"Mirage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The mirage yesterday and to-day is a wonderful freak of nature. At times, nothing can be seen as it really is. Icebergs and islands are flattened to one dead level, or doubled, so as to appear now like long bridges, now like high towers. The rapid changes in the appearance of solid ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... life and glory but a memory, is still the citta nobilissima,—a city of moods,—all beautiful to the beauty-lover, all mystic to the dreamer; between the wonderful blue of the water and the sky she floats like a mirage—visionary—unreal—and under the spell of her fascination we are not critics, but lovers. We see the pathos, not the scars of her desolation, and the splendor of her past is too much a part of her ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... into an immense pity for humanity, crucified upon the cross whose limbs are Time and Space. Those poor Russian pilgrims faring foot-sore across the great frozen plains, lured on by this mirage of blessedness, sleeping by the wayside, and sometimes never waking again! Poor humanity, like a blind Oriental beggar on the deserted roadway crying Bakhshish to vain skies, from whose hollow and futile spaces floats the lone word, Mafish—"there ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... tepid water, ate a little of the food each had, and were off again without letting the camels kneel—heading now away from the hills toward a dazzling waste of silver sand, across which the eyes lost all sense of perspective, and all power to separate three objects in a row; a land of mirage and monotony, glittering in places with the ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... She even shuddered at herself as, with burning face, she recalled how near she had come, on such brief and slight acquaintance, to giving herself to such a life, lured in great part by the glamour of that golden mirage into which so many of earth's brave and beautiful souls have hastened, only to find its sparkling waters to be nothing but dust and its promise of luscious delights of the senses, nothing but the dead sea ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... thin forests of Queensland, the open plains, and the interminable downs whereon the mirage plays with the fancies of wayfarers; and of the dust, heat and sweat of cattle stations. Has not the "Never Never Country" inspired many a traveller and more than one poet? It is well to realise that we have such bountiful land, and to be proud of the men capable of investing ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... him with an admiration I could not repress. There was, indeed, something of the hero about this simple-minded Saharaman. We were at the edge of the oasis, in a remote place looking towards the quivering mirage which guards dead Okba's tomb. A tiny earthen house, with a flat terrace ending in the jagged bank of the Oued Biskra, was crouched here in the shade. From it emerged a pleasant scent of coffee. Suddenly Safti's bare legs began to "give." I felt it would be cruel to push on farther. ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... glimmers through the Worst, She feels the sun is hid but for a night, She spies the summer through the winter bud, She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, She hears the lark within the songless egg, She finds the fountain where they wailed "mirage." ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... must understand, it's the world created by Him I don't and cannot accept. Let me make it plain. I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... freedom of it, its infinite expansion, its air like wine to the senses, the floods of sunshine, the waves of color, the translucent atmosphere that aids the imagination to create in the distance all architectural splendors and realms of peace. It is all like a mirage and a dream. We pass swiftly, and make a moving panorama of beauty in hues, of strangeness in forms, of sublimity in extent, of overawing and savage antiquity. I would miss none of it. And when we pass to the ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... horses were bathed in perspiration. Not a cloud hung in the blue sky; no wing of a bird broke the monotony of distance, no living animal crept across the blazing surface of the desert. Occasionally a distant mirage attracted the eye, making the dead reality even more horrible by its semblance to water, yet never tempting them to stray aside. After the first mile conversation ceased, the men riding grimly, silently forward, intent only on covering all the ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... phrase had a reminiscent ring as if it harked back to a time when three ample meals were a mirage of ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... and passing her hand over her eyes she murmured faintly but audibly, "Cruel, cruel mirage to taunt me thus! Vanish, thou image of a fevered brain, thou absurd memory! Come not to mock me!" The actors in the wings, taking their cue from her speech, found the string to which the sandwich was tied and jerked it. ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... her with its chances of real, quivering, human Life. Nunsmere, where nothing ever happened, lay behind her. She smiled graciously at Sypher, who saw her off at Waterloo, and said nice things to him about the Cure, but before her eyes danced a mirage in which Clem Sypher and his Cure were not visible. The train steamed out of the station. Sypher stood on the edge of the platform and watched the end buffers until they were out of sight; then he turned ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... they had just witnessed. The mirage of the desert! That enticing promise of water that had been the undoing of many a pioneer of ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... tears he saw the mirage of his own fireside. Perhaps for the moment his homing spirit rested there, and it was only the body from which the soul had fled that was in the saddle here before us riding through a hostile land. Perhaps more powerfully than the fulminations of any orator had ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... "God" has so designed things as to make a mock of man at the end. The want of complete harmony that is seen in the physical structure of man is carried over into his mental life. If theism be true man is mocked by a mirage. And the knowledge is made the more depressing by the belief that the plan is not accidental, it is not a product of the working of non-conscious forces, it is the preordained outcome of a plan ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... villages which would some day be great towns. And he spoke particularly of Timbuctoo the glorious, so long unknown, with a veil of legends cast over it as if it were some forbidden paradise, with its gold, its ivory, its beautiful women, all rising like a mirage of inaccessible delight beyond the devouring sands. He spoke of Timbuctoo, the gate of the Sahara and the Western Soudan, the frontier town where life ended and met and mingled, whither the camel of the desert brought the weapons and merchandise of Europe as well as salt, that indispensable ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... self-evident that they had not co-operated. They had not been pushing, aggressive, discordant: they had merely effaced themselves. She swept a startled eye from one familiar painting to another. The canvases were all there—and the frames—but the miracle, the mirage of life and meaning, had vanished like some atmospheric illusion. What was it that had happened? And had it happened to her or to the pictures? She tried to rally her frightened thoughts; to push or coax them into a semblance of resistance; but argument ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... barren range covered with heaps of lava blocks, and its foot marked by piles of stones, the memorials of deeds of blood, the lofty conical peak of Jebel Seearo rose in sight, and not long afterwards the far-famed Lake Assad, surrounded by its dancing mirage, was seen ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... greatest educator who ever lived, for he emancipated mankind from the narrowness of its own ignorance, and taught the great lesson that human destiny, like divine mercy, arches over the whole world. If a perspective of four centuries of progress could have floated like a mirage before the eyes of the great discoverer as he was sighting San Salvador, the American school-house would have loomed up as the greatest institution of the New World's future. Behind him he had left mediaeval ignorance, encumbered with superstition, ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... original, not derivative. For her, indeed, London had proved narrowing rather than widening. She became part of a parish instead of part of a town, and of a Ghetto in a parish at that! The vast background of London was practically a mirage—the London suburb was farther from London than the provincial town. No longer did the currents of civic life tingle through her; she sank entirely to family affairs, excluded even from the ladies' committee. Her lord's life, too, shrank, though ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... lines than with his pen by a very great deal, and it is difficult to believe that he ever wielded the pen of a ready writer. But perhaps FitzGerald was so fascinated by the qualities which did exist in his protege that he saw his friend through the medium of a glamour which set up, as it were, a mirage of things that were not. Well, it speaks better for a man's heart to descry non-existent merits than to imagine vain defects, and it was like the generous soul of FitzGerald to attribute excellencies to his friend which ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... did it really exist or was it an illusion, a dream, or the mirage which appears to the desert traveller, to satisfy him and lure him on, to quiet his imagination, and to save his senses from ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... loveliness, was still unsubdued. Through the fury of the winter's blizzard, the glory of the springtime, the brown wastes of burning midsummer, the long autumn, with its soft sweet air, its opal skies, and the land a dream of splendor which the far mirage reflects and the wide horizon frames in a curtain of exquisite amethyst—through none of these was the prairie subdued. Only to the coming of that king whose scepter is the hoe, did soul of the soil ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... connects the North Sea and the Cattegat. Pop. (1901) 31,457. The situation is typical of the north of Jutland. To the west the Linifjord broadens into an irregular lake, with low, marshy shores and many islands. North-west is the Store Vildmose, a swamp where the mirage is seen in summer. South-east lies the similar Lille Vildmose. A railway connects Aalborg with Hjorring, Frederikshavn and Skagen to the north, and with Aarhus and the lines from Germany to the south. The harbour is good and safe, though ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... other luxuries, of which we have almost forgotten the very taste; and that when things come to the worst we shall turn the corner, and enter into a period of universal abundance. These stores seem to me much like the mirage which lures on the traveller of the desert, and which perpetually recedes as he advances. But the great difficulty of the moment is to procure fuel. I am ready, as some one said, to eat the soles of my boots for the sake of my country; ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... milestones or other landmarks to show the progress you are making. Still, it is not so overwhelmingly wearisome as might be supposed. In the morning you may watch the vast lakes, with their rugged promontories and well-wooded banks, which the mirage creates for your amusement. Then during the course of the day there are always one or two trifling incidents which arouse you for a little from your somnolence. Now you descry a couple of horsemen on the distant horizon, and watch them as they approach; and when they come alongside you ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... if set in motion, would move mountains and revert the course of rivers. But we can't work up enough energy to consummate our aims and carry things to a finish. Perhaps we may be able to do so some day. Oh, Some Day, you are a mirage on the desert of life that ever lures us on to things that can only be attained in the ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... from early years cherished the hope of seeing some closer union of Germany established under Prussian influence. But he dwelt in a world where there was more of picturesque mirage than of real insight. He was almost superstitiously loyal to the House of Austria; and he failed to perceive, what was palpable to men of far inferior endowments to his own, that by setting Prussia ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Porphyrius Petrovitch; I won't quite allow that yet! I'll make a stand and tell you some plain truths to your faces, and then you shall find out my real opinion about you!" He had some difficulty in breathing. "But supposing that all this is pure fancy?—a kind of mirage? Suppose I had misunderstood? Let me try and keep up my nasty part, and not commit myself, like the fool, by blind anger! Ought I to give them credit for intentions they have not? Their words are, in themselves, not ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... point of the peninsula on which the settlers now were their gaze could extend along the southwest. Twenty-five miles off the coast terminated in the Claw Cape, which loomed dimly through the morning mists, and which, by the phenomenon of the mirage, appeared as if ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... a considerable mirage or refraction this morning on the rising of the frost; and I hastened to a small hill near our camp that I might behold the transient vision of a distant horizon. The view was most interesting for the high lands on all sides appeared raised as if by magic; and I thus discovered ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... quest with ardour; but the ardour had all gone out of him now. Only the empty solitude remained. He had lived a life of fevered variety, he had drunk deep of many waters; but he had never been satisfied. And now it seemed to him that all he had ever looked upon, all he had ever achieved, was mirage. Nothing of all that he had ever striven for was left. The fruit had turned to ashes in his mouth, and no spring remained ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... upon them, could be distinctly traced on the unruffled surface. As we continued to advance, the water however constantly retreated before us and at last surrounded us. I now found that we had been deceived by mirage; the apparent islands being really such only when these plains are covered by the sea. In many places the sandy mud was so moist that we sank deeply into it, and after travelling for fifteen miles on a north-east course I could still see no limit to these plains in that direction, nor ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... enhances the thrill of an unique experience. Vista after vista opens into the world of long ago so graphically depicted on the monumental tablets of the processional paths, while type and symbol point also to the infinite future intensely realised by Eastern mysticism. Mortal life was but a fleeting mirage besides this vision of the life beyond. For the words "Shadow, Unreality, Illusion," perpetually repeated by the yellow-robed monks on the beads of the Buddhist Rosary were inscribed on the inmost heart ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... a slice of pate de foie gras. Not in the least. It never entered my head. How could it? The Rita that haunted me had no history; she was but the principle of life charged with fatality. Her form was only a mirage of desire decoying one step ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... all is vanity." So spake the prophet in Jerusalem and the centuries have brought the bitter proof. Vanity has reared palaces which have vanished like the architecture of a mirage. Vanity has led the ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... many of which were far away, others perhaps only two or three miles off. At one time, their beauty would be softened and half obscured by mist, at another they would appear to be lifted up into the sky by the effect of the mirage. At times a heavy sea fog hung over the island and obscured every distant object, and to the nearer ones gave a ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... Limfjord is called Vendsyssel. Curious effects of mirage may be seen in summer-time in the extensive "Vildmose"[7] of ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... rock, with blue dimness in its shadow, with haply a fern or two in the moist places of its crevices, where there is rest, and a man can lie down and be cool, while all outside is burning sun, and burning sand, and dancing mirage. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... water, mark the desert mountains. The granite wears a brown, sunburned coat, while the masses of black lava show here and there patches of pink, yellow, and red. The air is often so wondrously clear that distant mountains seem much nearer than they really are. During the hot summer days the mirage forms apparent lakes and shady groves, illusions which have lured many a thirsty ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... his own brain, the phantom was welcome as joy. His spirit seemed to soar aloft in the yellow air and hang hovering over and around her, while his body stood rooted to the spot, like one who fears, by moving nigher, to lose the lovely vision of a mirage. She sat motionless, her gaze on the sea. Malcolm bethought himself that she could not know him in his fisher-dress, and must take him for some rude fisherman staring at her. He must go at once, or approach and address her. He came forward at once. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... finally, step by step, through laboriously elegant sentences, I worked my way up to the top of a lofty hill, the view from which to be graphically described as a picture and a poem dissolved together into mingled glory and mirage, and inundating with a billowy sea of beauty the landscape below;—and then further depicting to the delighted fancy of the reader, how on one side was a most remarkable river,—such as was never ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... New South Wales puts the climate of Hay, Hell, and Booligal in that order. Tim had driven starving, rickety sheep across his native plains when the earth's surface had been powdered to red sand and driven by shrivelling westerlies in travelling sandhills from mirage to summer mirage. Tim was used to hot places. That is why he became a stretcher-bearer for his company in Gallipoli, and transferred to the regimental bombers when they reached France. When they came to a sea of brown mud waves, which some cynic had misnamed the "Grass Bank," it was not Tim ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... wondrous mirage an effect very common in high latitudes, the American Coast, though separated from Siberia by a broad arm of the sea, loomed so close that a bridge might seemingly be thrown from ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... cricket match. He sat down in the shade of an oak tree on the unfrequented side, unable in the mood he was in to ask against whom the College was playing or which side was in. Players and spectators alike appeared unreal, a mirage of the sunlight; the very landscape ceased to be anything more substantial than a landscape perceived by dreamers in the clouds. The trees and towers of Silchester, the bald hills of Berkshire on the horizon, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... order of the day; from four in the morning to eight at night, even at an ox's pace, leaves every landmark of the day far in the rear at nightfall. Thus for the next few days we moved forward, the monotony of existence broken only by the great variety of mirage, the glare of heat-waves, and the silent signal in the sky of other voyageurs like ourselves. On reaching Pig Boggy, nothing but pools greeted us, while the regular crossing was dry and dusty and paved with cattle ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... with accident, so that no woman's eye could ever be tempted to rest upon him? He cursed the restrictions which held him on a straight path of routine, of narrow custom, when a world of possibilities spread about him on either hand, the mirage of his imprisoned spirit. Adventurous projects succeeded each other in his thoughts. He turned to the lands where life was freer, where perchance his happiness awaited him, had he but the courage to ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... be very unfortunate, for the ordeal will mean both pain and suffering for him and he must not be worried about it in advance. He will need all his nerve and courage when the time for action comes. Moreover, we feel it would be cruel for him to glimpse such a vision and then find it only a mirage. So we have told him nothing. But I have told you because you are fond of him and I wanted ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... surpassing all he had ever beheld. While he stood gazing in silent astonishment the scene slowly melted away and disappeared. [Footnote: This is a poetical description of a phenomenon which is said to be really exhibited in the strait of Messina, between Sicily and Calabria. It is called Fata Morgana, or Mirage.] ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... forms to clothe the ineffable experience of Mary and the disciples. For us, the story of outward events—the visible form, the eating of bread and fish, the conversations, the floating up into the clouds—all this fades away as a mirage. The reality below this symbol—the sense of the human friend's continued and higher life—this abides and renews itself; not as an isolated historic fact, but as an instance and counterpart of the message which in every ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... out-balancing good. Faith's first felicities fade; the world-mists thicken and roll, 'Neath the heavens arching their heaven; o'er-hazing the eye of the soul. Then the vision is pure no longer; refracted above us arise The phantasmal figures of passion; earth's mirage exhaled to the skies. And they go as the castled clouds o'er the verge when the tempest is laid, Towering Ambition, and Glory, and Self as Duty array'd:— Idols no less than that idol whom lustful Ammon of yore With the death-scream of children, a furnace of blood, ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... when it as suddenly appears where nothing was before. Hence its name and mysterious repute. But there is nothing really mysterious about this ghostly behavior, which occurs only when the heated atmosphere lends itself readily to mirage. ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... starry crown are not yours alone to offer, and every promise you make I make also. I offer the good and the bad indifferently. The lover, the poet, the mystic, and all who would drink of the first fountain, I delude with my mirage. I was the Beatrice who led Dante upwards: the gloom was in me, and the glory was mine also, and he went not out of my cave. The stars and the shining of heaven were illusions of the infinite I wove about him. I captured his soul with the shadow of space; a nutshell would have contained ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... laughed as they recalled the irritation of the men who found they had been riding for a mirage—And lunch ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... men; while they walk along the same path with you, you will see a vast plain strewn with garlands where a happy throng of dancers trip the gladsome farandole standing in a circle, each a link in an endless chain. It is but a mirage; those who look down know that they are dancing on a silken thread stretched over an abyss that swallows up all who fall and shows not even a ripple on its surface. What foot is sure? Nature herself seems to deny you her divine consolation; trees and ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... next time he looked this fantastic creation of his disordered mind would be gone. Again he glanced up in the direction of the kopjie. The apparition was still there, a horrible, monstrous, distortion of himself, standing still, speechless, staring at him. That it was only a mirage there could be no doubt. He had heard of such mirages at sea and also in the Sahara where wandering Arabs have beheld long caravans journeying in the skies. But he had never heard of a mirage lasting as long as this one. Would ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... seen a mirage and gone mad? We could see nothing but the broad hollow about us, barren and dry as ever. But still the boy continued to shout, "Water! water!" and presently he appeared round the bend, running and holding up what appeared to be a letter. It was a letter. When Frank reached the ambulance ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... dimensions of salt-grains,—finally vanish. Then the island grows uniformly bluish; it becomes cloudy, vague as a dream of mountains;—it turns at last gray as smoke, and then melts into the horizon-light like a mirage. ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... contemplation of an old age free from cares and troubles, which he had promised himself in the poorhouse, and which that morning had faded under the pressure of hard work like a fair mirage, now returned gradually to him. His heart soothed by the feeling of a pensioner assured for the rest of his days from anxiety, hunger, and homelessness, he sat at his ease on the turf, feeling the pleasing warmth of the sun on his withered skin. He gazed over the scene of his former activities ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... with many times the needed capital in sight, he should have lost. The perfume of the flowers filled the warm atmosphere; the music of running water was everywhere. As he left the side of the flume, the silver note of the fountain came to him from the patio, then, like a mirage between him and the low Spanish building, rose that miniature house he had found in the Alaska wilderness, with the small snow figure before it, holding a bundle in ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... I down 'ere after this precious Mr. 76?"—for Hogarth, if Monarch of the Sun, would have remained for Harris only a glorified 76, Colmoor being for him the reality of the universe, all else mirage, such stuff as ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... Heva—said to Heva: "I believe I'll look about a little." He wanted to go West. He went to the western extremity of the island where there was a little narrow neck of land connecting it with the mainland, and the devil, who is always playing pranks with us, produced a mirage, and when he looked over to the mainland, such hills and vales, such dells and dales, such mountains crowned with snow, such cataracts clad in bows of glory did he see there, that he went back and told Heva: "The country over there is a thousand times better than this, let us migrate." ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... rustic seat, and gave herself up to one of those delicious day-dreams which lure the spirit as the mirage ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... bhavabhaveti parikalpitum paryyate evam na bhavabhavanirva@nam, M.V. 197). In this state there is nothing which is known, and even the knowledge that the phenomena have ceased to appear is not found. Even the Buddha himself is a phenomenon, a mirage or a dream, and so are all his teachings ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... while for the worst of us, the heap, still lower by the leveling of those winged surveyors, is high enough, nevertheless, to overhang, and at last to close in judgment, on the seventh day, over the journeyers to the fortunate Islands; while to their dying eyes, through the mirage, "the city sparkles like ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in a mist the naked priest, his friend and rescuer, seated upon the sandy floor regarding him with a wrinkled brow and compressed lips, and then he sank into fever visions uncouth and dreadful, or mirage-pleasing ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... them several times, though never so distinctly. The purple tips, the bold rock-ribs, the shadowed canyons, so sharp and clear in the morning light—how impossible to believe that these were only the deceit of the desert mirage! Yet so they were; even for the Navajos ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... opulence, all human happiness extending as far as eye could reach; a map of enjoyments spread out to the horizon; a sort of radiant geography of which he was the centre. A perilous mirage! ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the Fourth. Islands to the westward. Red Island of Captain Heywood. Strong tides. Camden Bay. Buccaneer's Archipelago. Cygnet Bay. Dangerous situation of the brig. High and rapid tides. Cape Leveque. Examination of the coast to Cape Latouche Treville. Remarkable effect of mirage. Leave the coast for Mauritius. Voyage thither. Arrival at Port Louis. Refit. Some ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... an attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has told us, to 'perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods of the modern novel.' By the modern novel he means the novel as he had reconstructed it; he means Madame Bovary. That perfect book is perfect because Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... entertained for her in past days took new force in view of the sudden barriers that rose between him and the tender, graceful, confiding, charming Adele, whose image had so long and (as he now thought) so constantly dwelt in the dreamy mirage of his future. Under the spur of these feelings, he presently gave over his excited walk up and down the study, and, coming close to the Doctor, whispered, with a grave earnestness that made the old gentleman recognize a man ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... for a moment I pictured them as real! After the error was dispelled, the image which I once thought true remained in me. It had determined my tastes, fixed my opinions, set my mind at rest. Subsequently, I was to try and refashion the perfection of which I had beheld the mirage and, with still greater ardour, I was to pursue in others and conquer at last the reality of the once-known happiness which I thought that I ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... discounted; it is far rarer than facts, and often does more to lead to truth. This slight book is in verse and drawings, type integrated with delectable black-and-white representations of the prairie dog, armadillo, sanderling, mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this list to which it is akin is Eve Ganson's ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... morning mirage inverts an image of a stretch of trees along the far-away river and blends them top to top till they seem greenish-black columns supporting the dun clouds of the west, while the belated moon peers ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... Good Friday, we joined the rest of the column at Sumaikchah. The Cherub with his scouts went ahead to find a road. All the field was jumping with grasshoppers, on which storks were feeding. Scattered bushes looked in the mirage like enemy patrols. We were escorted by Fritz, whose kindly interest in our movements never flagged. We started late, at 6.50 a.m., and without breakfast, the distance being under-estimated. A zigzagging course made the journey into over ten miles, in dreadful ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... the distance showed a leaning column, black at base, pearl-colored in the primrose air, like smoke from some gigantic altar. He had seen islands in the lake under which the sky seemed to slip, throwing them above the horizon in mirage, and trees standing like detached bushes on a world rim of water. The Ste. Marie River was a beautiful light green in color, and sunset and twilight played upon it all the miracles ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... look for would be gone. One morning, he had been off for game for the dogs unsuccessfully, and, when he came back to his men, learned that they had seen seventeen deer. After them goes Pim; finds them to be three hares, magnified by fog and mirage, and their long ears answering for horns. This same day they got upon the Bay of Mercy. No ship in sight! Right across it goes the Lieutenant to look for records; when, at two in the afternoon, Robert Hoile sees something black up the bay. Through the glass the Lieutenant makes it out to be a ship. ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... will not chase the mirage of Mana, That man-fooling mist of god Lima-loa, Which still deceives the stranger— And came nigh fooling me—the tricksy water! 5 The mirage of Mana, is a fraud; it Wantons with the witch Koolau. A friend has turned up at Wailua, Changeful Kawelo, with gills ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... be really kind and comforting, talk to me of my wife. Say how sweet and lovely she is. Say that her arms are tender, her eyes gentle and kind. I am the thirsty traveller in the desert, who sights pure water, hastens eagerly forward, and finds—a mirage! But a deadly stream flows from the roots of the Upas—Hullo! Here comes Aubrey Treherne. Look out, Mrs. Dalmain! He owes you a grudge. Hey, presto! Vanish from the chair, or Helen's cousin will lean over, with a bleeding face, threatening to ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... silent as death. It took me the whole day to reach the patch,—which I found indeed a forest—but not a rudiment of brook or runnel had I crossed! Yet through the glowing noon I seemed haunted by an aural mirage, hearing so plainly the voice of many waters that I could hardly believe the opposing ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... an artist into hysterics. He is always working at the end of his tether. There is nothing more tantalising than an eternal quest after the ideal; like the horizon, it recedes from the traveller; like the mirage, it vanishes before the claims of hunger and thirst. On the other hand, it has enjoyments all its own. The idealist is always face to face with a great expectation. Perhaps to-night he may realise it; certainly in the morning it will be ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... different he was in her thought from what he was in his own best, influenced at least the rate of her growth towards the upper regions. We cannot be heart and soul and self in the company of the evil—and the untrue is the evil, however beheld as an angel of light in the mirage of our loving eyes, without sad loss. Her prayers were not so fervent, her aspirations not so strong. I see again the curl on the lip of a certain kind of girl-reader! Her judgment here is but foolishness. She ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... cheap edition of my work on Greek Philosophy and Logic. It is not in the least presumptuous to lay hands upon this venerable illusion, and show that it has not even the vitality of a ghost. It is but a simulacrum or mirage, and it is but necessary to approach it fearlessly, and walk through it, to ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... drift recommenced. Toward the middle of February we saw a mirage of the coming sun above the horizon; there were flights of Arctic petrels and snow-buntings; and spring was with us. In an ice-pack of big hummocks and narrow lanes we made good progress all ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... eager artist-bands, pilgrims to the Old, the Stately, and the Fair; Europe, which reared above our dull horizon the towers of Oxford and of Notre Dame, sent up into our pale, empty sky the shimmering mirage of Venice, and cast across our workaday way the grave and noble shadow of Rome; Europe, which gave out through the varying voices of Correggio, Canova, Hugo, and Wagner the cry, so lofty and so piercing-sweet, ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... fall and fade from sight, whence come, where gone no Thought can tell, Drink of yon mirage-stream and chase the ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... told me to hurry up, but I called him out of his tent and asked him if I was really a sergeant, or if it was a mirage. He said if I made a success of that bridge, and the command got across, and I was not killed I would be appointed sergeant. He said the general would try me as a bridge-builder, and if I was a success he would try ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... another mirage of riches as these thoughts went through it, and to settle the matter I stooped down and got a grip on the coffer—which was made of a tougher wood than the boxes and held together—and managed by a good deal of straining to ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... Thank goodness we have two nights here, on the golden shore of the blue Birket Karun, all that's left of Lake Moeris of which Strabo and Herodotus raved. From the dune-sheltered plateau where our white tents cluster, the glitter of water in the desert is like a mirage: a mysterious, melancholy sheet of steel and silver turning to ruby in the sunset, with dark birds ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Weary Willy's death, Scott, Oates and Gran started out and pulled towards the forage depot, which was at a point on the Barrier half a mile from the edge, in a S.S.E. direction from Hut Point. On their approach the sky looked black and lowering, and mirage effects of huge broken floes loomed out ahead. At first Scott thought that this was one of the strange optical illusions common in the Antarctic, but as he drew close to the depot all doubt was dispelled. The sea was full of broken pieces of Barrier ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... from her; and closing her lips very tight, she walked on. In thought she was already standing close to him, her eyes shut, waiting, with her heart beating wildly, to know what she would feel when his lips had spoken, perhaps touched her face or hand. And she had a sort of mirage vision of herself, with eyelashes resting on her cheeks, lips a little parted, arms helpless at her sides. Yet, incomprehensibly, his figure was invisible. She discovered then that she ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... love—I—even I!—who thought myself so clear-sighted, did not know how, with one flutter of his wings, Cupid can set the whole atmosphere in motion; change the proportions, size, colour, value, of every object; lead us into a mirage, and leave us in ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... restraint passed away from the brilliant assemblage. Before there had been a certain sense of unreality in the whole thing. The tone of the rejoicings had been feverish—who could tell but that in a week this thing might not have passed away like a mirage. Now a heartier note altogether prevailed, especially amongst the men. There were no more side glances, or shrugged shoulders—the volcano no longer trembled beneath their feet. Dancing commenced, and the King stood up with ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... see how she is in the morning, and, if she is no better, I will endeavour to get her on to some permanent water or creek running to the south. I think we have now made the dip of the country to the south, but the mirage is so powerful that little bushes appear like great gum-trees, which makes it very difficult to judge what is before us; it is almost as bad as travelling in the dark. I never saw it so bright nor so continuous as it is now; one would think that the whole country was under ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... she had been miserably weak that very night in so abandoning herself to the influence she loved and dreaded; but at the great moment, when heaven and earth swam before her as in a wild and unreal mirage, with the voice of the man she loved ringing in her ears, speaking such words as it was an ecstasy to hear, she had been no longer weak—the reality of danger had brought forth the sincerity of her goodness, and her heart had found courage to do a great deed. ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... expectant of I know not what magical occurrences, what mysteries. I am aware of the summons to advance to marvellous lands, where marvellous things must happen. I am taken by that sensation of almost trembling magic which came to me when first I saw a mirage far out in the Sahara. But Egypt, though it contains so many marvels, has no longer for me the marvellous atmosphere. Its keynote ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... fisherfolk and herders of the cattle and sheep of the neighbouring plain. The lone fortress-church rises tall and severe in its outlines, and the whole may be likened to nothing as much as a desert mirage that one sees in ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... all, change in themselves. This is the inexorable Death in Life, and in this Death we cannot dream of a fair consoling Hereafter. The thing we loved has not only perished—alas! we realise that it has never existed! What we worshipped was the shadow of our own making, a mirage conjured up by our heart's desire. To those who love most, love best, ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... vast and vague South-west, solitary, strange. Three, four, five years passed. The shepherd would be almost forgotten. Never the most trivial scrap of information as to his whereabouts reached Los Muertos. He had melted off into the surface-shimmer of the desert, into the mirage; he sank below the horizons; he was swallowed up in the waste of sand and sage. Then, without warning, he would reappear, coming in from the wilderness, emerging from the unknown. No one knew him well. In all that countryside he had but three friends, Presley, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... Van replied to Mrs. Grendon, "that—like the traveller in the desert, isn't it?—I only make out, as an oasis or a mirage, a sweet green rustling blur. I don't ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... Oliver for a ride with Abby and Susan, and on these evenings he stayed so late that Virginia ceased presently even to make a pretence of waiting supper. Several times, on September afternoons, when the country burned with an illusive radiance as if it were seen through a mirage, she put on her old riding-habit, which she had hunted up in the attic at the rectory, and mounting one of Abby's horses, started to accompany them; but her conscience reproached her so bitterly at the thought ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Ingersoll breathed deeply, staring into the blackness, searching for a glimmer, a glint, some faint reassurance that it had not been a mirage they had seen. And then Ingersoll felt a hand in his, Tom Shandor's hand, gripping his tightly, wringing it, and when the lights snapped on again, he was staring at Shandor, tears of happiness streaming from his pale, tired eyes. "You saw it?" ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... made the best of the power into which you came, and you could not do so, because the spring from which all the enriching waters of married life flow was dry. Poor Jasmine—poor illusion of a wild young heart which reached out for the golden city of the mirage! ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... modern uses of electric wires and telephone lines. Their dreaming tops were in the sky; their feet were in the sluicings of the stamp-mill that reared its long brown back in a semi-recumbent posture, resting one elbow on the hill; and beneath the valley smouldered, a pale mirage by day, by night a vision of color transcendent and rich as the gates of ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... ought not to surprise us. M. de Lamennais, a man of our own times, has strikingly presented the same contrast. In his beautiful book, the "Words of a Believer," the most immoderate anger and the sweetest relentings alternate, as in a mirage. This man, who was extremely kind in the intercourse of life, became madly intractable toward those who did not agree with him. Jesus, in like manner, applied to himself, not without reason, the passage from Isaiah:[4] "He shall not strive, nor cry; neither shall any man hear his voice in ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... a mirage on the desert waste, Lures the lost traveler, by a vision fair Of gushing fountains which he may not taste, Of streamlets cool depicted on the air; With tongue outstretched and parched he onward speeds, But as he moves the phantom ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... clearness, whether in the North after or before rain, or in some moments of twilight in the South, is always, as far as I am acquainted with natural phenomena, a notable thing. Mist of some sort, or mirage, or confusion of light, or of cloud, are the general facts; the distance may vary in different climates at which the effects of mist begin, but they are always present; and therefore, in all probability it is meant that we ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... them flat to catch the pouring rain, and then poured this precious fresh water—true water of life to them—into their calabashes. But when morning came no land could be seen anywhere. It was as though the island had been a land of enchantment and mirage, and now had faded away. Yet hope sprang in them erect and glad next day when land was sighted again; but the sea and the wind, as though driven by the spirits of contrariness, smote ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... footsteps of victorious death. I have heard it in the trenches, murmured low like a prayer.—Young man, this is a grievous hour. You are a survivor from the ghastly war; your vitality must affirm itself; you must live. Stripped of all falsehoods, freed from every mirage, you find yourself alone in your nakedness; before you stretches the great white road. Onward, the distance beckons. Leave behind you the old world, and the idols of yesterday. March forward without turning to listen to the outworn voices of ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... There is the hungry-looking prospector, waiting with ill-disguised impatience till he can "cross the Range" and follow again, as he has done year after year, the exciting chase after the ever-receding mirage—the visions of fabulous wealth always going to be, but never quite, attained. The time-honored symbol of Hope must, we think, give place to a more forcible representation furnished by the peculiar genius of our times; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... iniquity in many parts of the world, and vice in all, but the concentrated essence of all the iniquities and all the vices in all the continents finds itself at Port Said. And through the heart of that sand- bordered hell, where the mirage flickers day long above the Bitter Lake, move, if you will only wait, most of the men and women you have known in this life. Dick established himself in quarters more riotous than respectable. He spent his evenings on the quay, and ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the gloom of the masses of pine, the upward slopes of tree-stocked hills, the vastness of the Black Forest; but they were like the mirage to a man who dies in a desert; he knew, at the pace he went, he could not live to reach them. The blood was beating in his brain and pumping from his heart; a tightness like an iron band seemed girt about ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... in that land of The Resting of Camels shall come on The City of Ceasing. There, the dream-wrought pinnacles and the spires that are builded of men's hopes shall rise up real before thee, seen only hitherto as a mirage in the Waste. ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... that she had never seen as it was reflected to her from the books which she had read. It was a curious vision of life that she had: things were out of proportion to it; it was more like a dream than a reality—a mirage than the actual face of things. The idea of great cities, and especially of London, had a kind of fascination for her: she could scarcely realize the rush, the roar and hurry, the hard crowds of men and women, strangers to each other, feverishly seeking for wealth and pleasure beneath ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... ennui, that vile ennui, the precursor of storms, which she had so much reason to dread? In any event, she suffered herself to be deceived and had been living for several days in a state of delicious unrest, for love is so strong, so beautiful, that its semblance, its mirage, takes us captive and may move us ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the idea that by isolating the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it in space, as high as possible above the earth, they were placing it beyond attack; as if they were not, thereby, simply exposing it to be taken as an effect of mirage! Certainly they are right to believe in the absolute reality of the person and in his independence of matter: but science is there which shows the inter-dependence of conscious life and cerebral activity. When a strong instinct assures the probability of personal survival, they are right not ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... now a useless incumbrance, he left leaning against an up-ended cake of ice. That shore, if not lifted high by a mirage, was at least ten miles away. And ten miles to a boy and dog who have appeased their hunger for three days with two small birds, is no ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... snatching the image our soul has cast in it, What is the use of the Summers and Springs, The wave of the woods and the waft of the wings— Since all means nothing, and good things and ill Make madness,—a mirage tormenting us still? ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... day in early August; a light shower the night before had washed the valley clean of dust, and now the hot harvest sun poured down his ripening rays over the pulsating earth. To the south the Brandon Hills shimmered in a pale gray mirage. Over the trees which sheltered the Stopping-House a flock of black crows circled in the blue air, croaking and complaining that the harvest was going to be late. On the wire-fence that circled the haystack sat a row of red-winged blackbirds like a string of jet beads, patiently waiting ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... The current had accelerated, the wind had slackened, and the Pyrenees had sagged off to the west. The lookout sighted Barclay de Tolley to the eastward, barely visible from the masthead, and vainly and for hours the PYRENEES tried to beat up to it. Ever, like a mirage, the cocoanut trees hovered on the horizon, visible only from the masthead. From the deck they were hidden by ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... secured and classified over five hundred distinct species of fishes from this very division of the Indian Ocean; many of which are characterized by colors as gay and various as those of tropical birds and flowers. Mirage played us strange tricks, in the way of optical delusion, in these regions. We seemed constantly to be approaching land that was never reached, and which, after assuming the undulating shore-lines of a well-defined coast, at ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... it was impossible to feel drowsy. I felt very faint as we set out from Jayrud. The salt marshes in the distance were white and glistening, and the heat spread over them in a white mist which looked like a mirage bearing fantastic ships. We breakfasted at the next village, Atneh, in a harim, the women having all gone out. It was the house of a bride, and she had hung all her new garments round the walls, as we display our wedding presents ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... triangles of eternal snow, and drawing the purple shadows of evening around their feet. The high bold coast did not appear, in that clear atmosphere, to be fifteen miles away, and it seemed to have risen suddenly like a beautiful mirage out of the sea. In less than five minutes the grey curtain of mist dropped slowly down again over the magnificent picture, and it faded gradually from sight, leaving us almost in doubt whether it had been a reality, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... lover of Wordsworth, quotes, perhaps, with some apprehension; not knowing how far it carries into the hearts of others its affecting power; how vividly it calls up before them that mood of desolate loneliness when the whole vision of human love and joy hangs like a mirage in the air, and only when it seems irrecoverably distant seems also intolerably dear. But, however this particular passage may impress the reader, it is not hard to illustrate by abundant references the potent originality of Wordsworth's ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... be capable of being analysed into its elements; but there is no means of distinguishing the elements taken from reality from those which are the work of imagination. To use Niebuhr's expression, a legend is "a mirage produced by an invisible object according to an unknown law ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... bewildered by the mirage, "is it only a bad dream, after all?" And as the false magic glowed into blinding splendour to engulf them: "Oh, boy! boy!—is it hell or heaven ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... life. Favor of the Sultan, or his displeasure, is a question of Fate. A war is undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as in Europe for a duchy. The prolific sun, and the sudden and rank plenty which his heat engenders, make subsistence easy. On the other side, the desert, the simoom, the mirage, the lion, and the plague endanger it, and life hangs on the contingency of a skin of water more or less. The very geography of old Persia showed these contrasts. "My father's empire," said Cyrus to Xenophon, "is so large, that people ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... a mirage: it was a miracle," muttered the young man to himself. "Forty miles at least, and it seemed scarcely three hundred yards! ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne |
