"Diviner" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gods. For the later versions prepare us for a reference to a dream. If we take the line as describing Ziusudu's practice of dream-divination in general, "such as had not been before", he may have been represented as the first diviner of dreams, as Enmeduranki was held to be the first practitioner of divination in general. But it seems to me more probable that the reference is to a particular dream, by means of which he obtained knowledge of the gods' intentions. On the rendering of this passage depends our interpretation ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... yet in trance or dream That falls when crowned desire has died, So breathed the air of power supreme, So breathed, and calmed, and satisfied! Did then those mystic lips unclose, Or that diviner silence make A seeming voice? The flame arose, The deity his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... blood! Here could I spend whole hours, delaying: Here Nature shaped, as if in sportive playing, The angel blossom from the bud. Here lay the child, with Life's warm essence The tender bosom filled and fair, And here was wrought, through holier, purer presence, The form diviner beings wear! ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... here I think that we seem to be getting on the right track; for the priest and the diviner are swollen with pride and prerogative, and they create an awful impression of themselves by the magnitude of their enterprises; in Egypt, the king himself is not allowed to reign, unless he have priestly powers, and if he should be of another ...
— Statesman • Plato
... years Christians served God and loved man, before, as yet, they received this cultivation of our age; and we, because we have it so profusely, are forgetting the deeper and diviner lessons. The tradition of Christian education in this country is, as yet, unbroken. It has, however, been greatly undermined. It will be completely broken if we Catholics do not strive, to the best of our ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... emotion. It leaves, no doubt, no bitterness of any kind. Poverty can't rob me of those memories. I have lived in an ideal world that was not deceitful, a world which seems to me, when I recall it, beyond the human sphere, bathed in diviner light.' ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... nothing to do with it, Dolly. There are larger loves and diviner dreams than the fireside ones. You ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... creating day When He who called with thought to birth Yon tented sky, this laughing earth, And dressed with springs and forests tall, And poured the main engirting all, Long by the loved enthusiast wood, Himself in some diviner mood, Retiring, sate with her alone, And placed her on his sapphire throne, The whiles, the vaulted shrine around, Seraphic wires were heard to sound, Now sublimest triumph swelling, Now on love and mercy dwelling; And ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... together, he and I—Antony and I. There! I may as well confess that's what I call him to myself, for I've guessed your secret—and his. But don't be afraid. I won't tell a soul. It's too romantic and fascinating for words—or to put into words. He let me have my fortune told by an Arab sand diviner, who came while we were at dinner. I can't repeat to you what the fortune-teller said. But I feel as if I were living in a book. Oh, if only I were writing it myself and could make everything happen ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... O auspicious King, that Barsum replied, "Pardon, O King of the age; thou art right as regards the table, for thy slave is indeed a Nazarene." Whereupon all present, gentle and simple, wondered at the King's skill in hitting upon the truth by geomancy, and said, "Verily this King is a diviner, whose like there is not in the world." Thereupon Queen Zumurrud bade flay the Nazarene and stuff his skin with straw and hang it over the gate of the race-course. Moreover, she commended to dig a pit without the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... eyes, the speechless smile of lovers, ancestral memories of Spring-times, loves, and partings, evoked by this poignant lure from dim realms of sub-consciousness, like subterranean rivers rising through creaks and crannies towards the lifted wand of the diviner. It seemed the quintessence of human experience, the ecstasy of perfect and enfranchising sorrow, distilled from the shackling, smirching half-sorrows of actual life. Some of the listening faces smiled; some were sodden, stupefied rather than enlightened; some showed a sensual rudimentary ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... this chapter, till I have struck another and a Diviner note. I have been to the Islands again, since my return from Britain. The whole inhabitants of Aniwa were there to welcome me, and my procession to the old Mission House was more like the triumphal march of a Conqueror than that of ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... songs and Psalms, stopping suddenly, mingling the Psalms of David and the diviner words of his Son and Lord, with homely odds and ends ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... did not penetrate far into the darkness of the immense parlor. There was an easy chair near her piano and her music. After playing when alone, she would often sit there and listen to the echoes of those influences that come into the soul from music only,—the rhythmic hauntings of some heaven of diviner beauty. She sat there now quite in darkness and closed her eyes; and upon her ear began faintly to beat the sad sublime tones of ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... these very skies, And probing their immensities, I found God there, his visible power; Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense Of the power, an equal evidence That his love, there too, was the nobler dower. For the loving worm within its clod, Were diviner than a loveless god Amid his worlds, I will dare to say. You know what I mean: God's all, man's nought: But also, God, whose pleasure brought Man into being, stands away As it were a handbreadth off, to give Room for the newly-made to live, And look at him from a place ...
— Christmas Eve • Robert Browning
... was stamped a look of eager thought and spiritualised desire such as he had known portrayed in ancient masterpieces upon the face of the Virgin Mother. Except as regards her eyes and hair, Jess was not even a good-looking person. But, at that moment, John thought that her face was touched with a diviner beauty than he had yet seen on the face of woman. It thrilled him and appealed to him, not as Bessie's beauty had appealed, but to that other side of his nature, of which Jess alone could turn the key. It was more like the ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... like a dim recognition of kinship passes. I turn this Thrush in my hand,—I remember its strange ways, the curious look it gave me, its ineffable music, its freedom, and its ecstasy,—and I tremble lest I have slain a being diviner ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... unfold my sentence and my crime. My crime—that, rapt in reverential awe, I sate obedient, in the fiery prime Of youth, self-govern'd, at the feet of Law; Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings, By contemplation of diviner things. ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... impieties, or blind ourselves to the perpetuating tendencies of the bigotries of great men. Oh! had the first indoctrinators of Christian feeling, while enlisting the "divine Plato" into the service of diviner charity, only kept the latter just enough in mind to discern the beautiful difference between the philosopher's unmalignant and improvable evil, and their own malignant and eternal one, what a world of folly and misery they might have saved us! But as the evil has happened, let us hope that even ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... is a king; the ground He treads on is not ours; His soul by other laws is bound, Sustained by other powers. Liver of a diviner life, He turns a vacant gaze Toward the theater of strife, Where we consume our ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... yes! they are flourished all over with the rhetoric of the body; but nowhere is to be seen in them that diviner poetry, the oratory of the soul! Truly they are a splendid casket enclosing nothing—at least nothing now of importance to us; for what they once contained, the world, when stirred with nobler matter, disregarded, and left to perish. ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... begins the man feels refreshed in body and in soul because he has paused a little while in the mad whirl of his struggle for bread or fame, and has fellow-shipped with heavenly things, and heard something diviner than the Jangling discords of this narrow, ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... than of feature. She was as distinct from the rest of her clamorous family as a pearl from pebbles. She was an enthusiast, a dreamer, passionately sincere, passionately pitiful. She recognised truth as a water diviner finds water. She was brought up in a labyrinth of theories, creeds of equality, in hatred for the rich, and out of all the jargon she gathered some eternal truths which she made her own. She did not live with her people: she had rooms of her own ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... and ever-renewed interest, which his trade, as the dramatic critic of a daily paper, had hitherto failed to discourage. And he knew that Bob Wade, simple and undefiled by literature—Bernald's specific affliction—had a free and personal way of judging men, and the diviner's knack of reaching their hidden springs. During the days that followed, the young doctor gave Bernald farther details about John Winterman: details not of fact—for in that respect his visitor's reticence was baffling—but of impression. ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... forms of "gig-manity," and our bodies have not been made to waste and pine by the fashionable follies of this generation. It is our creed that life is greater than all forms, and that the soul's life is diviner than convenances ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... without the faculty of pure taste in literature, despite my vague longings? I do wish I could smack my lips over Wordsworth's Prelude as I did over that splendid story by H.G. Wells, The Country of the Blind, in the Strand Magazine!".... Yes, I am convinced that in your dissatisfied, your diviner moments, you address yourself in these terms. I am convinced that I ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... diviner making Than the sons of pride and strife, Quick with love and pity, breaking From a knowledge old as life; Women of a spiritual rareness, Whom old passion and old woe Moulded to a slenderer fairness Than the dearest ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... diviner epoch of man's mysterious passion, when ideas of perfection and purity, vague and fugitive before, start forth and concentre themselves round one virgin shape,—that rises out from the sea of creation, welcomed by the Hours and adorned by the Graces,—how the thought that this archetype ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... diviner, who had accompanied the Athenians on their expedition to Sicily. Thus the War was necessary to make his calling pay and the smoke of the sacrifice offered to Peace must therefore be unpleasant ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... who ascribe it to the opposite of the real cause. And once more, when a body large and too strong for the soul is united to a small and weak intelligence, then inasmuch as there are two desires natural to man,—one of food for the sake of the body, and one of wisdom for the sake of the diviner part of us—then, I say, the motions of the stronger, getting the better and increasing their own power, but making the soul dull, and stupid, and forgetful, engender ignorance, which is the greatest of diseases. There is one protection ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... troubled sea wherein to ride than the stormy fluctuance of mortal passion; Plato is diviner than Ovid," said a puritanic, piping voice from a coif that was fashioned out of the white camellia-blooms behind my chair, and circled the prim ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... themselves, as soon as possible, of the blood they have shed, or the shades of their victims would pursue them incessantly, and disturb their slumbers. They go in a procession, and in full armour, to the nearest stream. At the moment they enter the water a diviner, placed higher up, throws some purifying substances into the current. This is, however, not strictly necessary. The javelins and battle-axes also undergo the process of washing." Among the Bageshu of East Africa a man who has killed another may not return to his own house on the same day, though ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... grief-shattering, triumphant song, For all the victories of man's high endeavor, Palm-bearing, laureled deeds that live forever, The splendor clothing him whose will is strong. Hast thou beheld the deep, glad eyes of one Who has persisted and achieved? Rejoice! On naught diviner shines the all-seeing sun. Salute him with free heart and choral voice, 'Midst flippant, feeble crowds of spectres wan, The bold, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... could inspire a man with life and love and joy—could fire him with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos, equal to the genius of your book? No! no! Whenever I want to be more than ordinary in song—to be in some degree equal to your diviner airs—do you imagine I fast and pray for the celestial emanation? Quite the contrary. I have a glorious recipe; the very one that for his own use was invented by the divinity of healing and poesy, when erst he piped to the flocks of Admetus. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... by me, An odor from Dreamland sent, That makes the ghost seem nigh me Of a splendor that came and went, Of a life lived somewhere, I know not In what diviner sphere, Of memories that stay not and go not, Like music heard once by an ear That cannot forget or reclaim it, A something so shy, it would shame it To make it a show, A something too vague, could I name it, For others to know, As if I had lived it or ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... bright a May, when that vision of her new self should become a yet brighter reality. She was confident of April because she was confident of life, lapped in an aureate glow that seemed to suffuse the very air she drew into her lungs so that it intoxicated her like the breath of a diviner ether from Olympian heights. She had seen beauty, and lo! it had been revealed to her not as a thing apart and unattainable, but as a quality within herself. Her "difference" had become ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... though very tentatively, leaves an opening for immortality, where, as in the case of man, there are functions of the soul, such as philosophic contemplation, which cannot be related to bodily conditions. He really was convinced that in man there was a portion of that diviner aether which dwelt eternally in the heavens, and was the ever-moving cause of all things. If there was in man a passive mind, which became all things, as all things through sensation affected it, there was also, Aristotle argued, a creative mind in man, which is above, and unmixed with, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... 'Realm of Shadow.' The true Ideal is quite as liable to be lost amidst the maze of metaphysics, as in the actual thoroughfares of work-day life. A plunge into Kant may do more harm to a Poet than a walk through Fleet Street. Goethe, than whom no man had ever more studied the elements of the diviner art, was right as an artist in his dislike to the over-cultivation of the aesthetical. The domain of the Ideal is the heart, and through the heart it operates on the soul. It grows feebler and dimmer in proportion as it seeks to rise above human emotion.... Longinus does not err, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... the wizards themselves we must address a solemn preamble, begging them not to treat the world as if they were children, or compel the legislator to expose them, and to show men that the poisoner who is not a physician and the wizard who is not a prophet or diviner are equally ignorant of what they are doing. Let the law be as follows:—He who by the use of poison does any injury not fatal to a man or his servants, or any injury whether fatal or not to another's cattle or bees, ...
— Laws • Plato
... and incline his heart. Love had indeed made Harriet's spirit free. And to no woman can love mean so much as to one who is aware that she is physically deficient. Homely women are apt to make the better wives, and in all my earth-pilgrimage I never saw a more devoted love—a diviner tenderness—than that which exists between a man of my acquaintance, sound in every sense and splendid in physique, and his wife, who has been blind from her birth. For weeks after I first met this couple there rang ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... far from mortal joys, To Soul's diviner sense, that spurns such toys, Brave wrestler, lone. Now see thy ever-self; Life never fled; Man is not mortal, never of the ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... that transfigures the world. To such, despair cannot come; for when the worst arrives, when all they cherished is gone, heaven is still left to them; and they look up and smile. To them sorrow is but a preparation for a diviner joy. All things indeed work together for their good; since, whether fair fortune comes, or ill, they possess the spiritual alchemy that transmutes ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... see with their toes and fingers, and read unknown languages, and understand them too, by merely having the book placed on their bellies. Ignorant clodpoles, when once entranced by the grand Mesmeric fluid, could spout philosophy diviner than Plato ever wrote, descant upon the mysteries of the mind with more eloquence and truth than the profoundest metaphysicians the world ever saw, and solve knotty points of divinity with as much ease as waking men could ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... overwhelming one. The peculiar genius of the Indian people is the reverence innate in even the lowliest peasant for the worth of the Spirit, and for the monks and sadhus who have forsaken worldly ties to seek a diviner anchorage. Imposters and hypocrites there are indeed, but India respects all for the sake of the few who illumine the whole land with supernal blessings. Westerners who were viewing the vast spectacle had a unique opportunity ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... a mighty bard, and in a poem, he, under the name of Gweir, is imprisoned in the Other-world, and there becomes a bard, thus receiving inspiration from the gods' land.[371] He is the ideal faith—diviner, prophet, and poet, and thus the god of those professing these arts. Strabo describes how the Celtic vates (faith) was also a philosopher, and this character is given in a poem to Seon (probably Gwydion), whose artists are poets and magicians.[372] But he is also ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... are can always do with a man one of two things: either fascinate him with her own personality, so that his thought is only of her; or else through her beauty and words and manner, that are in keeping, suggest the diviner loveliness of a noble life and character. I am satisfied that one could not be in Miss Martell's society without being better, or wishing to be better. You might have the same influence, and to a greater degree, because you naturally have more force and quicker sympathies. There is more magnetism ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... the material for the dramatic development of the subject. The overture, beginning with an adagio movement in B-flat minor, gives expression to the vague yearnings of that time of doubt and hesitancy when the "oracles were dumb," and the dawning of a new era of stronger and diviner faith was matter of presentiment rather than of definite hope or expectation. Though the tonality is at first firmly established, yet as the movement becomes more agitated, the final tendency of the modulations also becomes uncertain, and for a few bars it ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... foreign soft dissyllables, Italian tones, made only to be murmured By angels dreaming in the moonlit "dew That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill," 10 Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart Unthought-like thoughts, that are the souls of thought,— Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions Than even the seraph harper, Israfel (Who has "the sweetest voice of all God's creatures"), 15 Could hope to utter. And I—my spells are broken; The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand; ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... walls one word could crush If those vast armoured throats dared to reply: But there the most implacable enemy Felt his eyes fill with gladder, prouder tears, As Nelson's calm eternal face went by, Gazing beyond all perishable fears To some diviner goal above the waste ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... is found in the Platonic Dialogue between Sokrates and Euthyphron. The philosopher asks the diviner to tell what is holy and what impiety. "That which is pleasing to the gods is holy, and that which is not pleasing to them is impious" promptly replies the mantis, "To be holy is to be just," said Sokrates; "Is the thing holy because they love it, or do they love ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... Is truth's diviner ray; A brighter radiance pouring Than all the pomp of day: The wanderer surely guiding, It makes the simple wise; And evermore abiding, Unfailing ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... him beyond all other men I have known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the sense of great things sweeping out of the shrouded night. But he could not receive them, because his heart was still full of little things. As the lost umbrella had spoilt the concert at Queen's Hall, so the lost situation was obscuring the diviner harmonies now. Death, Life and Materialism were fine words, but would Mr. Wilcox take him on as a clerk? Talk as one would, Mr. Wilcox was king of this world, the superman, with his own morality, whose head remained ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... me, that old Ali Mohamed was very dull of sight, or else he would have remarked strange alterations in my features when he made these observations. However, our conference ended by his promising to send me the most expert diviner of Ispahan; 'a man,' said he, 'who would entice a piece of gold out of the earth, if buried twenty gez deep, or even if it was hid in the ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... the secrets of the prison house. With Milton, we mount heaven-ward, and in the immortal verse of his minor poems, finer even than the stately march of Paradise Lost, we hear celestial music, and breathe diviner air. With that sovereign artist, Shakespeare, full equally of delight and of majesty, we sweep the horizon of this complex human life, and become comprehensive scholars and citizens of the world. The masters ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... that rough village and sprang from the broils of that one plain; Rome was most vigorous before it could speak. So a man's verse, and all he has, are but the last outward appearance, late and already rigid, of an earlier, more plastic, and diviner fire. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... this certitude it was that set him in such an atmosphere of power and made us all look to him instinctively; for he took no tentative steps, made no false moves, and while the rest of us floundered he moved straight to the climax. He was indeed a true diviner of souls. ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... worship of his majesty unto his excellency. It puts the stamp of divinity upon it, and spiritualizes the thoughts and affections, so as to put a true difference between the true God, and the gods that made not the heavens and the earth. Alas! the worship of many Christians speaks out no diviner or higher object than a creature, it is so cold, so formal and empty, so vain and wandering. There is no more respect testified unto him, than we would give unto some eminent person. You find in the scripture ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... And yet with gentle hands I place You with my priceless Delft and Dresden china, For sake of one who loved your homely face In days diviner. ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... ghostly lights and shadows; a willing but unhappy waiter dying of exhaustion and pain; a curious figure of Misery in which there certainly was nothing picturesque, but much to arouse one's pity and sympathy—the better, diviner part ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... New life, she digs her proper grave to-day; And icy moons with weary sameness weave From their own light their fulness and decay. Home to the poet's land the gods are flown, Light use in them that later world discerns, Which, the diviner leading-strings outgrown, On its own ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... The diviner part of him was weeping, and the cold, proud demon was struggling to regain his lost ascendency. Every sob of the fair, inspired child who had been speaking to him seemed to shake his heart,—he felt as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... was beautiful. I saw its unfailing index in those oval developments—the index, too, of the intellectual; for experience had taught me that intellect takes a shape; and that those peculiarities of form that we admire, without knowing why, are but the material illustrations of the diviner principles of mind. ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... of 87 feet, after going through sand, clay, and a bed of what Mr. Halliday says is quartz and lead ore. Mr. Campion, who was previously without a supply of pure water, is delighted with the results of the visit of the 'diviner,' and has faith in his power with the rod. Mr. Stears has since been called in to experiment on several farms on the Birdsall estate of Lord Middleton, the operations being conducted in the presence of Julia, ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... specially, in these so-called intellectual days, that there is something more than intellect, and that is—purity and virtue. Let her never be persuaded to forget that her calling is not the lower and more earthly one of self-assertion, but the higher and the diviner calling of self-sacrifice; and let her never desert that higher life, which lives in others and for others, like her ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... wisdom and his love with plans Poor and inadequate as man's. It must be that He witnesses Somehow to all men that He is That something of His saving grace Reaches the lowest of the race, Who, through strange creed and rite, may draw The hints of a diviner law. We walk in clearer light;—but then, Is He not God?—are they not men? Are His responsibilities For us alone and not ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of those I would allow to be poets: for one must not call it sufficient to tag a verse: nor if any person, like me, writes in a style bordering on conversation, must you esteem him to be a poet. To him who has genius, who has a soul of a diviner cast, and a greatness of expression, give the honor of this appellation. On this account some have raised the question, whether comedy be a poem or not; because an animated spirit and force is neither in the style, nor the subject-matter: ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... street of the sand-diviner the first ray of the moon fell on the white road. Far away at the end of the street Domini could see the black foliage of the trees in the Gazelles' garden, and beyond, to the left, a dimness of shadowy palms at the desert ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... that happiness is to be preferred to riches. But happiness consists in the operation of the noblest and diviner of the faculties that we possess—when the whole mind is occupied in contemplating the truth of wisdom, which is the most delectable of all our virtuous activities, as the prince of philosophers declares in the tenth book of the Ethics, on which account it is that philosophy is held ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... beauty, so he puts his 'naked thinking heart' into verse as if he were setting forth an argument. He gives us the real thing, as he would have been proud to assure us. But poetry will have nothing to do with real things, until it has translated them into a diviner world. That world may be as closely the pattern of ours as the worlds which Dante saw in hell and purgatory; the language of the poet may be as close to the language of daily speech as the supreme poetic language of Dante. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... religion, and that glorified it as long as it retained a genuine life; they filled the transepts with a radiant throng of saints and angels, and threw around the high altar a faint reflection—as much as mortals could see, or bear—of a Diviner Presence. But now that the colors are so wretchedly bedimmed,—now that blotches of plastered wall dot the frescos all over, like a mean reality thrusting itself through life's brightest illusions,—the next best artist to Cimabue or Giotto or Ghirlandaio or Pinturicchio ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... but we must never treat her sister coldly or with indifference, as though she had no right to be among us; because, though in the external she is unlovely, within she is equally radiant with her sister,—not the same charm of brilliancy, but a softer, diviner radiance shines ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... or physical pain? Your Father knoweth. Cease to fight against it. Come into His Kingdom. Suffering endures but a little while; and if you will have it so, out of it will come a diviner joy. ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... odor from the heavenly bowers, Which stirs our senses tenderly, and brings Dreams which are shadows of diviner things Beyond this grosser atmosphere of ours. An oasis of verdure and of flowers, Love smiteth on the Pilgrim's weary way; There fresher air, there sweeter waters play, There purer solace charms the quiet hours. This glorious passion, unalloyed, endowers With moral beauty ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... turns to nature, indeed, in all times of stress and trouble for its healing unconsciousness, its gentle changes that can be foreseen and reckoned upon, and that yet bring fresh interests and charming surprises; and in times of health and happiness he pictures the pleasant earth and its diviner beauties with a passionate intensity. Again and again we shall have to notice his poet's love for "unfrequented woods," his thinker's ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... in Nature or in men's hearts, had an infinitely more fertile imagination, and the result was therefore more various and multiplex; it reached a higher point in the graduated scale of ideality, it was the afflatus of a diviner inspiration, and was more akin to the effects of the most exalted poetry: yet it was of far less value as something which was to operate on men's minds than the result of Beecher's more pointed, more scintillating discourse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the sky, in a rivalry of intense but dazzling light, the crescent moon hung splendid over against a great constellation which glittered like a carcanet of diamonds. They seemed to speak together as if in some scene or passage of celestial drama, nor did I know which was the diviner speech, the moon's unwavering effulgence or that leaping coruscation of the stars. Nothing stirred on the right hand or the left, but earth and air were hushed, as if before that colloquy all sound and motion were miraculously ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... "hiatus valde deflendi," which made whole passages perfectly unintelligible. Many of the sweetest passages of Shakspeare were converted into unmeaning nonsense, from the absence of those words which his own all but divine genius had appropriated from a still diviner source. As to Milton, he was nearly ruined, as might naturally be supposed. Walter Scott's novels were filled with perpetual lacunae. I hoped it might be otherwise with the philosophers, and so it was; but even here it was ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... He smote, and clinging to the serious chords, With godlike ravishment drew forth a breath So deep, so strong, so fervid thick with love, Blissful yet laden as with twenty prayers, That Juno yearned with no diviner soul To the first burthen of the lips of Jove. Th' exceeding mystery of the loveliness Sadden'd delight, and with his mournful look, Dreary and gaunt, hanging his pallid face 'Twixt his dark flowing locks, he ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... the hero inflamed with love or liberty becomes invincible. When some Garibaldi or Lincoln appears, and the people behold his greatness and beauty and magnanimity, every heart catches the sacred passion. Then the narrow-minded youth tumbles down his little idols, sets up diviner ideals, and finds new measurements for the thrones of heaven and earth. Then, in a great abandonment of love, the nation pours out its heart ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... sacrifice, could we have any truth for its condition. But the falsehood has been written down by one whom we can nowise accuse. Alas! there is often as little truth in the entertainer. All together in the matter are walking in a vain show. We are at the mercy of a diviner's wand and a conjurer's spell. We have put on a foolish look of consent and compromise. We join with our new mate in extolling the wrong-doer who has inflicted him upon us. We dare not analyze the base alloy of the composition he conveys, which pretends ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... the great heart of Silence, till it beat Response with all its echoes: for from out That far, immortal orient, wherein His soul abides 'mid morning skies and dews, A wood-thrush, angel of the tree-top heaven, Poured clear his pure soprano through the place, Deepening the stillness with diviner calm, That gave to Silence all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... a fuller, larger life. It does not appear as distinctly developed in Adam Bede, where there is more of poise and repose. Maggie represents the restless spirit of the nineteenth century, intense dissatisfaction with self, and a profoundly human passion for something higher and diviner. A passionate restlessness and a profound spiritual hunger are united in this novel to an eager desire for a deeper and fuller life, and for a satisfactory answer to the soul's spiritual thirst. The spiritual repose of Dinah, who has found all the religious cravings of her nature satisfied ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... mother and the old woman. And in the morning, when the sun is up and all the village is light, the old women open their doors, and see no relish there, and they know what has happened, and so they go wilily to work. For they persuade the husband to consult the diviner that he may discover how to cure his impotence; and while he is closeted with the wizard, they fetch another man, who finishes the ceremony with the young wife, in order that the relish may be given ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... us, through centuries long, In peace secure, in justice strong; Around our gift of freedom draw The safeguards of thy righteous law: And, cast in some diviner mould, Let the new cycle shame ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... bits of old songs and Psalms, stopping suddenly, mingling the Psalms of David, and the diviner words of his Son and Lord, with homely odds and ends and ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... loveliness copied in the clear truth of its appreciation, and the passion for it had become, insensibly, the thirst of my life, before I thought of it as more than an intoxicating study. To be loved—myself beloved—by a creature made in one of the diviner moulds of woman, was, however, a dream that shaped itself into waking distinctness at last, and from that hour I took up the clogging weight of personal disadvantages, to which I had hitherto unconsciously been chained, and bore it heavily in the race which ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... phenomenon of commanding interest. And if among the more recent revelations of Nature there is one thing more significant for religion than another, it is the majestic spectacle of the rise of Kingdoms toward scarcer yet nobler forms, and simpler yet diviner ends. Of the early stage, the first development of the earth from the nebulous matrix of space, Science speaks with reserve. The second, the evolution of each individual from the simple protoplasmic cell to the formed adult, is proved. The still wider evolution, not of solitary ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the next spring lies the knowledge of the future—hinting at much fortune telling by means of pools, and faces of future husbands in basins of water and mirrors; while the three virgins are the Parcae—the goddesses of destiny. You know these ladies, reader; but here they are grander, gloomier, diviner than were our old friends Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. And the endless strife between the eagle and the serpent, stirred up by the squirrel, is the 'ever-battling, interchangeable action between Spirit and Matter, the ever hence-and-hither ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Malagasy tale of the way in which Andrianoro obtained a wife from heaven. There three sisters, whose dwelling-place is in heaven, frequent a lake in the crystal waters whereof they swim, taking flight at once on the approach of any human being. By a diviner's advice the hero changes into three lemons, which the youngest sister desires to take; but the others, fearing a snare, persuade her to fly away with them. Foiled thus, the hero changes into bluish water in the midst of the lake, then into the seed of a vegetable growing by the waterside, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... letter. Brilliard asked, if he would not please to write her some answer, or condescend to see her; 'No,' replied Octavio, 'I have done with all the gilded vanities of life, now I shall think of Sylvia but as some heavenly thing, fit for diviner contemplations, but never with the youthful thoughts of love.' What he should send her now, he said, would have a different style to those she used to receive from him; it would be pious counsel, grave advice, unfit for ladies so young and gay as Sylvia, and would scarce find a welcome: he ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... a story that once Pericles had brought to him from a country farm of his, a ram's head with one horn, and that Lampon, the diviner, upon seeing the horn grow strong and solid out of the midst of the forehead, gave it as his judgement that, there being at that time two potent factions, parties, or interests in the city, the one of Thucydides and the other of Pericles, the government would come about to ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... rhyming bards, For you cannot judge between truth and falsehood. If you be primary bards formed by heaven, Tell your king what his fate will be. It is I who am a diviner and a leading bard, And know every passage in the country of your king; I shall liberate Elphin from the belly of the stony tower; And will tell your king what will befall him. A most strange creature ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... her brain as of the serenity of stainless air, the power of sovereign seas, the majesty of marching stars, the energy of colliding elements, the rooted endurance of hills wide based, and, above all, as of the lustre of heroic beauty rushing victorious on the Night, vanquishing its shadows like a diviner sun. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... stayed two days, and resolved to undertake an operation. To spare the feelings of poor Martener he went to Paris and brought back with him the celebrated Desplein. Thus the operation was performed by the greatest surgeon of ancient or modern times; but that terrible diviner said to Martener as he departed with Bianchon, ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... ancient people had seen them. In the grandeurs and wonders of creation they could behold the being and the might and the goodness of the Creator. The strong, rich hearts of their seers yearned for a diviner life, in the deep, true consciousness they felt that there can be peace and joy to man only through reconcilement with God. And feeling their own unworthiness and impurity, as well as that of their people, they uttered their spiritual desires, and their aspirations and disappointments ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... present to that which is written, the conviction took hold on men that there was no limit to what they might know concerning their nature and destiny and no limit to that destiny. The priestly idea that the past was diviner than the present, that God was behind the race, gave place to the belief that we should look forward and not backward for inspiration, and that the present and the future promised a fuller and more certain knowledge ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... parish a long way off, who said that he could find springs with a divining rod. He was a curious old man with a crutch, and he came with his rod, and hobbled about till at last the rod twitched just at the tenant's back door—at least the diviner said it did. At any rate, they dug there, and in ten minutes struck a spring of water, which bubbled up so strongly that it rushed into the house and flooded it. And what do you think? After all, the water was brackish. You are the man with ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... through centuries long, In peace secure, in justice strong; Around our gift of freedom draw The safeguards of Thy righteous law; And, cast in some diviner mold, Let the new cycle shame ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... ox and ass are not, indeed, omitted; they must be present by religious and prescriptive usage; but they are to be made picturesque, as if they were in the stable by right, and as if it were only a stable, not a temple hallowed to a diviner significance. The ass, instead of looking devoutly into the cradle, stretches out his lazy length in the foreground; the ox winks his eyes with a more than bovine stupidity. In some of the old German pictures, while the Hebrew ox is quietly chewing the cud, the Gentile ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... true that there are many women far too great, too wise, too high, for mere housekeeping. But where is the woman in any way too great, or too high, or too wise, to spend herself in creating a home? What can any woman make diviner, higher, better? From such homes go forth all heroisms, all inspirations, all great deeds. Such mothers and such homes have made the heroes and martyrs, faithful unto death, who have given their precious lives to us during these three years ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fraught with peril to yourself and to others: do not think for a moment of employing an engine so fallacious and so dangerous.' But I listened not to the Zealot: could the steady and bright torch which, even where the Star of Bethlehem had withheld its diviner light, had guided some patient and unwearied steps to the very throne of Virtue, become but a deceitful meteor to him who kindled it for the aid of Religion, and in an eternal cause? Could it be perilous to task our reason, even to the utmost, in ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... close that I feel we never can be strangers again. It is true the lightning fuses the hardest substances, making them one; however, I am beginning to think that my hitherto callous nature has been smitten by a diviner fire. If so, Heaven grant that I'm ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... asked d'Avrigny, fixing his penetrating gaze on Noirtier. He watched the effect of this question on the old man. "No," replied he with an air of triumph which would have puzzled the most clever diviner. "Then you hope?" said d'Avrigny, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the stars o'erhead Things as divine and glorious as poesy Is wont to sing? Is't not some power in us, Some memory of a yet diviner world And things illumined by the light of God That dowers the stars with beauty, gives them strength And grandeur? 'Tis in us the stars have being, And poesy's self is but the memory Of things that have been or the seer's glance At ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... a picture of {104} human life, somewhere in the mind of God Himself, where the young man grows up without any harvest of wild oats, with clear and unselfish ideals, with a longing to make the world purer and diviner than he found it, a picture which is in some measure realised around us to-day. May God deliver us not only from vicious but from selfish thoughts! I believe Thackeray saw something of that picture, but he didn't draw it with the colours I could have wished. ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... of Greek writers, and the most celebrated theologian of Paganism, relates several apparitions both of gods and heroes, and also of the dead. In the Odyssey,[77] he represents Ulysses going to consult the sorcerer Tiresias; and this diviner having prepared a grave or trench full of blood to evoke the manes, Ulysses draws his sword to prevent them from coming to drink this blood, for which they thirst; but which they were not allowed to taste before they had answered the questions put to ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... inherited superstitious tendency lurks within most of us; and a few strange experiences can so appeal to that inheritance as to induce the most unreasoning hope or fear of the good or bad luck promised you by some diviner. Really to see our future would be a misery. Imagine the result of knowing that there must happen to you, within the next two months, some terrible misfortune which you cannot ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn |
