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... rapture and looked from one to the other. The fear of the distemper was small in comparison with the pleasure of the thought of seeing her sister and aunt and friend at intervals, now that she was so completely shut up in this lonely house, ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... his followers were received in the most friendly manner by the good King of Root-Valley. The Princess was in a sea of rapture at the brilliant appearance of the bright, varnished, wooden Prince, who in a formal and well-turned speech declared his love for her, together with his other wishes, in a pleasing and appropriate manner. The old King even ...
— The King of Root Valley - and his curious daughter • R. Reinick
... her but to learn the answer, and this she did, by tugging firmly, coyly, to free her wrist. The answer was rapture; his grip had tightened. She pulled harder, and felt herself being drawn toward him. Yes, yes, her triumph was a fact. Slowly an arm of iron, a tremulous, masterful ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... I grieve to say, were never more unclean Than those of ordinary life, in morals or in mien; They had not slummed or fully plumbed with rapture unalloyed The unconscious mind as now defined ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... thoroughly, for an hour, and was sure! The twenty-four hours' trip down from her plantation home, on the first boat that happened along, a rather poor thing, had been her first experience and a keen pleasure; but this, on the Votaress, was rapture. ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... Her soul now seemed to be flowing out through her fingers and to the keyboard; the music came not from the keyboard, really, but from her soul. Rapture! ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... the lighter parts of life, it is too late to get much intelligence. One of his answers to a boastful Frenchman has been related; and to an impertinent he made another equally proper. During his embassy, he sat at the opera by a man, who, in his rapture, accompanied with his own voice the principal singer. Prior fell to railing at the performer with all the terms of reproach that he could collect, till the Frenchman, ceasing from his song, began to expostulate with him for his harsh censure of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... heard nothing except the scene before her, with its grand inspiration and her own utterance of its praise. Brandon's own soul was more and more overcome; the divine voice thrilled over his heart; he shuddered and uttered a low sigh of rapture. ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... for such they had been, with which he had so long filled the forest, were changed to shrieks of rapture, as soon as he beheld help approach in the person of the astonished soldier. "Praised be the Etarnal!" he roared; "cut me loose, strannger!—Praised be the Etarnal, and this here dumb beast!—Cut me loose, strannger, for the love ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... clouds, and so close that between them was just a glimpse of a crystal grotto, on whose shining walls were figured many white-clad forms with faces radiant with joy. When I stood before the gate my heart and my soul were so full of rapture and longing that I forgot. And there stood at the gate two mighty angels with sweeping wings, and, oh! so stern of countenance. They held each in one hand a flaming sword, and in the other the latchet, ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... Frampton?" "I have not seen her," replied our hero with a sigh half uttered, and half suppressed, "these ten days." "What" cried the baronet, "no misunderstanding, eh?" "Not absolutely that. I saw her, I fear, without all the rapture that becomes a lover, and she resented it with a coldness that did not introduce an immediate explanation. Since that time I have been somewhat indisposed, or probably affairs would now have been settled." "And what," said sir William, "must ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... with my elation over my prospects of winning Vedia, for I felt sure of her personal favor, and the two notes from my great neighbors had thrown me into a sort of trance of rapture. I was genuinely pleased with the frugality, diligence and skill of my tenants. My estate was in a way to return far more than I had expected of it. I was in a position to be ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... by their rude contact. You force yourself hardily into the material presence of a mountain, or a river, whose name belongs to poetry and ancient religion, rather than to the external world; your feelings wound up and kept ready for some sort of half-expected rapture are chilled, and borne down for the time under all this load of real earth and water; but let these once pass out of sight, and then again the old fanciful notions are restored, and the mere realities which you have just been looking ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... in a wood near here. He seems to sing louder and more purely the heavier the fighting that is going on. When men are murdering each other he loses himself in a rapture, of song, recalling all the old joyous things which ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... brother!' She kissed his hand in a little rapture. 'The dear girls will be dreadfully disappointed,' added Rosa, laughing, with the dewdrops glistening in her bright eyes. 'They have looked forward ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... which would soon break upon her. She sang snatches of sweet songs, following which I said but little. When I addressed her, 'My dear daughter, you will soon rejoin your noble mother,' she answered, 'Oh, yes, and what rapture will I enjoy!' I fell down at her bedside, and again committed her soul to the almighty and enduring care of God. Then just before I went to my lecture I went to see her again: I asked her if she still remembered the hymn, 'Thou art mine, because I hold ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... to Elspeth. Heigh-ho! how she had guarded them once, confiding them half reluctantly even to Tommy; half reluctantly, that is, at the start, because they were her very own, but once she was embarked on the subject talking with such rapture that every minute or two he had to beg her to be calm. She was the first person in that part of the world to think that old furniture need not be kept in the dark corners, and she knew where there was an oak bedstead that was looked upon as a disgrace, and where to obtain the dearest ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... upon strings that had long since ceased to vibrate. He could not bring back, even in retrospect, the emotions inspired by Josephine Derry. Those strings had been tuned to other love-harmonies. To remember Fran's mother was to bring back not the rapture of a first passion, but the garrish days of disillusionment. He even felt something like resentment because she had remained faithful—her search and unending love for him made so much more of his desertion than ever he ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... music from Bach to Beethoven and from Beethoven to Wagner—yes, even to Richard Strauss—but enthusiasm with discipline? German music has been our mobilization; it has gone on just as in a partitur by Richard Wagner—absolute rapture with ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... story again. The mother gazed into his face in a rapture. But the priest's brow, at first jolly, little by little ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
