"Celtic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doubt and ignorance that the wisest Romans applied to the countries beyond the Vistula and the Rhine, when in Lord Bacon's words "the world was altogether home-bred." When Cicero jested with Trebatius on the little importance of a Roman jurist among hordes of Celtic barbarians, he little thought that from that despised country would arise a nation, before the blaze of whose conquests the splendour of Roman Empire would grow pale; a nation which would carry the art of government and the enjoyment of freedom to a perfection, the idea of which, had it been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... and northwest of the Alps from Rome—comprised in Caesar's day three divisions: Aquitaine to the southwest, Celtic Gaul in the middle, and Belgic Gaul to the northwest. The region was inhabited by various tribes having neither unity of race nor of customs whereby nationality becomes distinguished. Toward the close of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... flame ran from end to end of the steadfast hue. When the smoke lifted, the French column were wrecked. The British instantly charged. The spirit of the clan awoke in Fraser's Highlanders: they flung aside their muskets, drew their broadswords, and with a fierce Celtic slogan rushed on the enemy. Never was a charge pressed more ruthlessly home. After the fight one of the British officers wrote: "There was not a bayonet in the three leading British regiments, nor a broadsword amongst the Highlanders, that was not crimson with the blood of a foeman." ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... marbles of youth, of springtide, and the desire of life. In 1900, at his special exhibition, Paris, Europe, and America awoke to these haunting visions. Not since Keats or Swinburne has love been sung so sweetly, so romantically, so fiercely. Though he disclaims understanding the Celtic spirit, one could say that there is Celtic magic, Celtic mystery in his work. He pierces to the core the frenzy and joy of love and translates them in beautiful symbols. Nature is for him the sole theme; his works are but variations on her promptings. He knows ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... rising in the West. Nowhere was the royal cause to take so brave or noble a form as among the Cornishmen. Cornwall stood apart from the general life of England: cut off from it not only by differences of blood and speech, but by the feudal tendencies of its people, who clung with a Celtic loyalty to their local chieftains, and suffered their fidelity to the Crown to determine their own. They had as yet done little more than keep the war out of their own county; but the march of a small Parliamentary ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... That he turned from to life's open volume, Acquiring indelible lessons, Loyalty, candor, clear seeing, Sincerity, plain speaking, love of his own, Passion for all things American. From Jerry, his father, Came Celtic humor, delight in the dance, And devotion to things of the theatre; From Helen, his mother, Depth, Celtic devotion to things of the spirit, Fineness of soul. Early he turned from his fiddle To write ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... back," the man repeated, while his companions looked down at the Colonel with a strange fixedness. The Celtic nature, prone to sudden rage, stirred in them. The stranger who an hour before had been indifferent to them now wore the face of an enemy. The lake and the bog—ay, the secret grave yearned for him: the winding-sheet was ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... The tumult of Celtic altercation ceased. The old piper drew himself up to his full height and stood silent. Mrs. Catanach, red as fire with exertion and wrath, turned ashy pale. The marquis cast on her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... learned Celtic Polyglott Grammar, giving a Comparative View of the Breton, Gaelic, Welsh, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... know so little. The one certain fact fully established concerning them being, that they kept Easter at a different date from that appointed by Rome. The King, though no scholar, would seem to have been a linguist in his way, since he spoke both languages, that is the Saxon, and the Celtic or Pictish, again a most difficult question to determine—with a smattering of Latin; and was thus able to act as Margaret's mouthpiece in her arguments. She found fault with the Celts not only for the date ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... seascapes in Britain. Turn to the east, and the rising mountains culminate in the white summit of Snowdon and other giant peaks stretching upward through the clouds. Could Providence have selected a more fitting spot for the upgrowth of a romantic boy? Lloyd George's Celtic heart had an environment made for it in this nook between the Welsh mountains and the sea. Little wonder that he has never left the place. At the present time his country house is on the slope overlooking Criccieth, about a mile from ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... gradually evolved into two types. The freighter, broad in beam and capacious, is built to carry an enormous amount of freight at a moderate speed. The White Star liner Celtic is a vessel of this class; her schedule time between New York and Liverpool is about nine days. The Philadelphia of the American line, though not the fastest steamship, makes the same trip in an average time of five ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... the Celtic Venice, as it rises above the level landscape. The great seaport described by Greek historians six centuries before our own era, the splendid capital of Narbonese Gaul, rival of the Roman Nmes and of the Greek Arles, is now as dull a provincial ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... sweetness from the gamelan, an instrument well-loved in Old Bali. Soek Panjoebang had the delicate features and transparent skin of Sumatra, the supple long limbs of Arabia and in a pair of wide and golden eyes a heritage from somewhere in Celtic Europe. Murphy bought her a goblet of frozen shavings, each a different perfume, while he himself drank white rice-beer. Soek Panjoebang displayed an intense interest in the ways of Earth, and Murphy found it hard to guide the conversation. "Weelbrrr," ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... in our little town of St. Ia, that it is difficult to set them down with the clearness they deserve. We Cornish people are an imaginative race, just as all people of a Celtic origin are, but we never dreamed of what has taken place. One week we were sitting idly in our boats in the bay, the next our lads had heard the call of their country, and had hurried away in its defence. One day we were at peace with the world, the next we were at war with one of the greatest ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... went to "Wedded," and then to the sister's dress and close-fitting headgear which disguised Rosamund. And suddenly the impulsiveness which was her inheritance from her Celtic and Latin ancestors took complete possession of her. She got up swiftly and ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... agriculture and the land, the farmer and the landlord, the poverty and the hospitality of the people, were all to be studied at first hand; and there were churches by the way at Swords and Rush which the archaeologist will seek in vain to match in any other country. The Bound Tower (Celtic no doubt) at the former place, and the battlemented fortalice, which is more like a castle than a church, at Rush, are both worth ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... friend, Mr. George Olaus Borrow, who has devoted his attention specially to the Celtic dialect, suggests that the long-disputed etymology of the word Tory may be traced to the Irish adherents of Charles II., during the Cromwellian era. The words Tar a Ri (pronounced Tory,) and meaning ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... Ellachie once whispered in Highland clansmen's ear the warcry, 'Stand fast! Craig Ellachie.' Many a year has gone by since kith of Charles Gordon last heard from Highland hilltop the signal of battle, but never in Celtic hero's long record of honour has such answer been sent back to Highland or to Lowland as when this great heart stopped its beating, and lay 'steadfast unto death' in the dawn at Khartoum. The winds that ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... sixty characteristic stories from Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Babylonian, Arabian, Hindu, Greek, Roman, German, Scandinavian, Celtic, Russian, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Anglo-Saxon, English, ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had dwelt for so many years as justly to regard them as their inheritance, were Gaul. There the Celtic race had had their abode ever since history has spoken clearly, and had become, in Gaul especially, slightly more civilized from intercourse with the Greek colony at Massilia, or Marseilles. But they had become borderers upon the Roman dominions, and there was little chance that they ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... neighbourhood of present-day St. Davids, and he liked the look of the country so well that many years afterwards he established there a sort of missionary college known as "Ty Gwyn," or the "White House," and here on the slopes of Carn Llidi some of the earliest of the old Celtic holy men and women ...
— Legend Land, Vol. 1 • Various
... discovered red-skins or Atlantides; which latter, by the way, form also our own aborigines. The intermixture of the Celts with these primitive races just named produced the Jews and Semitic people. At the time of the Celtic invasion Western Europe and Northern Africa were occupied by the race of the Atlantides, while the Mongolians, including also the Lapps, Finns and Huns, peopled the north of Europe and of Asia. The Celts pushed in between these two races, and only very ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... of the once favourite Baldwin. It is also from a shop sign, and perhaps most frequently of all is for bald. The latter word is properly balled, i.e., marked with a ball, or white streak, a word of Celtic origin; cf. "piebald," i.e., balled like a (mag)pie, and the "bald-faced stag." [Footnote: Halliwell notes that the nickname Ball is the name of a horse in Chaucer and in Tusser, of a sheep in the Promptorium ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... old people still wear. Well! These men of the past are ugly with their home-spun trousers, their long hair, their jackets with pockets under the arms, their sottish air, half drunkard, half saint. And the Celtic relics, uncontestably curious for the archaeologist, have naught for the artist, they are badly set, badly composed, Carnac and Erdeven have no physiognomy. In short, Brittany shall not have my bones! I prefer a thousand times your rich Normandy, or, in the days when one has dramas ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... in a column notice says: "Mr Moore's 'Cornish Catches' are just so good as Cornish cream to a Cornish cat, and even those who do not know the dialect, with its faint, far-away echoes of Celtic verse-forms, will delight in his simple 'vitty' songs of the Delectable Duchy. He is a patriotic Cornish-man sure enough ... as good as anything of the kind written by the dialect-poets of Lancashire or Dorset ... it is a thing to rejoice over, ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... began the round-up of details. There was, first of all, Captain Cronin to be visited in Bellevue. Here he was agreeably surprised to find the detective chief recuperating with the abettance of his rugged Celtic physique. The nurse told Shirley that another day's treatment would allow the Captain to return to his own home: Shirley knew this meant the executive office of the Holland ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... Irish Brontes in existence before Nelson became Duke of Bronte; but all Patrick's brothers and sisters, with whom, it must be remembered, he was on terms of correspondence his whole life long, gradually, with a true Celtic sense of the picturesqueness of the thing, seized upon the more attractive surname. For this theory there is, of course, not one scrap of evidence; we only know that the register of Patrick's native parish gives us Brunty, and that his signature ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... little of this sentiment of race animosity appeared. While the German element remained intact in the union of Germany and Austria, there was a strange mingling of races in the other side of the struggle, that of the Slavic Russian, the Teutonic Britain, and the Celtic French. As for Italy, the non-Germanic member of the Triple Alliance, it at first wisely declared itself out of the war, as one in which it was in no sense concerned and under no obligation to enter into ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... represented by the Ambrosian chant as we find it in the oldest MSS. It seems most likely that it is the musical counterpart of the primitive liturgy organized, as is supposed, about the epoch of Pope Damasus, of which the Ambrosian, Gallican, Mozarabic, and Celtic are so many variations, due to national characteristics. Documentary proof of this is but scanty, but a study of the Lessons used at Mass supports the theory as far as the text is concerned. It is further recorded that at Monte Cassino the Ambrosian chant was fused with the Gregorian by ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt
... see them on the seventeenth of March, for example, when everybody wears a green ribbon and they're all laughing and glad,—you know what the Celtic nature is,—and talking ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... possible, be glad to have her maiden name and origin, as well as that of her first husband. She might have been the widow of Sir Richard Bingham, Governor of Connaught, &c., whose MS. account of the Irish wars is now publishing by the Celtic Society, and who died A.D. 1598. In that case, I leave a conjecture before me, that she was a Kingsmill of Sidmanton, in Hampshire. I mention this to aid enquiry, if any one will be so good as to make it. If there is such a monument in existence, his arms ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... deaths. Of all deceased ancestors the Khasis revere Ka Iawbei the most, the word Iawbei being made up of 'iaw, short for kiaw (grandmother), and bei, mother. Ka Iawbei is the primeval ancestress of the clan. She is to the Khasis what the "tribal mother" was to old Celtic and Teutonic genealogists, and we have an interesting parallel to the reverence of the Khasis for Ka Iawbei in the Celtic goddess Brigit, the tribal mother of the Brigantes. Later on, like Ka Iawbei, she was canonized, and ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... manners of his beloved Lutetia; where the amusements of the theatre were unknown or despised. He indignantly contrasted the effeminate Syrians with the brave and honest simplicity of the Gauls, and almost forgave the intemperance, which was the only stain of the Celtic character. If Julian could now revisit the capital of France, he might converse with men of science and genius, capable of understanding and of instructing a disciple of the Greeks; he might excuse the lively and graceful follies of a nation, whose martial spirit has never been enervated ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... at parting, when the warmhearted Irishwoman clung to Maren and wept against her bosom, calling her all the hundred words for "darling" in the Celtic and vowing to ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... excursions may be made. To Kells, twelve statute miles, where there are the ruins of an important twelfth century priory. Two miles from Kells is Kilree, where are situate a ruined church, Round Tower, and Celtic cross, and a remarkable tomb slab in the church, on which is an ancient symbolic sculpture of a cock-in-a-pot crowing. Three miles from Kilree is Aghavillar, with ruined church, attached castellated house, and Round Tower. About seven miles from the city is the Cave of ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... no one dreams of attaching faith to the events narrated in it. But a philosophy attempts to give us some account of the nature of the world in which we live. If the philosopher frankly abandons the attempt to tell us what is true, and with a Celtic generosity addresses himself to the task of saying what will be agreeable to us, he loses his right to the title. It is not enough that he stirs our emotions, and works up his unrealities into something ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... for some time head of the Theological College at Chartres, a cathedral town of France, anciently the capital of Celtic Gaul, and afterwards he was consecrated as Bishop of that diocese. He died ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... modernised and no great work of art—called up for a moment that chapel of Saint Blaise on the Akragantine rocks, which once was the temple of Demeter and her Child. And, if one only had the means of finding out, it may be that the Archangel displaced some Celtic powers, such as those which Gregory of Tours still knew as abiding on the Puy de Dome of Auvergne. But the life of Mortain as Mortain is, or rather as Mortain, with its counts and its canons, once was, began at a lower point, at ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... was born, and his father's little vineyard, where the rich purple and amber clusters, such as little Amy now sent him as costly luxuries, hung down in rich masses which any hand could pick. Such descriptions were intensely fascinating to Nelly's quick Celtic imagination, and she would speak in her turn of the breezy slopes by the sea where she had so often played in days she could still vividly remember; of the aromatic scent of the burning heaps of sea-weed, ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... Galotti', with its drastic comment upon the infamies of princely lust, he saw the subject of court life in a light very different from that in which it habitually appeared to the carefully guarded pupils of the Stuttgart academy. He became acquainted with Ossian, and the shadowy forms of the Celtic bard, big with their indefinable woe, increased the turmoil of his soul. Probably he read Rousseau more or less, though direct evidence of the fact is lacking. At any rate the air was surcharged with Rousseauite feeling. Certainly he read Plutarch and Cervantes, and along with all these came Shakspere,[12] ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... drove before him these little dark men, he enslaved their survivors or wedded their women, and in his turn fell into slavery to the cruel Druidic religion of his subjects. To these Iberians, and to the Celtic dread of them, we probably owe all the stories of dwarfs, goblins, elves, and earth-gnomes which fill our fairy-tale books; and if we examine carefully the descriptions of the abodes of these beings we shall find them not inconsistent ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... established beyond any reasonable dispute to have been a pure invention of the seventeenth century may, I think, be safely asserted, while it is, with almost equal conclusiveness, shown that the Mackenzies are descended from a native Celtic chief of the same stock as the original O'Beolan Earls of Ross, as set forth in the Table printed ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... discover, if he had no history to help him, but must rely wholly on the examination of modern French, that the bulk of the population of France is connected by way of blood with ancient Gauls who spoke Celtic, until the Roman conquest caused them to adopt a vulgar form of Latin in its place. The Celtic tongue, in its turn, had, doubtless not so very long before, ousted some earlier type of language, perhaps one allied to ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... literature. The writer, who was only a boy, was a little frightened at first, but, not wishing to appear a child of absolute ignorance, he summoned what little learning he had, and began to blunder out something about the Celtic languages and their literature, and asked the Lion who he conceived Finn Ma Coul to be? and whether he did not consider the "Ode to the Fox," by Red Rhys of Eryry, to be a masterpiece of pleasantry? Receiving no answer to these questions from the Lion, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... like to remind those who may be forgetting that Tir-na-n'Og is the land of eternal youth and joyousness—the Celtic "Land of Heart's Desire." It is a country which belongs to us all by right of natural heritage; but we turned our backs to it and started journeying from it almost the instant we ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... duly observed by the missionaries who came to the South of England from Rome, headed by Augustine, and in the northern parts of the country the Christian festivities were revived by the Celtic missionaries from Iona, under Aidan, the famous Columbian monk. At least half of England was covered by the Columbian monks, whose great foundation upon the rocky island of Iona, in the Hebrides, was the source of Christianity to Scotland. The ritual of the Celtic differed from that of the ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... speaking, there shot in, a young, auburn-curled, blue-eyed man, whose adolescent buoyancy, as much as his delicate, silver-buckled feet and clothes of perfect fit, pronounced him all-pure Creole. His name, when it was presently heard, accounted for the blond type by revealing a Franco-Celtic origin. ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... also not impossible that there was a time when the western [213] or Celtic princes made themselves masters of Greece, of Egypt and a good part of Asia, and that their cult remained in those countries. When one considers with what rapidity the Huns, the Saracens and the Tartars gained possession of a great part of our continent one ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... successfully undermined the ancient and venerable lore. And thirdly, and worst of all, Disraeli never suspected that the French Revolution, which in the same breath he once contemptuously denounced as "the Celtic Rebellion against Semitic laws," was, in spite of its professed attack against religion, really a profoundly Christian, because a democratic and revolutionary movement. What a pity he did not know all this! What a shower of splendid additional sarcasms he would have poured over those flat-nosed ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Cornwall, to see the shattered ruins of it which remain. When the Wesleys achieved their notable revival and swept off the dust of a dead Anglicanism which covered religious Cornwall like a pall in the days of the Georges, the old Celtic spirit, though these heroes found it hard enough to rekindle, burst from its banked-up furnaces at last and blazed abroad once more. That spirit had been bred by the saint bishops of Brito-Celtic days, and Wesley's ultimate success was a grand ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... and Celtic (Scottish and Irish) immigrants during the late 9th and 10th centuries A.D., Iceland boasts the world's oldest functioning legislative assembly, the Althing, established in 930. Independent for over 300 years, Iceland was subsequently ruled by Norway and Denmark. Fallout from ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... observation with regard to the Celtic women, in Plutarch, on the virtues of women. The North Americans pay a similar ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... Celtic race, and are reported to have been compelled by their numbers to leave their country, which was insufficient to sustain them all, and to have gone in search of other homes. And being, many thousands of them, young men able to bear arms, and carrying with them a still greater number of women ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... in order to climb Wolstonbury—the most mountainous of the hills in this part, and indeed, although far from the highest, perhaps the noblest in mien of the whole range, by virtue of its isolation and its conical shape. The earthworks on Wolstonbury, although supposed to be of Celtic origin, were probably utilised by the Romans for military purposes. More than any of the Downs does Wolstonbury bring before one the Roman occupation of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... be bothered with material questions of government and administration. They should leave such cares to the stolid, practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain to the further exercise and development of what someone had called "the starfire of the Celtic nature." Ireland should look upon England as her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of Irish saints to the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. "'T is an embarrassment of riches. If we were once to begin, we could never leave off till we had canonised ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... Mabinogion to English readers in the form which, probably, will ever most delight them. Her transcript of the Red Book of Hergest was not perfect, she found the meaning of many a Welsh phrase obscure, but her rendering is generally very accurate; and the Celtic tales retain in their new dress much of the charm, which so often evades the translator, of a perfect style ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... drama that it would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain. Nor in AEschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of tenderness, in Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great artists, in the whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no more than the life of a flower, is there anything that, for sheer simplicity of pathos wedded ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... "Celtic London" at the head of a chapter we naturally feel inclined to ask, "Was there such a place? Was there any Celtic London?" Although it is almost impossible to answer such a question by either "yes" or "no," it ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... provides for, and in that way, taken by itself, authorizes the States to wholly disfranchise entire races of its people, and that, too, whether that race be white or black, Saxon, Celtic, or Caucasian, and without regard to their numbers or proportion to the ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... pride his nationality, he admits that his mother, now among the stars, "sat down alonga 'nother side," and his complexion, or rather what is seen of it through an artless layer of charcoal and grease, applied out of respect to the memory of his deceased brother-in-law, shows no Celtic trace. Yet he has a keen appreciation of fun, has ready wit, and, according to his own showing, is not averse to a shindy, so that, perhaps his given name is at least characteristic of his assumed race. A flat overhanging forehead, keen black eyes, a broad-rooted, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... community pretty normal in bulk. But the fact is that no one can take a cab across Liverpool without having a quite complete and unified impression that the pathos is not a pathos of individual cases, but a pathos in bulk. People talk of the Celtic sadness; but there are very few things in Ireland that look so sad as the Irishman in Liverpool. The desolation of Tara is cheery compared with the desolation of Belfast. I recommend Mr. Yeats and his mournful friends to turn their attention to the pathos of Belfast. I think if they ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... Wishart, at six and twenty, had been one of those magnificent Canadian women who are most at home in the open; she could have carried Gifford Maturinout of the wilderness on her back. She was five feet seven, modelled in proportion, endowed by some Celtic ancestor with that dark chestnut hair which, because of its abundance, she wore braided and caught up in a heavy knot behind her head. Tanned by the northern sun, kneeling upright in a canoe, she might at a little distance have been mistaken for one of the race to which the forests and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sprang from an ancient Celtic hill fort, and, through successive stages, has since grown to a Roman, a mediaeval, and finally a modern city. It crowns the top of a very considerable eminence, the like of which, says Professor Freeman, does not exist in England. ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... finicky: but they can be called insufficient. He had, perhaps, over and above his honest Pantheism two convictions profound enough to be called prejudices. He was probably of Welsh blood, certainly of Celtic sympathies, and he set himself more swiftly though more subtly than Ruskin or Swinburne to undermining the enormous complacency of John Bull. He also had a sincere hope in the strength of womanhood, and may be said, almost without hyperbole, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Celt. If, for one brief period, he forced himself, for personal reasons, to veil this feeling, the feeling remained rooted within him, and soon resumed its wonted expression. He liked the South, and the people of the South, and had a true Celtic sympathy with their aristocratic pretensions. The salary of an assistant editor at that time was something between the wages of a compositor and those of an office-boy. Seven dollars a week would have been considered rather liberal pay; ten, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... Saint Andrew's, and came home in June with new, flat bands of muscle in his chest, and Onnie worshiped with loud Celtic exclamations, and bade small Pete grow up like Master San. And Sanford grew two inches before he came home for the next summer, reverting to bare feet, corduroys, and woolen shirts as usual. Onnie eyed him dazedly when he strode into her kitchen ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a people mentioned by Herodotus, who occupied principally the peninsula of the Crimea, are distinguished by Prichard from the Cimbri or Kimbri, but supposed by M. Amedee Thierry to be a branch of the same race, and Celtic. Many of their customs are said to present a striking conformity with those of the Cimbri of the Baltic and of the Gauls. Those who inhabited the hills in the Crimea bore the name of Taures or Tauri, a word, Thierry says, signifying mountaineers in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... America, and especially the many favors extended by the Morris family. Mr. Morris's wife was Miss Sarah Kane, daughter of Colonel John Kane, and she was beautiful even in her declining years. She also possessed the wit so characteristic of the Kanes, who, by the way, were of Celtic origin, being descended from John Kane who came from Ireland in 1752. She was the aunt of the first De Lancey Kane, who married the pretty Louisa Langdon, the granddaughter of John Jacob Astor. Their daughter, Emily Morris, made frequent visits to our house. She was renowned for ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... were the product of that strange race that, through the ages, has so strongly preserved its old Celtic aroma, while it has ever taken a bizarre pride in clothing its ideas with the cast-off clothes and laws of the Roman conqueror. There were to be found in it absolutely pure the Gallic audacity, the spirit of heroic reason, of irony, the mixture of braggadocio and crazy bravura, which set out ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... she was walking the streets of the new Jerusalem. She sang as she worked in the house, her sweet, ribbony voice filling the room with a gladness and rapture that made her mother, with her mystical Celtic temperament ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... said that the Ancients did not know how to hold converse with nature, and that little or no sign of it can be found in their writings. Matthew Arnold has traced to a Celtic source the sympathy with, and deep communing with nature that first appeared among European poets. Under the patronage of Charlemagne the cloisters and brotherhoods became even more learned and cultivated than they had been before. Whatever the people knew of tilling ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... Wanderings in quest of Manx Literature. Now the title alone of that book is worth a library of commonplace works, for it gives the world an inkling of a thing it never before dreamed of, namely, that the little Celtic Isle of Man has a vernacular literature. What a pity if the book itself should be eventually lost! Here some person will doubtless exclaim, 'Perhaps the title is all book, and there is no book behind it; what can Mr. Borrow know of Manx literature?' ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... first have felt, laughed heartily at Biddy's vehement gestures, as she carried out Percy's directions to the full. Now she rushed to one end of the platform, now to the other, giving vent to her feelings by various war shouts in her native Celtic. ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... person, and firmly convinced that no resistance was to be expected either from the Roman garrison or from the court; being, moreover, in urgent pecuniary embarrassment, landed in Alexandria with the two amalgamated legions accompanying him to the number of thirty-two hundred men and eight hundred Celtic and German cavalry, took up his quarters in the royal palace, and proceeded to collect the necessary sums of money and to regulate the Egyptian succession, without allowing himself to be disturbed by the saucy remark of Pothinus that Caesar should not for such petty ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... direction of his studies, but in the suggestion of an English university education, and in advice as to the mode in which he should obtain entrance there. Mr. Bronte has now no trace of his Irish origin remaining in his speech; he never could have shown his Celtic descent in the straight Greek lines and long oval of his face; but at five-and-twenty, fresh from the only life he had ever known, to present himself at the gates of St. John's proved no little determination of will, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... must the others. Hobson had dropped in, and he, David, McHenry, Schlyter, and Lying Bill, trod a measure, and I, though with only a Celtic urge and a couple of years in Hawaii to teach me, faced Temanu. The bandsmen could not remain still, and, with Kelly to play the accordion, the rout became general. McHenry did not molest Hobson, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... presided over joint-houses of monks and nuns. This custom accompanied Celtic monastic missions to France and Spain, and even to Rome itself. At a later period, A.D. 1115, Robert, the founder of Fontevraud, committed the government of the whole order, men as well as women, to a female ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... antiquity which abound in this country, are the visible memorials of those nations which have succeeded one another in the occupancy of this island. To the age of our Celtic ancestors, the earliest possessors of its soil, is ascribed the erection of those altars and temples of all but primeval antiquity, the Cromlechs and Stone Circles which lie scattered over the land; and these ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... of the men who stood near, for it was well-known that not a few of the laird's ancestors had taken kindly to mountain dew without the hampering influence of moderation, though the good man himself had never been known to "exceed"—in the Celtic acceptation of that term. ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... Celtic origin screamed murder from a third-story window. The thought of murder was disagreeable to The Hopper. Shaver's father had missed him by only the matter of a foot or two, and as he had no intention of offering ...
— A Reversible Santa Claus • Meredith Nicholson
... 8: Unless we may attribute that distinction to the blind Irish bard Raftery, who flourished sixty years ago. See various accounts of him given by Lady Gregory (Poets and Dreamers) and W. B. Yeats (The Celtic Twilight, 1902). But he appears to have been more of ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... constantly changing and progressing. The bards who sang upon the earth centuries ago—Homer, Virgil, the Greek and Roman, the Celtic and Saxon writers of old—have passed beyond the spirit sphere which I inhabit to a spirit planet still more refined, and have left behind only the ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... than if the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being borderers for over six hundred years. But the Welsh had their own national traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form, entered into the general literature of Europe. The French came into contact with the old British literature in two places: in the Welsh marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... in the air. I had come into a household of five children, two girls and three boys, the oldest ten years and the youngest two. One had died in infancy, making me the seventh child. Mother was twenty-nine and father thirty-five, a medium-sized, freckled, red-haired man, showing very plainly the Celtic or Welsh strain in his blood, as did mother, who was a Kelly and of Irish extraction on the paternal side. I had come into a family of neither wealth nor poverty as those things were looked upon in those days, but a family dedicated ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... The hot Celtic blood in Kitty Fagan's heart gave a leap. The stout muscles gave an involuntary jerk. The substantial frame felt the thrill all through, and the rickety stool on which she was standing creaked sharply under ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... made itself felt in many religions when they have progressed to a certain plane of thought. The ancient Egyptian gods were nearly all triune; Phanes, in the Orphic hymns the first principle of things, was tripartite; the Indian trinities are well known; the Celtic triads applied to divine as well as human existence; the Jews distinguished between Jehovah, his Wisdom and his Word; and in Christian religion and philosophy the doctrine of the trinity, though nowhere taught by Christ, has found a lasting foothold, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... the jovial huskers, Love stole in at Labor's side, With the lusty airs of England, Soft his Celtic measures vied. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... But numerous words came in from other sources. The early introduction of Roman Christianity into England, and the revival of learning at the close of the Middle Ages, introduced a large Latin element. The Celtic population of the British Isles contributed a few words, such as pibroch, clan, bard. A considerable Greek element has been introduced by theology and science, and English conquests and commerce have introduced words from almost every portion of the globe, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... friend certainly said something of the kind. He is also the one among us who is endowed with that Celtic temperament which would make him sensitive ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... slayer of the cloud-dragons. Sometimes it was a frog, when it seemed to be sinking into or squatting upon the water; and out of this fancy, when the meaning of it was lost, there grew a Sanskrit legend, which is to be found also in Teutonic and Celtic myths. This story is, that Bheki (the frog) was a lovely maiden who was found by a king, who asked her to be his wife. So she married him, but only on condition that he should never show her a drop ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... studied Banneker out of placid, inscrutable eyes, soft as a dove's, while he chatted at large about theaters, politics, the news of the day. Afterward the applicant met the Celtic assistant, Mr. Mallory, who broadly outlined for him the technique of the office. With no further preliminaries Banneker found himself employed at fifteen dollars a week, with Monday for his day off and directions to report on the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Malcolm owed to his Celtic blood was an utter impatience of rudeness. In his own nature entirely courteous, he was wrathful even to absurdity at the slightest suspicion of insult. But that, in part through the influence of Mr Graham, the schoolmaster, he had learned to keep a firm hold on the reins of ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... Among such tales of this kind, for instance, as linger on in our own islands, there is but little to be found which can be looked upon as a specially characteristic deposit left by the waves of Iberian, Celtic, and Teutonic population which have successively passed over the face of the land. This statement does not, of course, hold good in the case of such legends about national heroes as Mr. J. F. Campbell has found thriving in Ireland and the West Highlands ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... the Breton land. The legends of those sainted men to whom Brittany owes so much will be found in a separate chapter, in collecting the matter for which I have obtained the kindest assistance from Miss Helen Macleod Scott, who has the preservation of the Celtic spirit so much at heart. I have also included chapters on the interesting theme of the black art in Brittany, as well as on the several species of fays and demons which haunt its moors and forests; nor will the heroic ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... into seven periods. They are (1) The decay of Victorianism and the growth of a purely decorative art, (2) The rise and decline of the AEsthetic Philosophy, (3) The muscular influence of Henley, (4) The Celtic revival in Ireland, (5) Rudyard Kipling and the ascendency of mechanism in art, (6) John Masefield and the return of the rhymed narrative, (7) The war and the appearance of "The Georgians." It may be interesting to trace these developments ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... name implies, comes of the mixed Norse and Celtic race which constitutes the population of the Isle of Man. Hall, his mother's name, is Norse, and is common to this day in Iceland, from which the Norsemen came to Manxland. Caine, which means "a fighter with clubs," is Celtic. Hall Caine himself, with his ruddy beard and hair and ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... "Mrs. Eppingwell," and her Celtic voice rose shrilly, "it is with great pleasure I make you acquainted with Freda Moloof, Miss Freda Moloof, as ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... books on this subject, and am rather puzzled. Are the English people, as existing now, Teutons, or Danes, or Celts, or what? Can we be Teutons when the aborigines of these islands were not Teutonic? I feel that my own genius—and I have a lot—is Celtic; at the same time I have always prided myself on my Norman blood; yet from my liking for the sea, which never makes me sick, at least at Herne Bay, I fancy I must be descended from a Scandinavian Viking. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... Finn, the Irish hero, was once entrapped by a sorceress on a similar pretext into plunging into an enchanted lake, which changed him into an old man. (See Joyce's Old Celtic Romances, "The Chase of Slieve Cullin.") The story is also related in one of ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... we have said are a third part of Gaul, were entering into a confederacy against the Roman people, and giving hostages to one another; that the reasons of the confederacy were these—first, because they feared that, after all [Celtic] Gaul was subdued, our army would be led against them; secondly, because they were instigated by several of the Gauls; some of whom as [on the one hand] they had been unwilling that the Germans should ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... ambition—or perhaps his hobby—to infuse into the greyness of modern political life some of the colour of Disraelian dandyism, tempered with the correctness of Anglo-Saxon taste, and supplemented by the flashes of wit that were inherent from the Celtic strain in him. His success was only a half-measure. The public missed in him that touch of blatancy which it looks for in its rising public men; the decorative smoothness of his chestnut-golden hair, ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... the music he was already vaguely acquainted; and he had gathered, in a general way, that Ulick Dean was considered to be a man of talent. The British public might demand a new opera, and there had been some talk of Celtic genius in the newspapers lately. Dean's "Grania" might make an admirable diversion in the Wagnerian repertoire—only it must not be too anti-Wagnerian. Mr. Goetze prided himself on being in the ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... "Galatia" is used in a popular sense to describe the country inhabited by the Galatai, then it means North Galatia, a district in {151} the extreme north of Asia Minor. It was mainly inhabited by Celts, who came thither from Europe in the 3rd century B.C., and spoke a Celtic language as late as the 2nd and even 4th century after Christ. This language is mentioned by Pausanias, and St. Jerome says that it was a dialect only slightly varying from that used in Gaul by the Treveri. But if the word "Galatia" ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... It is not the Celtic memory only that is tenacious of national wrong. The Saxon was doomed to drink to the dregs the same bitter cup which he administered so unmercifully to the Briton. His Teutonic blood saved him from no humiliation or insult. The Normans seized all the lands, all ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... on and mention several other subjects, well worthy of the same distinction. If the study of Celtic languages and Celtic antiquities deserves to be encouraged anywhere, it is surely in England,—not, as has been suggested, in order to keep English literature from falling into the abyss of German platitudes, nor to put Aneurin and Taliesin ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... doctrine and tradition preached throughout the globe is as uniform as if the Church consisted of one family, possessing one soul, one heart, and as if she had but one mouth. For, though the languages of the world are dissimilar, her doctrine is the same. The churches founded in Germany, in the Celtic nations, in the East in Egypt, in Lybia, and in the centres of civilization, do not differ from each other; but as the sun gives the same light throughout the world, so does the light of faith shine everywhere ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... accent, and in rather a low tone of voice, so much so, indeed, that I found it difficult to catch every word. He mentioned my 'Fairy Legends,' and hoped he should soon have the very great enjoyment of reading the second volume. 'You are our—I speak of the Celtic nations' (said Sir Walter)—'great authority now on fairy superstition, and have made Fairy Land your kingdom; most sincerely do I hope it may prove a golden inheritance to you. To me,' (continued Sir Walter) 'it is the land of promise of much future entertainment. I have been reading ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... general in the Royal Engineers, published an "Essay on the Celtic Language," etc., in 1782. "The language [the Iberno-Celtic]," he writes (p. 4), "we are now going to explain, had such an affinity with the Punic, that it may be said to have been, in a great degree, the language of Hanibal (sic), Hamilcar, and of Asdrubal." Sir Laurence Parsons (1758-1841), ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... exact reproduction of a room existing at Jerusalem in the time of Saint Louis; this was explained by inscriptions and devices in Gothic or Celtic. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... would not do. Malone, being neither good-natured nor phlegmatic, was presently in a towering passion. He vociferated, gesticulated; Donne and Sweeting laughed. He reviled them as Saxons and snobs at the very top pitch of his high Celtic voice; they taunted him with being the native of a conquered land. He menaced rebellion in the name of his "counthry," vented bitter hatred against English rule; they spoke of rags, beggary, and pestilence. The little parlour was in an uproar; you would have ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... East Kent and Surrey. There were also the Northern and Southern dialects, which, blending with the East Midland, formed the basis of modern English. But these three dialects are likewise compounds of the Saxon, Celtic, Danish, and Norman tongues. To get rid of the smell of paint, sprinkle some hay with chloride of lime and leave it in the rooms; also a basin of water, to be changed night and morning. You will perceive traces on the surface ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various |
