"Trance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ordinarily classed together as 'mediumistic phenomena.' The most important of these are psychometry, 'vision' of 'spirit' forms, claimed communications by means of rappings, table movements, automatic writing, independent writing, trance speaking, etc. With them also ought to be noted what are generally called physical phenomena, though in most cases, since they are intelligibly directed, the use of the word 'physical,' without this qualification, might be misleading. ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... a few passes, the Fairy sank into a mesmeric trance. Then, CINDERELLA desired that her Godmother should imagine that she had been the heroine of a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... been any present to have remarked him, they would have seen his features move and work with the intensity of internal emotion. Some mighty struggle he was enduring; something there was passing at his very heart, for when recalled from that trance by the heavy bell of the adjoining church chiming the hour of five, and he looked up, there were large drops of moisture on his brow, and his beautiful eye seemed for the moment strained and blood-shot. He paced the chamber slowly ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... with my note-books, specimens of dried plants, insects, fragments of minerals, etc., and, hanging these satchels on my arms, called on Copernicus to fulfil his promise. Instantly all things disappeared again from my view; I was floating with my satchels in mid-ether, and fell into a trance. When I awaked, I was in my father's house in New York. How long the passage required, I have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... as if in a trance, her eyelids drooping over almost sightless eyes. The last blow had fallen upon her, and she knew that she must go. That she could ever be forced away thus without her brother, that Horace could be given no chance to help her, had ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... her,—some withering fire had swept over her, and she was no longer what she once had been. This he felt by a lover's intuition,—intuition keener and surer than all positive knowledge; and not the faintest hope stirred within him that she would ever shake off the trance of that death-in-life into which she had been plunged by some as yet unknown disaster—unknown to him, yet dimly guessed. Meanwhile Priscilla's loving task was soon done, and Innocent was clothed, warm and dry, in one of ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... tide, oh trust not to the Sea! It will come back to shore with redness of the morrow; O don't believe in me when in the trance of sorrow I swear I am no longer true ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... the paper to the Queen, and then, drawing forth another section from her bag, she carried it to the bewildered Raleigh, who took it like one in a trance. ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... go into the trance state. Just before adjournment the Medium laid her hands upon the table and tried to produce ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... literally mosaics of blue, purple, pink, yellow, and crimson bloom. Clumps of wild roses fringed the road, and the air was delicious with a thousand odours. Nature was throbbing with the fullness of her short midsummer life, with that sudden and splendid rebound from the long trance of winter which she nowhere makes except ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... that the band could keep presence of mind to go on playing the "Merry Widow," instead of stopping short with a gasp and crash of instruments, to start again with the "Tango Trance," her dance in ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... the top of his voice, "Dem s'ords an' dem famines!" After nearly an hour of this intense excitement, the congregation was dismissed, one of them, at least, more dead than alive; for "Aunt Ceely," who had long been known as "er pow'ful sinful ooman," had fallen into a trance, whether real or assumed must be determined by wiser heads than mine; for it was no uncommon occurrence for those "seekin' 'ligion" to lie in a state of unconsciousness for several hours, and, on their return to consciousness, to relate the most wonderful ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... his magic sword to ward off the blow, but it fell with terrific force upon the blade and broke it in two pieces. From that moment the fortune of the battle turned against the Volsungs, and they fell fast around their king. But Sigmund stood as in a trance, and the war rage faded from his face. All-Father Odin had come to claim the sword he had given all those many years ago, and had left him defenceless against the foe who now pressed hot ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... See Maj. Nik. 43. But the point of the discussion seems to be not so much special commendation of this form of trance as an explanation of its origin, namely that it, like other mental states, is bound to ensue when certain preliminary conditions both moral and intellectual have been realized. See also Sam. Nik. XXXVI. ii. 5. See for examples ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... beside her day after day. (That does sound vain of me, but I cannot resist the temptation of writing it!) And the means—the means! Such means you would never divine! It is mesmerism. She is thrown into the magnetic trance twice a day; and the progress is manifest; and the hope for the future clear. Now, what do you both think? Consider what a case it is! No case of a weak-minded woman and a nervous affection; but of the most manlike woman in the three kingdoms—in the best sense of man—a woman gifted with admirable ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... had told him on the top of the mountain. And when they were all assembled, and the betel and sirih had been handed round, he told them what had happened. On the top of the mountain he had fallen into a trance, and the great spirit had appeared to him with a face like burnished gold, and had said—"Oh Rajah! much plague and sickness and fevers are coming upon all the earth, upon men and upon horses and upon cattle; but as you and your people have obeyed me and have come up to my great mountain, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... think the withdrawals by telegraph brought it down to practically five thousand. We offered a hundred thousand, you know.—But let me go on with my story. I stood there, in front of our street-door, in a kind of trance. The words of that Jew—'Sell Rubber Consols at three-quarters!'—buzzed inside my head as if they would burst it open. I turned—and I happened to see my Broker—the Scotchman, Semple, you know—coming along toward me. Right at that minute, like a flash, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... interest in these first glimpses of the new country to which he had come. For the next few weeks he went about as if in a trance, struggling to adjust himself to life in an American city. How different it was from his beloved Venice! How sharp the September days with their early frost! How he missed the golden warmth of the sunny Adriatic and the familiar sights of home! ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... The awkward pause following the recitation was suddenly broken by a loud and uncontrollable laugh. Doris, startled, turned to look at young Dunstable. For it was he who had laughed. Madame also shook off her stage trance to look—a thunderous frown upon her handsome face. The young man laughed on—laughed hysterically—burying his face in his hands. Madame Vavasour—all attitudes thrown aside—ran up to ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... into the habit, when starting on a long journey, of fixing his eye on a high and distant object, commanding his horses to begin, and then going into a sort of a trance of observation. Multitudes of drivers might howl in his rear, and passengers might load him with opprobrium, he would not awaken until some blue policeman turned red and began to frenziedly tear bridles and beat the soft ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... a great many things this evening," replied Kathrien, vibrant with excitement, yet instinctively lowering her voice so as not to break in on Willem's semi-trance. "Little things that I've never noticed before. I'm putting them together. Just as Willem put that picture together. And I must know who the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... Delavie party. The Major went up stairs, and sat by Aurelia's bed gazing with eyes dazzled with tears at the child he had so longed to see, and whom he found again in this strange trance. A doctor came, and quite confirmed Mr. Wayland's opinion, that the drug would not prove deleterious, provided the sleep was not disturbed, and Betty continued her watch, after hearing what her father knew of Mr. Belamour. She was greatly struck with the self-devotion that had gone with open ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... swooning dream of chloroform. Nature was before man with her anesthetics: the cat's first shake stupefies the mouse; the lion's first shake deadens the man's fear and feeling; and the crotalus paralyzes before he strikes. He waited as in a trance,—waited as one that longs to have the blow fall, and all over, as the man who shall be in two pieces in a second waits for the axe to drop. But while he looked straight into the flaming eyes, it seemed to him that they were ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... her trance—a heavy footstep, mayhap, in the street below, the distant roll of a drum, or only the clash of steel saucepans in Aunt Marie's kitchen. But suddenly Jeanne was alert, and with her alertness came terror ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... "because of certain words that came from the lips of the Baaltis, when she had been thrown into the holy trance before the fire of sacrifice. As is my accustomed part, I bent over her to hear and to announce the message of the gods, but in place of the hallowed words there issued babblings about this Hebrew stranger and of a meeting to be held with him at ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... his momentary trance. "Yes, yes, Mr. Williams. They'll be low enough. Times is kind of dull now and I'd like a movin' job first-rate. I'll give 'em to you to-morrer. But—but Olive'll have to move, won't she? And where's ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... why tarriest thou?' The Messias answered him: 'I indeed am going; but thou shalt tarry until I come'; thereby condemning him to live until the day of judgment. He lives forever, but at the end of every hundred years he falls into a fit or trance, on recovering from which he finds himself in the same state of youth in which he was when Jesus suffered, being then about thirty years ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... lock snapped as they went out the window. Two men with rifles plunged into the gas; sighing, they fell to the floor in a catatonic trance. ...
— The Green Beret • Thomas Edward Purdom
... surreptitiously keen look at his wife. Her formless bulk overflowed the chair. She kept her eyes fixed out the window in a strange kind of trance. Her eyes showed that she ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... all endeavor. He claimed to have attained, himself, to this union, and to have received direct inspiration. Giving a Greek coloring to the Hebrew notion of prophecy, "My soul," he says, "is wont to be affected with a Divine trance and to prophesy about things of which it has no knowledge"[67].... "Many a time have I come with the intention of writing, and knowing exactly what I ought to set down, but I have found my mind barren and fruitless, and I have gone away with nothing ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... two young children used to drop in every morning and talk German to me—by request. One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows—all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Florentine lady of old time, wedded to a cold and cruel husband, had died, or was supposed to have died, and had been carried to "the rich, the beautiful, the dreadful tomb" of her proud family. In the night she wakened from her trance and made her escape. Chilled and terrified, she had made her way to her husband's door, only to be driven away brutally as a restless ghost by the horror-stricken inmates. A similar reception awaited her at her father's. Then she had wandered blindly through the streets of ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... appetite, which moving the animal spirits causeth the body to walk up and down as if they were awake. Fracast. l. 3. de intellect, refers all ecstasies to this force of imagination, such as lie whole days together in a trance: as that priest whom [1603]Celsus speaks of, that could separate himself from his senses when he list, and lie like a dead man, void of life and sense. Cardan brags of himself, that he could do as much, and that when he list. Many times such men when they come to themselves, tell strange things ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... still stared at my friend like a man in a trance. "You cunning, cunning fiend!" was all that ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... had hit on a walk in life which enabled him to go the limit in that direction. He was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of his time, as far as I could make out, he spent in a sort of trance. He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a worm and wondering what on earth it was up to, for ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... an embrace— so colorable an imitation of the real thing that Winter, entering at that instant, could make no distinction, and was secretly amazed at these strenuous methods of consoling the lady— Theydon lifted the receiver, and heard as one in a trance the telephone ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... family began really to fear that the poor man's wits were diseased. He muttered in his sleep at night about mines of wealth, about pearls and diamonds, and bars of gold. In the daytime he was moody and abstracted, and walked about as if in a trance. Dame Webber held frequent councils with all the old women of the neighborhood; scarce an hour in the day but a knot of them might be seen wagging their white caps together round her door, while the poor woman made some piteous recital. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... a controlling power,—would snatch a pencil, and dash out upon paper the wildest discords. These we would play for him, at his request, from morning till night,—during much of which time he would seem to be in a happy trance. Of this music no chord or melody was true; they were jangling memories of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... (pale-faced and large-eyed). And I Fear he is something worse. I had a trance In which the devil tempted me: the shape Was Julian's to the very finger-nails. Non nobis, Domine! I overcame. I am sure of one thing—music tortures him: I saw him once, amid the Gloria Patri, When the whole chapel trembled in the sound, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... killing time. He was deep in an inventive trance, with vengeance for the prize to be won, and for the means to the end, iron-works and pipe plants and forgings—especially the forging of one particular thunderbolt which should shatter the Farley fortunes beyond repair. When this bolt was ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... more high, more high! Or we shall be belated: For slow and slow that ship will go, When the mariner's trance is abated.' ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... moments of passion forgets himself entirely. He is in a sort of artistic trance. Technical mastery of the composition being presupposed, the artist need not and does not give thought to the matter of playing the notes correctly, but, re-creating in himself what he feels to have been the mood of the composer, re-creates the composition ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... and paid it back to an eternal death. The old cattleman was refusing his payment. It was no state of coma in which he lay; it was no prolonged trance. He was vitally, vividly alive; he was concentrating with a bitter and exhausting vigour day and night, and fighting a battle the more terrible because it was fought in silence, a battle in which he could receive no aid, no reinforcement, a battle in which he could ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... upon it the likeness of Jeremiah, and the people began to stone it, believing that it was Jeremiah. And in the meantime he went on speaking to Baruch and Ebedmelech until he had committed to them all the mysteries which he had heard while he lay in a trance. ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James
... carriage man in a trance. The gods, of a deed, were fighting furiously on Natica's side—for she could not have foreseen this vantage, readily as she swung her attack by its aid. Exquisite torture, truly, to flaunt a husband's folly in his own face, over his own mahogany, with ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... lived—he breathed—he moved—he felt; He raised the maid from where she knelt; His trance was gone, his keen eye shone With thoughts that long in darkness dwelt; 330 With thoughts that burn—in rays that melt. As the stream late concealed By the fringe of its willows, When it rushes reveal'd In the light of its ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... nothin', but tries to shake me off. I gits him out at last, an' we goes over to where poor Jess stands, stiff an' starin' down inter the gulch. When she hears our feet on the side planks, she starts up an' begins to beller like a week-old calf; an' that fetches Jud outer his trance for a while, an' he puts his arm aroun' her an' he helps her back along the walk till we comes to a place where we gits down an' goes ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... he proceeded, observing that the young man was absorbed in his narrative, "if you would pass your word to me never to betray me, I would procure for you a sight of the external world, and in a trance you should see those places where gold is dug, and traverse those regions forbidden ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... identification, and there was found upon him a card with the following remarkable inscription:—'I am not dead. Take me to the St. James's Hospital.' To St. James's Hospital accordingly the young man was conveyed. It seems probable he is in a condition of trance—not for the first time—since he was provided with the card, and knew the hospital with which is associated in all men's minds the name of Dr Lefevre, who is so famous for his skill in the ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... their joyous tone; The ants, the bees, the swallows, re-appear; Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons' bier; 5 The amorous birds now pair in every brake, And build their mossy homes in field and brere; And the green lizard and the golden snake, Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake. ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... with the dews at even; Her tears fell ere the dews were dried; [3] She could not look on the sweet heaven, Either at morn or eventide. After the flitting of the bats, When thickest dark did trance the sky, She drew her casement-curtain by, And glanced athwart the glooming flats. She only said, "The night is dreary, He cometh not," she said; She said, "I am aweary, aweary, I would that I ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... are dumb; No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance, or breathed spell, Inspires the pale-eyed priest from ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... clear Lord Brumpton and his servant Trusty enter. The former has wakened from his cataleptic trance, as the faithful Trusty watched beside him, and is horrified to learn of Lady Brumpton's lack of grief. But hush; he will conceal himself, for here comes my lady, accompanied by her woman and ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... the shore with the rest of us, but just stood where he was, like a statue. He was in a kind of a trance, ...
— Roy Blakeley's Camp on Wheels • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... serving-men, and tottered into the room where the dead man lay. Hutcheon saw aneugh at the first glance; for there were torches in the room, which showed him the foul fiend, in his ain shape, sitting on the laird's coffin! Ower he couped as if he had been dead. He could not tell how lang he lay in a trance at the door, but when he gathered himsell he cried on his neighbour, and getting nae answer raised the house, when Dougal was found lying dead within twa steps of the bed where his master's coffin was placed. As for the whistle, it was gane anes and aye; but mony a time was it heard at ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... the sect as idle and immoral. In 1785 White and Mrs Buchan published a Divine Dictionary, but the sect broke up on the death of its founder in spite of White's attempts to prove that she was only in a trance. Even White was eventually undeceived. Andrew Innes, the last survivor, died in 1848. See J. Train, The Buchanites from First to Last ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... husband and I awoke from our honeymoon trance, we found ourselves in California, strangers in a lone land, penniless and jobless. My husband was blessed with neither college education nor profession, but we were both young and undaunted—therefore we pulled through. We rented an apartment, furnished, at ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... seen a girl on the verge of hysteria, swore deep and long under his breath, staring as if in a trance. He came to himself only when the water overflowed the manhole, and he let go of the spout with a carelessness that earned him a wetting as it lifted, dripping, ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... drunk, or a man in a trance, he is—he's just not there in the head, and you have to walk around and dress his body, like he was a dumb wax-work. If I get the lay, Smathers, I'll tip you off. There might be something in it for us. He's due for dinner and bridge at the Met., but unless Frenchy ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... about Tara and the Game and the silver watch that made him reliable. He simply lay there in a trance-like stillness, that was not of the West, absorbing it all, with his eyes and his dazzled brain and with every sentient nerve in his body. And again—as when his mother smiled her praise—the Spring sunshine itself seemed to flow ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... pole, a green umbrella of Gargantuan proportions, adorned with red tassels, protected his wrinkled head from the rays of the sun. One hand clutched some religious object upon which his eyes were glued in a hypnotic trance, the other cruised aimlessly about the horizon, in the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... not come to her common, hackneyed. Why, sometimes, out in the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer noons, she had knelt by the shaded pools, and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of water-lilies, her blood curdling in a feverish languor, a passioned trance, from which she roused herself, weak ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... hour, he issued from his house in one of the small alleys, staff in hand, and with a curious kind of horn or whistle. This he blew as he walked along, from time to time, without turning his head, in that strange trance of passivity which distinguishes the Valencian peasant. Out from dark corners, narrow passages, mud hovels on all sides, came tearing along little pigs, big pigs, dark, light, fat, thin pigs,—pigs of every description,—and joined the procession headed by this sombre-looking herdsman, with his ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... to seem to hurry things, sir, but the boy's ready. He's in a trance-state now," he reported, pointing to the pair of visiplates at ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... the young engineer into another bunk, covered him up, and then watched until Tom Reade, utterly exhausted, fell into a deep sleep that was more like a trance. ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... and provided that the person whose consciousness is spoken of does not need to leave his active body, his body of action, in using his consciousness on any of these planes, does not have to throw the body into trance in order to be conscious on any or on all of them, we speak always, then, of that consciousness as being "his waking consciousness." Some disciples, for instance, will often include in the waking consciousness the astral, mental, and even buddhic planes; but it is characteristic of ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... there without ringing. Then, as some one approached, he seemed waken out of a trance. He rung sharply, and the summons was ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... his trance with a start to find a hundred and seventy pounds of cow-puncher sprawling in his lap and clinging about his neck. His dull eyes, gummy with sleep, showed him a hat of sorts, ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... serve the Nome King," replied the machine. "But they will do us no harm. You must call for the King, be-cause with-out him you can ne-ver find the en-trance to the pal-ace." ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... way to this dissolution, absolute passivity, withdrawal into the inmost self, cessation of all the powers: giving recipes for procuring this beatific torpor or trance; ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... poisoned by my step-mother, and that she had already poisoned my grandparents Barrois in the same manner. He had himself given me an antidote. But the means he had were not sufficient to shield me from all danger, and he begged me to drink a potion, which would put me in a trance for the space of three days. I took the potion which the count gave me; I lost my senses. How long I lay thus I do not know, but when I woke I found myself in a coffin in a church, and the count standing beside me. A new and powerful potion restored ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... slept, but lay in trance 265 All night within the fountain—as in sleep. Its emerald crags glowed in her beauty's glance; Through the green splendour of the water deep She saw the constellations reel and dance Like fire-flies—and withal did ever keep 270 The tenour of her contemplations calm, With open eyes, closed ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Then, when that trance of peace had given them the light sadness which fulfilled beauty brings, they found it good to hasten down the deserted street to the cafes and thronging friendly people. They knew how to live ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... entailing dismemberment which the Great Powers imposed on Russia during her cataleptic trance are revised, as they may be, whenever she recovers consciousness and strength, what course will events then follow? If she seeks to regather under her wing some of the peoples whose complete independence the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... "Hunh! I spects dese chillun kin 'member tomorrow every word I tells you today. Dey knows everything." Her bony arm encircled the Negro child. "Jooroosalom oak—we got some and give it to dis lil' thing for worms. She went off in a trance and never come out until 2 o'clock nex' day. I think we got de wrong thing and give her root instead of seed. I never fool wid it no more it skeered me so. Thought ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... editor of the Spiritualistische Bltter, published at Liepsic, Ger., has given in the issue of March 31st the following communications from Dr. Hahnemann and Dr. Spurzheim, delivered through a trance medium. They are valuable essays, whatever may be their source, and the reader will not fail to observe their general coincidence with the doctrine presented by myself in the May number of the JOURNAL OF MAN in the article on the "Genesis of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... will tell you that. That is why a shepherd's pipe is such a splendid thing. To pick out a tune and listen to it starts the mind out of its trance and promotes mental exercise. It does what gymnastics do for ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... suggestive, and incomplete as those to Columbia and Harvard. I repeat that I never actually saw the educational machine in motion. What it seemed to me that I saw in each case was a tremendous mechanical apparatus at rest, a rich, empty frame, an organism waiting for the word that would break its trance. The fault was, of course, wholly mine. I find upon reflection that the universities which I recall with the most sympathy are those in which I had the largest opportunity of listening to the informal talk of the faculty ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... of course, that his offer was one among fifty; did not know that the curious state of mind he was in, between trance and hysteria, was a very common one to the public after a trial in which the elements are dramatic or the central figure in any way picturesque. He did not even know how Ruth Oliver was being noisily besieged by Pressmen and Editors anxious for her biography; ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... same, but the scene was changed! The beauties of Oxford were vanished! I was awakened from the most delightful of dreams to a disgusting reality, and would have given kingdoms to have once more renewed my trance. The friends of Hector, though not all of them his equals in turbulence profaneness and folly, were of the same school. Their language, though less coarse, was equally insipid. Their manners, when not so obtrusive, were more bald. They all cursed blustered and behaved with insolence ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish's burrow, Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead, First his waving antennae, like straws of hay, And soon his body, colored like soap-stone, Gemmed with eyes of jet. And you wondered in a trance of thought What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all. But later your vision watched for men and women Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities, Looking for the souls of them to come out, So that you could ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... than usually obstinate after his late success. 'Never mind, sir. I can stand pretty firm of myself, sir, I believe, without being shored up by you.' And having given utterance to this retort, Mr Willet fixed his eyes upon the boiler, and fell into a kind of tobacco-trance. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... dumb; No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving: Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving: No nightly trance or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... mystics report.[8] These are each and all of them special cases of kinds of human experience of much wider scope. Religious melancholy, whatever peculiarities it may have qua religious, is at any rate melancholy. Religious happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance. And the moment we renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon as it is classed with others, or its origin is shown; the moment we agree to stand by experimental results and inner quality, in judging of values—who does ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... they brought me, pinioned hand and foot In catalepsy—say I should have known That trance had not yet darkened into death, And held my scalpel. Well, suppose I knew? Sum up the facts—her life against her death. Her life? The scum upon the pools of pleasure Breeds such by thousands. And her death? Perchance The obolus to appease the ferrying Shade, And ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... different tongues and of different continents—are largely devoted to the investigation of trance, clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, hypnotism, dreams, premonitions, automatic writing, visions, and messages from the dying, multiple personality, and all the phenomena associated with the subconscious self. Many students have dispensed with the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... gave a little start, as if awakened out of a kind of trance. The sheer vacuity of his mind might naturally slide into ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Protevangelion and Harleian MS. agree in placing the vision in the garden; the latter adding, that she fled "into her chamber in great fear, and fell upon her bed, and lay as in a trance all that day and all that night, but did not tell the vision to her maid, because of her bitter answering." Giotto has deviated from both accounts in making the vision appear to Anna in her chamber, while the maid, evidently being considered an important personage, is at work in ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... been laid on a bed, and every means having been used to bring her out of the trance into which she had fallen, after nearly two hours' exertion she showed signs of recovery. Mr. Armstrong insisted on her being left perfectly quiet; and they now thought it would be best for John to return to the Manse and ease Mr. Martin's mind as to her safety. "I will do that ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... gleaming hilt, girt for the fray Freedom demands, he cannot stay: Forward his motion, keen his glance: 'Tis victory painted in a trance. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... making him creep forth into the fields and woods, heavily leaning on his stick. One day he stayed out longer than usual, and, the doctor arriving, a search was made after him. It was fruitless for some time; at last, however, he was found in his favourite hollow oak, sitting as in a trance, his face illumined by the setting sun. Enraptured joy seemed to pervade his whole being; unutterable bliss to fill his mind. The doctor looked serious, and made an attempt to upbraid his patient, but which was entirely unsuccessful. 'If you loved the sun and flowers as I do,' quietly said Clare, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... overcoming instinctive but undesirable impulses, and so forth, by means of hypnotism, they would have refused to believe the thing possible. Few people knew that an order made during a mesmeric trance, even an order to forget or an order to desire, could be given so as to be obeyed after the trance was over. Yet there were men alive then who could have told them the thing was as absolutely certain to come about as—well, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... "He's gone into a trance simply because there's not enough left in him to constitute an individuality. The germ has taken the inside clean out of him. He's just an immortal ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... monetary support the Birmingham Bishopric Scheme is dead, or in such a very sound trance that it is hardly likely to revive. At its birth it was not very strong, and its early existence was jeopardised by conflicting ideas among its sponsors, chiefly caused by the difficulties in the way of raising all the money required. Birmingham, ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... sustaining each other. They will smother schism and reap infidelity and indifference; and while the battle for freedom goes on around them, they will only sink the more apathetically into servitude and a deep trance, perhaps occasionally interrupted by furious fits of frenzy, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... The men take something from each other of exalted enthusiasm. This efflux of their combined energies inspires them and exasperates the mighty resonance of metal which they rule. They are lost in a trance of what approximates to dervish passion—so thrilling is the surge of sound, so potent are the rhythms they obey. Men come and tug them by the heels. One grasps the starting thews upon their calves. Another is impatient for their place. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... dream, O to awake and wander There, and with delight to take and render, Through the trance of silence, Quiet breath; Lo! for there among the flowers and grasses, Only the mightier movement sounds and passes; Only winds and rivers, Life ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... scene, until the sound alike of mastiff and of cur had ceased, the grasshopper refused to pipe upon the dusty road, and the too distant bullfrog was no longer heard gurgling to its mates, but all was silent, lying as in a trance, both heaven and earth. And then he paused, and lapsing into meditation, stood unconscious of surrounding things, till the tolling of the clock in the distant tower of the cathedral of Notre Dame awoke him, and, starting from his ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... music in heaven, for the angels in all the pictures have harps in their hands. He is mad, upon my word!" she said to herself, as she saw Castanier's attitude; he looked like an opium-eater in a blissful trance. ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... overwhelming wave of tender and compassionate feeling toward the other: seeing, as if with spiritual vision, a nature unstrung, hardly responsible, and one that invited only the most infinite tenderness and care. This wave of new and perfectly clear perception was like a magnetic trance. It was an hour of absolute spiritual clairvoyance, and the evidence was furnished by a letter received, the next morning, from a mutual friend, which entirely substantiated and corroborated the telepathic impression that had been experienced ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... remove his eyes from Bertha. She held him as by a powerful spell. He saw that her face was lighted with an altogether new beauty; he noticed the deep glow upon her cheek, the brilliancy of her eye, the slight quiver of her lip. But he saw all this as one sees things in a half-trance, without attempting to account for them; the door between his soul and ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... Mrs. Huntley—Mr. Musgrave. Every ill suspicion, every stinging remembrance, is dead or fallen into a trance. All bad thoughts have melted away from the earth. Only joyful love and absolute faith remain, only the knowledge that Roger is mine, and I am his, and that we are in each other's arms. I do not know how long we remain without speaking. I do not imagine that souls in ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Just then the clock in the little church tower struck ten. The village was asleep—and there was no sound of human life anywhere. The faint, subtle scent of sweetbriar stole on the air as he stood in a trance of desperate uncertainty—and as the delicate odour floated by, a rush of tears came to ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... the explanations that followed, as every one will readily understand them. Captain Truck listened to Paul like one in a trance, and it was some time after the young man had done before he spoke. With a wish to cheer him, he was told of the ample provision of stores that had been brought off in the launch, of the trade winds that had now apparently set in, and of the great probability of their ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... to Bebee that he, this stranger from Rubes' fairyland, could come at all to keep pace with her little clattering wooden shoes over the dust and the grass in the dim twilight time. The days went by in a trance of sweet amaze, and she kept count of the hours no more by the cuckoo-clock of the mill-house, or the deep chimes of the Brussels belfries; but only by such moments as brought her a word from his lips, or even a glimpse of him from afar, across the ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... fish. These intruders served a personage such as had never been seen. For she—if indeed a woman—was tall, with a face the color of the highest mountain peaks, and eyes gleaming like strange stones. She walked as if in a trance; but in her trancelike face was a cold grief, or maybe a cold fury, like that of some goddess whose taboos had been broken, and who ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... officers, the captain of the ship, and General Humbert. They treated us with great humanity on board the cutter, giving us a little weak brandy and water every five or six minutes, and after that a bason of good soup. I fell on the locker in a kind of trance for near thirty hours, and swelled to such a degree as to require medical aid to restore my decayed faculties. Having lost all our baggage, we were taken to Brest almost naked, where they gave us a rough shift of clothes, and in consequence of our sufferings, and the ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... stream of foamy water, seemed to flow down a winding path. The goats were standing quite still. Suddenly they flung up their heads, as if at an imperious call, and in wild abandon rushed toward the shadowy woods above. The dog, as if roused from a trance, gave chase, shattering the silence with yelping barks. The boy, his heart beating violently, followed. It took all the afternoon to collect and quiet the flock, and when Marcus started home he had himself not lost the awed sense of a Presence in his ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... fanaticism alone could suggest a ray of hope and consolation. "How can he be dead, our witness, our intercessor, our mediator, with God? By God he is not dead: like Moses and Jesus, he is wrapped in a holy trance, and speedily will he return to his faithful people." The evidence of sense was disregarded; and Omar, unsheathing his cimeter, threatened to strike off the heads of the infidels, who should dare to affirm that the prophet was no more. The tumult was appeased by the weight and moderation of Abubeker. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... desert—among vestals, who rendered themselves habitants of wilds and of caverns, that they might perform in secret those Christian rites which they dared not assist in openly; that this should be so, in truth and in reality, seemed too incredible—it must be a dream—a delusive trance of the imagination. While these thoughts passed through the mind of Kenneth, the same passage, by which the procession had entered the chapel, received them on their return. The young sacristans, the sable nuns, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... apparitions sworn to by this Englishman, declared that no theory could explain them, Gevingey perorated, "Permit me, messieurs. We have the choice between two diverse, and I venture to say, very clear-cut doctrines. Either the apparition is formed by the fluid disengaged by the medium in trance to combine with the fluid of the persons present; or else there are in the air immaterial beings, elementals as they are called, which manifest themselves under very nearly determinable conditions; or else, and this is the theory ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... mountain-side, watched till the pretty confusion of the water, with its half-interpreted voices, had dizzied and dazed her to the point of complete forgetfulness of self. She had entered into a sort of a trance, a Nirvana ... She shook herself out of it, ate her lunch and scrambled quickly back to "Nigger Baby." It was late afternoon when she crossed the mountain glades. Their look had mysteriously changed. There was something almost uncanny now about their brilliance in the sunset ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... I throw you into a state of trance? No! I'll give you a shock of another kind—a shock of surprise. I know as much as you do about Mr. Gracedieu's daughters. What do you ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... loud that it resembled the simultaneous discharge of a whole army of rifles, smote upon their ears; and then, as they stood in a trance of breathless expectation, wondering what was about to happen, an immense section of the icy cliff was seen to be in motion. Slowly at first, but with ever-increasing rapidity, it slid downward into the water, with a continuous roaring reverberating crash, to which even ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... fair landscape never a sign of life, human or animal! Yet, stay; what was that dark film, like a tiny cloud, that came sweeping down toward them from far up the lake? Dick, the practical, was the first to catch sight of it, for Phil was standing like one in a trance gazing at the scene with a retrospective look in his eyes that seemed to say his thoughts were far away. As Dick watched the approaching cloud-like film it resolved itself into a flock of wild ducks, making, as it seemed, directly for the patch of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... her mother's heart, She, blushing, said no word to break my trance, For I was breathless; and, with lips apart, Felt my breast pant and all my pulses dance, And strove to move, but could not for the weight Of unbelieving joy, so ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... chairs and tables near him until he had found his point; then he would get up and begin rollicking, slamming books together, cleaning up his debris and playing like a great porpoise with the litter he had made. At such times—and, indeed, all the time unless he was in what he called a "legal trance"—Hedrick was bubbling with good spirits, and when he left his office for politics he could get out in his shirt-sleeves at a primary and peddle tickets, or nose up and down the street like a fat ferret looking for ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... Instead, Big Turkey had brought her a doll,—a pink-cheeked doll of the white people. In her cheap suitcase which she had carried wrapped in her shawl on her back to the ranch, Annie-Many-Ponies still had that doll. So with her eyes fixed upon the letter, her mind stared trance-like at the vision of that long-ago day which had been to ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... miles back from the line lay all that night hideous in respirators. Anxious Staffs rang up other anxious Staffs. Gunners questioned the infantry. The infantry desired information from the gunners. All along the line the private soldier was jolted from that kind of trance which he calls "getting down to it," and was bidden to stand ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... a ferrywoman called Rohe. Any soul whom she carried over and who ate the food offered to it on the further bank was doomed to abide in Hades. Any spirit who refused returned to its body on earth and awoke. This is the meaning of what White men call a trance. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... in the Poem. The whole part of this great Enemy of Mankind is filled with such Incidents as are very apt to raise and terrifie the Readers Imagination. Of this nature, in the Book now before us, is his being the first that awakens out of the general Trance, with his Posture on the burning Lake, his rising from it, and the Description of his Shield ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... thought, to look like Buddhists, or like those devoted persons who, in the times of the desert monks, remained for long periods posed upon pillows in sandy wastes musing upon Eternity. At first, as he met their fixed eyes, he fancied that they were, perhaps, falling into a trance, but presently the conviction seized him that they must be, on the contrary, busily thinking out some problem. He hoped fervently that he did not form part of it. At length the quivering silence ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... not move. As though he had never before seen a woman, as though her dazzling loveliness held him in a trance, he stood still, gazing, gaping, devouring Winnie with his eyes. In her turn, Winnie beheld a strange youth who looked like a groom out of livery, so overcome by her mere presence as to be struck motionless ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... to the soul in its exile. So great is this delight that frequently it seems that the least thing would make it forsake the body for ever." "When the soul seeks God in this way," the saint feels with supreme delight her strength ebbing away and a trance stealing over her until, devoid of breath and all physical strength she can only move her hand with great pain. The delights experienced by her are described in great detail and very sensuous language; ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... The trance continued till after breakfast, when our officers' impatience could no longer withstand the bait, and, though short of efficient boats, the yawl and lieutenant's gig were manned for a hazardous enterprise. The former was crammed with six sailors, two marines, and a supernumerary ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... Plutarch, Apuleius, and other Greek authors, bear ample testimony of this persuasion, and tell us that by uncommon and irregular motions of the body intoxicating vapours, or certain holy ejaculations, men might be thrown into an enchanted trance; in which, being in a state between sleeping and waking, they were unsusceptible of external impressions and obtaining a glimpse of futurity, were gifted with the power of prophecy. Here their allusion, however, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... and all persons. For example, it matters not how new associational systems are formed so long as they are substituted for the pernicious ones. It may be in the common experiences of every-day life, through the pleading of a friend, during sleep or trance, in some abnormal state of a hypnotic character, or during religious ecstasy, and we cannot well say in any given case that one form will be more efficacious than another. Mental healing creates nothing new, but simply makes use of the normal mechanism of the mind and body. ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... you, Kate," she cried. "I'm so upset I can't eat a thing. Feather duster indeed. Well, it's better than the mop Pete swabs up the floors with. If you'd said that, I'd sure have gone straight off into a trance, and—and got buried alive. But your appetite's awful, Kate, and I can't sit here forever. I'd say food's mighty important, but it's nothing beside a man waiting for you somewhere, and you don't know where. Guess I'll have something to eat before I go to bed. Please, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... doubts that accompany insomnia, is made so credible that we accept his symptoms without the least demur; his condition is merely unusual enough to excite a trembling interest. Even the passing of his early years of trance does not arouse scepticism. But then we fall with one terrific plunge into the world of A.D. 2100, and, like Graham, we cannot realise it. Moreover this changed, developed world has a slightly mechanical air. The immense enclosed London, imagined by Mr ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... poverty, my obscurity—cold and pinching want, but a quiet conscience to season my scanty meal! I bartered all for gold, for fame and—misery! A cruel bondage! compared to which I could envy the meanest thing that crawls on this abject earth. In my trance I dreamed of green fields and babbling streams; of my brethren, my playmates, my days of innocence and sport, when all was freshness and anticipation—life one bright vista beyond, opening to sunny regions of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby |
