"Mystic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But that mystic exaltation was not the only experience that he had of it: it recurred several times, but never with the intensity of the first. It came always at moments when Christophe was least expecting it, for a second only, a time so short, so sudden,—no longer than a wink of an eye or a raising of a hand—that ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... other persons. Human faculty is everywhere identical although the form in which it is expressed differs according to education, the presence of certain dominating ideas, and the general influence of one's environment. To admit the claim of the mystic is to surrender all hope of a scientific co-ordination of life. It is quite fatal to the scientific ideal and involves the re-introduction into nature of a dualism the removal of which has been one of the most ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... has it, "we now say farewell," with no further knowledge than that vague tradition says he was "levitated." The writer now leaves classical antiquity behind him—he does not repeat a saying of Plotinus, the mystic of Alexandria, who lived in the third century of our era. The best known anecdote of him is that his disciples asked him if he were not sometimes levitated, and he laughed, and said, "No; but he was no fool who persuaded you of this." Instead of Plotinus, we are referred to a mass of Jewish ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... there was still a demand for certain comfortable little nostrums (delicately sweet and pungent to the taste, cheering to the spirits, and fragrant in the breath), the proper distillation of which was the airiest secret that the mystic Swinnerton had left behind him. And, besides, these old ladies had always liked the manners of Dr. Dolliver, and used to speak of his gentle courtesy behind the counter as having positively been something to admire; though of later years, an unrefined, and almost rustic simplicity, ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Twenty thousand men, under the command of Colonels Ward, Pribble, Heath, Prescot, and Thomas, officers who had served in the provincial regiments during the last war, put themselves in cantonment, and formed a line nearly twenty miles in extent, with their left leaning on the river Mystic, and their right on the town of Roxburghe, thus enclosing Boston in the centre. Their headquarters were fixed at Cambridge, and they were soon joined by a strong detachment of troops from Connecticut, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... more than casually heard of the existence of the other.[1] At length, amongst the books which, were procured for him by the high, priest of Saffragam, was one which proved to be this neglected commentary on the mystic and otherwise unintelligible Mahawanso; and by the assistance of this precious document he undertook, with confidence, a translation into English of the long lost chronicle, and thus vindicated the claim of Ceylon to the possession ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... we have been saying. The Jews, in respect of their dramatic culture, seem more like one who enjoys Shakspeare in the closet; the Greeks, like those who are tolled off to the theatre to see him acted. The Greeks would have contrived a pair of bellows to represent the whirlwind; mystic, vast, inaudible, it passes before the imagination of the Jew, and its office is done. The Jew would be shocked to see his God in a human form; such a thing pleased the Greek. The source of the difference is to be sought in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... sensitiveness, and what frantic sensibility; what earthquakes of the heart and whirlwinds of the soul are confined in that simple phrase, a schoolboy's friendship! Tis some indefinite recollection of these mystic passages of their young emotion that makes grey-haired men mourn over the memory of their schoolboy days. It is a spell that can soften the acerbity of political warfare, and with its witchery can call forth a sigh even amid the callous ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... night! Some hearts were bowed, But some amid the waiting crowd Because of too much youth Felt not that mystic ruth; ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... noise arising from the care and haste whose only aim was to gain money; there was darkness because of mystic fears and dreams there was narrowness and suffocating because of ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... in a penny, blushing and tittering; a faint musical tinkle is heard from the case, and the little fairies begin to revolve in a solemn and mystic fashion; growing excitement of crowd. A pasteboard bower falls aside, revealing a small disc on which a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 20, 1891 • Various
... about them. The rugged mountain-side with its chaos of riven boulders, its forest of splintered rocky spires, silver cold in the twilight, its impassive bulk looming so large, yet a mere segment in the circling range, was as a day-dream of some ancient Valhalla, clothed in the mystic glory of ever-changing light, and crowned ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the next day's life. Its bells had had no influence in restoring me to consciousness of existence. I never have liked metallic commanders. Now Jeffy's Ethiopian tones were inspiriting, and to their music I began the mystic march of another day. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... of France, Dawn of the whole world's morning, when the trance Of all the world had end, and all its woes Respite, prophetic of their perfect close. Light of all tribes of men, all names and clans, Dawn of the whole world's morning and of man's Flower of the heart of morning's mystic rose, Dawn of the very dawn of very day, When the sun brighter breaks night's ruinous prison, Thou shouldst have risen as yet no dawn has risen, Evoked of him whose word puts night away, Our father, at the music of whose word ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the two were one. Then he caught up another piglet and pushed it into the first, where it disappeared. And so, one by one, the nine tiny piglets were pushed together until but a single one of the creatures remained. This the Wizard placed underneath his hat and made a mystic sign above it. When he removed his hat the last piglet ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... which diamonds are fashioned. It makes my heart beat but to imagine the glorious show of deep-hued burning, flashing, stinging light! The heaviest of its hues was borne light as those of a foam-bubble on the strength of its triumphing radiance. There pulsed the mystic glowing red, heart and lord of colour; there the jubilant yellow, light-glorified to ethereal gold; there the loveliest blue, the truth unfathomable, profounder yet than the human red; there the green, that haunts ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... supreme virtue in the eyes of the Church, the mystic key to Christian holiness. Continence was one of the most sacred pretensions by which the organized preachers of superstition claimed the reverence of men and women. It was identified, therefore, in a particular manner ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... the year 1656, several of the people called Quakers, led, as they professed, by the inward movement of the spirit, made their appearance in New England. Their reputation, as holders of mystic and pernicious principles, having spread before them, the Puritans early endeavored to banish, and to prevent the further intrusion of the rising sect. But the measures by which it was intended to purge the land of heresy, though more than sufficiently vigorous, ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... Christianity, but of all morality;—the very words virtue and vice being but lazy synonymes of prudence and miscalculation,—and which ought to be expunged from our vocabularies, together with Abraxas and Abracadabra, as charms abused by superstitious or mystic enthusiasts. ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... butterflies had visited the mound, the thyme had flowered, the wind sighed in the grass. The azure morning had spread its arms over the low tomb; and full glowing noon burned on it; the purple of sunset rosied the sward. Stars, ruddy in the vapour of the southern horizon, beamed at midnight through the mystic summer night, which is dusky and yet full of light. White mists swept up and hid it; dews rested on the turf; tender harebells drooped; the wings of the finches fanned the air—finches whose colours faded from the wings how many centuries ago! Brown autumn dwelt ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... hidden in thy chamber lowest As in the sky the lark, Thou, mystic thing, on working goest Without the poorest spark, And yet light's garment round me throwest, Who else, as thou, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... Franklin Square. But as a matter of fact, in whatever hostile regions he may have sojourned, he never quite lost his residence in the supersensual world. Somehow he succeeded in reaching Franklin Square and becoming an editor without ceasing to be a mystic. ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... fancied in its early autumnal tones something Florentine, something Venetian, but, after all, it is not quite either, even when the tones of these are crudest. It is the subtlest, the most penetrating expression of the New York temperament; but what that is, who shall say? That mystic air is haunted little from the past, for properly speaking there never was a city so unhistorical in temperament. A record of civic corruption, running back to the first servants of the Dutch Companies, does not constitute municipal ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... extracted the sheet of parchment, printed in black letter with red capitals, that had been used to line the binding. A corner of it had crept out, through the injuries of time, and on that, in Bell's "crame" (for it is more a crame than a shop), I had caught the mystic words ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... find Food for the fever of his mind. Eager he read whatever tells Of magic, cabala, and spells, And every dark pursuit allied To curious and presumptuous pride; Till with fired brain and nerves o'erstrung, And heart with mystic horrors wrung, Desperate he sought Benharrow's den, And hid him from the haunts ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... hall seemed to have donned strange carnival clothes, for a mystic Saturnalia. It was literally swaddled in bedquilts,— tumbler-quilts, rising-suns, Jacob's-ladders, log-cabins, and the more modern and altogether terrible crazy-quilt. There were square yards of tidies, on wall and table, and furlongs of home-knit lace. Dilly looked at this product of the patient ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... as chests of plate, with vast shells medallioned and orbed like shields, and dented and blistered like shields that have breasted a battle, shaggy, too, here and there, with dark green moss, and slimy with the spray of the sea. These mystic creatures, suddenly translated by night from unutterable solitudes to our peopled deck, affected me in a manner not easy to unfold. They seemed newly crawled forth from beneath the foundations of the ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... strange guest more indulgently than he had looked yet. "You are the only mystic I have met with," he said, "who is willing to give fair evidence fair play. I don't despair of converting you before our inquiry comes to an end. Let us get on to the next set of events," he resumed, after referring for ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... society pleasant when they sat round the stove on long cold nights, for the priest had been trained in Europe and knew the great world as he knew the Canadian wilds. A scholar and something of a mystic, he was marked by a wide toleration and liberality ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... Stanley, "amid the festivities which attended this joyful and magnificent occasion, seemed to be unmoved. Whether she failed to enter into its spirit, or was disgusted with the mystic dances in which her husband shared, the stately daughter of Saul assailed David on his return to his palace—not clad in his royal robes, but in the linen ephod of the priests—with these bitter and disdainful ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... ends the epilogue. The reader may label it as he pleases. Its significance is obvious from the circumstances of its employment. It rings out fortissimo when the mystic chorus, which stands for the Divine Voice, puts the question, "Knowest thou Faust?" An angelic ascription of praise to the Creator of the Universe and to Divine Love is the first vocal utterance and the last. In his notes Boito observes: ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... pieces of betel-nut is then brought in and uncovered, and the contents examined to ascertain the will of the gods. Should the pieces of betel-nut, by some mystic power, increase in number, the marriage will be an unusually happy one; but should they decrease, it is a bad omen, and the marriage must be postponed or relinquished altogether. But, as a matter of fact, they neither increase nor decrease, ...
— Children of Borneo • Edwin Herbert Gomes
... that it does not own a certain allegiance to the claims of age, of childhood, of sensitive and timid natures, when they plead with it not to look at those sacred things by the broad daylight which they see in mystic shadow. How grateful would it be to make perpetual peace with these pleading saints and their confessors, by the simple act that silences all complainings! Sleep, sleep, sleep! says the Arch-Enchantress ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... only the symbol of a tree. The story of the tree of good and evil, and the tree of life, has been the origin of many superstitious notions regarding trees. The notion that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was an apple tree, caused the apple to have a great many mystic meanings, and gave it a prominent place in many legends, and also brought it into prominence as a divining medium. In many parts of Scotland the apple was believed to have great influence in love affairs. If an apple seed were shot between the fingers ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... music as my principal dependence; and ideas of harmony rising in my brain, I imagined, that if placed in a proper situation to profit by them, I should acquire celebrity, and presently become a modern Orpheus, whose mystic sounds would attract all the ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... a broken and mysterious picture. A boy of quick and enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... songs of the great Indian mystic—Kabir. Let me read you more. It is like the singing of a lark, lost in the infinite of light ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... the days of S. Thomas was the saint's scientific method more lacking. Everywhere there is need for a mystic doctrine, which in itself is neither hypnotism nor hysteria, and in its expression is neither superlative nor apostrophic, lest the hungered minds of men die of ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... a sudden order draws him from visionary meditation. Dreams, which may be the creation of indigestible junk—that is, salt beef which may have been round the Horn a few times—are realities: privileged communications from a mystic source. There is great vying with each other in the relation of some grotesque nightmare fancy, which may have lasted the twentieth part of a second, but which takes perhaps a quarter of an hour to repeat; ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... the poetical theory of Mallarme and of the French Symbolists enunciated in this definition and commendation of 'that class of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one'? To this 'mystic or secondary impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always a distinct, but an august soul-exalting echo.' Has ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... insect pay grateful homage. In Egypt, India, China, Japan, Persia, and Asiatic Russia, how many millions have bent their heads in adoration of her relative the sacred lotus! From its centre Brahma came forth; Buddha, too, whose symbol is the lotus, first appeared floating on the mystic flower (Nelumbo nelumbo). Happily the lovely pink or white "sacred bean" or "rose-lily" of the Nile, often cultivated here, has been successfully naturalized in ponds about Bordentown, New Jersey, and may be elsewhere. If he who planteth a tree is greater ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... of this ethical character occur in the Phaedo. The first may be described as the aspiration of the soul after another state of being. Like the Oriental or Christian mystic, the philosopher is seeking to withdraw from impurities of sense, to leave the world and the things of the world, and to find his higher self. Plato recognizes in these aspirations the foretaste of immortality; as Butler and Addison in modern times have argued, the one from the moral tendencies ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... heaving. All her limbs were gracefully reclining, Set at rest by sweet and godlike balsam. Gladly sat I, and the contemplation Held the strong desire I felt to wake her Firmer and firmer down, with mystic fetters. ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... meerschaum mounted with silver: Ireneus several pieces of silk worked by his cousins, and a wooden cup, very beautifully carved by an Angermanian peasant. Exclamations were made as the different objects were detached from the mystic tree, for Alete had taken care to wrap each article with a double and triple envelope, in order to prolong the expectation of the spectators, and to enjoy their surprise. Afterward the servants came in, and also ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... brief sentences in which compliment played no insignificant part. To Brant, as he marked the heightened color flushing her fair cheeks, the experience brought back fond memories of his last cadet ball at the Point, and he hesitated to break the mystic spell with abrupt questioning. Curiosity, however, finally mastered ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... 'right here'; intensely so, taking in everything around her. I was very much attracted towards her in this way, not as a youth would be towards a maiden—there was none of that feeling whatever. I felt she was a mystic, a powerful one, and she interested me greatly. When sitting in the room with all the members of the family, I noticed at times she would eye me very closely; and if I returned the gaze I saw such an expression in her face as if she did not belong here at all, but was living ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... against another; still less by any criticism, hostile or friendly, as it may be, of the methods of Christian work, or of the parity and elevation of the character and motives of the workers. Humanity is one, linked by a mystic chain, and every link of it should thrill by a common impulse; and through all the members there should circulate a common life. That great thought is one of the gains that the Gospel has brought us, and in the presence of it and our ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... head." Many well-informed persons, however, are of the opinion that Morgan was hired to go to Smyrna, where he lived some years, and then died; but his real or supposed assassination awakened a profound popular indignation. Some good men who belonged to the "mystic tie" felt it their duty to dissolve their connection with it, and the Anti-Masonic party was at once got up by a goodly number of hopeful political aspirants. As General Jackson and Mr. Clay were both "Free and Accepted ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Bathing, exercise and diet had to be followed according to prescribed custom. Among the Cherokee the partaking of rabbit was forbidden, because the animal is "timid, easily alarmed and liable to lose its wits"; so if the player ate of this dish, he might become infected with like characteristics. Mystic rites were sometimes performed to prepare the player so that he would be successful. ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... to human sight, Ye gods, who rule the regions of the night, Ye gliding ghosts, permit me to relate The mystic wonders of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... caricature. It has been my aim to subdue and tone down the persons introduced, and the general agencies of the narrative, into the lights and shadows of life as it is. I do not mean by "life as it is," the vulgar and the outward life alone, but life in its spiritual and mystic as well as its more visible and fleshly characteristics. The idea of not only describing, but developing character under the ripening influences of time and circumstance, is not confined to the apprenticeship of Maltravers alone, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Isis in those rites At Coptos held, I hail her when she lights Her first young crescent on the holy stream— When wandering youths and maidens watch her beam And number o'er the nights she hath to run, Ere she again embrace her bridegroom sun. While o'er some mystic leaf that dimly lends A clew into past times the student bends, And by its glimmering guidance learns to tread Back thro' the shadowy knowledge of the dead— The only skill, alas, I yet can claim Lies in deciphering some new loved-one's name— Some gentle missive hinting ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... essay, DR. F. HARTMANN, an enlightened author of the Theosophical and Occult school, presents the mystic or Oriental view of man, in an interesting manner, deducing therefrom a philosophy of the healing art. My readers will no doubt be interested in his exposition, and, as the ancient doctrine differs materially ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... mystic twist is spinning, And the infant's life beginning, Dimly seen through twilight bending, Lo, what ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... overnight, by the help of a cigar and a moonlight contemplation on deck, for sensations on landing in Egypt. I was ready to yield myself up with solemnity to the mystic grandeur of the scene of initiation. Pompey's Pillar must stand like a mountain, in a yellow plain, surrounded by a grove of obelisks as tall as palm-trees. Placid sphinxes brooding o'er the Nile—mighty Memnonian countenances ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... his loose-box without a pitchfork. I seen him pull his jockey off by the toe of his boot afore now. But him!—he's a Christian. A child could go in to him and climb on to his back by way of his hind-leg. Look at them 'ocks," he continued in the low, musing voice of the mystic. "Lift you over a house. And a head ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... the God by whom the sinner who has faith is restored and justified. From this conception as a starting-point, Luther acquired fresh strength and energy for advancing in the fight, whilst the pious mystic remained passively and quietly behind. From this also he learned to realise Christian liberty and moral duty in regard to daily life and its vocations, whilst the mystics remained shut off altogether from ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... and from which women are shut out; nor is the method of it shut off from any woman or any man. 'I counsel you to study sanctification,' wrote Rutherford, the same year to the Lady Cardoness. And if you think that Rutherford was a closet mystic and an unpractical and head-carried enthusiast, too good for this rough world, read his letter to Lady Cardoness, and confess your ignorance of this great and good man. 'Deal kindly with your tenants,' ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... snow-crested peaks of the Sawtooth Mountains, like frosted spires against an amber sky. Soon the amber would change to amethyst and deepen to purple—fading at last to a shadowy gray; and all the world seemed steeped in the mystic calm of those twilight hours before the ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... enjoyed the joke too much to afford the others any light on the subject. Haven was delighted with the motto, and moved that it be accepted. As it had been furnished by the Grand Protectress, it was unanimously adopted. The weak scholars were very curious to know the meaning of the mystic words. Most of them could make out a part of the sentence, but not enough to translate it. The business of the meeting was completed, and the members separated, all of them feeling that the mutiny of the Young America was more like a merrymaking than anything else. To be decorated with the ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... quality you lack, an eagerness for reality and truth and life as it is. Brian has painted poorly what he saw but he painted boats for ragged sailors. Real boats. You've painted brilliantly, in the pine picture for instance, what you wanted to see, a dark forest for mystic folk to dance in when the moonlight lies ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... insight to translate, transpose and transfigure this mournful object of pity into an exalted, dignified personage, worthy our worship as the mother of the race, are to be congratulated as having a share of the occult mystic ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Their relationship became mystic, symbolic, solemn, and filled with a deep religious awe; she had dreams where Father La Combe appeared to her—afterward she could not tell whether the dream was a vision or a reality. When they met in reality, she construed it into a dream. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... again the original subject, and so finally the end. The most notable features of this novelette are its vigor, the different forms in which the subjects return, and the persistence of the two main ideas—the march and the lyric trio—which form the substance of it. The mystic and fugue-like interlude is merely an interlude. It perhaps represents one of those moments when the mind is too full for clear utterance—a condition more celebrated in fiction than ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... moment of inspiration got hold of the tail of a really musical idea—a perfect accompaniment for the song he had so kindly given her. She had scrawled, as a specimen, a few bars at the end of her note, mystic, mocking musical signs which had no sense for her correspondent. The whole letter testified to a restless but rather pointless desire to remain in communication with him. In answering her, however, which he did that night before ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... controversialists, and also of St. Augustine and the Bible, and the teaching of Wishart, raised him from a mundane life. Then he awoke to a passionate horror and hatred of his old routine of "mumbled masses," of "rites of human invention," whereof he had never known the poetry and the mystic charm. Had he known them, he could not have so denied and detested them. On the other hand, when once he had embraced the new ideas, Knox's faith in them, or in his own form of them, was firm as the round ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... bliss", that the "Church expectant" and the "Church militant" are not two Churches, but the one Church of Christ in two places and in two states, on earth and in Paradise, fighting and waiting; that they have still "mystic sweet communion" in praise and worship and prayer—the Church in Paradise leading our worship as the choir leads ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester
... power excelling, here in stately temple dwelling, O Iacchus! O Iacchus! Come to tread this verdant level, Come to dance in mystic revel, Come whilst round thy forehead hurtles Many a wreath of fruitful myrtles, Come with wild and saucy paces Mingling in our joyous dance, Pure and holy, which embraces all the charms of all the Graces ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... spiritual isolation, and the passionate love of this master-mystic for his dead wife are so finely rendered that the reader's sympathies go out at once to this most pathetic and lonely figure....It would be difficult for any sensitive man or woman to follow Philip Aylwin's story as related by his son without the tribute of aching heart and scalding ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... to an examination of doctors and learned men touching her faith and the character of her visions, which all this time had been of continual recurrence, yet charged with no further revelation, no mystic creed, but only with the one simple, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... as much as Tommy could do to get hold of an approximation to the name of the town. And besides these renamings, other inscriptions flamed about the streets; alphabetical hieroglyphs, in which the mystic letters H.Q. most often appeared; "This way to the Y.M.C.A. hut"; in many humble windows the startling announcement, "Washing done here." British motor-lorries and ambulances crowding the little place and ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... by the general of his division. These American officers had heard such stories; they regarded England with a kind of worship. As men who hoped to be brave but were untested, they found something mystic and well-nigh incredible in such utter courage. The consumptive racing across the Atlantic that he might do something for England before death took him, made this spirit ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... consult her, and she had no lead. There was a border of lead, however, over the attic window outside. All she had to do was to steal upstairs, climb out of the window on to the roof, and cut a piece of the lead off. It was now the mystic moment to obtain lead, but she must be wary. She strolled through the kitchen in a casual way. Harriet was busy about the grate, and paid no attention to her; so she secured the carving-knife without difficulty, went up to the attic, and opened the window. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a huge palm. Eleanor has sometimes "wished" by it with Carol, pretending there is some mystic spell ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... all that had been promised and they sat through its mystic-scenes with rapt attention, comparing notes enthusiastically in the intervals when the curtain was down, and when it was over they came out into the daylight with that peculiar sensation of unreality in the daylight world that ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... indicated by the composer as requiring advanced technique for performance, are full of poetical thought and tonal beauty that make them worthy of study. Many of them possess that Nature tone painting, that mystic, subtle romanticism of whispering tree-tops and elfin glades, that freshness and open air spirit which distinguish MacDowell's ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... of the Sabbath," that is, Saturday; whom Wallin suspects to be of Jewish origin, relying, it would appear, principally upon their name. The ringing of the large bell suspended to the middle pole of the tents at sunset, "to hail the return of the camels and the mystic hour of descending night," is an old custom still maintained, because it confers a Barakat ("blessing") upon the flocks and herds. Certainly there is nothing of the Bedawi in this practice, and it is distinctly contrary to the tradition of El-Islam; yet many such survivals ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... their 'negotiator' or business man. It was Le Coq who made the yearly trips to Quebec for supplies, and who with infinite labour brought many heavy burdens over the difficult trails. Brebeuf had proved himself essentially an enthusiast for souls, a mystic, a spirit craving the crown of martyrdom, yet withal a man of great tact, and a powerful exemplar to his fellow-priests. Lalemant, while lacking Brebeuf's dominating enthusiasm, was a more practical man, with great organizing ability. ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... power and miraculous gifts of the early Church. But when the pure doctrine became corrupted, and the Christian Church (like the Jewish of former times) gave itself up to idolatry, masses, image-worship, and the like, the knowledge of the mystic name was withdrawn, and all miracles have ceased in the Church from ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... prosaic-minded would have designated a lady's-maid, but who had risen from that humble position to be no less than Chancellor of State to her sovereign majesty, Miss Ocky. The two women had shared the ups-and-downs, the sunshine and shadow, of that mystic, colorful Orient through whose extent the restless curiosity of the younger had led them to and fro. Out there the line between mistress and servant had inevitably been supplanted by the bond of companionship; but when they returned to ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... la Torre, was her confessor, she wrote an Introduction to the History of the Most Blessed Virgin. It was destroyed by the direction of another confessor. Later on, by the order of her superiors, and under the guidance of her Franciscan confessor, Andres de Fuen Mayor, she wrote The Mystic City of God. It is an extraordinary book, full of apocryphal history, visions and scholasticism, which professes to have been written by divine inspiration, and is devoted to praise of the Virgin. In 1642 she sent to Philip IV. an account ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... saw a slowly-stepping train - Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar - Following in files across a twilit plain A strange and mystic form the ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... heart that music cannot melt? Alas! how is that rugged heart forlorn! Is there, who ne'er those mystic transports felt Of solitude and melancholy born? He needs not woo the Muse; he is her scorn. The sophist's rope of cobweb he shall twine; Mope o'er the schoolman's peevish page; or mourn, And delve for ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... take off her glasses. The worst quarter-hour when, though the roads were an amethyst rich to the artist, they were also a murkiness exasperating to the driver, yet still too light to be thrown into relief by the lamps. The mystic moment when night clicked tight, and the lamps made a fan of gold, and Claire and her father settled down to plodding content—and no longer had to take the ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... it a good And God-like discontent. It springs from the soul that longs for its goal— For the source from which it was sent. Then surge, O breast, with thy wild unrest— Cry, heart, like a child at night, Till the mystic shore of the Evermore Shall dawn on ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... was never any friction, until now. Now, the problem of all these past years is dumped right in my lap. I don't know how to handle it. I am desperate for advice, so desperate that I now seek the counsel of the Oracle of the Footlights, the Mystic of the Sawdust Ring. Wilt thou help me, Sire?" concluded Adine, as she bowed in mock distress to the little man squirming ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... A mountainous and mystic brute No rein can curb, no arrow shoot, Upon whose domed deformed back I sweep the planets ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... other's last embrace, They sobbed and wailed. When they at last had done Their weeping and their cry arose no more, A silence followed; all at once a voice Called him, and made the hair of each of us That heard it stand on end with sudden fear. Repeatedly it called, that mystic voice, "Oedipus, linger thou no more," it said, "Thine hour is come; too long is thy delay." He, hearing the celestial summons, called For our King Theseus to draw near to him; And when the King drew near, he said, "Dear Prince, Pledge to my ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... a railway to the moon? Yet every building of brick or wood is a hint of that high railroad; every chimney points to some star, and every tower is a Tower of Babel. Man rising on these awful and unbroken wings of stone seems to me more majestic and more mystic than man fluttering for an instant on wings of canvas and sticks of steel. How sublime and, indeed, almost dizzy is the thought of these veiled ladders on which we all live, like climbing monkeys! Many a black-coated clerk in a flat may comfort himself for his sombre garb by reflecting that ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... unusual, fitting into nooks, and often taking up and bearing burdens the brothers left behind. But when many people who had either daughters or nieces of their own, and might be said to be in that mystic ring called "Society," congratulated me pointedly about the boys, I began to ponder about the matter mother-wise. Then, three years ago the New York Colony seized upon the broad acres along the Bluffs, and dotted two miles with the elaborate stone and brick houses ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... grown artistic, Talk a jargon new and strange? Will this feeling, subtle, mystic, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 25, 1893 • Various
... the Franciscans who began this new intellectual movement in the persons of the Englishman, Alexander of Hales (died 1245), who was the first to be able to use the whole of the Aristotelian writings, and his pupil, the mystic Bonaventura (died 1274). But the scholastic philosophy as it is taught to this day was the work of the two great Dominicans, Albert of Bollstadt, a Suabian, known as Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), and ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... "flutter the dove-cots in Corioli," than did the advance of the supposed X. Y. agitate the bosoms of Lord Spendquick and his sympathizing friends. Pocket-book in hand, and apparently feeling for something formidable within its mystic recesses, step by step came Dick Avenel towards the fireplace. The group stood ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... went back down Carl Johann. It was now about eleven. The streets were fairly dark, and the people roamed about in all directions, quiet pairs and noisy groups mixed with one another. The great hour had commenced, the pairing time when the mystic traffic is in full swing—and the hour of merry adventures sets in. Rustling petticoats, one or two still short, sensual laughter, heaving bosoms, passionate, panting breaths, and far down near the Grand Hotel, a voice calling "Emma!" The whole street was a swamp, from which ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... and lighted the fire in three places, then handed the torch to Kathleen as he crept again into his mother's lap, awed into complete silence by the influence of his own mystic rite. Kathleen waved the torch to and fro as she recited some beautiful lines written for some such purpose as that which called ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the picturesque imaginings of the oriental poet from the charm of all that is languorously seductive in nature into the shadowy realms of the supernatural. At one moment the sturdy bowman or lithe and agile lancer is before us in hurrying column, and at another we are told of mystic sentinels from another world, of Djinns and demons and spirit-princes. All seems ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... "O mystic Lady; Thou in whom alone Our human race surpasses all that stand In Paradise the nearest round the throne! So eagerly I wait for thy command That to obey were slow ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... truth. He knew it now, despite the longing that Cairo, the real Cairo of the strange, dimly-lit and brightly-tinted interiors, of the shrill and weary music, of the painted girls and the hashish smokers, and of that voice which cried aloud in the mystic hour the acclamation of the Creator—had waked in his Eastern nature to sink into the life which his ancestors knew—the life of the Eastern Jews. He knew what his real ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... look over the "Personals," for I know well the connection between fortune and the Press. I have not forgotten the success of A.T. STEWART and many other millionaires, and their dependence on the newspapers—but never until that day had I seen any thing in that mystic column which could possibly be construed to apply to inc. As for the rest of the paper, I knew that there was nothing to interest me there. You see I was after Fortune. The advertisement to which I refer ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... softly, in a voice as sweet as the voices of the women who sang the praises of the mystic Venus in the secret ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... degree melancholy—like the tune of a long ballad; and its harmony grave and gentle, sad and tender: it would be unendurable else. The loneliness of women in the country makes them of necessity soft and sentimental. Leading a life of calm duty, constant routine, mystic reverie,—a sort of nuns at large—too much gaiety or laughter would jar upon their almost sacred quiet, and would be as out of place ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in short, for the body what the mystic's ecstasy is for the soul. Intoxication steeps you in fantastic imaginings every whit as strange as those of ecstatics. You know hours as full of rapture as a young girl's dreams; you travel without fatigue; you chat pleasantly with your ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... would lose the ship." Meredith's mind wandered back to her hurried home-leaving; the dread that the ship that was to bear her from the Philippines might have gone. The mystic Ship upon The Rock was all that was needed ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... returned the Wise One, smiling. He stepped to an ancient chest, deeply carved with mystic signs, that stood quite by itself in a corner of the hut. From out that chest many magic gifts had come, when need was great. Filled to the brim with treasures as it always was, none saw aught within but those gifts which were ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high. The manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and, moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white water, the foam racing down from the summit of each wave, requiring a new leap, and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully bumping a crest, she would slide, and race, and splash down a ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... mystic circles and went to the sideboard for a drink. In the evening, when the exaltation of the day had died down, he went to the sideboard again, and after some visits became convinced that the eye-doctor was a liar, since he could still see ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... she stood before me, whom I'd sought, With dying hope, through life's decaying years— A form, a spirit, human yet divine. Love gave her eyes the light of heav'n, and taught Her lips the mystic music of the spheres. Our beings met,—I felt her ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... drawn of Gordon as a gloomy ascetic, wrapped up in mystic thoughts, retiring from all communion with the world, and inspiring fear rather than affection. I can only describe him as he appeared to me. Far from being a gloomy ascetic, he always seemed to me to retain ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... a very dull, stupid bird, with a look almost idiotic, and is seldom seen except by the sportsman or the tramper along marshy brooks. But for a brief season in his life he is an inspired creature, a winged song that baffles the eye and thrills the ear from the mystic ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... voluminous Judeo-Hellenic literature, of which but a few, though characteristic, specimens have descended to us. The intermingling of Greek philosophy with Jewish religious conceptions resulted in a new religio-philosophic doctrine, with a mystic tinge, of which Philo is the chief exponent. In Jerusalem, Judaism appeared as a system of practical ceremonies and moral principles; in Alexandria, it presented itself as a complex of abstract symbols and poetical allegories. The Alexandrian form ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... phase of actual experience may we not find a hint from which to study the words of Jesus to his disciples,—"It is expedient for you that I go away." Through that mystic silence that fell between them on His departure from the visible world, there thrilled the sense of a communion so near, so exalted, so divinely sweet, that it could never have been theirs in the external ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... it was over we hurried to the drawing-room. Even those who loved their after-dinner wine joined the ladies, as if in expectation of something wonderful. The truth was, it had gone around that Mr. Voltaire was going to tell us a story concerning the mystic rites that are practised in Eastern lands, and the subject was an attractive one. The ladies especially, evidently fascinated by the witchery of this man's presence, anxiously waited ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking |
