"Ecstatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the steak—a great thick slice. He knew she could never eat it, and she knew she could never eat it. But she did eat it all, ecstatically. And in a sort of ecstatic Nirvana the quiet and vastness and peace of the big old frame house settled down ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... for those attuned to receive them! Her fingers laced with Bob's, and from the contact a warm, ecstatic glow flooded both their bodies. She looked at his clean brown face, with its line of golden down above where the razor had traveled, with its tousled, reddish hair falling into the smiling eyes, ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... religious phenomena, we find in Japan, as in other lands, the practice of ecstatic union with the deity. In Shinto it is called "Kami-oroshi," the bringing down of the gods. It is doubtless some form of hypnotic trance, yet the popular interpretation of the phenomenon ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... whom he would stand contemplating, not unlike the rhinocerous out of the spelling- book, tamed and on his hind legs, was a part of the Institution. Also that when he remained after the singing in his most ecstatic state, some bold spirit from the back should say, "What do you think of it, Joey?" and he should be goaded to reply, as having that instant conceived the retort, "Arter that ye may all on ye get to bed!" These were ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... last year of Commodus. The tension between the two religions—for in Africa, at all events, the old and the new were followed with equally fiery enthusiasm—had already reached breaking point. A heathen mob, headed by the priestesses of the Mater et Virgo Caelestis, the object of the ecstatic worship afterwards transferred to the mother of Christ, had two or three years before besieged the proconsul of Africa in his own house because he refused to order a general massacre of the Christians. In the anarchy after the assassination of Commodus, the persecution ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... of the infinite vision, of the "backward educated" mind, ready to tell miraculous things of a hidden universe. Could she strike him dumb? It would be as if Lazarus had come forth from the open grave and men were to bandage again his ecstatic lips! ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... you should be so uncivil to the child in her presence, and so ecstatic now! However, take care you do not get too familiar. Remember, these Wardours are no relations, and I will not have you letting them call you ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... chimes of some near clock. I began to read the article by Radet in the Revue Rouge—the one I had bought of the old woman in the kiosque. It upset me a good deal—that article. It gave away the whole Greenland show so completely that the ecstatic bosh I had just despatched to the Hour seemed impossible. I suppose the good Radet had his axe to grind—just as I had had to grind the State Founder's, but Radet's axe didn't show. I was reading about an inland valley, a broad, shadowy, grey thing; immensely broad, immensely shadowy, winding ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... found their knight lying apparently dead under the carcass of the dragon. When they had extricated him, taken off his helmet, and sprinkled him with water, he recovered, and presently was led into the city amid the ecstatic shouts of the whole populace, who conducted him in triumph to the palace of ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... considerably taken aback when, a quarter of an hour after the young lover's ecstatic return to his quarters, Gale knocked at his door, for the trader's visit, coupled with the late hour and his ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... the only exhibit of the kind shown at the Fair. Sportsmen and lovers of life in the woods from all parts of the land visited it; many were ecstatic in its praises; some complimented it by saying it was the most artistic feature of the whole forestry, fish and game exhibit. It was photographed perhaps more than one hundred times during the season and in one instance by nine different persons ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... Justina would carry off Teresa to the kitchen, and the rest of us would hurry to the orchard where grandfather with a vigorous hand would shake down the apples and pears into our outstretched aprons. Those were ecstatic moments when we could bury our teeth in the newly-fallen fruit. Soon father would cry, "That's enough! That's enough! There'll be nothing left for anybody else!" But grandfather continuing to shake down more fruit would answer with his great ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte
... St. Clair and Kendall around the wings for short gains. Once, when Kendall, almost stopped, wriggled himself free and dashed on along the side line, the Brimfield supporters leaped to their feet in the stand with ecstatic visions of a touchdown dancing before their eyes. But Kendall was forced out on Claflin's thirty-five yards and the yells of triumph subsided. From there Harris made it first down through a hole as wide as ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... thou dost breed Thought in me beyond all telling; Shootest through me sunlight, seed, And fruitful blessing, with that welling Ripple of ecstatic rest, Gurgling ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... statues, old and rare, Fashioned by no mere mortal skill, With robes that fluttered in the air, Blown out by Art's eternal will; And delicate ivory netsukes, Richer in tone than Cheddar cheese, Of saints and hermits, cats and dogs, Grim warriors and ecstatic frogs. ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... time the rich and costly food had been sadly medium—like the wines. But these turkeys were a genuine triumph. Even Mildred gave them a look of interest and admiration. In a voice that made General Siddall ecstatic Presbury cried: ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... the French pseudo-classical school. Florian, Richardson, Sterne, Rousseau, and Bernardin de St. Pierre found first translators, and then imitators, and soon the loud-sounding declamation and wordy ecstatic despair of the stage heroes were drowned in the deep-drawn sighs and plaintive wailings of amorous swains and peasant-maids forsaken. The mania seems to have been in Russia even more severe than in the countries where it originated. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Ewing, McNulta, Fifer, Rowell, and others as listeners, he once graphically described the first battle in which he was engaged. Turning to his old-time comrade, McNulta, he said: "There is one supreme moment in the experience of a soldier that is absolutely ecstatic!" "That," quickly replied McNulta, "is the very moment when ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... like, through thirty lines of exquisite words; and he is captivated by the multiple brevity of these vignettes of sense, keen, momentary, ecstatic with the morning dip of youth in the wonderful stream. The poem is a catalogue of vital sensations and "dear names" as well. "All these have been ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... to alarms. It may be best figured by supposing yourself to get dead drunk, and yet keep sober to enjoy it. I have a notion that open-air labourers must spend a large portion of their days in this ecstatic stupor, which explains their high composure and endurance. A pity to go to the expense of laudanum, when here is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... difference between the really high-class man and us commonplace, workaday men is the difference between, say, the eagle and the barnyard chicken. I am the barnyard chicken. I have my wings. There are ecstatic moments when I feel I want to spurn the sordid earth and soar into the realms of art. I do fly a little, but my body is heavy, and I only get as far as the fence. After a while I find it lonesome on the fence, and I hop down ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... that night in the spruces of Silver Creek, in one of the prettiest little places that ever lay out of doors. As they prepared the supper and ate it, sharing plate, cup and spoon, the boy was fairly ecstatic. ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... quickly, allowing myself no time to think upon any strange or perplexing point in my adventures, but giving myself entirely up to the joy of the new and ecstatic life which thrilled through me. A mirror in the room showed me my own face, happy and radiant,—my own eyes bright and smiling,—no care seemed to have left a trace on my features, and I was fully conscious of a perfect strength and health that made the mere act of breathing a pleasure. In a very ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... as a snowball," he reflected, courage and decision growing stronger each moment. "I might just as well die one way as another. If I could only catch 'em napping for a minute, I might turn the trick. God, that would be—" he was lost in ecstatic contemplation of the glory that ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... of theaters had never seen the beautiful Italians who pounce upon protesting zylophones with small clubs, or the side-splitting juggler's assistant who breaks up piles and piles of plates. And as to the top hat that turns into an accordion and produces much melody, she was ecstatic. ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... and partly in Wales; and from Ireland, where he had gone to regenerate the country, he opened correspondence with William Godwin, the philosopher and author of 'Political Justice'. His energy in entering upon ecstatic personal relations was as great as that which he threw into philanthropic schemes; but the relations, like the schemes, were formed with no notion of adapting means to ends, and were often dropped as hurriedly. Eliza Westbrook, ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... ecstatic body, a short, staccato bark—and Binks had caught his enemy. He bit once; he bit again—and then, a little puzzled, he dropped it. Impossible to conceive that it was really dead at last—and yet, it no longer hooted. Binks looked up at his master for information ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... her lips were dyed pomegranate, her eyes darkened and her cheeks touched with rouge. A pair of substantial gilt shoes slung over her shoulders clinked their heels together as she walked. Narcisse barked his ecstatic admiration around this beauteous creature, and had I been a dog I should have barked mine too. My dignity as a man only allowed me to cast sidelong glances at her and hope that she would soon put on the gilt shoes. As for my master, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... as Cyrus ran frantically into the room, and leaping upon the couch with ecstatic barks of welcome, threatened again to take the place that belonged by right to Harry. But this time ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... failed to go, had God Granted his prayer, there would have been For him no leadership to win; No pillared fire; no magic rod, No smiting of the sea; no tears Ecstatic, shed on Sinai's steep; No Nebo, with a God to keep His burial; only forty years Of desert, watching with ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... undepress'd by cumb'rous clay, Through cloudy regions win my easy way; Rapt through poetic shadowy haunts I fly: The shrines all open to my dauntless eye, My spirit searches all the realms of light, And no Tartarean gulphs elude my sight. 20 But this ecstatic trance—this glorious storm Of inspiration—what will it perform? Spring claims the verse that with his influence glows, And shall be paid with what himself bestows. Thou, veil'd with op'ning foliage, ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... ecstatic ten minutes, then, realizing that time was moving and he was burning fuel at a terrific rate, he ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... lead to the further consideration:—"What matter though it be only disease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?" Vague though this sounds, it was perfectly comprehensible to Muishkin, though he knew that it was but a ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... strange and varied: the dark-skinned Italians ecstatic in the night and the moon, the blue-eyed old woman ecstatic in the busy sunshine, the monks in the garden below, who are supposed to unite both, passing only in the neutrality of the average. Where, then, is the meeting-point: where in mankind ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... she never writ, nor Katy neither," Aunt Betsy exclaimed, while Mark, raised to an ecstatic state, replied, "I refer to Dr. Grant. Haven't they been engaged for ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... austere, inhuman, and sometimes cruel. Both monks and nuns, when they conformed to the rules of their order, were sad, solitary, dreary-looking people, although their faces shone occasionally in the light of ecstatic visions of heaven and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... indicated a large empty chest of drawers, a white covered bed in a deep corner away from the window, a small drawer in the dressing-table and five pegs in a large French wardrobe. Emma was going very gravely about the room collecting her work-basket and things for raccommodage. She flung one ecstatic glance at Miriam as she ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... to us like the ecstatic union of natural beauty and poetic fancy, and in its playful sublimity resembles the azure canopy mirrored in the smiling waters, bright, liquid, serene, heavenly! A great outcry, we know, has prevailed for some time past against poetic diction and ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... by the several vegetable substances with which he meets, and thus the effect of narcotics is early discovered, and the savage in the practice of his religion oftentimes resorts to these native drugs for the purpose of producing an ecstatic state under which divination may be performed. The practice of ecstasism is universal in the lower stages of culture. In times of great anxiety, every savage and barbarian seeks to know of the future. Through all the earlier generations of mankind, ecstasism has been practiced, and civilized ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... and peaceful countenance, yet with a certain plaintive wistfulness in the shadows of her blue eyes, which betokened no exemption from the ordinary fate of mankind. But now! what unspeakable joy, what ecstatic delight seemed to infuse fresh life and vigour to the fragile, graceful form! For a few moments she crossed her hands on her bosom, and with closed eyes remained silent; then, starting up and pacing backwards and forwards in the limited space of a railway ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... not even heard his mother was ill. He had just received her ecstatic response to his wire—and that very night she came to him, vividly, as he hovered on the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... used to speak of the ecstatic mood in which he wrote "Zarathustra"; how in his walks over hill and dale the ideas would crowd into his mind, and how he would note them down hastily in a note-book from which he would transcribe them on his return, sometimes ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... hardly expressible. He dreamed of the reel, the jig, the strathspey, and the corant; and the elasticity of his frame was such that he was bounding over the heads of maidens, and making his feet skimmer against the ceiling, enjoying, the while, the most ecstatic emotions. These grew too fervent for the shackles of the drowsy god to restrain. The nasal bugle ceased its prolonged sounds in one moment, and a sort of hectic laugh took its place. "Keep it going—play up, you devils!" ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... examine the bottle in which the blood of St. Januarius annually liquefies. The Holy Coat will be held up by priests at a discreet and convenient distance; the multitude of fools will fall before it in ecstatic adoration; and the result will be the usual one in such cases, a lightening of the devotees' pockets to the profit of ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... not notice. She went through the rest of that interview in a dazed, ecstatic wonder. She only knew at its conclusion that she was to go up to Vermont to care for His house, to live in the rooms that He had lived in, to rest where He had rested, to walk where He had walked, to see what He ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... man has found and won his mate then the best traditions demand a lyrical interlude. It should be possible to tell, in that ecstatic manner which melts words into moonshine, makes prose almost uncomfortably rhythmic, and brings all the freshness of every spring that ever was across the page, of the joyous exaltation of the happy lover. This at any rate was what White had always ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... length found, when in B.C. 92 the Roman soldiery commanded by Sulla penetrated into the valley of Comana in Cappadocia. There was a whole community, a miniature state, devoted to the service of a goddess not unlike the Great Mother of Pessinus, but whose cult was more ecstatic, more orgiastic, than that of the Magna Mater, at least as Rome knew her. The king was the chief priest, and the citizens were priests and priestesses. The war with Mithradates brought the Roman army there again and also to another Comana in Pontus, where there was a branch of the Cappadocian cult. ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... of sculpture in marble, a guardian angel for the Convent at Granada, but this no longer exists. Some of his architectural drawings are preserved in the Louvre. Ford says that his St. Francesco in Toledo is "a masterpiece of cadaverous ecstatic sentiment." ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... contempt for material truth is a lesson to all artists. We are reminded of William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley. He seems to regard the human-frame as so much soft clay, upon which he can trace his ecstatic hieroglyphs, in defiance both of ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... to the fireworks style of elocution on the part of my curate," I said, "and if you could shed a calm, lambent light on this ecstatic episode, it ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... finding in the courtyard, among the serving men, a man in the habit of a fakir,[FN82] said. 'Whence comes yonder fellow?' Quoth they, 'He is a merchant, who hath lost his goods by shipwreck, but saved himself on a plank; and he is an ecstatic.'[FN83] Now this was none other than Uns el Wujoud, [but the Vizier knew him not]; so he left him and went on into the castle. He found there no trace of his daughter and questioned her women, who answered, 'She abode with us ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... more welcome than her sea-green home? What sight finer than the myriad diamond-sparkles in her eye? What sound sweeter than the murmurs of her soothing, never-ceasing voice? What perfume so rare as the crisp fragrance breathing from her robes? What so thrilling, so magnetically ecstatic, as her tumultuous heaving, and the lithe, undulating buoyancy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... discord—no profane Or senseless gossip of unworthy things— Only the songs of chisels and of pens. Of busy brushes, and ecstatic strains Of souls surcharged with music most divine. Here is no idle sorrow, no poor grief For any day or object left behind— For time is counted precious, and herein Is such complete abandonment of Self That tears turn into rainbows, ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... is quite ecstatic That I am engaged to Joe; She thinks I am rather erratic, And feared that I might say "No." But, Mabel, I'm twenty-seven (Though nobody dreams it, dear), And a fortune like Joe's isn't given To lay at ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... mother usually took in the Tuileries, Adelaide for the first time went up to Hippolyte's studio, on the pretext of seeing the portrait in the good light in which it had been painted. She stood speechless and motionless, but in ecstatic contemplation, in which all a woman's feelings were merged. For are they not all comprehended in boundless admiration for the man she loves? When the painter, uneasy at her silence, leaned forward to look at her, she ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... These ecstatic praises of the Convention sounded oddly, as that body had just been discussing a petition from several Parisians who had lately been imprisoned without knowing why or by whom. And the Belfast address of congratulation ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... by MACDUFF, who can outfight and outhowl him with perfect ease. The tragedy being at last over, the audience disperses with solemn steps and slow; the men and elderly ladies still whispering their stereotyped chorus of praise, and the young ladies adding to their panegyrics of BOOTH ecstatic admiration ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... Labre. They were of plaster run into moulds, or roughly carved in wood, and were colored with paint as glaring as the red and blue of a barber's pole, and covered with vulgar gildings. Chins in the air, ecstatic eyes shining with varnish, horribly ugly and all new, they were drawn up in line like recruits at the roll-call, the mitred bishop, the martyr carrying his palm, St. Agnes embracing her lamb, St. Roch with his dog and ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... Faith, including a Prayer, among his writings; and there can be little doubt, in spite of Condorcet's incredible account of the circumstances of its composition, that it is the expression of what was at the time a sincere feeling.[17] It is, however, rather the straining and ecstatic rhapsody of one who ardently seeks faith, than the calm and devout assurance of him who already possesses it. Vauvenargues was religious by temperament, but he could not entirely resist the intellectual influences of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... being concluded a female priest takes the betel-nut omen. Seven quids of betel nuts are placed by one of the family priestesses upon a sacred dish.[16] She then sets it upon the head of the bridegroom and falls into an ecstatic condition, steadying the plate with her hand. Should one of the betel-nut slices become separated from its betel leaf, the omen is considered unpropitious and is followed immediately by the prophylactic rite—the ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... the Sciarra Palace is small but very select. The pictures are hung with judgment, and well taken care of. The Magdalen, which is considered one of Guido's masterpieces, charmed me most: the countenance is heavenly; though full of ecstatic and devout contemplation, there is in it a touch of melancholy, "all sorrow's softness charmed from its despair," which is quite exquisite: and the attitude, and particularly the turn of the arm, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... to keep from thinking that very thing, ever since I heard Mrs. Courtney tell us of that horrid woman's being in Reno. Our Dalky will be free, and what so great as to have him fall in love with a really appreciative woman." Eleanor clasped her hands and expressed ecstatic joy at the very idea ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... thousands of thousands, shall sing with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing, for ever and ever." Such were the ecstatic vision which Bunyan enjoyed, drawn from the unerring pages ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... walking in fresh air. Are you dilatory and irresolute?—you may dawdle to your heart's content; you may change all your plans a dozen times in a dozen hours; you may tell "Boots" at the inn to call you at six o'clock, may fall asleep again (ecstatic sensation!) five minutes after he has knocked at the door, and may get up two hours later, to pursue your journey, with perfect impunity and satisfaction. For, to you, what is a time-table but waste-paper?—and a "booked place" but a relic of the dark ages? ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... by, and the colour and tone of my existence had suffered a momentous change. In the acquirement of a fearful joy, I had lost all joy. In rendering every moment of my life blissful and ecstatic, I had robbed myself of all felicity. A few weeks before, and my state of being had realized a serenity that defied all causes of perturbation and disquiet. Now it was a sea of agitation and disorder; and a breath, a nothing had brought the restless waves upon the quiet surface. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... his overwrought, ecstatic band across the river, Waitstill Baxter, then a child, was watching the strange, noisy company from the window of a little brick dwelling on the top of ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... surprise when one glorious moonlight night which showed up the magnificent elms then arching the street before our house—the air was full of fragrance—I was suddenly aroused by several voices adjuring me, a lady of beauty, to awake. I was bewildered—ecstatic. This singing was for me. I listened intently and heard the words of ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... about her. And yet the family life was unaltered; no one at home seemed to be much impressed, not even Ethel, though Ethel's sympathy could be depended upon; Milly was still Milly, the youngest, the least important, the chit of a thing. At times it appeared to her as though the triumph of that ecstatic and glorious night was after all nothing but an illusion, and that only the interminable dailiness of family life was real. Then the ruthless and calculating minx in her shut tight those pretty lips and coldly determined that nothing should ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... Body of his Lord, and the voices behind him rose and exulted up the aisles, the women's and children's voices soaring passionately up in the melody, the mellow men's voices establishing, as it seemed, these ecstatic pinnacles of song on mighty and ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... on in April, and the boys got off their shoes for good, there came races, in which they seemed to fly on wings. Life has a good many innocent joys for the human animal, but surely none so ecstatic as the boy feels when his bare foot first touches the breast of our mother earth in the spring. Something thrills through him then from the heart of her inmost being that makes him feel kin with her, and cousin ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... forth such a laudatory buzzing of tongues and such a cordial shaking of hands that one might have easily mistaken the meeting for a successful political rally or a religious revival. The Youngest and Prettiest Trustee fluttered about him, chirping ecstatic expletives, while the Disagreeable Trustee watched her and growled ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... he was quite polite." "And what was your impression of him?" "Oh, how he stank!" I answer that this is the odor of sanctity, and my friend thinks that I am enormously witty; I have to explain to her that I am not jesting, but that there are definite physiological phenomena incidental to the ecstatic life. ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... Ecstatic as Ben was, he could see sense in this; but vacation came first and Geraldine was a belle at Keefeport that summer. Her beauty blossomed, and all the repressed vivacity of her nature came to the surface. Her room at Rockcrest commanded the ocean, and ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... like a passionate woman turns, Filled with remorseful terror to the man she scorned, and her love For myself in my own eyes' laughter burns, Runs ecstatic over the pliant folds rippling down to my ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... I seem'd By an ecstatic vision wrapt away: And in a temple saw, methought, a crowd Of many persons; and at the entrance stood A dame, whose sweet demeanor did express Another's love, who said, 'Child! why hast thou Dealt with us thus? ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... to lash the colors downwards to the main-top-mast shrouds; which having done, he placed himself on the crosstrees, to look around him, and almost instantly hallooed out,—"A sail."—It would be impossible to describe the ecstatic emotions of the crew: every man was aloft, in order to be satisfied; though, a minute before, not one of the crew ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... ecstatic state I gazed—till lo! I was aware A fisherman had joined her there— A weary man, with halting gait, Who toiled beneath a basket's weight: Her father, as I guessed, for she Had run to meet him gleefully And ta'en his burden to herself, ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... was scrambling to his feet in futile grabs after one of the hounds that was making off with his herring, but he nodded back over his shoulder. Helga looked from one to the other of her companions with an ecstatic smack of her lips. "Honey," she informed them. "Sigurd ran across a jar of it last night. That pig of an Olver yonder hid it on the highest shelf. Very likely the goldsmith's daughter gave it to him and it was his intention to keep it all for ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... have likewise endeavored to instil into them the precepts of lunar philosophy. We have insisted upon their renouncing the contemptible shackles of religion and common sense, and adoring the profound, omnipotent, and all perfect energy, and the ecstatic, immutable, immovable perfection. But such was the unparalleled obstinacy of these wretched savages that they persisted in cleaving to their wives, and adhering to their religion, and absolutely set at nought the sublime ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... They showed it to each other innocently and frankly; yet of love as we of the grosser creation call it, with its impatient pains and burning hopes, they never spoke nor dreamed. It was an unutterable, ecstatic fondness, a clinging to each other in thought, desire, and heart, a joy more than mortal in each other's presence; yet, in parting, not that idle and empty sorrow which unfits the weak for the homelier demands on time and life, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dark-coloured mantle, chosen as emblematic of her clouded fortunes, was flung loosely around her; and its hood was brought forward, so as to shadow, but not hide, her beautiful countenance. Her looks had lost the high and ecstatic expression which had been inspired by supposed revelation, but they retained a sorrowful and mild, yet determined character—and, in addressing the soldiers, she used a mixture of entreaty and command—now throwing herself upon their protection—now ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Cultured members, on drinking it, were wont to say things about Locusta and Borgia. The commoner sort swore like hell at Freddy Parker. It made you feel squiffy after the sixth glass—argumentative, magisterial, maudlin, taciturn, erotic, sentimental, sea-sick, ecstatic, paralysed, lachrymose, hilarious, pugilistic—according to your temperament. Whatever your temperament it gave you a thundering head next morning, and a throat like Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace. It was ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... in a matter-of-fact sort of way, and Elsa went upstairs in a less ecstatic mood than when she came down, and told Karin calmly that her father seemed pleased that she liked having a ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... a benediction—an ecstatic surety that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know. For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal—then there was a bumping, scraping sound ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... them (for spirits here know one another by intuition). I presently met a little daughter whom I had lost several years before. Good gods! what words can describe the raptures, the melting passionate tenderness, with which we kissed each other, continuing in our embrace, with the most ecstatic joy, a space which, if time had been measured here as on earth, could not be ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... hero in a quiet way. Yes, I well may like him! And I am sure he likes me!' said another whisper of the heart, which, veiled as was the lady in the mirror, made Phoebe put both hands over her face, in a shamefaced ecstatic consciousness. 'Nay—I was the first lady he had seen, the only person to speak to. No, no; I know it was not that—I feel it was not! Why, otherwise, did he seem so sorry I was not poor? Oh! how nice it would be if I were! We could work for each other in his glorious new land of hope! ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... matter for Higginson had been like the ditch with Bryant: something tremendous, something to be met with the means at hand, something to be accomplished at all costs. And now his brain was ringing with triumph. He was superior to anything Bryant might think or say or do. For the moment he was quite ecstatic. One in his exalted state could conceive nothing unmeet in having haled a strange, sensitive girl into the ghastly ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... his scorn,"—a man of vast experiences and intense convictions and superhuman earnestness, despising the world which he sought to elevate, living isolated in the midst of society, a wanderer and a sage, meditating constantly on the grandest themes, lost in ecstatic reveries, familiar with abstruse theories, versed in all the wisdom of his day and in the history of the past, a believer in God and immortality, in rewards and punishments, and perpetually soaring to comprehend the mysteries of existence, and those ennobling ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... at a glance that he had fallen into the hands of the enemy—in other words, into the hands of the rival school. There were senior boys and junior boys. Prominent amongst the latter he noticed Mellor, who was quite ecstatic with delight at ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... their master that he had a privilege and a passport permitted him such as no mortal man has had the like since JOHN'S eyes closed upon his completed Apocalypse. After repeated and prolonged reading of Behmen's amazing books, nothing that has been said by his most ecstatic disciples about their adored master either astonishes or offends me. Dante himself does not beat such a soaring wing as Behmen's; and all the trumpets that sound in Paradise Lost do not swell my heart and chase its blood like Jacob Behmen's broken ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... on puzzled, for Jesus stood like one in ecstatic vision and began to put questions to the camel-driver regarding the quality of the sheep the shepherds led, asking if the rams speeded, if there were many barren ewes in the flock, and if there was as much ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... so—" Bertha's ecstatic tone went no farther. It was in quite a different voice that she said—"But then there's Father! Oh no, Cousin. Thank you so much, ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... led by clever and eloquent men. Uplifted by a sense of the constant presence of the Holy Ghost, they would fall into ecstatic trances, fully convinced of their own divinity and desiring only to be ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... light-hearted as a schoolboy just escaped from drudgery, while Bertie's Nellie, as a matter of course, was overcome with ecstatic giggles. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Shelburne Porter—so Mrs. Pat mentally distinguished them—were sailing along with a good start, and Major Booth was close at their heels. The light soil of the tilled field flew in every direction as thirty or more horses raced across it, and the usual retinue of foot runners raised an ecstatic yell as Mrs. Pat forged ahead and sent her big horse over the fence at the end of the field in a style that ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... instinctively seen in the child was now to be summoned forth; and the vague, half-understood motive which had impelled him to take the abandoned babe from Badillo into the shelter of his own great heart would at length be revealed. The man's joy was ecstatic. With a final clasp of the priest's hand, he rushed from the house to plunge into the work in progress at ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... he took upon the glistening surface of his trousers the muddy soles of merchants, the clay-bronzed brogans of hired men, the cowhide toboggans of teamsters, and the brass-toed, red-kneed boots of little boys ecstatic in their first feel ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... the high psalm of ecstatic delight— Heard the harps harping, like soundings of seas— Watched earth's assoiled ones walking in white Under the shade of ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... through Clarissa; Camilla could quote; Knew the raptures of Werter and Charlotte by rote; Thought Smith and Sir Walter ecstatic; And as for the novels of Miss Lefanu, She dog's-eared them till the whole twenty looked blue; And studied 'The Monk' ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various
... cursing her dead rival by the leaping flames, no longer icily terrible as in the judgment-hall, no longer rich, and sombre, and splendid, like a Tyrian cloth, as in the dwellings of the dead. No, her mood now was that of Aphrodite triumphing. Life—radiant, ecstatic, wonderful—seemed to flow from her and around her. Softly she laughed and sighed, and swift her glances flew. She shook her heavy tresses, and their perfume filled the place; she struck her little sandalled foot upon the floor, and hummed a snatch of some old Greek epithalamium. All ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... has spent his boyhood there linger associations of the cool wind of the hill-top, the sound of the sea audible yet invisible, the hush before a storm, the tumbling of the ice in the river in the spring freshets, the berries that grew on the edge of the wood, the ecstatic thrill of physical strength and delight on the playground where he ran "drinking in the wind of his own speed." But youth is the season not alone of action, but of reverie. Most of our original thinking is done before we are sixteen: after that we acquire so much of other men's experience ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... frequented by ladies who stood eagerly examining the array of bright gauzes, the glittering buckles, the flowers and plumes displayed there. And what a chattering they kept up! What a stir and a hubbub they made! So many "Oh-h's" and "Ah-h's," so many "How lovely's," and other ecstatic exclamations, were mingled with their conversation as was quite bewildering. In time, however, I became accustomed to this and discovered it was simply a way ladies have of expressing their approval of things in general. Around the glass cases which held the trimmed hats the women ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... ground in a brilliant heap, and the moment that Susy and Ruth alighted Blue Bonnet gathered them both in an ecstatic hug. But not for long was she permitted a monopoly. These newly arrived two-sevenths were passed from hand to hand, or, more literally, from arm to arm, and caressed and exclaimed over until Mrs. Clyde came to the rescue ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... within had just returned from his lonely retreat with his mind and nerves in a state of unnatural tension,—a sort of ecstatic clearness and calmness, which he mistook for victory and peace. During those lonely days when he had wandered afar from human converse, and was surrounded only by objects of desolation and gloom, he had passed through as many phases of strange, unnatural experience ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... divine truth, once attained, supersedes specific moral injunctions; ceremonies and systems, even, of religion, become indifferent to the mind illuminated by the sacred idea. A higher degree is the perfect conception or ecstatic vision of the Deity;—the highest-reserved only for the prophetic few—a real immediate union with his essence. Here, it will be seen, are four steps or stages, each of which has its sacred manual or appropriate system of teaching. In the hieratic system, of which Schamyl is the head, the divisions ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... true to her by deceiving her. It was the only way. "At last, Grizel," he cried, "at last!" and he put joyousness into his voice. "It has all come right, dear one!" he cried like an ecstatic lover. Never in his life had he tried so hard to deceive at the sacrifice of himself. But he was fighting something as strong as the instinct of self-preservation, and his usually expressionless face gave the lie to his joyous words. Loud above his voice his ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... me smiling, and his face was always very sweet when he smiled. "Why, the rogue will have it that when such a cavalier as Lancelot tumbles into love he becomes a very ecstatic, and sees the world as it never is, was, or shall be. The sun is no more than his lady's looking-glass, and the moon and stars her candles to light her to bed. You are a lover, Messer Guido. Do you ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... your paragraph to Miss Martineau; she received it, as she was bound, with a good grace. But I doubt, I doubt, O Ralph Waldo Emerson, thou hast not been sufficiently ecstatic about her,—thou graceless exception, confirmatory of a rule! In truth there are bores, of the first and of all lower magnitudes. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... for there beside him stood Isabel like an accusing angel, severe and implacable. It was she whose gentle impulsion had facilitated his exit from the parlor car, and beyond question she had witnessed the kissing, a disagreeable circumstance that fell smotheringly upon his ecstatic mood. ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... to the inclinations of their hearts—and about Goethe's love affairs whole libraries are published that are devoured by his male and female admirers in wrapt ecstasy—why condemn in others that, which done by a Goethe or a George Sand, becomes the subject of ecstatic admiration? ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... himself he now began to elaborate his own system. He had learnt that neither the doctrines nor the austerities of the Brahmans were of any avail for accomplishing the deliverance of man, and freeing him from the fear of old age, disease, and death. After long meditations, and ecstatic visions, he at last imagined that he had arrived at that true knowledge which discloses the cause, and thereby destroys the fear, of all the changes inherent in life. It was from the moment when he arrived at this knowledge, that he ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... part in his own life. Since his mother's death he had known a few in the frontier settlements, and they had been good to him in a friendly way, but this ecstatic mother-love was new and it made him ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... touched something unusually or unexpectedly hot, which caused him to shake his hand with great energy, and clap the tips of his suffering fingers to his mouth. The act was simple and natural, but the result was wonderful. He rolled his eyes in ecstatic pleasure, his frame distended, and, conscious of a celestial odour, his nostrils widened, and, while drawing in deep inspirations of the ravishing perfume, he sucked his fingers with a gusto he had never, in his most ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... usually in such a case? We can judge by recalling what happens when we are in the society of a mental inferior. We say things of which he misses the import; we joke, and he does not smile; what makes him laugh loudly seems to us horseplay or childish; he is blind to beauties which ravish us; he is ecstatic over what strikes us as crude; and his profound truths are for us trite commonplaces. His perceptions are relatively coarse; our perceptions are relatively subtle. We try to make him understand, to make him see, and if he is ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... your art, if you preferred Drayma to opry, you'd be all the mustard; For you (ecstatic pressmen have averred) Have Sarah Bernhardt larruped to ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... had joined with song Of bird ecstatic, light, and free; Our laughter rollicked with the brook Running ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... to a fainting pink and fallen to the ground, and the laburnum was weeping golden tears which would soon drop to the pavements and blacken there; the red and white hawthorns were all out, and Henrietta's daily walks had been punctuated by ecstatic halts when she stood under a canopy of flower and leaf and drenched herself in scent and colour, or peeped over garden fences to see tall tulips springing up out of the grass; but to-day she ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... in death an expression of ecstatic happiness. Even the soldiers who guarded the cross were struck with wonder. Vivantius, accompanied by some of the Christian brethren, claimed the body, and buried it with the remains of the other martyrs in the crypt of St. John the ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... village, where children played on the green and a square-towered grey church seemed to watch over the steep-roofed cottages and creeper-covered vicarage. If she had been a happy American tourist travelling in company with impressionable friends, she would have broken into ecstatic little exclamations of admiration every five minutes, but it had been driven home to her that to her present companion, to whom nothing was new, her rapture would merely represent the crudeness which ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... "That's right," cried ecstatic Belle. "Honest confession is good for the soul. I'll admit that most men and women are made of dust—street dust at that—but Roger Atwood is pure gold. He has the quickest brain and steadiest hand of any fellow in the world, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... is not without honor, save he be a pessimist. The ecstatic prophecies of Isaiah did far more to restore the exiles of Israel to their homes than the lamentations of Jeremiah did to deliver them from ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... it was some ju-ju affair. They had a sort of box which they carried on poles, and their dresses were peculiar, and abnormally ample over the upper part of their body. They were prancing about in an ecstatic way round the box, which had one end open, beating their drums and shouting. They were fairly close to me, but fortunately turned their attention to another bit of undergrowth, or that evening they would have landed another kind of thing to what they were after. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... might suppose would be characteristic of such ecstatic natures, was cherished between the two celebrated Spanish mystics, Saint Theresa and Saint John of the Cross. The fullest expressions of it may be found in their respective writings, now translated into many languages, and easy of access almost ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... face. She sits beside a mossy well Amid some dim marmoreal place, Some fragrant Moorish hall Set all about with arabesques of stone And intricate mosaics of gem and shell. She sings again, she plays a monotone, Perpetual rhythm like a far-off bell, And someone dances, in a dancing river The white ecstatic limbs flutter and quiver Against the shadow. In the odorous flowers That grow about the well, still forms are lying, A group of statues, an eternal throng, Watching the dance and listening to the song; ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... scheming, mixing and mingling, and succeeding—not only in the money-winning, but also—until the Agatha Geddis incident came along—in the field of good repute. At the last Agatha had set me free, and Polly's love had opened the ultimate door of supreme happiness; a joy so ecstatic that at the end of the honeymoon I was only beginning to realize ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... substances having passed away. He was at that time, I should suppose, fifteen or sixteen years old; and at that period of life he certainly appreciated the general beauty of the composition, and felt the more passionate passages; for his features and exclamations were ecstatic. How often have I in after-times ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... unexpectedly to himself and Carlotta, he had her in his arms and was covering her face with kisses. Carlotta's cheeks flamed. She was no longer a lily, but a red, red rose. Never in her life had she been so frightened, so ecstatic. With all her dainty, capricious flirtations she had always deliberately fenced herself behind barriers. No man had ever held her or kissed her like this, the embrace and kisses of a lover to ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... commission, and especially since he had joined the active army and taken part in the battle of Vyazma, Petya had been in a constant state of blissful excitement at being grown-up and in a perpetual ecstatic hurry not to miss any chance to do something really heroic. He was highly delighted with what he saw and experienced in the army, but at the same time it always seemed to him that the really heroic exploits were being performed just where he did not happen to be. And he was always in a hurry ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... regarded me. I wanted to feel myself yours so closely and so dearly that you would not mind if any one told you that I had once cared, or thought I had cared, for another. The week of our marriage came; I was mad with gaiety and ecstatic with hope. Nothing had occurred to mar my prospects. No letter from Denver—no memento from the Klondike, no word even from Wallace, who had gone north with his brother. Soon I should be called wife again, but by lips I loved, and to whose language my heart thrilled. The past, always ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... case—you, for instance." He turned toward Mrs. Marteen. "I congratulate you," he smiled. "She's just the sort of a girl that should have a good time—the very best the world can give her; the world owes it. But aren't you"—and he lowered his voice—"just a little afraid of those ecstatic eyes? Dear child, she must keep all the pink and gold illusions—" The end of his sentence he spoke really to himself. But an expression in his hearer's face brought him to sudden consciousness. Quite unexpectedly he had surprised fear in ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... savages watched them die. Have you ever thought what it means? But of course you have, for like myself you are cursed with imagination. God in heaven! is it wonderful that it gets upon the nerves? especially when one cannot find what one is looking for, that vast treasure"—and his face became ecstatic—"that shall yet be yours and mine, and ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... Mathesis alone was unconfined, Too mad for mere material chains to bind,— Now to pure space lifts her ecstatic stare, Now, running round the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Krishna found its classic expression. In the Hari-vamsa and Vishnu-purana religious emotion is still held under a certain restraint; but in the Bhagavata it has broken loose and runs riot. It is a romance of ecstatic love for Krishna, who is no longer, as in the Vishnu-purana, the incarnation of a portion of the Supreme Vishnu, but very God become man, wholly and utterly divine in his humanity. It dwells in a rapture of tenderness upon the God-babe, and upon the wanton play of the lovely child ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... she cried, giving him an ecstatic shake. "I do; an' I love you, too, Scotty, you're a dear!" Scotty looked slightly ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... that Horseleech!" "When Vampyre is once drawn out, what a great creature it is!" These, and similar ecstatic eulogiums, have I frequently heard murmured forth from muzzy mouths into tinged and tingling ears, as I have been leaving a company of choice spirits. There never was a greater mistake. Horseleech, to be candid, far from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the Berlin public first saw its Barberina dance, and wrote ecstatic Latin Epigrams about that miracle of nature and art; [Rodenbeck, pp. 111, 190.]—miracle, alas, not entirely omissible by us. Here is her Story, as the Books give it; slightly mythical, I judge, in some of its non-essential parts; but ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... sensible effect upon the body: it feels to counteract gravity, it makes the body feel so light it is about to leave the ground; it affects walking, and unaccountably changes it to staggering. To receive this attraction can be an ecstatic condition, but is by no means ecstasy. So long as we have power to move the body by will we are not in true ecstasy. In ecstasy the body feels to be disconnected in some unaccountable manner from the will; it lies inert, though it knows itself and knows that it stills lives—which ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... Bertin too was a dreamer, and even his common-sense, his precocious irony did not protect him from impossible hopes and generous schemes for the renovation of the human race. How fair the future had appeared to their youthful eyes! And in those moments of ecstatic vision how their hearts had seemed to melt together ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... ecstatic breath. "Well, for a girl who has always felt that she didn't really belong anywhere, that is a prospect that would just about turn my head if I hadn't found a new chart and compass to steer by. As for the 'old gentleman,' if you don't ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... in range and nature were the communings of Wade Ruggles, who until this eventful evening, had cherished a hope, so wild, so ecstatic, so strange and so soul-absorbing that he hardly dared to admit it to himself. At times, he shrank back, terrified at his presumption, as does the man who has striven to seize and hold that which is unattainable ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... one letter from his betrothed—a letter that transfused him with ecstatic joy for about a day, and then sent him back to his old unrest. This, however, may be taken as a part of Marx's curious nature, which was never satisfied, but was always reaching after something which ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of laughter or the shrill notes of the musical instruments. These are the banjo and accordion, the former being the favorite, perhaps because it is more intimately associated with the social traditions of the negroes. Their best performers play very skilfully on both, and indulge in as much ecstatic by-play as musicians of the most famous schools. They throw themselves into many strange contortions as they touch the strings or keys, swaying from side to side, or rocking their bodies backward and forward till the head almost reaches the floor, or leaning ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... clear notion of a living bond between himself and men of like sort in the ancient world. Greek and Roman civilization was to him no dead and buried antiquity, but its poets and thinkers lived again as if they were his neighbors. His love for the past amounted almost to an ecstatic enthusiasm. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... get considered. Certain contentions are rejected because they will not stand criticism. Public opinion formed in this way has the character of a judgment, rather than a mere unmeditated expression of emotion, as in the crowd. The public is never ecstatic. It is always more or less rational. It is this fact of conflict, in the form of discussion, that introduces into the control exercised by public opinion the elements of rationality ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love, and never lose again. God bless you, and support you ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... ecstatic fury of the singing-birds reached such a deafening climax that their mistress was obliged to pause in her communication, and to go round the room dropping extinguishers of silk and muslin over the cages. ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... in London," she answered, clapping her hands and gazing with ecstatic pride at all her treasures. "It will be wonderful. Oh, Geoffrey, Geoffrey, you are so good to give ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... ecstatic welcome, Muriel took her place on the hockey-field that afternoon with a heavy heart. Her long attendance upon Daisy had depressed her. But gradually, as the play proceeded, she began to forget herself and her troubles. The spring air exhilarated her, and when they returned to the field after ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... experienced merit the appellation of love. Well, at twenty-nine I saw Valentine; for two years I have loved her, for two years I have seen written in her heart, as in a book, all the virtues of a daughter and wife. Count, to possess Valentine would have been a happiness too infinite, too ecstatic, too complete, too divine for this world, since it has been denied me; but without Valentine the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sense and perception of the presence of the invisible in the visible, of the infinite in the finite, of the ideal in the real, of the divine in the human, and, in ecstatic moments, of very God in man, accompanied with a burning desire to impart to others the vision revealed; distinguished as "seraphic" from insanity as "demonic" by this, that the inspired man sees an invisible which is there, and the insane an invisible which ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Mr. Orgreave, who had wandered, smiling enigmatically, to the sofa. His legs, like the whole of his person, had a distinguished air; and he held up first one slippered foot and then the other to the silent, sham-ecstatic inspection of the girls. "He may look in again, later on. It's evidently Hilda he wants to see." This said, Mr. Orgreave lazily sank into an easy chair, opposite the sofa, and lighted a cigarette. He was one of the most industrious ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... lofty and inquiring mind that to arrive at the end he seeks he must enter by some other door than that of painful and useless austerities, and hence that the teachings of the Brahmans are fundamentally wrong. He discovers that no amount of austerities will extinguish desire, or produce ecstatic contemplation. In consequence of these reflections a great change comes over him, which is the turning-point of his history. He resolves to quit his self-inflicted torments as of no avail. He meets a shepherd's daughter, who offers him food ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Joy's ecstatic trial: He, with viny crown advancing, First to the lively pipe his hand addrest: But soon he saw the brisk awakening viol Whose sweet entrancing voice he loved the best: They would have thought who heard the strain They ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... me, and lifted her hands with a gesture of ecstatic gratitude. A lovely, angelic brightness flowed like light from heaven over her face. For one moment she stood enraptured. The next she clasped me passionately to her bosom, and whispered in my ear: "I am Mary Dermody! I made ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... passionate. Sleepy eyes that see everything. An indolent purposeful step. An unimaginable grace. If you were /her/ lover, my boy, you would learn how fierce love can be, how capricious and sudden, how hostile, how ecstatic, how violent! ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... rendered. It is not a rare thing to see spectators go into raptures on these occasions, for I have seen few places where nature and art so harmonize and unite in producing scenes of enchanting beauty and creating feelings of ecstatic delight, as here on Champs Elysees. The atmosphere of Paris, too, is preeminently soft and balmy, and the temperature so even that ladies may sit in the most brilliant attire all evening in the open air under the trees of this pleasure-garden without the least danger of contracting ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... the keyholes, especially at night, when Beth would hide her head under the bed-clothes to keep out the racket, or, in another mood, lie and listen to it, and imagine herself out in the storm, till her nerves were strung to a state of ecstatic tension, and her mind fairly revelled in the sense of danger. When her father was at home in the evening, she would sit still beside the fire in the sitting-room, listening in breathless awe, and excitement wholly pleasurable, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... and consummate effect of the work; the artists would suffer no inferior hands to pack and despatch it to the sea-side; peasants greeted its triumphal progress;—the people of Richmond were emulous to share the task of conveying it from the quay to the Capitol hill; mute admiration, followed by ecstatic cheers, hailed its unveiling, and the most gracious native ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... to describe that waltz. It was one of the ecstatic moments which Young Joy sometimes tosses from her garlanded arms. It was one of the sudden, vivid, unforgettable delights which makes youth a fever and a desire. For Billy it was the wildest stab the sex had ever dealt him. For though this was perhaps the nine thousand nine ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... peculiar pride, On earth my brother, and in heav'n my guide! Methinks I see thee reach th' empyrean shore, And heav'n's full chorus hails one angel more; While 'mid the seraph-forms that round thee fly, Thy father meets thee with ecstatic eye! He springs exulting from his throne of rest, Extends his arms, and clasps ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... dear? ah! do not say that. I had celestial, ecstatic dreams; ecstasies, you know. My soul held converse with other souls—like your own soul. Angels smiled at me through the foliage of the cypress-trees—and so forth, ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet |
