"Mystical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... He was tall and slender, with a wide chest, oval countenance, black eyes, and his dark brown hair set off the paleness of his brow. His imposing but modest appearance inspired at the first glance favour and respect. His voice clear, impressive, and full-toned; his majestic carriage, his somewhat mystical style, commanded the reflection, as well as the admiration, of his auditors. Equally adapted to the popular tribune or the pulpit, electoral assemblies or cathedral were alike too circumscribed in limits for the crowds who flocked to hear him. It seemed as though he were ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... was an artist: she expressed herself in music as I did in painting. Our temperaments were alike though our gifts were different, and we served the same mystical Goddess though our appointments in her temple were not ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... should call her, but according to her own statement, Jeanne (or, as M. Michelet asserts, Jean [Footnote: "Jean":—M. Michelet asserts that there was a mystical meaning at that era in calling a child Jean; it implied a secret commendation of a child, if not a dedication, to St. John the evangelist, the beloved disciple, the apostle of love and mysterious visions. But, really, as the name was so exceedingly common, few people will detect a mystery in ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... round table, and treated her with marked consideration—cordial but courteous, and easy, with a certain degree of deference. His wife, who piqued herself on her perception of character, threw her brown velvet eyes on her neighbour, Mr. Penruddock, and cross-examined him in mystical whispers. She soon recognised his love of nature; and this allowed her to dissert on the subject, at once sublime and inexhaustible, with copiousness worthy of the theme. When she found he was an entomologist, and that ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... her aunt in a kind of mystical transport. A great light of joy, almost of pride, was ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... Nahemah (students will recognize its significance), began to display even more marked evidence of a sort of monomania. Bast, the cat-goddess, became an obsession with her, and she finally conceived the idea that the attributes of that mystical and partly-understood deity were active within her; that she was Bast, re-born. And, certainly, during one month of every year, her condition closely resembled that which was termed in the Middle ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... months, but to Chris since his twelfth birthday, and the latter had formed with him a kind of peaceful confederacy, often looking in on him at unusual hours, always finding him genial, although very rarely confidential. It was to Mr. Carleton, too, that Chris owed his first drawings to the mystical life of prayer; there was a shelf of little books in the corner by the window of the priest's room, from which he would read to the boy aloud, first translating them into English as he went, and then, as studies progressed, reading the Latin as ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... boundaries of sense and meet; or as to Matthew Arnold a refuge from pain and disillusionment. Browning regards the world about him more in the sane, unsentimental, straightforward, intelligible way of Chaucer or of Shakespeare. The mystical elements in Wordsworth's feeling for nature were foreign to Browning's mind. An instructive comparison might be made between Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" and Browning's "Prologue to Asolando." The poems have the same starting point. Each one ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... God in Prayer.—In prayer there would sometimes come upon me such a sense of the Presence of God that I seemed to be all engulfed in God. I think the learned call this mystical experience; at any rate, it so suspends the ordinary operations of the soul that she seems to be wholly taken out of herself. This tenderness, this sweetness, this regale is nothing else but the Presence of God in the praying soul. At the same time, I believe ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... relaxation of this severity. Besides, communion is not absolutely necessary to salvation, and one may communicate spiritually in reading the word, which is like the body; in uniting oneself with the Church, which is the mystical substance of Christ; and in suffering for Him and with Him, this last communion of agony that is your portion, madame, and is the most perfect communion of all. If you heartily detest your crime and love God with all your soul, if you have ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... never added his voice to a medley of music. If moved to sing while others were doing so, he first reduced them to silence by a peculiar mystical call, which had a marked effect not only upon every bird in the room, but upon the human listeners as well. This call cut into the ripple of sweet sounds about him like a knife, loud, sharp, and incisive, instantly ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of life—angels, and the signs of heaven, and the labours of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these, another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... times in which his days were spent, his travels, his army life, his periods of professorship, we can not help but wonder at the amount of writing Mickiewicz did. And his life was not a long one; it did not reach to sixty years. But during the working years allotted him, before a mystical melancholy—which was threatening to degenerate into madness—had impaired his faculties, his mind was unusually brilliant, creative and marvelously disciplined. It obeyed at will. At one time he was professor of Latin in Lausanne; at another ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz
... my children. Forget not, ye Romans, that I say so much. When the seed needs rain it falls. Sarishan, brothers and sisters all." And with this strange speech, mystical to the last, she rode away into the setting sun, on the gray donkey, looking more like an almshouse ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... hard forms of marble: he sculptured with his pencil; and that cold austerity of tone, still more remarkable in his last pictures, as it became mannered, chills the spectator on a first glance. When POPE was a child, he found in his mother's closet a small library of mystical devotion; but it was not suspected, till the fact was discovered, that the effusions of love and religion poured forth in his "Eloisa" were caught from the seraphic raptures of those erotic mystics, who to the last retained a place in ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... bride with the first chant of forever united, and consequently holy love. It hallows at the baptismal font the introduction of the infant into the mystical oneness of the children of Christ. Even at the grave it softens human sorrow by its heavenly whisperings of eternal union in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... a flaming arrow of death fell on his flock, and pierced the heart of his dearest! Silent the music now, as the shepherd entered the mystical temple of sorrow: Long he tarried in darkness there: but when he came out ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... it, with now a strip of sun, now a shadow, he thought that there was something strange and wild about it. He knew not why, but the idea came to him that once upon a time there were many strong and brave heroes in these mystical regions who had passed through many dangerous and daring adventures. The old passion of wanting to share in all sorts of wonderful adventures ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... have been constructed to explain the phenomena of embryological development. Of these the simplest and least mystical is that of His in the great classic work on embryology, "Unsere Koerperform." His tells us: "In the entire series of forms which a developing organism runs through, each form is the necessary antecedent step of the following. If the embryo is ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... spiritual and corporal, that were to be the types of all works of mercy ever afterwards. He gave spiritual and ascetic teaching on the Mount of Beatitudes, dogmatic instructions in Capharnaum and the wilderness to the east of Galilee, and mystical discourses in the Upper Chamber of Jerusalem and the temple courts. His activities and His proselytisms were unbounded. He broke up domestic circles and the routine of offices. He called the young man from his estates and Matthew from custom-house ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... goddess Cybele, built while the Roman Empire was yet heathen, and while Constantinople was still called by the name of Byzantium. It is well known that the superstition of the Egyptians—vulgarly gross in its literal meaning as well as in its mystical interpretation, and peculiarly the foundation of many wild doctrines,—was disowned by the principles of general toleration, and the system of polytheism received by Rome, and was excluded by repeated laws from the respect ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... what is most disagreeable, whether proceeding from God or the world." "The way of God consisteth not in ways of devotion or sweetness, though these may be necessary to beginners, but in giving ourselves up to suffer." And so we must fly from all "mystical phenomena" (supernatural manifestations to the sight, hearing, and the other senses) "without examining whether they be good or evil." "For bodily sensations bear no proportion to spiritual things"; since the distance "between God and the creature is infinite," "there is no essential ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... some deep-chested organ whose grand inspiration, Serenely majestic in utterance, lofty and calm, Interprets to mortals with melody great as its burthen The mystical harmonies chiming for ever throughout ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Teresa, who reformed the Carmelite Order, and died in 1582, is sometimes called the Doctor of Mystical Theology, because of her luminous writings on the relations of the soul with God ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... of pagan antiquity he loved as intensely as if it were not alien and hostile, as the many thought, to that glow of spiritual piety, that zeal of martyrdom, that white, consuming splendor which for the mystical imagination surrounds the holy cross. Humanism at its best is ordinarily thought to be embodied in the many-sided figure of Erasmus, with his sanity, his balance, his power to see both sides, that of Luther and of the Church, his delicate satire, his ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... poet of great imagery praised as a great mystic. Nevertheless, although a great mystical poet makes images, he does not do so in his greatest moments. He is a great mystic, because he has a full vision of the mystery of realities, not because he has ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... remorselessly back. Full tides of longing beat pitilessly upon his senses, never, it seemed, to ebb again. And yet, at times, when his whole soul so cried out for her that he stretched his arms, in yearning, toward the myriad phantom Ediths that peopled the room, mystical assurance would come from somewhere that she, too, was ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... on the altar and the home, and there had been some of the open tumults which seem in Rome to express every social emotion. But the clericals had triumphed, and an observer more anxious than I to give a mystical meaning to accident might have interpreted the disfiguring ribbon over Bruno's bronze lips as a new silencing ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... far more pretentious affair—a sort of army and navy seminary combined, where mystical mathematical problems were solved by the midshipmen, and great ships-of-the-line were navigated over imaginary shoals by unimaginable observations of the moon and the stars, and learned lectures were delivered upon great guns, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... according to its mystical interpretation, we have a summary description of the state of the Church, from the coming of the Savior to the end of the world. For the Lord constrained his Disciples to get into a ship, when he committed the Church to the government of the Apostles and their followers. And thus ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... her bosom heaved, and she began to wiggle her bottom. For some time she played with the hair which thickly covered my mount of Venus—twisting it around her fingers, she then gently divided the folding lips and endeavored to penetrate the interior of the mystical grotto—but she could not effect an entrance but was obliged to satisfy herself with titillating the inside of the lips. Suddenly flows of pleasure shot through my entire body—for her finger had come in contact with the peeping ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... illustrated by R. Machell. A collection of the weirdest tales ever written down. They contain paragraphs of the profoundest mystical philosophy. Cloth ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... abide, indefinitely again, till in the same large impersonal way it was pulled and pushed out on the platform beside the track, where a freight-car marked for the Hill Country division of the road, with devices intelligible to the train-men, had been shunted down by a pony engine in obedience to mystical semaphoric gesticulations, from the brakeman risking his life for the purpose among the rails, addressed to the engineer keeping his hand on the pulse of the locomotive, and his head out of the cab window to see how near he could come to killing the ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... detected in her frank, direct look—madness, which invariably betrays itself in conversation, which it involuntarily interrupts by sudden, irregular, and eccentric outbreaks, was nowhere discernible in Lady Hester's exalted, mystical, and cloudy, but sustained, connected and ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think! There is nothing mystical about the fact that ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-binding activities. Humans are thus made untrue to "human nature." Hypnotism is a known fact. It has been proved that a man can ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... chores at his home in Pennsylvania. It was the boys who faced and conquered hard physical jobs that became the men of endurance later." He had seen and shared the devotion of the missionary spirit, and had seen, too, how largely it failed of fruit by being spent on supernatural conversion and mystical emotion. He knew the tropical temperament, common to Hawaiian and negro,—how accessible to transient fervor, how deficient in persistence and continuity. He had watched his father's operations, as minister ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... them. Many of these, like those of the negroes in the United States, were extemporaneous, and allusive to events passing around them. But what was passing around them? The grand events of a spirit-stirring war; occurrences likely to impress themselves, as the mystical legends of former times had done, upon their memory; besides which, a retentive memory was deemed a virtue of the first water, and was cultivated accordingly in those ancient times. Ballads at first, and down to the beginning of the war with Troy, were merely recitations, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... the first body of these worshippers gathered together in the wilderness mainly from the seaboard aristocracy of the Church of England. A small frame building on the northern slope of the wide valley served them for a meeting-house. No mystical half-lights there but the mystical half-lights of Faith; no windows but the many-hued windows of Hope; no arches but the vault of Love. What more did those men and women need in that land, over-shadowed always by the horror of quick or ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... Shakspere did in poetic expression, Abraham Lincoln essentially did in his personal and official life. I should say the invisible foundations and vertebra of his character, more than any man's in history, were mystical, abstract, moral and spiritual—while upon all of them was built, and out of all of them radiated, under the control of the average of circumstances, what the vulgar call horse-sense, and a life often ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... answer and then it is harder still to find out its meaning. I imagine that Linnet and Marjorie, even Will Rheid, would not understand that; but you and I are not led along in the easiest way. It must be because the answer is worth the hard work: his Word and Spirit can interpret all his involved and mystical answers. Think with a clear head, not with any pre-formed judgment, with a heart emptied of all but a willingness to read his meaning aright, be that meaning to shatter your hopes or to give bountifully your desire—with a sincere and abiding determination ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... those concerning which we wish to be informed. The words of Jesus went forth full-freighted with vitality. They were truly spirit and life, because charged with a virtue that can only come from a soul in submission to the law by his lips enunciated. Hence we see why, in the mystical language with which the Gospel of St. John begins, he is called the Logos, Reason or Word of God, from God and one with God, because he reveals the divine thought concerning man, inherently perfect from the first, but requiring time and space for its ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... the hopes of another restoration are in the follies of the Republic, a little reflection on that eloquence of ruin ought to put the Republic on its guard. A sentimental tourist may venture to remark that in the presence of several chateaux which appeal in this mystical manner to the retrospective imagination, it cannot afford to be foolish. I thought of all this as I drove back to Blois by the way of the Chateau de Cheverny. The road took us out of the park of Chambord, but through ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... of fantastic subjects,—somewhat in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe—has made me more susceptible for all that world which lies beyond and about the world of every-day life. I have sought after,—and yet feared—the mystical; cool and lucid as I can be at times, I have always had an inclination for the ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... noblest power of your nature. It forms your whole life, be it what it will. All evil and all good come from your heart. Your heart alone has the key of life and death for you.' I was just about to ask you at this point which of our two authors, our allegorical or our mystical author upon the heart, you like best. But that would be a stupid and a wayward question since you have them both before you, and both at their best, to possess and to enjoy. To go back then to John Bunyan, and to his ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... his eyes shining. "There is beauty in every line and Truths that we have forgotten in the rush of modern life. A reconciliation and proof of the interrelationship between the Mystical and the Concrete. By manipulation of symbols he ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... her mother. They were both brown-eyed, and inclined to be mystical, such women as treasure religion inside them, breathe it in their nostrils, and see the whole of life in a mist thereof. So to Miriam, Christ and God made one great figure, which she loved tremblingly and passionately when a tremendous sunset burned out the western sky, and Ediths, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... has written broad comedy like Synge's Shadow of the Glen and Lady Gregory's Irish Comedies; his Pot of Broth is a most clever retelling of an old, comical tale. But it is by his mystical and poetical plays that he would be judged as playwright and poet—particularly Deirdre, which should be compared with Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows; The Unicorn of the Stars, written in collaboration with Lady Gregory; Cathleen Ni Hoolihan, a dramatization of the spirit ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... regnancy of a false and fantastic philosophy, yet shot through with refracted light from the not risen but rising truth,—a scheme of physics and physiology compounded of Cartesian mechanics and empiricism (for it was the credulous childhood of experimentalism), and a corrupt, mystical, theurgical, pseudo-Platonism, which infected the rarest minds under the Stuart dynasty. The only not universal belief in witchcraft and apparitions, and the vindication of such monster follies by such men as Sir M. Hale, Glanville, Baxter, Henry More, and a ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... Breughel. Lastly, the Miserere of Josquin de Pres, choirmaster of Louis XII., has, like the panels of the Early Masters of Burgundy and Flanders, a patient intention, a stiff, threadlike simplicity, but also it exhales like them a truly mystical savour, and its awkwardness of outline is ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... was not renewed. Philip was rather averse to Amine practising those mystical arts, which, if known to the priests, would have obtained for her in all probability the anathema of the Church. He could not but admire the boldness and power of Amine's reasonings, but still he was averse to reduce them into practice. The third day had passed away, and ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... smile, her very attitudes, seemed to wear a curious expression of everlastingness. Yes, she would sit just like that, and he and Jenny would sit near her for ever and ever. No mere abstractions like Time and Space could fill with emptiness the place where she now sat and smiled. In some mystical way eternity had breathed upon this hour and given it immortality. It had been suddenly touched with a wand into an enchanted permanence. Theosophists tell of an astral light, where every moment of time endures in strange paintings upon space. Isabel and Theophil ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical. ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... many sympathies with the teaching of Carlyle, himself a spiritual descendant of the old Covenanters. But his intellect, as I have also remarked, unlike Carlyle's, was of the thoroughly utilitarian type. Respect for hard fact, contempt for the mystical and the dreamy; resolute defiance of the a priori school who propose to override experience by calling their prejudices intuitions, were the qualities of mind which led him to sympathise so unreservedly with Bentham's legislative theories and with Mill's 'Logic.' Let us, before all ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... extraordinary compositions which may mean anything—that is, if the meaning can be discovered. Felix had a pleasant voice, though it was not very strong, and the music was pretty, while the words were mystical. The ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... supply it with a nervous system accustomed to the kind of vibrations required, and an environment favourable to the early development of the physical centres of these faculties; to assist a being whose scientific, mystical, or metaphysical side needs to be developed, other environment and parentage will be chosen, and it is this relative parallelism existing between the moral qualities of the parents and those of the children which has deceived observers insufficiently ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... to us; and among these, twenty are in the Bohemian language. His style has a classical perfection; the contents of his works are manifold, and have mostly lost their interest for the present age.[37] In the last years of his life Comenius is said to have devoted himself to a mystical interpretation of the prophetic Scriptures; he discovered in the Revelation of St. John the state of Europe, as it then was; awaited the millennium in the year 1672; and believed in the far-famed ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... the subject of this paper, has reference to the bearing of the public toward the labors of the medical man in meeting the effects of the low wave of heat. The public, looking on the doctor as a sort of mystical high priest who ought to save, may often be dissatisfied with his work. Let the dissatisfied think of what is meant by saving when there is a sudden fall in the thermometer. Let them recall that it is not ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... that they therefore speak of two stones, a celestial and a terrestrial. The celestial stone is the eternal blessedness and, as far as the Christian world of ideas is considered, is Christ, who has aided mankind to attain it. The terrestrial stone is the mystical Christ whom each may cause to be crucified and resurrected in himself, whereby he attains a kingdom of heaven on earth with those peculiar qualities that have been allegorically attributed to the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... the average reader might have to consult the dictionary for the precise meaning of "Crystalline" [clear, unalloyed], "Runic" [old-fashioned, mystical], "Tintinnabulation" [bell-ringing], "Monody" [a monotonous sound], "Ghouls" [imaginary evil beings supposed to prey upon human bodies], and "Paean" [a song of triumph]. The pupil should understand that except in the rare cases where mere sound helps us, we learn wholly ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... this. There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future—and that freedom is an ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practised by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... and we the branches, deriving thence life for ourselves? Hear Paul saying 1 Cor. 10, 17; Rom. 12, 5; Gal. 3, 28: We are all one body in Christ; although we are many, we are, nevertheless, one in Him; for we are all partakers of that one bread. Does he perhaps think that the virtue of the mystical benediction is unknown to us? Since this is in us, does it not also, by the communication of Christ's flesh, cause Christ to dwell in us bodily? And a little after: Whence we must consider that Christ is in us not only according to the habit, which we call love, but also by natural participation, ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... is born of longing to embrace a lofty, victorious personality. In real life she has found the fulfilment of her longing in her husband, the strange prophet who as half a Turk gathered about himself in Munich a queer circle of auditors for his mystical Oriental philosophy. To his memory she erected a dutiful monument in her last work Isebies (1911), an apology for her own life, her longing, her seeking, and her salvation. But even in this work ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... frivolity. He published The Purse, Mme. Firmiani, A Study of a Woman, The Message, La Grenadiere, The Forsaken Woman, Colonel Chabert (which appeared in L'Artiste under the title of Transaction), The Vicar of Tours, and he composed that mystical work which cost him so much pains that he almost succumbed to it, the Biographical Notice of Louis Lambert. At the same time he corrected, improved and partly rewrote The Chouans and the newly published Magic Skin, with a view to new editions, ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... with ideas of filial duty perplexed, and with a fitful love for either, that was not attachment: a baffled natural love, that in teaching us to brood on the hardness of our lot, lays the foundation for a perniciously mystical self-love. He had waged precociously philosophic, when still a junior. His father had kept him by his side, giving him no profession beyond that of the obedient expectant son and heir. His first allusion to the youth's dependency had provoked their first ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... madness. She had caught up a light shawl, which she extended from hand to hand, as if she were dancing with some one, and then she proceeded to execute a slow waltz in this circumscribed space, humming the improvised music in a mystical and rhythmical manner. And what were these dark utterances that the inspired one gave forth, as she glanced from time to time at her ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... occasionally touched upon such subjects as death, was, as we have seen, informed with inspiring Hellenic beauty rather than depressing Hebraic moralization. It was in his sad moments, says Henry C. Whitney, that the mind of Lincoln "gravitated toward the weird, sombre and mystical. In his normal and tranquil state of mind, 'The Last Leaf,' by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was his favorite" (poem). It was Lincoln's happy lot to rise in the realm of oratory by the power of his poetic spirit higher than any American, save probably Emerson, has done in other ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... a very intelligent and learned priest. He was superior of a community, and he directed, here in Paris, the only review which ever was really mystical. He was a theologian much consulted, a recognized master of divine jurisprudence; then he had distressing quarrels with the papal Curia at Rome and with the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris. His exorcisms and his battles ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... legend and it relates how Joseph of Arimathea—that good man and just, who laid our Lord in his own sepulcher, was persecuted by Pontius Pilate, and how he fled from Jerusalem carrying with him the Holy Grail hidden beneath a cloth of samite, mystical and white. ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... an improvisation, like that of his "musing organist," for it was written, we are told, almost at a single sitting, entirely within two days. The theme may have been suggested by Tennyson's Sir Galahad, but his familiarity with the old romances and his love of the mystical and symbolic sense of these good old-time tales were a quite ample source for such suggestion. Moreover Lowell in his early years was much given to seeing visions and dreaming dreams. "During that part of my life," ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Andrew's. He exactly trod in the footsteps of his predecessors; and that not only in uncleanness, taking men's wives from them for his concubines, (as the popish clergy must not be married) but was also a violent oppressor and persecutor of Christ's gospel in his mystical members. Adam Wallace and Walter Mill were by his direction committed to the flames. Again, when Mr. Knox went with the lords to preach at St. Andrew's, he raised 100 spear-men to oppose him. He had a hand in most of the bloody projects, in the queen regent's management. ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... The particular story of Malicorn is said to be taken from a narrative in Rosset's Histoires Tragiques, a work which the present editor has never seen. In the conference between Malicorn and Melanax, Dryden has made much use of his astrological knowledge; and its mystical terms give a solemnity to the spirit's predictions, which was probably deepened by the poet's secret belief in this visionary study. As he borrowed liberally from Davila in the other parts of the play, he has not here disdained to use the assistance of Pulci, from whose romantic poem he has ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... in the deep blue twilight, Under that palm with the lion's mane, Would pluck, once more, at his golden heart-strings, And tell him the old sea-tales of Spain; And there should the daughters of Hesperus teach him Their mystical songs again. ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... drawn to the same media of expression: pianoforte, solo voices and orchestra. And yet, so dissimilar were the underlying strains in their temperaments that their compositions, as an expression of their personalities, show little in common. Schumann, as we have seen, was fantastic, mystical, a bold, independent thinker, the quintessence of the Romantic spirit. Mendelssohn, on the other hand, though not lacking in poetic fancy and warmth, was cautious—a born conservative; and his early classical training, together with the opulent circumstances of his life, served as a natural ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... of such talks as did seem to penetrate the question was this, that among these stop-the-war people there are really three types. First there is a type of person who hates violence and the infliction of pain under any circumstances, and who have a mystical belief in the rightness (and usually the efficacy) of non-resistance. These are generally Christians, and then their cardinal text is the instruction to "turn the other cheek." Often they are Quakers. If they are consistent they are vegetarians and wear Lederlos boots. They do not desire police ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... Sect. 1. That mystical significations are placed in the controverted ceremonies, and that they are ordained to be sacred signs of spiritual mysteries, to teach Christians their duties, and to express such holy and heavenly affections, ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... Restitution of all Things. In that famous Line of Time, from the Decree for the Restoring of Jerusalem, after the Babylonish Captivity, there seem to remain a matter of Two Thousand and Three Hundred Years, unto that New Jerusalem, whereto the Church is to be advanced, when the Mystical Babylon shall be fallen. At the Resurrection of our Lord, there were seventeen or eighteen Hundred of those Years, yet upon the Line, to run unto, The rest which remains for the People of God; and this Remnant in the Line ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... one girl is standing straight up; and nothing of her is reflected in the pool but a glimmer of white feet. This picture, however, has not the intense pathos and tragedy of the Beguiling of Merlin, nor the mystical and lovely symbolism of the Days of the Creation. Above these three pictures are hung five allegorical studies of figures by the same artist, all worthy ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... in some other mystical natures, a certain something had been developed in the soutar not unlike a spirit of prophecy—an insight which, seemingly without exercise of the will, sometimes laid bare to him in a measure the thoughts and intents of hearts in which he was more than usually ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... private box at a theatre, and is in fact the tribune reserved for the masters of the Castle. (In former days those masters were the Sforzas. So, from this tribune, the members of that race of iron and blood, of fierceness and of guile, have assisted at the mystical sacrifice of the Lamb of God!) Heretofore, during John's residence at the presbytery, the tribune had stood vacant. To-day it was occupied by Maria Dolores and Frau Brandt. Maria Dolores, instead of wearing a hat, had adopted the ancient and beautiful ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... with a shrug. "Nothing to get mystical about. Patterns. Just patterns. Every environment leaves the stamp of its matrix on the individual shaped in it. It's a personnel man's trade to recognize the make of a person, just as you would recognize the make ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute- player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any one told him of this picture that 'all the thoughts and experience of the world had etched and moulded ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... all this influence of cities is of a worldly, immoral, irreligious character; what must be its blasting power on the general interests of religion! It was when the pretended successor of Peter established his authority in Rome, that that mystical Babylon became "the mother of harlots," and "made the nations drunk with the wine of the wrath of her fornications." And not until the angel shall "cry, with a mighty and strong voice, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen," will the strong man armed be vanquished, and ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton
... still invisible, but now evidently present monitor. At the least imperfection in her conduct, before she had time to accuse and to condemn herself, she felt the blow of a mysterious hand, the warning of an ever-attentive guardian; and the sound of that mystical chastisement was audible to others also. Great was the astonishment of those who could thus discern something of God's dealings with this chosen soul. Once, when she had abstained through human respect ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau, Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of humanity as the higher and more divine." (Dowden, III.) Within the last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of instinct in men, reaching its climax ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... is on the wings of adoration that the soul has at all times striven to rise to heaven to find its God, even though it flutters but a little height and soon falls again to the ground, then we must admit that from the beginning there has been a mystical element, or a tendency to mysticism, in religion. In the lowest, and probably in the earliest, stages of the evolution of religion, this tendency is most manifest in individual members of the community, who are subject to 'possession,' ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... and the violin give her a fluttering drape. But there are things to be seen. This is not the Aphrodite of the Blue Danube waltz—but a duskier, more mystical lady. There are no roses on her cheeks, no lilies in her skin. She is colored like a panther flower and her limbs are heavy with taboo magic. But she is still imperial. In vain the mountebanks and burlesqueries ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... or carelessness; but he was accused of having poisoned his patient. This event might have been expected to bring his career to an end; but it was not long before he recovered the confidence of the people whom he deluded with his mystical language and promises of cure. He had three methods of treatment, all consisting of baths—hot, tepid, or cold—preceded or followed by the taking of wonder-working medicines. Horatillavus treated every kind of disease, internal and external; he even practised midwifery, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... has been much studied lately, by Le Bon and other writers in France, by Mr. Graham Wallas in England. I think that Le Bon is in danger of making The Crowd a mystical, superhuman entity. Of course, a crowd is made up of individuals, who remain individuals still. We must not accept the stuffed idol of Rousseau and the socialists, 'The General Will,' and turn it into an evil spirit. There is no General Will. All we have a right to ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... din—of rattle and chatter—heedless, happy chaos, but in the pines the voice of every pine-spill is as a chord in the voice of all the rest, and the whole solemn, measured chant of it floats to us as the voice of the sky itself. It is as if all the mystical, beautiful far-things that human spirits know had come from the paths of Space, and from the presence of God, to sing in the tree-trunks over ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... PROVE all this by his interpretation of the Book of Revelation; by labored calculations based upon arithmetical principles, and algebraic formulae until then unknown, but which appeared mystical and appalling from the fact that they were incomprehensible. The book was written in a style well calculated to perplex, astonish, or terrify the readers, especially those who were not well stocked with intelligence. ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... subjects. This mythological and fabulous creation, composed as it was of scattered and discordant parts, then became a source of future punishments and rewards, in which divine justice was supposed to correct the vices and errors of this transitory state. A spiritual and mystical system, such as have mentioned, acquired so much the more credit as it applied itself to the mind by every argument suited to it. The oppressed looked thither for an indemnification, and entertained the consoling hope of vengeance; the oppressor expected by the costliness of ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... endowment of light and lustre simply, and the mystical curve of the lids. For so they could look only because the heart was disengaged from them. They were but ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... word in the newspaper. With many very young children, concern about their own origin seems to arise spontaneously. "Where did I come from, Mother?" It is a natural question, yet it has a certain mystical quality, coming as it does from within and reaching ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... head in great plenty, and shone like silver in the moonlight. Straight as a pillar she stood before the astonished boy, and the wounded bird had now spread out both its wings across her bosom, like some great mystical ornament of ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... burnings That hope unsatisfied brings, The weary longings and yearnings For the mystical better things, Are the sands on which is reflected The pitiless moving lake, Where the wanderer falls dejected, By a thirst he never ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... gazing at her sleeping young master, whom her heart only could now see. At the first sign of his awaking she was on her feet with her hand upon the bell. On the arrival of the lamp Mavra would withdraw to the workroom. At night in her dreams she would continue her spiritual, almost mystical, contemplation of the beautiful fair ...
— The Little Russian Servant • Henri Greville
... to having waked early and not been able to hit it off again in a morning nap, though it appeared that they were adepts in that sort of thing. The hour of their vigils corresponded so nearly with that of Hewson's apparition that he wondered if a mystical influence from it had not penetrated the whole house. The adventitious facts were of such a nature that he controlled with the greater difficulty the wish to explode upon an audience so aptly prepared for it the prodigious ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... mystical side of her character now, as ever, came forward suddenly in the midst of her other interests. The sunshine was bright in the gaudy room. A tiny spaniel, which Elvira's senile slave had procured for her, lay on a red cushion in its ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... indigenes with Osiris Unnefer ("Hare God"). These are the lines upon which investigation should run. And of late years there is a notable improvement of tone in treating of symbolism or idolatry: the Lingam and the Yoni are now described as "mystical representations, and perhaps the best possible impersonal representatives of the abstract expressions paternity and maternity" (Prof. Monier Williams in "Folk-lore Record" vol. iii. part ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... rose from the water, assuming every imaginable and unimaginable shape in the uncertain light; while on the right the eye ranged over the inky lake till it was lost in thick darkness. A thin, transparent night-fog added to the mystical appearance of the scene, upon which I looked with mingled feelings of wonder and awe. The only distinct sound that could be heard was the measured sound of the paddles, which the men plied in silence, as if unwilling to break the stillness of the ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... instructed even in their phrases and speeches, I might have made valuable conjectures. But even their language, on these occasions, seems, by their own admission, beyond the learning of the 'linkisters.' It is a poetical, mystical idiom, varying essentially from that of trading and of familiar intercommunication, and utterly incomprehensible to the literal minds of mere trafficking explainers. Even were it otherwise, the persons hovering upon the frontier most ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Roman Catholic, her son a free-thinker, in the broadest significance of the term, if one might judge from the selections that adorned his library shelves. But deep in his soul was the germination of a mystical creed, which gradually ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... of Hawthorne is so dripping wet with the supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical—so surcharged with adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a poet of greater imaginative impulse than Emerson or Thoreau. He was not a greater poet possibly than they—but a greater artist. Not only the character of ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... of the festival Otare came and took us to see the mystical rite of cutting the "Flower ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... opinions: and as I had often enough heard it said that every man has his own religion at last, so nothing seemed more natural to me than that I should form mine too; and this I did with much satisfaction. The Neo- Platonism lay at the foundation; the hermetical, the mystical, the cabalistic, also contributed their share; and thus I built for myself a world ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... masters of craft and form. How in his wandering, laborious life, bound to the hack work of the press and crushed by an ever-growing burden of want and debt, did he ever come upon all this deep and mystical lore, this knowledge of all history, of all languages, of all art, this penetration into the hidden things of the East? As Steadman says, "The self training of genius is always a marvel." The past is spread before us all and most of us spend our lives in learning those ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... he must have worn it as an ornament. The grave he lay in was that of a Crusader, for the legs are crossed upon his brass, although his name has gone. Oh! here it is," and he produced an oblong piece of black graphite or some such stone, covered with mystical engravings. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... this reed fence she sits whenever the weather will allow, as I believe going through 'the rites of the Flower.' At least when I called upon her there one day, in a boat, I found her wearing a white robe and singing some mystical native song." ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... Now this mystical thing happened. As this son of a line of preachers brooded on this unlovely strife among men, he lost the equipoise of the scholar and student of modern history. He grew narrower and more intense. The burden of his responsibility as a preacher ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... modern science. Knowing little, and caring less for the depth and largeness of that heavenly Wisdom, on which the Apostle delights to expatiate, or the variety of those sciences, dogmatic or ethical, mystical or hagiological, historical or exegetical, which Revelation has created, these philosophers know perfectly well that, in matter of fact, to beings, constituted as we are, sciences which concern this world and this state of existence are worth far more, are more arresting and attractive, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... all, the red and the blue, the furious and the tranquil, the puritanical and the licentious, the mystical and the intemperate, those that had voted for the death of kings, and those in which the frauds in the grocery trade had been denounced; and everywhere the tenants cursed the landlords; the blouse was full of spite against broadcloth; and the rich conspired against the poor. Many wanted ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... In the mystical gloom which, in northern latitudes, precedes the summer dawn, Garth and Natalie, each leading a pack pony, rode through the Settlement, which straggled for several miles around the shore of Moose Bay, a wide, ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... property of any kind gives a curious consciousness of dignity to the human being who is its owner, due very likely to the traditional estimate of the importance of all possessions, and to the mystical but generally erroneous belief that property is in some way an outward and visible proof of the worth or the ability of its possessor—or his forbears. Even the possession of a possibility such as Clark's Field—which ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... in the top of their left ear, shoot the rapids of the first cataract. We stood, too, in the temple of Luxor, before the altar of Hathor, with the sunset on one side and the moonrise on the other, and heard what her votaries say to the Goddess of Beauty. It was so mystical that we almost joined in the worship of the Egyptian Venus Aphrodite. It was so still, so majestic, so aloof ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... dry land and congregated waters, as a sea, a river, a flood, are put for the people of several regions, nations, and dominions; embittering of waters, for great affliction of the people by war and persecution; turning things into blood, for the mystical death of bodies politic, that is, for their dissolution; the overflowing of a sea or river, for the invasion of the earth politic, by the people of the waters; drying up of waters, for the conquest of their regions by the earth; fountains of waters for cities, the permanent heads of rivers ...
— Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John • Isaac Newton
... form a magic barrier against the Jinn, after the fashion of the mystical circles used by ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... smile on his quiet face, Dead to the sting of a heart's disgrace.... How should I wish him a lesser grace, How should I strive with a wiser Will? Yet how can the heart that is reft divine Death's mystical, measureless charity? The cry of the stricken king is mine: "Would ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... and in the severe practice of monastic duties, repose and forgetfulness. She congratulated herself, however, upon her resolution, which she considers the accomplishment of an imperious duty; but she suffers continually, for she is not formed for those mystical contemplations, in the midst of which certain people, forgetting all affection, all earthly remembrances, are lost in ascetic delights. No; Fleur-de-Marie believes, prays, submits herself to the rigorous and harsh observance of her order; she pours out the most evangelical ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... blood Thy sempiternal food. Then let some little child, Some friend I shall not see, When the great dawn is gray, Some lover I have not known, In summers far away, Sit listening under thee. And in thy rustling hear That mystical undertone, Which made my tears run wild, And made ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... to relate how when the human being who has used this mystical ointment betrays his extended vision in some way to a fairy, the latter strikes or stabs him in the eye, thus depriving him not only of the etheric sight, but of that of the denser physical plane as well. (See The Science of Fairy Tales, ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... have been called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy of the Book of Martyrs are still legible the ill spelt lines of doggrel in which he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his implacable enmity to the mystical Babylon. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he handled the more commonplace subjects of thought or action with which ordinary men concern themselves, he seemed to miss the most obvious and palpable points. He was a philosophical thinker, with a natural bent towards the abstract and the mystical—a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian. He saw things invisible to grosser eyes; he heard voices not audible to ordinary ears; and, when he was once fairly launched in speculation on such a theme as Personal Identity or the Idea of ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... scene is so rich with a beauty mystical and idealistic that Monica draws instinctively nearer to Desmond, with that desire for sympathy common to the satisfied soul, and stirs her ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... his success; yet he was not a man to indulge in rank hypocrisy. He, accordingly, adopted a studied and ambiguous phraseology, which for long imposed upon the religious public, who put their own interpretation upon his mystical utterances, and gave him the benefit of any doubts. In the "Life of Sterling" he threw off the mask, but still was not taken at his word. Had there been a perfect tolerance of all opinions he would have begun as he ended; and ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... judgment.' In Moscow, during the prepetrean period, performances of nearly the same character, chosen especially from the Old Testament, were also in great favour. Apart from such plays, the world was overflooded with mystical writings, 'verses'—the heroes of which were always selected from the ranks of angels, saints and other heavenly citizens answering to the devotional purposes of the age. The recluses of our monasteries, ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... Once she had begun to write it was as though an unseen power guided her to inspiration. She wondered if somewhere under the stars Tom Gray was seeking, at the same time, to send her a message. Never before had she been so thoroughly imbued with the mystical impression of his nearness to her. It was not a long letter, yet somehow she had managed exactly to convey the meaning she had intended. As she was finishing it, she heard the distant chime of the grandfather's clock downstairs, striking the half hour, and she smiled tenderly ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... absolutely "uninteresting" to the average man—if, notwithstanding, he perceive devotion to these interests, he calls it desinteresse, and wonders how it is possible to act "disinterestedly." There have been philosophers who could give this popular astonishment a seductive and mystical, other-worldly expression (perhaps because they did not know the higher nature by experience?), instead of stating the naked and candidly reasonable truth that "disinterested" action is very interesting and "interested" action, provided that... "And love?"—What! Even an action for ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and her father, if not particularly gratifying to Darrow, had at least increased his desire to see the little girl. It gave him an odd feeling of discomfort to think that she should have any of the characteristics of the late Fraser Leath: he had, somehow, fantastically pictured her as the mystical offspring of the early tenderness ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... moment in art. Those lovely creations, so precisely drawn up to a certain point, so elusive beyond it, raised the feeling for pure beauty into a wholly ideal plane. The deepest longings of men were satisfied by the contemplation of a paradise in which we should be even as they. In that mystical portraiture of the invisible world an answer—perhaps the only answer—was found to the demand for an ideal of beauty. That remarkable saying preserved by S. Clement, of a kingdom in which "the two shall be one, and the male with the female neither male nor female,"[2] might form the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... one respect, recalls M. Zola's later hero, the Abbe Froment of 'Lourdes' and 'Rome.' He has the same loving, yearning nature; he is born—absolutely like Abbe Froment—of an unbelieving father and a mother of mystical mind. But unlike Froment he cannot shake off the shackles of his priesthood. Reborn to life after his dangerous illness, he relapses into the religion of death, the religion which regards life as impurity, which denies Nature's laws, and so often wrecks human ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... the agony of seeing some of them pass away; through the ambition of having him rise in his profession and through the ideal of making his home an earthly paradise; through loneliness when he was away and joy whenever he came back,—upon her whole life had rested the wintry benediction of that mystical phrase: ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... institution called Freemasonry. Whatever its origin, whether remote and derived from Solomon's Temple as its devotees assert, or, as seems more intrinsically probable, comparatively modern and representing one of the hundreds of semi-mystical fads which flourished in the age of Cagliostro, it had acquired considerable importance in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. At some unknown date it was carried across the Atlantic, and sprouted vigorously in America; but it does not seem ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... those who were speakers of the truth, but it turned into boiling water and scalded the wicked when they tried to drink of it. Chapter LXIV is an epitome of the whole Book of the Dead, and it formed a "great and divine protection" for the deceased. The text is of a mystical character and suggests that the deceased could, through its recital, either absorb the gods into his being, or become himself absorbed by them. Its rubric orders abstention from meats, fish and women on the part of those who were to recite it. Chapter LXV gave the deceased victory ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... "beautiful" need not to be erased; it was the very word that sprang naturally from the heart to the lips of every one when they met Maximus Grant. No Greek sculptor ever dreamed of a more perfect form and face; the latter illumined by noticeable grey eyes, contemplative and mystical, a face, thoughtful and winning, and constantly ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... against the tree-trunk and looked up through the dusky branches at the first faint stars glimmering in a quiet sky. The dreamy, mystical eyes, deep blue under black lashes, were an inheritance from his Cornish mother, and Montanelli turned his head away, that he ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... taketh away the sin of the world," and did not understand it. But a feeling almost of jealous envy stole into his heart toward the two disciples of the Baptist, who, hearing the witness, followed Jesus. His hungry soul echoed their "Where dwellest Thou?" in the mystical sense in which he instinctively read it, and he felt it would be joy indeed to hear that One say, "Come and see." Would he not come, indeed, if he ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... more," he cried once in accents of passionate belief. "The money was coming in all right." The deposits you understand—the savings of Thrift. Oh yes they had been coming in to the very last moment. And he regretted them. He had arrived to regard them as his own by a sort of mystical persuasion. And yet it was a perfectly true cry, when he turned once more on the counsel who was beginning a question with the words "You have had all these immense sums..." with the indignant retort "What have I had ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... an Easter for him! and doubtless we all who will by and by, as the world rolls round, receive the Holy Eucharist shall be in some way united to him as well as to all departed saints— members of His Mystical Body. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stimulation, to be manifested, or it may be transformed, in mere solitary physical sex activity, in dreams of the night, in day-dreams, in shapes of literature and art, in symptoms of nervous disorder such as some forms of hysteria, and even in the most exalted phases of mystical devotion. Since then, a more elaborate attempt to develop a similar dynamic conception of sexual activity has been made by Freud; and the psycho-analysts who have followed him, or sometimes diverged, have ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... prayed that all his people should be one, that scores or hundreds of divisions and sects should exist within his church. That is owing, exclaims the Catholic, to the Protestant rule of private judgment. It is not. It is owing to that Pandora's box of mystical interpretation placed in the church by old Origen, that prince of mischief-makers. By this method, which has no method and no standard, the interpretations of God's word will ever be as various and ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... the son of King Menkera (Mycerinus), to whom the discovery of part of the Ritual, cap. lxiv. is attributed, and who was the author of a mystical work. ...
— Egyptian Literature
... appearance, he was by no means deficient in intelligence. The courage displayed in his taming exercises (which he gravely attributed to his recent conversion), a solemn and mystical style of speech, and a hypocritical affectation of austerity, had given him a species of influence over the people he visited in his travels. Long before his conversion, as may well be supposed, Morok had been familiar with the habits of wild beasts. In fact born in the north of Siberia, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... have very strange notions about holy things; but they are also, by nature, quite religious and spiritually minded. You are not only this latter, but you are free from strange doctrines and the traditions of men. The mystical influences of the day will make themselves felt upon those innocent little hearts, and you will have the opportunity to correct wrong teachings and ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... and storms. I also made marvellous palaces and gardens wonderful as Aladdin's. All my dreams of enchanted regions, of strange tropical luxuries, which I later found in the distant corners of the world, took form in the little play of the "Donkey's Skin." Leaving out the mystical experiences at the commencement of my life, I can affirm that almost all my fancies had their essay on that tiny stage. I was nearly fifteen when the last decorations, unfinished ones, were laid away forever in the cardboard box that served them ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... greatest books in the world's literature, and Hamlet the greatest play, with the possible exception of the Agamemnon. It is the abysmal sadness quite as much as the furor arduus of Lucretius that makes me think him the mightiest of Latin poets. I would not give the mystical melancholy of certain poems of Donne's for half a hundred of the liveliest love-songs of the time, and could extend the list page-long and more if it would not savour of ostentation in more ways than one. But mere temperamental [Greek: heolokrasia] or [Greek: ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... light to Celia. Till now, upon these occasions, with her black ceremonial dress, her air of aloofness, her vague eyes, and the dignity of her carriage, she had already produced some part of their effect before the seance had begun. She had been wont to sail into the room, distant, mystical. She had her audience already expectant of mysteries, prepared for marvels. Her work was already half done. But now of all that help she was deprived. She was no longer a person aloof, a prophetess, a seer of visions; ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... with other than its physical qualities. It was bright, intelligent, sympathetic and, just now, happy. But I thought it more, I thought it mystical. Something that her mother said to her, probably about her dress, caused her smile to vanish for a moment, and then, from beneath it as it were, appeared this shadow of innate mysticism. In a second it was gone and she was laughing again; but I, who am accustomed to observe, ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... contemplate him in his cenotaph or sepulchre. Nor is this much to believe; as we have reason, we owe this faith unto history: they only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith, who lived before his coming, who, upon obscure prophesies and mystical types, could raise a belief, and ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... Middle Ages was embodied in real action, with all its extravagant absurdities and monstrosities. This, carried into the courts of law, where the relations of society and conduct or feelings of individuals were suffered to be under control of fanciful or mystical notions, could have but one effect. When a whole people abandoned the solid ground of common sense, overleaped the boundaries of human knowledge, gave itself up to wild reveries, and let loose its passions without restraint, the result was more destructive to society ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... keeping Jack mured up with you and your magnum opus. No wonder he "crouches in sphinxlike silence on the curbstone." He prefers it to your company. You once told me that you found humanitarians difficult to live with: I wonder what Jack thinks of mystical philosophers in the domestic relation. It almost brings tears to my eyes. And some day in a similar situation I may be driven to seek the ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... humanity of Paul of Tarsus; who can study the lives of Francis of Assisi, or of Catherine of Siena, without wishing that, for the furtherance of his own ideals, he might be even as they; or who can contemplate unmoved the steadfast veracity and true heroism which loom through the fogs of mystical utterance in George Fox. In all these great men and women there lay the root of the matter; a burning desire to amend the condition of their fellow-men, and to put aside all other things for that end. If, in spite of all the dogmatic helps or hindrances in which they were ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... in the sense of "essential orthodoxy, continuity, and breadth and liberality within limits, checked by the principle of discipline, and an outlook, above all, theocentric; fidelity to Christianity as the religion of the Incarnation, and of the Church viewed as Christ's mystical body."[13] ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... number of the Ahau was taken from the last day Cauac preceding the Kan with which the first year of each Ahau began—for, as 24 is divisible by 4, the first year of each Ahau necessarily began with the day Kan. This number was the "ruling number" of the Ahau, and not for any mystical or ceremonial purpose, but for the practical one of at once and easily converting any year designated in the Ahau into its equivalent in the current Kin Katun, or 52 year cycle. All that is necessary to do this is, to add the number ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... itself instead in cruelty and hardness of heart. The little habit of self-indulgence which you in your foolish fondness have allowed in that boy of yours may, in after-life, come out as the very impurity which you have endeavored so earnestly to guard him against. This mystical interdependence and hidden correlation of our moral and intellectual being is a solemn thought, and can only be met by recognizing that the walls of the citadel must be strengthened at all points in order to resist the foe at one. Truthfulness, conscientiousness that refuses ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... spell, man. Old Shotover sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar. The devil gave him a black witch for a wife; and these two demon daughters are their mystical progeny. I am tied to Hesione's apron-string; but I'm her husband; and if I did go stark staring mad about her, at least we became man and wife. But why should you let yourself be dragged about and beaten by Ariadne as a toy donkey is ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw |
