"Ecstatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... persons can accurately foretell the day of an approaching attack and how long it will last. The same thing occurs almost invariably in the case of spontaneous, and generally in that of artificial, somnambulism; certainly the Pythia, as is well known, used to announce the date of her next ecstatic state. In like manner the curative instinct displays itself in somnambulists, and they have been known to select remedies that have been no less remarkable for the success attending their employment than for the completeness with ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... insensibly leads to the joy, And grateful esteem bids its pleasures ne'er cloy. Yet here you should stop-but your whimsical sex Such romantic ideas to passion annex, That poor men, by your visions and jealousy worried, To Dyinphs less ecstatic, but kinder, are hurried. In your heart, I consent, let your wishes be bred; Only take care your heart don't get into ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... Once Lafe had told her no one, no, not even Maudlin Bates, could keep her own from her! Her honor and her very life were in the tender hands of the cobbler's angels. Suddenly in fancy Jinnie saw the whole world about teeming with bright ecstatic beings, and multitudes of them were hurrying through the warm summer air to the Bellaire marshes. They were coming—coming to help her, to save her from a fate worse than death! Her mind reeled under the ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... on filthy rush mats were numerous Chinese, Burmese and Indians; also a few women of the lowest class, each and all sunken in the various stages of an ecstatic slumber. ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... off to sleep—though in reality she had been unconscious for more than two hours—when she awoke suddenly, to see Doubler sitting erect in the bunk, watching her with a wan, sympathetic smile. There was the light of reason in his eyes and her heart gave an ecstatic leap. ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... interesting, but it's mostly a poetic, or ecstatic, jumble of words," said Mr. Perry. "And right there is the secret of many a mystery. It's clothed in a maze of language. Remove the maze, and it begins to ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... convention in 1920. Maurice Baring, the British author and globetrotter, goes into raptures over the cooking he discovered in a Pine street restaurant. Read his Round the World in Any Number of Days and satisfy yourself that a sophisticated observer from London town can become as ecstatic as a Gaul in the presence of soup a l'oignon. There's a diversity to the restaurants of San Francisco that makes it difficult to single out any one type. French and Italian restaurants appear to predominate, ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... seven, life had so changed for her that it was a far cry back to the Spring days in the Square Gardens. She went back, however, back into that remote ecstatic past. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... remarkable way in which the lecturer fused speaker, audience, spectators, and players into one excited, ecstatic whole—just as you have found yourself starting forward in your seat at the delivery of the ball with "three on and two down" in the ninth inning. Notice, too, how—perhaps unconsciously—Talmage painted the scene in Homer's characteristic style: not ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... failed to go, had God Granted his prayer, there would have been For him no leadership to win; No pillared fire; no magic rod, No smiting of the sea; no tears Ecstatic, shed on Sinai's steep; No Nebo, with a God to keep His burial; only forty years Of desert, watching ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... of Jules La Touche came to disturb her as she drifted off into delicious memories of the past and ecstatic dreams of the future. No thought of the promise she had given, no remorse at her own falsity, troubled her easy conscience. What did she care for Jules La Touche? What was he beside this splendid Mr. Reinecourt? ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... by wagging his beard. His silence seemed instinct with delight whenever violent revolutionary propositions were made. His eyes assumed a soft ecstatic expression at the mention of the guillotine. He half closed them, as though he could see the machine, and was filled with pleasant emotion at the sight; and next he would gently rub his chin against the knob of his stick, with ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... encircled her neck; her lips were dyed pomegranate, her eyes darkened and her cheeks touched with rouge. A pair of substantial gilt shoes slung over her shoulders clinked their heels together as she walked. Narcisse barked his ecstatic admiration around this beauteous creature, and had I been a dog I should have barked mine too. My dignity as a man only allowed me to cast sidelong glances at her and hope that she would soon put on the gilt shoes. As for my master, on beholding her, he doffed his hat and saluted her with ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... these women's orders was looked upon as a special and sacred office whereby the nun became the mystic bride of the Church, and it was no uncommon thing for the sisters, when racked and tortured by the temptations of the world, to fall into these ecstatic contemplative moods wherein they became possessed with powers beyond those of earth. In that age of quite universal ignorance, it is not to be wondered at that the emotional spirit was too strongly developed in all religious observances, and, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... who had been studying birds in the Park. Berkeley was written all over him. A thin, pure type. He was dressed in field glasses and a bag full of green weeds and stout walking boots. There was an ecstatic glint in his eye which meant that he had discovered a long-billed, yellow-tailed Peruvian fly-catcher, "very ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... their a b c's? I'm afraid that isn't your specialty, heart of mine. Now if you could teach other women the art of making a man believe that he has cornered the entire visible supply of ecstatic thrills in marrying the woman of his choice—by Jove, now! ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... true to her by deceiving her. It was the only way. "At last, Grizel," he cried, "at last!" and he put joyousness into his voice. "It has all come right, dear one!" he cried like an ecstatic lover. Never in his life had he tried so hard to deceive at the sacrifice of himself. But he was fighting something as strong as the instinct of self-preservation, and his usually expressionless face ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... Paradise coyned with the Countess of Pembroke's Love, 1592, and another work of his, The Countess of Pembroke's Passion (first printed from manuscript in 1867), pays the Countess, who was merely his literary patroness, a homage which is indistinguishable from the ecstatic utterances of a genuine and overmastering passion. The difference in the sex of the persons addressed by Breton and by Shakespeare seems to place their poems in different categories, but they both really belonged to the same ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... others, he had great difficulty in keeping his good resolutions, but persevered, nobly and successfully. Latterly, he was admitted into the orchestra, and got command of the big drum. He was so anxious to show his zeal, that he beat far too vehemently, and drowned all the other instruments in his ecstatic rataplan. The captain mildly remonstrated with him, and requested him to beat a little more gently. "Gently!" shouted the reformed drummer, "that's impossible. Since I've got salvation, I feel so happy, that I could ding the whole slammed thing to bits!" ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the tension of his nerves began to relax. Her gaze, so grave and yet so sweet, was like a deep pool into which he could plunge and hide himself from the hard glare of his misery. As this ecstatic sense enveloped him he found it more and more difficult to follow her words and to frame an answer; but what did anything matter, except that her voice should go on, and the syllables fall like soft touches on his ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... all dissensions. Joy, lively and deep-seated, was in every heart. Their morals were austere, but pervaded by a soft and tender sentiment. They assembled in houses to pray and to devote themselves to ecstatic exercises. The recollection of these two or three first years remained and seemed to them like a terrestrial paradise, which Christianity will pursue henceforth in all its dreams and to which it will vainly endeavor ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... ecstatic gratitude of Briggs! All she stipulated for was that little Rawdon should be allowed to come down and see her at the Hall. Becky promised this—anything. She ran up to her husband when he came home and told him the joyful news. Rawdon was glad, deuced glad; the weight was off his conscience ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... In the unfailing consciences of men, 170 Those stern, unflattering chroniclers, I find: The future, from the causes which arise In each event, I gather: not the sting Which retributive memory implants In the hard bosom of the selfish man; 175 Nor that ecstatic and exulting throb Which virtue's votary feels when he sums up The thoughts and actions of a well-spent day, Are unforeseen, unregistered by me: And it is yet permitted me, to rend 180 The veil of mortal ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... McNulta, Fifer, Rowell, and others as listeners, he once graphically described the first battle in which he was engaged. Turning to his old-time comrade, McNulta, he said: "There is one supreme moment in the experience of a soldier that is absolutely ecstatic!" "That," quickly replied McNulta, "is the very moment when he gets ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... him. This is the sweetest place—I really cannot bear to leave it. My scholars drew flowers, this morning. Mr. Emerson and Ellery Charming passed along; and Mr. Emerson asked Julian to go with the children to Fairy Land [in Walden woods]. He went, in a state of ecstatic bliss. He brought me home, in a basket, cowslips, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... shall thy fair frame destroy, (That cause of all my guilt, and all my joy!) In trance ecstatic may thy pangs be drown'd, Bright clouds descend, and angels watch thee round, 340 From opening skies may streaming glories shine, And saints embrace thee with a ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... king, With frozen gesture and unfocused eyes. The trappings of the beast were over-scrawled With broideries—sea-shapes and flying things, Fan-trees and dwarfed nodosities of pine, Mixed with old alphabets, and faded lore Fallen from ecstatic mouths before the Flood, Or gathered by the daughters when they walked Eastward in Eden with the Sons of God Whom love and the deep moon made garrulous. Between the carven tusks his trunk hung dead; Blind as the eyes of pearl in Buddha's brow His beaded eyes stared thwart upon the ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... to see her appear in that expectant frame. Twenty years before—though he had forgotten it—in a dazzling room where there was a Christmas tree, he had uttered a shriek of ecstatic timidity just as a jingling Santa Claus began to emerge from behind the tree, and he had run out of the room and out of the house. He did exactly the same thing now, though this time the shriek ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... up to opprobrium as an infidel crowd, hostile to the morals and the institutions of society, and to the rights of property. Nevertheless the Workingmen's Party proceeded with an enthusiastic, almost ecstatic, campaign and polled 6,000 votes, a very considerable number compared to the whole number of voters at ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... no over-zeal now about Charley. He ought to have been happy enough, for he had his charmer in his arms; but he showed very little of the ecstatic joy of a favoured lover. There he sat with Norah in his arms, and as we have said, Norah was a handsome girl; but he would much sooner have been copying the Kennett and Avon canal lock entries in Mr. Snape's ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... deep corner away from the window, a small drawer in the dressing-table and five pegs in a large French wardrobe. Emma was going very gravely about the room collecting her work-basket and things for raccommodage. She flung one ecstatic glance at Miriam as she ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... triumph swelling, 35 Now on love and mercy dwelling; And she, from out the veiling cloud, Breathed her magic notes aloud: And thou, thou rich-hair'd youth of morn, And all thy subject life was born! 40 The dangerous passions kept aloof, Far from the sainted growing woof: But near it sat ecstatic Wonder, Listening the deep applauding thunder; And Truth, in sunny vest array'd, 45 By whose the tarsel's eyes were made; All the shadowy tribes of mind, In braided dance, their murmurs join'd, And all the bright uncounted powers ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... comfortable realisation that he was falling desperately in love. He shook his head at himself and smiled. He was not ill pleased with himself. He would return to a perfectly regulated life later on. In the meanwhile he would give a free rein to these ecstatic moods, these wild emotions. When he had given a free rein to them they ambled round a little paddock, and brought him back to his own front door. It was delicious. He had thoughts of ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... veritable fact in the lives of many devout souls in this age. The following years witnessed a marked development of that essentially Asiatic and perhaps more especially Indian form of religious feeling, which finds its natural satisfaction in solitary ecstatic contemplation. As a necessary consequence an order of devotees was established in 1876, divided into three main classes, which in ascending gradation were designated Shabaks, Bhaktas and Yogis. The lowest class, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... her dark furs. Her right hand played with a lash, while her bare foot rested carelessly on a man, lying before her like a slave, like a dog. In the sharply outlined, but well-formed linaments of this man lay brooding melancholy and passionate devotion; he looked up to her with the ecstatic burning eye of a martyr. This man, the footstool for her feet, was Severin, but beardless, and, it seemed, ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... Here the ecstatic fury of the singing-birds reached such a deafening climax that their mistress was obliged to pause in her communication, and to go round the room dropping extinguishers of silk and muslin over the ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... greatest poets, and the most inspired teachers of modern days have found justification for the unanimous verdict of antiquity. The tributes of Addison, Tennyson, and others, the throbbing paraphrases and ecstatic interpretations of Swinburne, are too well known to call for special comment in this brief note; but the concise summing up of her genius by Mr. Watts-Dunton in his remarkable essay on poetry is so ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... chrysanthemums, which pressed against the glass great curled polls almost as large as her own head. It was impossible to imagine a Scotswoman practising so felinely elastic an attitude before the open street, or possessing a face so ecstatic with pertness, or finding herself inside a dress which, though black, disclaimed all intention of being mourning and sought rather, in its clinging economy, to be ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... eyebrows, mobile features, and small, sharp, dark eyes—liable at all times to fits of abstraction, attacks of inspiration. He will drop his knife and fork while at dinner, sink back in his chair, assume an ecstatic expression: the fit is on him; he must abandon his meal and hurry away at once to lock himself in his studio, and place upon record the superb idea which has so inconveniently visited him. His companions ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... hands, on his breast, &c. besides all his finery, his feather mantles, plumes, clothing, shell money, his fancy bows, painted arrows, &c. When the torch was applied they set up a mournful ululation, chanting and dancing about him, gradually working themselves into a wild and ecstatic raving, which seemed almost a demoniacal possession, leaping, howling, lacerating their flesh. Many seemed to lose all self-control. The younger English-speaking Indians generally lend themselves charily to such superstitious work, especially if American spectators are present, but even ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... communicate with each other, we know not whether this be done in human fashion. It is possible even that their own refrain may be inaudible to them: the murmur that comes to us heavily laden with perfume of honey, the ecstatic whisper of fairest summer days that the bee-keeper loves so well, the festival song of labour that rises and falls around the hive in the crystal of the hour, and might almost be the chant of the eager flowers, hymn of ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... teaching adopted from previous belief was the practice of ecstatic meditation. In the very earliest times of the most remote animism we find the belief that a person, rapt from all sense of the outside world, possessed by a spirit, acquired from that state a degree of sanctity, was supposed to have a degree of insight, denied to ordinary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... drank cold in summer. She offered it to him in the twilit room like an enraptured handmaid. He had forgotten it. The fact that he had forgotten it and she had remembered it yet further increased her strange, mournful, ecstatic bliss. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... is the ecstatic or parallel vision; but the object is not so far away that its distance may not be determined. The convergence is not appreciable. This is the dreamy expression. We shall here treat of one only, to which we refer the three others. Let us take the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... public first saw its Barberina dance, and wrote ecstatic Latin Epigrams about that miracle of nature and art; [Rodenbeck, pp. 111, 190.]—miracle, alas, not entirely omissible by us. Here is her Story, as the Books give it; slightly mythical, I judge, in some of its non-essential parts; but good enough ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of nature, that broken-down animal had been forgotten as soon as he was done with. He would have given his four legs—if he could legally dispose of them—for a single draught of sweet delicious rapturous ecstatic water; but his bloodshot eyes sought vainly, and his welted tongue found nothing wet, except the flakes of his own salt foam. Until, with the help of the moon, a sparkle (worth more to his mind than all the diamonds he could ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... reestablish himself and then take her with him somewhere else. She was sorry for Mrs. Cowperwood, but she was convinced that she was not suited to him—that Frank needed some one more like herself, some one with youth and beauty and force—her, no less. She clung to him now in ecstatic embraces until it was time to go. So far as a plan of procedure could have been adjusted in a situation so incapable of accurate adjustment, it had been done. She was desperately downcast at the last moment, as was he, over ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... speech seemed to please his auditors, but his real reward came when Helen met him at the wings and caught his arm to her side in an ecstatic little hug. "You did beautifully! You make me afraid of you when you stand tall and grand like that. You were scared though. I could ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... with more repose, is the Apocalypse of S. John painted upon the cupola of S. Giovanni. The apostles throned on clouds, with which the dome is filled, gaze upward to one point. Their attitudes are noble; their form is heroic; in their eyes there is the strange ecstatic look by which Correggio interpreted his sense of supernatural vision: it is a gaze not of contemplation or deep thought, but of wild half-savage joy, as if these saints also had become the elemental genii of cloud and air, spirits emergent from ether, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... up memories from that solemn rite administered so simply and yet so impressively under the June sky, with the many-pointing forest spires to lift the soul to heights ecstatic. One was the singing of the choir, minimized and made celestially sweet by the lack of bounding walls and roof. Another was the sight of his father's face, with the grim smile gone, and the steadfast eyes gravely ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... and alder bushes. From it a little gate led into Aunt Kirsty's garden, which surrounded the house. The boy paused with his hand on the latch of the gate, looking down at the water. And then he gave a loud, ecstatic "Oh!" that made Collie bark, and stood perfectly still. He could see Lake Algonquin spread out before him, stretching away to the north in lovely curves like a great river. Its gleaming floor was dotted with green, feathery islands. To the west, in a silver haze, lay the town; to the ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... was the ecstatic comment. "After all this there remains but one other possible contingency. Has she ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... on me, and lifted her hands with a gesture of ecstatic gratitude. A lovely, angelic brightness flowed like light from heaven over her face. For one moment she stood enraptured. The next she clasped me passionately to her bosom, and whispered in my ear: "I am Mary Dermody! ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... dear D.O.V.E.," whispered Julietta, who was timid, from the circumstance of never having published, "which he thinks the most ecstatic ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... gathering dusk, he discerned the outline of a rustic bridge, and guided by the sound of plashing waters, directed his footsteps towards it. Then above the murmur of the stream he heard the ripple of a girl's ecstatic laughter, followed by what appeared to be high words between two men, and then more laughter, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... of her voice, 'Soelver, Soelver!' And driven by some mystic power of will, he forced himself under the same hypnotic influence which surrounded her. He compelled himself to leave the clear broad way of reason and to enter the ecstatic, perilous, paths of the sleep walker. He was no longer awake. He sought, he touched, he stood before that after which he had groped. He was himself driven by a magic power, by a marvelous single purpose, which must be attained. This whole transformation took place in him merely ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... you all seem so dissatisfied," said Mr. Payton, with so droll an attempt to look gloomy that Lucile then and there threw her arms about his neck and gave him an ecstatic kiss, crying joyfully, "Oh, you are the most wonderful father ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... through a mental crisis, such as, in other circumstances, and under fostering influences, has produced more than one small ecstatic enthusiast; the infant shining light of some Methodist conventicle; the saintly child visionary of some Catholic convent. But Madelon had no one to foster, nor to interpret for her these feverish visions, so inexplicable ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... and ecstatic Brock, Mrs. Medcroft was soon urging her sister to go to bed and let the story go until daylight. She persisted in telling all that she had done and ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... and laid the handful of her jewels on the table without another glance at them. "These mountains!" She threw wide her arms and drew a long, ecstatic breath. She came near to him and touched his arm. "I hated them once, I love them now." She smiled up at him, her darkly ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... spoken with a cockney accent, in broken French and liquid Russian. Enid Blunt, increasingly guttural, and mingling German words with her Bedford Park English, refuted, or strove to refute, Jennings's ecstatic praise of French verse, citing rapidly poems composed by members of the Sitwell group, songs of Siegfried Sassoon, and even lyrics by Lady Margaret Sackville and Miss Victoria Sackville West. Jennings, who thought he was still ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... windows seemed to us most beautiful, especially those on the right-hand side through which the light streamed red, yellow and blue from the jewelled panes. The window representing the crowning of Charles VII at Rheims is especially rich in color. Joan, with a rapt ecstatic expression on her face, is here to see her King crowned and with her is the banner that she loved even more than her mystic sword. Below are inscribed her own simple words, "It has been with him in the suffering, it is right that it should ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... of the women transcendentalists, MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850), a distinguished early pleader for equal rights for her sex, believed that when it was fashionable for women to bring to the home "food and fire for the mind as well as for the body," an ecstatic "harmony of the ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... from her, and seizing her father's black head in her arms, she gave it a quick, impetuous hug. Then, disconcerted by this unusual display of affection, she fled out of the house and up to her seat on the mountainside, overlooking the ruins of the hermit's hut, where she held an ecstatic thanksgiving ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... times ten thousands, and thousands of thousands, shall sing with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing, for ever and ever." Such were the ecstatic vision which Bunyan enjoyed, drawn from the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... men of like sort in the ancient world. Greek and Roman civilization was to him no dead and buried antiquity, but its poets and thinkers lived again as if they were his neighbors. His love for the past amounted almost to an ecstatic enthusiasm. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara would watch the Nurse with open hostility and defiance, and her rustling exit from the ward would be followed by swift cessation of cries, and, close to Annie or Jennie or Maggie's heart, there would be small ecstatic gurglings—and peace. ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... beasts. Folly, you see, is the lot of humanity, whether it arises in the flowery paths of pleasure, or the thorny ones of an ill-judged devotion. But of the two sorts of fools, I shall always think that the merry one has the most eligible fate; and I cannot well form a notion of that spiritual and ecstatic joy, that is mixed with sighs, groans, hunger, and thirst, and the other complicated miseries of monastic discipline. It is a strange way of going to work for happiness to excite an enmity between soul and body, which Nature and Providence have designed to live together in union and friendship, ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... the violence of the sensation, I must have loved her for quite a while. Probably it had begun that night in the St. Ives restaurant; for when before had I watched any girl with such special, ecstatic, almost proprietary rapture? Yes, that was why, ever since, I had been cutting such crazy capers. From first to last they were the natural thing, the prerogative of a man in my ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... then, I fancy that that part of Canada's future which lies in the hands of the children of Montreal, and the Province of Quebec generally, will be for the good of the Dominion. Certainly the attitude of the people as shown in the packed and ecstatic streets of Montreal was a very ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... the postman arrived quite laden with parcels and letters addressed to "Miss Diana Hewlitt". As Mrs. Fleming had prophesied, everything came at once, and her young guest spent a busy and ecstatic half-hour opening her various packages. Scent, French chocolates, Parisian embroideries, gloves, ribbons, and other dainty vanities such as girls love were raved over and spread forth on the table, while Diana devoured the ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... littleness; the sounds at the end are peculiarly adapted to express horror, solemnity, awe, deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the large, from the bright to the dark, from ecstatic delight to horror, and from the trivial to ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... from work and make faces at mother from the road. Mother, too, was willing to join in the fun, for she knelt down among the wet flowers, and as her head drooped lower and lower it looked, for one ecstatic moment, as though she were going to turn head over heels. But she lay quite still on the ground, and father came half-way through the gate, and then turned and ran off down the hill towards the station. Jack stood in the window, clapping his ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... moment propped up in the middle of the great mahogany four-poster, all lace and ruffles and ribbons, her wayward hair in adorable confusion about her face, as she pawed over the sweets and breathed ecstatic ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... personal work and endeavor of each individual. The revelation of divine truth, once attained, supersedes specific moral injunctions; ceremonies and systems, even, of religion, become indifferent to the mind illuminated by the sacred idea. A higher degree is the perfect conception or ecstatic vision of the Deity;—the highest-reserved only for the prophetic few—a real immediate union with his essence. Here, it will be seen, are four steps or stages, each of which has its sacred manual or appropriate ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... It is not a rare thing to see spectators go into raptures on these occasions, for I have seen few places where nature and art so harmonize and unite in producing scenes of enchanting beauty and creating feelings of ecstatic delight, as here on Champs Elysees. The atmosphere of Paris, too, is preeminently soft and balmy, and the temperature so even that ladies may sit in the most brilliant attire all evening in the open air under the trees of this pleasure-garden without the least danger of contracting a cold. One ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... greeted them through the old gateway was certainly calculated to justify their ecstatic remarks. A grassy courtyard, interspersed with box-edged flower beds and flagged footpaths, led to a large, gray old Tudor house, whose mullioned diamond-paned windows, twisted chimney stacks, irregular moss-grown roof, ivied bell-tower, stone balls and carved porch offered the very utmost of ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... creatures are used to it. The dervishes wear their hair long, which adds to their crazy appearance, by covering their faces with it during the jerking process, the hair flying back and forth with each movement. What the ecstatic point is in this ridiculous performance was not apparent, and they did not tumble down overcome by unconsciousness. It is supposed that all travelers visit them, but we came away more punished than entertained or ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... he doubted, he leaped upon his feet in transport, held up his hands, stretched at their length, in a kind of ecstatic joy, and, as the glorious sight approached, was near rushing into the sea ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... remarked it wonderingly; and with one accord we threw ourselves upon the grass and drank in the bounteous melody. It was not different in quality so much as in quantity. Such a flood of it! Such magnificent copiousness! Such long, trilling, deferring, accelerating preludes! Such sudden, ecstatic overtures would have intoxicated the dullest ear. He was really without a compeer, a master artist. Twice afterward I was conscious of having heard the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... scrambling to his feet in futile grabs after one of the hounds that was making off with his herring, but he nodded back over his shoulder. Helga looked from one to the other of her companions with an ecstatic smack of her lips. "Honey," she informed them. "Sigurd ran across a jar of it last night. That pig of an Olver yonder hid it on the highest shelf. Very likely the goldsmith's daughter gave it to him and it was his intention to keep it all for himself. We will put a trick upon him. Bring ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... of Milton and give him ecstatic praise, and say that I love to ponder for hours o'er his living lays; I speak of his noble epic, that jewel which proudly shines, and quote from his splendid sonnets (I know maybe twenty lines); but when I am home John Milton is left on the bookcase shelf; he's rather too dull for reading—you ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... colonial country seats near Philadelphia. Woodlands and Bush Hill, the homes of the Hamiltons, Cliveden, of Chief Justice Chew, Fair Hill, Belmont, the estate of Judge Peters, were splendid examples. An ecstatic account of the glories and wonders of some of them was written just after the Revolution by a visitor who fully understood their treasures, the Rev. Manasseh Cutler, the clergyman, statesman, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... poets polishing a phrase Show anger over trivial things; And as she blundered in the blaze Towards him, on ecstatic wings, He raised a hand and smote her dead; Then wrote "That I ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... ecstatic. He gamboled and capered, he zoomed and zigzagged, he essayed quick, climbing spirals and almost came to grief among the tangled pinnacles on the ridge of the hogback. He swooped downward again in a series of shallow, ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... chiming from a wold, Or bleat of lamb within its fold, Or cooing of love-legends old To dove-wives make not quiet less; Ecstatic chirp of winged thing, Or bubbling of the water-spring, Are sounds that more than silence bring Itself and ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... comes with herald clouds of dust; Ecstatic frenzies rend his breast; A moment, and he graced the earth— Now, seek ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... at Jerusalem the regular clergy of the temple prophesied to the music of harps, of psalteries, and of cymbals; and it appears that the irregular clergy also, as we may call the prophets, depended on some such stimulus for inducing the ecstatic state which they took for immediate converse with the divinity. Thus we read of a band of prophets coming down from a high place with a psaltery, a timbrel, a pipe, and a harp before them, and prophesying as they went. Again, when the united forces of Judah ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... two parallel members prove, in opposition to Redslob and others, that the verb [Hebrew: nba] here, as everywhere else, has reference to an ecstatic condition, to the speaking in the Spirit, although this is by no means limited to a revelation of the future. The closeness of the connection between prophesying, dreaming dreams, and seeing visions, is evident from Num. xii. 6, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... but will, Will to my bent, I'd have afar ones near me still, And music of rare ravishment, In strains that move the toes and heels! And when the sweethearts sat for rest The unbetrothed should foot with zest Ecstatic reels. ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... towards the end of the refection that they were startled into intercourse by a general growling and leaping up of the great hound, and of the two big ungainly dogs chained to the waggon, as wet, lean, bristling but ecstatic, Watch dashed in among them, and fell ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ecstatic ten minutes, with my hand pressed against my wildly beating heart, I planned my wedding dress, selected with care and discrimination my trousseau, furnished the rose-embowered cottage far from the madding crowd—and wondered why Father did not send ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... a long white streak opened up in the wake of the schooner, announcing that McGuffey's engines were doing duty, and a nice breeze springing up two points aft the beam, the Maggie heeled over and fairly flew through the water. Mr. Gibney smiled an ecstatic smile as he took the wheel and guided the schooner through the channel. He rounded her up in twelve fathoms, and within five minutes every stitch of canvas was clewed down hard and fast. The sun was setting as they dropped anchor, and Mr. Gibney ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... sober at the allusion yet ecstatic. "That's just what I should like to do. It would give me more scope. I wish my articles to be of real use—to help people to live better, ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... case? We can judge by recalling what happens when we are in the society of a mental inferior. We say things of which he misses the import; we joke, and he does not smile; what makes him laugh loudly seems to us horseplay or childish; he is blind to beauties which ravish us; he is ecstatic over what strikes us as crude; and his profound truths are for us trite commonplaces. His perceptions are relatively coarse; our perceptions are relatively subtle. We try to make him understand, to make him see, and if he is aware of his inferiority we may have some success. ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... short, tries hard to eliminate selfishness and see all things impersonally. Such a man could know nothing whatever of the disagreeable part of the astral life and would pass quickly through even the higher subdivisions and reach the ecstatic happiness of ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... sat within had just returned from his lonely retreat with his mind and nerves in a state of unnatural tension,—a sort of ecstatic clearness and calmness, which he mistook for victory and peace. During those lonely days when he had wandered afar from human converse, and was surrounded only by objects of desolation and gloom, he had passed through as many phases of strange, unnatural experience as there were flitting smoke-wreaths ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... sincerely trusted that he would get his fellowship. Otherwise what was the poor fellow to do? Ridiculous as it may seem, she was even jealous of Nature. One day her husband escaped from Ilfracombe to Morthoe, and came back ecstatic over its fangs of slate, piercing an oily sea. "Sounds like an hippopotamus," she said peevishly. And when they returned to Sawston through the Virgilian counties, she disliked him looking out of the windows, for all the world as if Nature was some ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... hatching-room these males on the stacks of trays are so numerous that the place is filled with the sound of the whirring of their wings. The down flies from their wings to such an extent that one continually sneezes. The spectacle of the stacks of trays covered by these ecstatic moths is remarkable, but still more remarkable is the thrilling sense of the power of the life-force in a supposedly ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... suddenly I seem'd By an ecstatic vision wrapt away: And in a temple saw, methought, a crowd Of many persons; and at the entrance stood A dame, whose sweet demeanor did express Another's love, who said, 'Child! why hast thou Dealt with us thus? Behold thy sire and I Sorrowing ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... right, and holds the Infant Saviour in her arms. In the foreground on the left there is a book and cushion, behind which St. John stands, his hands clasped, bearing a cross. Never was a head designed with more genius than that strange Virgin, ecstatic, mysterious, sphinx-like; with half-closed eyes, she bends her face to meet her God's kiss. In this picture Botticelli sought to realise the awfulness of the Christian mystery: the Mother leans to the kiss of her Son—her ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... their master that he had a privilege and a passport permitted him such as no mortal man has had the like since JOHN'S eyes closed upon his completed Apocalypse. After repeated and prolonged reading of Behmen's amazing books, nothing that has been said by his most ecstatic disciples about their adored master either astonishes or offends me. Dante himself does not beat such a soaring wing as Behmen's; and all the trumpets that sound in Paradise Lost do not swell my heart and chase its blood like Jacob Behmen's broken syllables about the Fall. I would not ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... thinker. It is an illusion of the senses. The duty of the philosopher is to overcome the illusion by turning away from the world of sense and fixing his mind on true being; by ascesis and contemplation he endeavours to attain the ecstatic state, in which the illusion of the world's reality disappears, and the potential identity of man with the universal spirit becomes actualised in experience. Similarly, for the monophysite, the humanity of Christ was a creation of the senses. Christ's ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... course, I know them. They're old favourites of mine—in fact, I adore Wordsworth." (I doubt whether Charles has ever in his life read a line of poetry, except Doss Chiderdoss in the Sporting Times.) He took the book and glanced at them. "Ah, charming, charming!" he said, in his most ecstatic tone. But his eyes were on the lady, and ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen |
