"Mystical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prove by physical, or, if you prefer it, metaphysical reasons." So he wrote in his "Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicarum," which he published two years after going to Graetz, that is, in his twenty-fifth year. In this book his fiery and mystical spirit first found expression, flaming forth in meteoric coruscations. The problem which Kepler attempted to solve in the "Prodromus" was no less than the determination of the harmonic relations of the distances of the planets, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... stands wholly upon their relation to Him as members of His "mystic body, the Church." It is in this respect only that they are "one with Him;" and there can be no identity of Christ with "little children" but by virtue of the same relation, that is, as they are members of His mystical body, the Church; of which membership baptism is now, as circumcision was then, the initiatory rite.... The benefits of this Sacrament require to be briefly exhibited. Baptism introduces the adult believer into the covenant of grace and the Church of Christ; and is the seal, the pledge, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... later, for my imprisonment under The Leads of Venice; not owing to his slanders, for I do not believe he was capable of that, Jesuit though he was—and even amongst such people there is sometimes some honourable feeling—but through the mystical insinuations which he made in the presence of bigoted persons. I must give fair notice to my readers that, if they are fond of such people, they must not ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova • David Widger
... know that with me the ultimate foundation of morality is the truth which in the Vedas and the Vedanta receives its expression in the established, mystical formula, Tat twam asi (This is thyself), which is spoken with reference to every living thing, be it man or beast, and is called the Mahavakya, the ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... monosyllables constitute the essence of the Swedish tongue, and that they alone are required to carry on an effective and agreeable dialogue. "It is not at all difficult," he says, "to keep up a conversation with a Swede, when you are once acquainted with a certain mystical formula, whereby all emotions and sentiments are to be expressed, and by the aid of which you may love and hate, curse and bless, be good-humoured or satirical, and even witty. The mighty and all-sufficing words are, 'Ja so!' (Yes, indeed!) ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... in a worthy manner the reasons why the republican form of state cannot assist China to maintain her existence; now let me state why it is impossible to restore the monarchical system. The maintenance of the dignity of a monarch depends on a sort of mystical, historical, traditional influence or belief. Such an influence was capable of producing unconsciously and spontaneously a kind of effect to assist directly or indirectly in maintaining order and imparting blessing to the country. In this ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... social instincts. The link is one of feeling, primarily, though it has associated with it, in an indissoluble way, purpose and action. The existence of the social instinct is undisputed; its explanation is varied and ranges from the mystical to the evolutionary. For the mystical (which crops out in Bergson, Butler and even in Galton), the unity of life is its basis, and there is a sort of recognition of parts formerly united but now separate individuals. This does not explain hate, racial and individual. The evolutionary ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... make a tolerable case in favour of the mythological identity of the legend of Ladybird—that is, the sun-chafer, or barn-bie, the fire-fly, "whose house is burnt, and whose bairns are ten," of course the first ten days of the Egyptian year[4]—with the mystical stories of the said black or dark blue lords of radiance, Pan ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... with Venetian and Chinese lanterns of various colours. These had been hung from hooks in the rocks and pillars with infinite good taste at long intervals, so as to illuminate not too brilliantly the mystical darkness of the scene. Looking upon the vague, indefinite vista, as it glimmered away into an indefinable distance, one ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... who are anxious to smoke, but say they are not, to take out their pipes in his drawing-room. It was easy to see the man he was, by a hasty look at his book-shelves. All the philosophers were represented there, from Plato to the present-day mystical Germans. Lang's Odyssey was side by side with the Icelandic sagas and the Song of the Niebelungs. I did not see many books of Systematic Theology; but the Greek tragedians, the Sacred Books of the East, German and French novels, had all a place in the bookcase ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... escape. Instead of uttering in reply to Bear's Meat's question the simple truth, therefore, he rather sought for such an answer as might make the process in which he was engaged appear imposing and mystical. ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... [6316]"the whole Scripture is a message, an exhortation, a love letter to this purpose;" to incite us, and invite us, [6317]God's epistle, as Gregory calls it, to his creatures. He sets out his son and his church in that epithalamium or mystical song of Solomon, to enamour us the more, comparing his head "to fine gold, his locks curled and black as a raven," Cant. iv. 5. "his eyes like doves on rivers of waters, washed with milk, his lips as lilies, drooping down pure juice, his hands as rings of gold ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... was a relaxation of this severity. Besides, communion is not absolutely necessary to salvation, and one may communicate spiritually in reading the word, which is like the body; in uniting oneself with the Church, which is the mystical substance of Christ; and in suffering for Him and with Him, this last communion of agony that is your portion, madame, and is the most perfect communion of all. If you heartily detest your crime and love God with all your ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... universal organism, the assumption of a reciprocal influence of terrestrial bodies could not be foreign, nor did this cease to correspond with a higher view of nature, until astrologers overstepped the limits of human knowledge with frivolous and mystical calculations. ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... especially in their hours of trial. She disliked the idea of leaning for help on something which in her hours of vigor she rejected. A refuge, an explanation,—no, it was not possible! The story of the atonement, the rewards, the mystical attempt to explain the tragedy of life, its sorrow and pain,—no, it was childish! So the word "religious" had something in it repellent, sickly, and self-deceptive.... Suddenly the words stood out sharply in her ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... was assisted by Aeschines himself; and that his mother was priestess of a 'thiasos' or voluntary association of worshippers of Dionysus-Sabazios, among whose ceremonies was doubtless one symbolizing a marriage or mystical union between the god and his worshippers. (Whether the form of 'sacred marriage' which was originally intended to promote the fertility of the ground by 'sympathetic magic' entered into the ritual of Sabazios is doubtful.) Such ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... existence, and think that it should be consulted by whomsoever would pay proper attention to his own outward appearance. The merely useful may possibly make the shape approximate to that of a Quaker's or a jarvey's, but the beautiful has to elevate and modify it into the mystical proportions fit for a man of taste. One other quality, however, which is intimately connected with the useful, has to be noticed. The substance should not be hard and unyielding. Witness, ye reminiscences—ye painful images of bygone headachs, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... desires towards an ideal object." "It must be allowed," says Dr. Mansel,[87-2] "that it is not through reasoning that men obtain their first intimation of their relation to a deity." In writers and preachers of the semi-mystical school, which embraces most of the ardent revivalists of the day, we constantly hear the "feeling of dependence" quoted as the radical element of religious thought.[87-3] In America Theodore Parker, and in Germany Schleiermacher, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... philosophy of government. Your histories, your books on philosophy, your whole literature, glorify the State; and you have accepted the dangerous doctrine that the individual exists to serve the State, forgetting that the State is not the mystical, divine thing you picture it, but a government carried on by human beings like yourselves, most of them reasonably upright, but some incompetent and others deliberately bad, just like any other human government. We believe that the only excuse for the ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson
... rigid Roman Catholic, her son a free-thinker, in the broadest significance of the term, if one might judge from the selections that adorned his library shelves. But deep in his soul was the germination of a mystical creed, which gradually ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... march. It was all a continuous piling up of dross, amidst which he lost himself. Although Fourier had sprung from Saint-Simon he denied him in part; and if Saint-Simon's doctrine ended in a kind of mystical sensuality, the other's conducted to an unacceptable regimenting of society. Proudhon, for his part, demolished without rebuilding anything. Comte, who created method and declared science to be the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... for the Union under the Constitution, but declared, with the prescience of a seer, that the only danger threatening the government arose from its centralizing tendency. It was "the sunset of life which gave him mystical lore." ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute- player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all the thoughts and ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... not far distant when yonder monarch at the window, who had won so many victories, would have a reckoning with the Smalcalds, the allied Protestants of Germany, and his vivid imagination surrounded him with an almost mystical power. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... abounded in spots which tempted one to live out of doors. There was the tall pine with its mystical whispered songs. Thinkright had swung a hammock from one of its branches since Judge Trent's visit. From beneath its shade was no view of the sea, but one could lie there and listen to the rhythmic murmur ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... and I come, my children. Forget not, ye Romans, that I say so much. When the seed needs rain it falls. Sarishan, brothers and sisters all." And with this strange speech, mystical to the last, she rode away into the setting sun, on the gray donkey, looking more like an ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... precedes the flock, and should lead it aright, is the Pope. A mystical interpretation of the injunction upon the children of Israel (Leviticus, xi.) in regard to clean and unclean beasts was familiar to the schoolmen. St. Augustine expounds the cloven hoof as symbolic of right conduct, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... appropriate or equivalent prediction; and it did seem at times sufficiently marvellous that few occurrences should take place which could not be traced to some dark foretokening enveloped in one or other of these mystical revelations. Events happen to ourselves that do occasionally, and not unfrequently, rush back upon our minds with unaccountable and almost appalling force, as though, however novel in reality, they were but facts and feelings with which we had long ago been familiar, yet in what manner we are unable ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... background and environment of seventeenth century Quakerism. There can be little doubt, I think, that I have here found at least one of the great historical sources of the Quaker movement. This volume, together with my Studies in Mystical Religion, will at any rate {vi} furnish convincing evidence that the ideas, aims, experiences, practices, and aspirations of the early Quakers were the fruit of long spiritual preparation. This movement, as a whole, has never been studied ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... after truth, his nature did intuitive reverence to one who appeared to be still more spiritual, who, as he conjectured, at times at any rate, had discovered some portion of the truth. He believed it, although she had never told him so. Indeed that semi-mystical side of Stella, whereof at first she had shown him glimpses, seemed to be quite in abeyance; she dreamed no more dreams, she saw no more visions, or if she did she kept them to herself. Yet to him this woman seemed to be in touch with that unseen which ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... capacities that are more peculiarly human. Even the treatment of instincts has been misleading. For instance, instincts have been discussed under such heads as the "self-preservative instincts," "the social instincts," just as if the child had an inborn, mystical something that told him how to preserve his life, or become a social king. Original nature does not work in that way; it is only as the experience of the individual modifies the blind instinctive responses through learning that these results can just ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... other's characters. The maiden's pure heart knew no distrust, and Jean was faithful and chivalrous as Sir Galahad. They spoke not always of love: words were unnecessary to explain what every look betokened. Jean found her skilled in strange, mystical, lore, but ignorant of all that sways and rules mankind. The history of the selfish struggles of human interests and passions was to her a sealed book. She had been carefully shrouded from the knowledge of evil; but, in order to protect her in ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... mystical water, the Moyle, to have two isles in it like Islay of the pipers and Raghery of the black caves. It was over Moyle that Columkill went in his little coracle to be a hermit in Iona, the gentlest saint that Ireland ever knew. And it was over the Moyle that Patrick came, landing whilst ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... nearly all, the red and the blue, the furious and the tranquil, the puritanical and the licentious, the mystical and the intemperate, those that had voted for the death of kings, and those in which the frauds in the grocery trade had been denounced; and everywhere the tenants cursed the landlords; the blouse was full of spite against broadcloth; and the rich conspired against ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... still popular account, the dark enigmas of Eleusis were borrowed from Egypt;—the drama of the Anaglyph [45]. But, in answer to this theory, we must observe, that even if really, at their commencement, the strange and solemn rites which they are asserted to have been—mystical ceremonies grow so naturally out of the connexion between the awful and the unknown—were found so generally among the savages of the ancient world—howsoever dispersed —and still so frequently meet the traveller on shores to which it is indeed a wild speculation ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... amusement," Basterga replied with a gesture of haughty deprecation. "A parergon, if you please. I take it, a man may dip into the mystical writings of Paracelsus without prejudice to his Latinity; and into the cabalistic lore of the school of Cordova without losing his taste for the pure oratory of the immortal Cicero. Virgil himself, if we may believe Helinandus, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... were before, and yet are changed into another thing:" or, that which Gelasius saith: "The substance of the bread, or the nature of the wine, ceaseth not so to be:" or, that which Theodoret saith: "After the consecration the mystical signs do not cast off their own proper nature; for they remain still on their former substance, form, and kind:" or that which Augustine saith: "That which ye see is the bread and cup, for so our eyes tell us: but that which your faith requireth to be taught, is this: ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... age to do aught but lament over so much wasted ingenuity, when we find the author maintaining that the whole of the one hundred and fifty Psalms were written by King David, and that Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun have only a mystical meaning; that the first seventy represent the Old Testament, and the last eighty the New, because we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ on the eighth day of the week, and so forth. A closer study of the book might perhaps discover in it some genuine ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... significance), began to display even more marked evidence of a sort of monomania. Bast, the cat-goddess, became an obsession with her, and she finally conceived the idea that the attributes of that mystical and partly-understood deity were active within her; that she was Bast, re-born. And, certainly, during one month of every year, her condition closely resembled that which was termed in the ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... Chamber"), by Ts'ao Hsueeh-ch'in, who died in 1763. It describes the downfall of a rich and powerful family from the highest rank of the gentry, and the decadent son's love of a young and emotional lady of the highest circles. The story is clothed in a mystical garb that does something to soften its tragic ending. The interesting novel Ju-lin wai-shih ("Private Reports from the Life of Scholars"), by Wu Ching-tzu (1701-1754), is a mordant criticism of Confucianism with its rigid formalism, of the social ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... been in fact under discussion. When Marius recalled its circumstances he seemed to hear once more that voice of genuine conviction, pleading, from amidst a [90] scene at best of elegant frivolity, for so boldly mystical a view of man and his position in the world. For a moment, but only for a moment, as he listened, the trees had seemed, as of old, to be growing "close against the sky." Yes! the reception of theory, of hypothesis, of beliefs, did depend a great deal on temperament. ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... the crowd has been much studied lately, by Le Bon and other writers in France, by Mr. Graham Wallas in England. I think that Le Bon is in danger of making The Crowd a mystical, superhuman entity. Of course, a crowd is made up of individuals, who remain individuals still. We must not accept the stuffed idol of Rousseau and the socialists, 'The General Will,' and turn it into an evil spirit. There is no General Will. All we have a right ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... army life, his periods of professorship, we can not help but wonder at the amount of writing Mickiewicz did. And his life was not a long one; it did not reach to sixty years. But during the working years allotted him, before a mystical melancholy—which was threatening to degenerate into madness—had impaired his faculties, his mind was unusually brilliant, creative and marvelously disciplined. It obeyed at will. At one time he was professor of Latin in ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz
... naturally gravitated into the company of Sidgwick, Myers, and Gurney, as men busied in an undertaking that appealed to his detective instinct. He was radically different from them in temperament and point of view—not at all mystical, full of animal spirits, fond of all manner of sports, and interested in occult subjects only so far as they furnished working material for his nimble and inquiring mind. The Cambridge trio, however, took kindly ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... bearing organ. A manifest example whereof appeareth in those who, fasting, are not able to carry to their head a great goblet full of wine without a trembling and a shaking in the hand that holds it. This of old was accounted a prefiguration and mystical pointing out of the Pythian divineress, who used always, before the uttering of a response from the oracle, to shake a branch of her domestic laurel. Lampridius also testifieth that the Emperor Heliogabalus, to acquire unto himself the reputation ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... is for crowds. It has discovered that crosses, to common people in common things, seem oriental and mystical. The common people of the western world instead of being born with dreamy imaginations are born with pointed and applied ones. It is not impossible that the comparative failure of the Christian religion in the western world and in the later generations is that it has been trying to be oriental and ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... assembled in the great hall, observing with childish wonder and faith the performances of a new magician, a fresh arrival. His dress was the extreme of the fantastic; as showy and foolish as the sort of thing an Indian medicine-man wears. He was mowing, and mumbling, and gesticulating, and drawing mystical figures in the air and on the floor,—the regular thing, you know. He was a celebrity from Asia—so he said, and that was enough. That sort of evidence was as good as ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... admiration, and therefore quite innocent. I am the only woman he loves, and he never even remembers me when he is in the sacred office. If you could see him come out of the vestry in his white surplice, with his rapt face and prophetic eyes. So mystical! So beautiful! You would not wonder that I ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... the shining acres of floor, the mystical woman and a dentist had ceased singing, and were examining a fresh sheet of music. The dentist coyly poked his finger at her coiffure, and she slapped ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... ways for philosophic purposes by the synthetic principles of comparative anatomy. But even the most important universal laws of organisation—of which the old system of comparative anatomy was one—had to take refuge in mystical ideas of a plan of structure and of creative final causes (causae finales); they were incapable of arriving at a true and clear perception of effective mechanical causes (causae efficientes). This last, most difficult, and grandest problem, Charles Darwin was ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... don't think that could have been so, because the device on it was the Eye of Osiris, and Ti, as you know, was an Aten-worshipper. However, it was a very charming ring, and Uncle John, who had a queer sort of devotion to the mystical Eye of Osiris, commissioned a very clever goldsmith to make two exact copies of it, one for himself and one for me. The goldsmith naturally wanted to take the measurements of our fingers, but this Uncle John would not hear of; the rings were to be exact copies, and an exact copy must be the ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... faced and conquered hard physical jobs that became the men of endurance later." He had seen and shared the devotion of the missionary spirit, and had seen, too, how largely it failed of fruit by being spent on supernatural conversion and mystical emotion. He knew the tropical temperament, common to Hawaiian and negro,—how accessible to transient fervor, how deficient in persistence and continuity. He had watched his father's operations, as minister of public instruction under the Hawaiian king; his experiments in more practical and prosaic ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... whose signatures are appended to the accompanying statement are the best-known of the eight who were present,—men whose testimony in a court of law would be accepted without question. Dr. Frank Collins is, or was, President of the Osteopaths' Association, a Spiritualist, student of Astrology and mystical subjects, and a member of the Council of the California Psychical Research Society. Dr. J. C. Anthony is a well and favorably known physician, who has practised here for many years, also a member of our Council. Dr. Cecil E. Nixon is a Dentist, best known as a Magician, and as ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... century, the Eucharist remained what it had ever been, "the breaking of bread," the commemorative meal. Then there came a change, and men began to read into it a sacrificial meaning and to interpret it as a mystical repetition of the death of Christ. From Cyprian this novel theology apparently passed to Augustine and Ambrose in the fourth century, and thenceforth it became dominant, though by no means universally so, until the eighth and ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... notwithstanding, he perceive devotion to these interests, he calls it desinteresse, and wonders how it is possible to act "disinterestedly." There have been philosophers who could give this popular astonishment a seductive and mystical, other-worldly expression (perhaps because they did not know the higher nature by experience?), instead of stating the naked and candidly reasonable truth that "disinterested" action is very interesting and "interested" ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country by her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and converting the strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions. Thither went also Samuel Gorton, a man of no ordinary power, who proclaimed a mystical union with God in love, thought that heaven and hell were in the mind alone, but esteemed little the clergy and the ordinances. The colony was protected also by the thoughtful and chivalrous Vane, who held that water baptism had had its day, and that the Jewish Sabbath ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to relate how when the human being who has used this mystical ointment betrays his extended vision in some way to a fairy, the latter strikes or stabs him in the eye, thus depriving him not only of the etheric sight, but of that of the denser physical plane ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... on, saying the lines by rote as Phene had learned them—and hard indeed they must have been to learn! For, as Lutwyche had told his friends, it must be "something slow, involved, and mystical," it must hold Jules long in doubt, and lure ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... remarkable, however, is his Geistreiche Sinn-und Schluss-reime (1657), afterwards called Cherubinischer Wandersmann (1674). This is a collection of "Reimsprueche" or rhymed distichs embodying a strange mystical pantheism drawn mainly from the writings of Jakob Boehme and his followers. Silesius delighted specially in the subtle paradoxes of mysticism. The essence of God, for instance, he held to be love; God, he said, can love nothing inferior ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... Kong-foo-tse, born 551 B.C., was as practical in intellect as Laoutse was mystical, and has exerted an extraordinary influence upon the Chinese race. For this reason it seems important to give some account ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... had I heard Beethoven interpreted and understood like this before. I am not a musician, but I suppose even musicians do not know how much there is in that Sonata. I cannot find another word than "oppressiveness" to describe the sensation wrought upon the audience. One had a feeling as if mystical rites were being performed; there rose before me a vast desert, not of this world, weird and unutterably sad, without shape, half lit up by a ghostly moon, in the midst of which hopeless despair waited ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... up her spirits. Says he, I'll go up, and prepare her; but won't tell her of it. So he came up to me, as I have said, and amused me about Mr. Williams, to half prepare me for some surprise; though that could not have been any thing to this: and he left me, as I said, in that suspense, at his mystical words, saying, He would send to me, when they ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... one of a little group of young men who met almost every evening in d'Arthez's room, united by the keenest sympathies and by the earnestness of their intellectual life. They all foresaw a great writer in d'Arthez; they looked upon him as their chief since the loss of one of their number, a mystical genius, one of the most extraordinary intellects of the age. This former leader had gone back to his province for reasons on which it serves no purpose to enter, but Lucien often heard them speak of this absent friend as "Louis." Several of the group were destined to fall by the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... sense is termed Mystical, that is, above sense, supernatural; and this it is, when spiritually one expounds a writing which even in the Literal sense by the things signified bears express reference to the Divine things of Eternal Glory; as one can see in that Song of the Prophet which says that by the exodus of the people ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... shoulders. He was a "pocket. Hercules," and incredible tales, like that about the gates of Khaybar, are told of his strength. Lastly, he was the only Caliph who bequeathed anything to literature: his "Cantiloquium" is famous and he has left more than one mystical and prophetic work. See Ockley for his "Sentences" and D'Herbelot s. D. "Ali" and "Gebr." Ali is a noble figure ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... censurable. This, indeed, was not the limit of my deviations. Deception was often unnecessarily practised, and my biloquial faculty did not lie unemployed. What has happened to yourselves may enable you, in some degree, to judge of the scenes in which my mystical exploits engaged me. In none of them, indeed, were the effects equally disastrous, and they were, for the most part, the result of ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... of great imagery praised as a great mystic. Nevertheless, although a great mystical poet makes images, he does not do so in his greatest moments. He is a great mystic, because he has a full vision of the mystery of realities, not because he has a clear invention ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... by a new spine, with a limited power of modifying its form,—spine on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a right angle; and, between the lines of this mystical quadrant, all animate beings find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, or the snake, as the type of prediction of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the spine, nature puts out smaller ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the request of Dichu (but for what cause I know not), did the saint build the church, having its aspect against the north, and looking toward the southern point. Perchance that by this mystical structure the worshippers of idols might be persuaded from the northern coldness of unbelief unto the meridian fervor of the faith and the charity of Christ—the which to this day is called Sabhall Phadruig, that is, the Barn of Patrick; for in process of time he builded there a fair monastery, ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... health; worried about the death of his brother; broken over the death of his wife; distressed by the death of favorite dogs and horses. Also, he recalls a gypsy saying having to do with the end of the Bismarck family, under strange conditions, in these mystical words: ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... often proves to be insufficient to meet the great variety of conditions and circumstances with which the miracles have been handed down to us.' Very true; but what remedy? 'We find one German writer endeavouring to explain away the miracles on the mystical (mythical) theory; and another riding into the arena of controversy on the miserable hobby-horse of "clairvoyance" or "mesmerism"; each of these, and a host of others of the same class, rejecting whatever ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... mind. But it was keenly alive in Jeff's mind, and he was in the strange necessity which men in the flush of life and health often feel of seeking counsel of those who stand in the presence of death, as if their words should have something of the mystical authority of the unknown wisdom they ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... intimate than the poet; they are more exterior to their work; they are less personally in it; they part with less of themselves in the dicker. It does not change the nature of the case to say that Tennyson and Longfellow and Emerson sold the poems in which they couched the most mystical messages their genius was charged to bear mankind. They submitted to the conditions which none can escape; but that does not justify the conditions, which are none the less the conditions of hucksters because ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... burned also? Do you forget, then, anti-Christ, the Inquisition, and the Saint Bartholomew, and the stakes of Vanini and Bruno, and the tortures of Galileo, and the martyrdom of so many free thinkers? Do not try to distinguish here between use and abuse: for I should reply to you that from a mystical and supernatural principle, from a principle which embraces everything, which explains everything, which justifies everything, such as the idea of God, all consequences are legitimate, and that the zeal of the believer is the sole judge ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... a long time but we didn't come to anything in the end. There's something mystical about the proud man, in your sense. Perhaps you are right from your point of view, but if you take the matter simply, without complicating it, then what pride can there be, what sense can there be in it, if a man is imperfectly ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... admiration of Kant and his prompt recognition of the far-reaching importance of Kant's doctrine, could not be perfectly satisfied with a philosophy which decreed that an arabesque is more beautiful than any woman, and that morality cannot be beautiful at all, except in some mystical poetic sense. Nor could he be content with Kant's sensus communis aestheticus, which seemed to leave the beautiful finally a matter of taste. His mental attitude is clearly brought to view in a letter of February 9, 1793, to the Prince of Augustenburg. After speaking warmly ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Laddie, beware of the day! For, dark and despairing, my sight, I may seal, But man cannot cover what God would reveal; 'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, And coming events cast their ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... Rockies, and a darkness, soft and mystical and silent, stole up the valley, hushing even the noiseless day. Presently the glow of the rising moon burst in ruddy effulgence over the foothills to the east, first with the effect of fire upon their crests, and then as a great, slowly-whitening ball soaring high into the fathomless ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... itself in the environment of Rabbinism, where the mind, though forced into the mould of scholasticism, was yet working at high speed. But such "heretical" thinking was utterly inconceivable in the dominant circles of Hasidism, where the intellect was rocked to sleep by mystical lullabies and fascinating stories of the miraculous exploits of the Tzsaddiks. The era of political and civil disfranchisement was a time of luxuriant growth for Hasidism, not in its creative, but rather in its stationary, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... is generally called a man of religious sensibilities, having long ago discarded belief in the supernatural; and I am not overcome at odd moments by mystical feelings. Furthermore I had been intimate with this particular patch of vegetation for some eighteen hours. I had viewed its decaying state; I had injected life into it; I had seen it in the first flush of resurrection. In spite of all this, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... monarch on his throne owes his mother, and yet this lessens not his authority, nor subjects him to her government.'[20] The monarchical theory ascribes to the King of England two bodies or capacities, a natural body, and a politic or mystical body, and 'from this mystical union of the ideal with the real king, the enquirer after constitutional information is led through childish reasoning and unintelligible jargon, to practical consequences founded on expediency.'[21] ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... on the contrary, how insignificant he was and how insignificant every one is in this world where beings, agitated like grains in a van, are mixed and separated by a shake of the rustic or of the god. This idea of the agricultural or mystical van represented measure and order too well to be exactly applied to life. It seemed to him that men were grains in a coffee-mill. He had had a vivid sensation of this the day before, when he saw Madame Fusellier grinding ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... The mystical unity of the Catholic Church was a thing understood by few in those days. The one party held themselves the true church, and anathematized their baptized and Christian brethren as heretics and outcasts; whilst, ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... relations are handled in a mystical, sensuous way; something of the same kind of treatment occurs ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... un exemplaire), a unique Mallarme. Catholicism being the adopted religion of the Decadence—for its venerable age, valuable in such matters as the age of an old wine, its vague excitation of the senses, its mystical picturesqueness—Des Esseintes has a curious collection of the later Catholic literature, where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find their place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello, the amalgam of a monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... men chatter of such a small matter As Ladies Magnetic, with mystical forces, Whose billiard-cue business strikes with sheer dizziness Muscular Miloes who're game to lift horses. As MITCHELL the bulky was made to look sulky By slight Mrs. ABBOTT, the Georgian Mystery, She is struck silly by Behemoth BILLY, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... her bottom. For some time she played with the hair which thickly covered my mount of Venus—twisting it around her fingers, she then gently divided the folding lips and endeavored to penetrate the interior of the mystical grotto—but she could not effect an entrance but was obliged to satisfy herself with titillating the inside of the lips. Suddenly flows of pleasure shot through my entire body—for her finger had come in contact with the peeping sentinel that guarded the abode of bliss, an article which ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... the second part of the tale of Zayn al-Asnam—the Quest of the Ninth Image—and the Turkish version of which my friend Mr. Gibb has kindly furnished us with a translation from the mystical work of 'Ali 'Aziz Efendi, the Cretan, although no other version has hitherto been found,[FN382] I have little doubt that the story is of either Indian or Persian extraction, images and pictures being ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... your magnum opus. No wonder he "crouches in sphinxlike silence on the curbstone." He prefers it to your company. You once told me that you found humanitarians difficult to live with: I wonder what Jack thinks of mystical philosophers in the domestic relation. It almost brings tears to my eyes. And some day in a similar situation I may be driven to seek the cold ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... building touched depths of feeling and opened gates of wonder. No doubt the men who first balanced one stone over two others must have looked with astonishment at the work of their hands, and have worshiped the stones they had set up. This element of mystical wonder and awe lasted long through the ages, and is still felt when work is done in the old way by keeping close to nature, necessity, and faith. From the first, ideas of sacredness, of sacrifice, of ritual rightness, of magic stability, of likeness to the universe, of perfection ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... more highly specialized poetic genius. What is he like? He is like everything. He is like the soil which holds the germs of a thousand forms of life; he is like the grass, common, universal, perennial, formless; he is like your own heart, mystical yearning, rebellious, contradictory, but ever throbbing with life. He is fluid, generative, electric; he is full of the germs, potencies, and latencies of things; he provokes thought without satisfying it; he is formless without being void; he is both ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... the mystical meaning of the Jewish tabernacle and its vessels, with the garments of the high priest, is taken out of Philo, and fitted to Gentile philosophical notions. This may possibly be forgiven in Jews, greatly versed in heathen learning and philosophy, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Jacob, who was exalted to be a Prince with God, and to prevail by intercession? Yet, you see, he is a shepherd, to image to us that mystical and true Shepherd and Bishop of souls who was to come. Yet there is a second and a third as highly favoured in various ways. The second is Moses, who drove away the rival shepherds and helped the daughters of the Priest of Midian to water their flock, and who, while he was keeping the flock ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... concerning which we wish to be informed. The words of Jesus went forth full-freighted with vitality. They were truly spirit and life, because charged with a virtue that can only come from a soul in submission to the law by his lips enunciated. Hence we see why, in the mystical language with which the Gospel of St. John begins, he is called the Logos, Reason or Word of God, from God and one with God, because he reveals the divine thought concerning man, inherently perfect from the first, but requiring time and space for its outworking. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... their generations, their kinds, sorts and differences; with the description of sundry new Metals or Semi-Metals, and many other things pertaining to Mineral knowledge. As also, the handling and shewing of their Vegetability, and the discussion of the most difficult Questions belonging to Mystical Chymistry, as of the Philosophers Gold, their Mercury, the Liquor Alkahest, Aurum potabile, and such like. Gathered forth of the most approved Authors that have written in Greek, Latine, or High Dutch; With some Observations ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... opened at their feet and she drew herself from him to gather up her skirts for the descent. Then the tension broke with a tremulous "Susan, wait!" She knew what was coming and braced herself to meet it. The mystical hour, the silver-bathed wonder of the night, a girl's frightened curiosity, combined to win her to a listening mood. She felt on the eve of a painful but necessary ordeal, and clasped her hands ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... big seal and ribbon attached. The size of the receipt and seal was proportioned according to the amount paid—if you had a son or a daughter in Purgatory, it was wise to pay a large amount. The certificates were in Latin and certified in diffuse and mystical language many things, and they gave great joy ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... indirect explanation of the course she had followed. Harvey could not question her sincerity, but she seemed to him a trifle morbid. It might be natural reaction, in a temper such as hers, against the monstrous egotism by which her life had been subdued and shadowed. She inclined to mystical views; mentioned Christina Rossetti as one of her favourites; cared little or nothing for the louder interests of the time. Impossible to detect the colour of her thoughts with regard to Cecil; she spoke of him gravely and gently, but without ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... himself. This should by no means be so. Surely the terms which are constantly used and are the sine qua non of their theories should have a definite meaning of some sort, at least to the Freudians themselves. Mystical and metaphysical implications should not continue to find a sheltering place in the province of psychopathology. They should be uprooted and driven forth from the dark and hidden recesses into the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Amersfoort and listen to the wise men dilate on the Bhagavadgita, Psycho-analysis and Religion, Plato, Sufism, and other subjects on the programme; anyway I would have no prepossessions and prejudices in listening to Dr. G. R. S. Meads' course of lectures on The Mystical Philosophy and ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... posited by a primary mystical judgment, man immediately generalizes the subject by another mysticism,—analogy. God, so to speak, is as yet but a point: directly he ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... himself with essays that would have been voted brilliant had they dealt with things less extravagant than Universal Harmony and Fraternal Happiness; with verses that all admitted to be highly polished and melodious, but something too mystical in meaning for the understanding of an every-day world; with music, whereof he was conceded an interpreter of no ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... communication with spirits of another world. For, be it observed, Smith possesses all the qualities and exercises all the tricks of the necromancers during the middle ages. His speech is ambiguous, solemn, and often incomprehensible—a great proof to the vulgar of his mystical vocation. ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... most respectable appearance. Mr. Brassfield bent on him a piercing look, and strove mentally to account for the impression that he had met this man before, wondering again at that hazy association with the mystical, dreamy region of the woman in yellow and black. It was as if he saw everything that evening through some medium capable of imparting this mystic coloring. ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... the one side gave the greatest part of the secular interest, on the other almost the whole of the mystical attraction, to the complete story, had, however, it seems probable, been actually added before Layamon wrote. For the date of the earlier version of his Brut is put by the best authorities at not ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... "The poet whose mystical and somber genius has caused us such profound emotions starts, in a few days' time, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... the Asiatic churches, for that in Colossae is bidden to welcome him. Then comes this mention of him in the text. The fact that Mark was beside Peter when he wrote seems to confirm the view that Babylon here is a mystical name for Rome; and that this letter falls somewhere about the same date as the letters to Colossae and Philemon. Here again he is sending salutations to Asiatic churches. We know nothing more about him, except that some considerable time after, in Paul's last letter, he asks ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... wedding, stood before the mirror. Laying aside her dress, she draped her shimmering cloth about her, dragging her hair down in a heavy mass over ears and neck until she seemed herself a bride. And as she stood there, awed with the mystical union of a dead love and a living new born self, there came drifting in at the window, faintly, the soft sound of far-off ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... possessor? A new Mdlle. de Maupin, with royal lily and aureole, cloud-capped mountains, great gulfs of sea-water flowing up and reflecting as in a mirror the steep cliff's side; the straight white feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is torn, and the pure, strange soul continues its mystical exhortations. Then the radiant vision, a white glory, the last outburst and manifestation, the trumpets of the apocalypse, the colour of heaven, the closing of this stupendous allegory—Seraphita lying dead in the rays of the first sun of the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... It is impossible for me to describe to you the fascination which this man exercises over me. You know that I do not usually exaggerate, although inclined to the mystical and romantic. I have lived too little on land, however, for any ideas of that nature to have taken much hold upon my mind. At sea, the movement of the winds and waves, the unintermitting intercourse with one's fellow-men—the whole ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... is in itself sufficiently mystical, having been pursued by multitudes, who seemed to themselves ever on the eve of consummation, but as constantly baffled when to their own apprehension most on the verge of success. The discovery indeed appears ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... understand her nineteenth century wit; for he did not laugh. Perhaps he had lost his taste for clever women. Anon Dante and Swedenborg came together conversing earnestly about things remote and mystical. Swedenborg said it was very warm. Dante replied that it might ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... his favorite conventional tame man, since, among the shouting heroes, Gunnar whimpers like a Tesman. Here is Ibsen's favorite trick of unrequited self-sacrifice; it is Sigurd, in Gunnar's armor, who kills the mystical white bear, but it is Gunnar who reaps the advantage. It is only fair to say that there is more than this to applaud in The Vikings at Helgeland; it moves on a consistent and high level of austere romantic beauty. Mr. William Archer, who ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... light and lustre simply, and the mystical curve of the lids. For so they could look only because the heart was disengaged from them. They were but ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of these mystical reformers were William Briconnet, Bishop of Meaux, and his disciple, Margaret d'Angouleme, sister of Francis I. Though a highly talented woman Margaret was weak and suggestible. She adored her dissolute brother and was always, on account ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... insulted, let down into some cleft or cave. It is clearly a "Carrying out the Death," though we do not know the exact date at which it was celebrated. It had its sequel in another festival at Delphi called Herois, or the "Heroine." Plutarch[23] says it was too mystical and secret to describe, but he lets us know ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... man have proclaimed the Divinity in Man, its real and eternal existence, in any drama, in any poem, in any glorious splendor of rhetoric with what fervor soever of mystical ecstasy endued—with such deadly effectiveness, such inevitable success, as in this simple way he elected? There are men whose actions seem to spring from a source super-ethical: it is cheap to speak of them as good, great, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Rhode Island greenings; Excellent apples for pies; There are no mystical meanings In fruit of that color and size. They are too coarse and too juiceful; They are too large and too useful. There are the Baldwins and Flyers, Wrapped in their beautiful fires! Color forks up from their stems As if painted by Flora, ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... Hence in this story there is a philosophy of Pan-theism—no "me," no "you," no "it." It is a mystical story, with a storm scene in which is painted a picture that reminds one strongly of "The Fall of the House of Ushur,"—with the frankly added words, "On him were marks of hoofs of a monstrous goat that had ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... hesitated in petulant style to assail Luke's Gospel because therein good and virtuous works are frequently commended to us. Whom did he consult? The Spirit. Theodore Beza has dared to carp at, as a corruption and perversion of the original, that mystical word from the twenty-second chapter of Luke, this is the chalice, the new testament in my blood, which (chalice) shall be shed for you [Greek: potaerion ekchunomenon], because this language admits of no explanation ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... of embodying truth, common, in various degrees, to almost all, if not all, the writers of the New Testament. The attempt to define it thoroughly would require an essay. I will hazard but one suggestion towards it: A mystical mind is one which, having perceived that the highest expression of which the truth admits, lies in the symbolism of nature and the human customs that result from human necessities, prosecutes thought about truth so embodied by dealing ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... unhappy, and I see you have lost all the feeling of romance that you had before the war. You make a great mistake if you think you can be romantic without religion. Sometimes I think that with both of us the secret of success, when we find it, is the mystical element in us: something flows into us that enlarges our personalities, and when it ebbs out our personalities shrink; I should call your last two letters rather shrivelled. Beware of losing yourself in the personality of ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the principles of the Methodists: I have tried to learn them, and have read one of their books. The visible part seems to be nothing but stricter practice than that of our church, clothed in the old exploded cant of mystical devotion. For example, you take a metaphor; we will say our passions are weeds; you immediately drop every description of the passions, and adopt every thing peculiar to weeds: in five minutes a true Methodist will talk with the greatest compunction of hoeing—this catches women ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... recognise that these Africans have often a remarkable mental acuteness and a large share of common sense; that there is nothing really "child-like" in their form of mind at all. Observe them further and you will find they are not a flighty-minded, mystical set of people in the least. They are not dreamers, or poets, and you will observe, and I hope observe closely—for to my mind this is the most important difference between their make of mind and our own—that they are notably deficient in all mechanical arts: they have ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... brought me ambrotypes Of the old pioneers to enlarge. And sometimes one sat for me— Some one who was in being When giant hands from the womb of the world Tore the republic. What was it in their eyes?— For I could never fathom That mystical pathos of drooped eyelids, And the serene sorrow of their eyes. It was like a pool of water, Amid oak trees at the edge of a forest, Where the leaves fall, As you hear the crow of a cock From a far—off farm house, seen near the hills Where the third generation ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... observation, never doubted its truth. At this moment, there are men in every western settlement who have only vague, crude notions of what a city is—who would feel nervous if they stepped upon the deck of a steamboat—and are utterly at a loss to conjecture the nature of a railroad. Upon either of these mystical subjects they will swallow, without straining, the most absurd and impossible fictions. And this is not because of their ignorance alone, for many of them are, for their sphere in life, educated, intelligent, and, what is better, sensible men. Nor is it by any means a national trait: ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... judgment.' In Moscow, during the prepetrean period, performances of nearly the same character, chosen especially from the Old Testament, were also in great favour. Apart from such plays, the world was overflooded with mystical writings, 'verses'—the heroes of which were always selected from the ranks of angels, saints and other heavenly citizens answering to the devotional purposes of the age. The recluses of our monasteries, like the Roman Catholic monks, passed their ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... confirmed in almost every point by the narrative now published. "The imagination of Dee," observes that elegant writer, "often predominated over his science; while both were mingling in his intellectual habits, each seemed to him to confirm the other. Prone to the mystical lore of what was termed the occult sciences, which in reality are no sciences at all, since whatever remains occult ceases to be science, Dee lost his better genius." I shall refer the reader to this popular work instead of attempting an original paper on the subject, which would necessarily ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... best description I have been able to formulate of the development of the Mystical Sense by means of which we can get a view of the Reality through our Window. I will try to give my own experience of this, which will, I know, wake an echo in other hearts, as I have met those who have felt the same. From a ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... of Christ's Burial is the mystical meaning, that meaning which was brought home to the minds of the early Christians by the picturesque and symbolic ritual of baptism. The man who had, by faith, accepted Christ as his Lord and Master, was baptised into ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... Watch tick'd behind the panel'd oak, Inexplicable tremors shook the arras, And echoes strange and mystical ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... every character having been noted for musical utterance, and all the choral effects carefully planned. Besides this he composed what was then called the "Orchestic," whence we have our word orchestra. By orchestic they meant an apparatus of mystical dancing or posturing and marching and certain gestures. We do not know precisely what this famous orchestic was, for no example of it has come down to us in intelligible form. But from the descriptions of it by contemporary writers, it seems to have formed the pantomimic ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... commonplace. Philosophy had become extravagant, eclectic, abstract, devoid of any real content. At length it ceased to exist. It had spread words like plaster over the whole field of knowledge. It had grown ascetic on one side, mystical on the other. Neither of these tendencies was favourable to literature. There was no sense of beauty either in language or in art. The Greek world became vacant, barbaric, oriental. No one had anything new to say, or any conviction ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... inquire into the subject at all; at any rate it was quite evident I was set down as a good subject, from the moment of my appearance. Even the somnambule testified to this, though she would not then consent to be put into a trance in order to give her opinion its mystical sanction. ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... quality of a deep vein of sentiment; and this was now consecrated to Isabel Norris. He had pleasant dreams as he rode home in the autumn evening, under the sweet keen sky where the harvest moon rose large and yellow over the hills to his left and shed a strange mystical light that blended in a kind of chord with the dying daylight. It was at times like that, when the air was fragrant with the scent of dying leaves, with perhaps a touch of frost in it, and the cottages one by one opened red glowing eyes in the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... example which we might all find in Him, as well as promise us immortality with Him. As the minister went on, Annie followed him with the interest which her belief that she heard between the words inspired, and occasionally in a discontent with what seemed a mystical, almost a fantastical, ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long. These were based on the mystical or sacramental principle, and spoke of the various economies or dispensations of the eternal. I understood them to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the outward manifestation of realities ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... contests of the schools a dialectical display of remarkable powers in which great interest was felt, yet but little knowledge was acquired. In one respect the Scholastic doctors rendered a service: they demolished all dreamy theories and poured contempt on mystical phrases. They insisted, like Socrates, on a definite meaning to words. If they were hair-splitting in their definitions and distinctions, they were at least clear and precise. Their method was scientific. Such terms and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... actually giving Himself, as they emphatically say, to be chewed by the poor and humble man and the serf, show them to have been most especially born, abortions though they be, in the mightiest throes of mystical feeling, after the incubation of whole nations, born of the great mediaeval marriage, sublime, grotesque, morbid, yet health-bringing, between abstract idealising religious thought and the earthly affections of lovers and parents—a strange marriage, like that of St. Francis and Poverty, of which ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... quadrangular, taper, high spire or pyramid, raised perpendicularly, and terminating in a point, to serve as an ornament to some open square; and is very often covered with inscriptions or hieroglyphics, that is, with mystical characters or symbols used by the Egyptians to conceal and disguise their sacred things, and the mysteries ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... with so many important affairs which regard the whole Church. I entreat you to give us this cardinal, to whom we may have recourse in our wants, always under your sanction, since it is from you, the Head of the mystical Body, that all power emanates." The Pope granted his request with alacrity, and recommended the cardinal to take great care of the Order. From that time, the Orders of Friars Minor have always had a cardinal protector, whose powers are extended as the Pope shall see fit; the terms of the ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... gazing out with wild eyes at the Pup's mystical performance. "I'll give back them boots to the b'y. I'll give 'em back, Dan! Let me be now, won't 'ee, ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... that when, in 1863-64, the subject of the Duchies cast its shadow on the path, it revealed its importance to Bismarck, as it had done fourteen years previously to Dahlmann, and stood forth distinctly as the initial syllable of the one mystical ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... mighty dungeons where heroes and the brothers of kings, and saints and scientists have died their long death—as one gropes through the black night of the Crypt, where a faint, mysterious glint of light falls aslant the mystical face of the Black Virgin; as one climbs to the light beneath the ogive arches of the Aumonerie, through the wide-lit aisles of the Salle des Chevaliers, past the slender Gothic columns of the Refectory, up at last to the crowning ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the Imperio-Davido-classical school of French art, and the namby-pamby mystical German school, which is for carrying us back to Cranach and Duerer, and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mystical tide, Ebbing and flowing by night and day; Gladness and misery scattering wide, Gladness and misery ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... which in her simple mind usually occupied the space that worldly feelings filled in that of Judith, and she was not without an expectation of witnessing some open manifestation of divine power, on an occasion so solemn. Still she was neither mystical nor exaggerated; her mental imbecility denying both. Nevertheless her thoughts had generally so much of the purity of a better world about them that it was easy for her to forget earth altogether, and ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... cellar, a new baby home from the hospital, a word in the newspaper. With many very young children, concern about their own origin seems to arise spontaneously. "Where did I come from, Mother?" It is a natural question, yet it has a certain mystical quality, coming as it does from within and ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... and opinions of men are substituted for the word of God. With Origen was introduced a new mode of interpreting scripture, which afterwards became prevalent. The scriptures, instead of being received in their natural and obvious sense, were regarded as mystical and allegorical. Milner, in his Church History, says: "From the fanciful mode of allegory, introduced by him, and uncontrolled by scriptural rule and order, there arose a vitiated method of commenting on the sacred ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... much affected, his nerves having been weak from childhood, and already so shattered that, in 1846, he was on the verge of insanity. Even at that time he had begun to have attacks by night of that "mystical terror," which he has described in detail in "Humiliated and Insulted," and he also had occasional epileptic fits. In Siberia epilepsy developed to such a point that it was no longer possible to entertain any doubt as to the character ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... to forget the way in which she was led. By slow and painful degrees she was drawn away from the circles of fashion in which once her soul delighted. Then her nature seemed so retiring, and the tone of her piety so mystical, while she dreaded nervously all approach to "religious enthusiasm," that a career of publicity, either in prisons, among rulers, or among the ministers of her own Society, seemed too far away to ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... increasing evil,) should not know that old wounds require rather vinegar than oil, the cautery instead of unguents. As a member of the persecuted Church, I will not allow the declarations of a brother of that holy and mystical body to be overborne and set at naught by an ill liver like this Philip Joy. I say that men have become too free in uttering their licentious imaginations about those who are placed by God's Providence ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... trying rather piteously to remind herself that it was Sunday. Far away in a New England village, the bells were ringing for the evening meeting. Lucy, shutting her eyes, could smell the spring scents in the church lane, could hear the droning of the opening hymn. A vague mystical peace stole upon her, as she recalled the service; the great words of 'sin,' 'salvation,' 'righteousness,' as the Evangelical understands them, thrilled ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what it will. All evil and all good come from your heart. Your heart alone has the key of life and death for you.' I was just about to ask you at this point which of our two authors, our allegorical or our mystical author upon the heart, you like best. But that would be a stupid and a wayward question since you have them both before you, and both at their best, to possess and to enjoy. To go back then to John Bunyan, and to his allegory of the ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte |
