"Preternatural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... made the Islands tremble. There was hasty hope, or idle exultation, or pious fear, or panic terror, in the hearts of the leading spectators of that awful drama, according to the prejudices or principles they maintained. Over all the three kingdoms there was a preternatural calm, resembling that physical stillness which in other latitude precedes the eruption ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... to seek a "funny man" among the quadrupeds, I should name another dweller of the Southwestern prairies, the jack-rabbit,—John II. let us call him. Nobody ever gets quite accustomed to the preternatural ears of this hare. In proportion they are to those of others of the Leporidae nearly what the ears of the mule are to those of the horse. When this bit of bad drawing, as big as a fawn and weighing ten pounds or so, jumps up before you and bounds away at railroad speed, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... I was somewhat a spoiled child before this, it might have ended in her completely finishing me; but she was roused up from her state of half syncope by a vigorous attack from my teeth, which, in the agony of suffocation, I used with preternatural force of jaw from one so young. I bit right through everything she had on, and as my senses were fast departing, my teeth actually met with my convulsive efforts. My granny, roused by the extreme pain, rolled over on her side, and then it was that my mother and aunt, who supposed ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... Eustace, when he opened the door, with a look of such preternatural sharpness, that it almost frightened him. The beginning of that eagle glance was full of inquiring hope, and the end of resigned despair. The child had thought that Eustace might be a client come to tread the paths ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... it is clear to demonstration thou art smit: the Queen of Hearts would see a "man of genius" also sigh for her; and there, by art-magic, in that preternatural hour, has she bound and spell-bound thee. "Love is not altogether a Delirium," says he elsewhere; "yet has it many points in common therewith. I call it rather a discerning of the Infinite in the Finite, of the Idea made Real; which discerning again may be either true or ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... a knack of slipping from under the hand of serious judgment. He is a Proteus, and feels himself bound to speak the bare truth only when he is reduced to his proper person, not whilst he is exercising his preternatural powers of illusion. He holds in his grasp the rod of the Enchanter, Pleasure, and with a touch he unnerves the joints that would seize and drag him before the seat of an ordinary police. But we must remember that we are now scrawling unprivileged prose; and beware that we do ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... one of the vestry-chairs, muttering something, inaudible to all ears save those which seemed fatally gifted with preternatural acuteness—the young bridegroom's. Nathanael fancied—nay, was certain—that he heard his brother say, "Oh, my poor Agatha." He looked suddenly at his bride, whose weeping had changed into silent but violent trembling. He dropped her hand, then with a determined ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... deceptions that has ever fallen upon Christendom? The Bible in the plainest terms, declares that in the last days malign influences will be let loose upon the world; false pretensions will be urged upon the minds of men; and deceptions, backed up by preternatural signs and wonders, will develop to such a degree of strength, that, if it were possible, they would deceive the very elect. Is it possible that Spiritualism may be the very development of evil, against which this warning ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... other occasions, when their powers of belief were still further tested, they displayed a courageous resolution which disarms ridicule, and is not the less admirable because shown on an absurd occasion. Among the inferior class of Lamas there are many who pretend to possess preternatural gifts, which are exorcised publicly on solemn occasions, and greatly increase the fame of the saint who exhibits them, and the revenues of the community of which he is a member. M. Huc and his companion being in the neighborhood of a large Lama-house, heard ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... supported by the facts that the swelling is increased by a depending position of the limb, and diminished by a horizontal one—by the occurrence of an inflammatory state of the parts being incompatible with such a degree of debility, and lastly by the absence of preternatural heat on the surface of an oedematous part. To these pretended arguments, Dr. A. opposes, that the effusion cannot be attributed purely to debility; because the effects are in no correspondence with the assigned cause,—the debility being, in some ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... brilliant was the intermittent light that it appeared to fire the revolving pillars of mud-coloured cloud beneath, and gave ghastly peeps of river and bank and plain, miles upon miles away. But perhaps its most awful circumstance was the preternatural silence. The distant boom and muttering of thunder had died away, and now the great storm swept on in voiceless majesty, like the passage of a ghostly host, from which there arose no sound of feet or of rolling wheels. Only before it ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... opened then; It gave to general sight The alabaster couch alone; But all its lucid substance shone With preternatural light. ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... forth a mass of confused, contradictory, and ill-written reports, based upon imperfect evidence, and leading to no definite conclusion, the literary commission, as Llorente informs us, was silent altogether; whereupon Llorente attributing, not unnaturally, this preternatural silence on the part of the three French savans, to the impossibility of finding any thing to say, after the lapse of a year and a half publishes his arguments, and appeals to literary Europe as the judge "en dernier ressort" of this important controversy. Llorente, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... something rather too preternatural about this, though she could well believe it, as she looked at the wonderful manner in which the watches turned themselves out. It frightened her, and they proceeded farther on, and came to much artillery, carefully constructed by the higher civilisation ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... the opening of the sixth seal in the book of Revelation, there was 'a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon as blood.' A preternatural and awful darkness broods over nature, preparatory to its final dissolution. Thus Satan darkens the things above to the natural man, so that he cannot discern spiritual things, while those of time and sense are magnified and multiplied in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... class is altogether morbid— forced on, in fact, by the mere stimulation of the disease. I would, however, suggest, as a possibility, the very opposite order of relation between the disease and the intellectual manifestations. Not the disease may always have caused the preternatural growth of the intellect; but, inversely, this growth of the intellect coming on spontaneously, and outrunning the capacities of the physical structure, may ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... early in my travels; nor was my father much better off. But Miss Shepard, now restored to life, made amends for her late incompetence by discoursing with excited French officials with what seemed to me preternatural intelligence; indeed, I half doubted whether there were not some conspiracy to deceive in that torrent of outlandish sounds which she and they were so rapidly pouring forth to one another. However, all turned out well, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... hitherto been printed, is directly opposite to our poet's and his speaker's meaning. As I have stopped it, the sense quadrates with the context: and surely it is one unalterable property of philosophy to make seeming strange and preternatural phenomena familiar and reducible to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... Minerva still was young And just the least romantic, Soon after from Jove's head she flung That preternatural antic, 'Tis said to keep from idleness Or flirting,—those twin curses,— She spent her leisure, more or less, In ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Spencer. "The spectators were now absolutely electrified. The Marquess quietly adds his usual ten" and so there an end. "Mr Evans, ere his hammer fell, made a short pause—and indeed, as if by something preternatural, the ebony instrument itself seemed to be charmed or suspended in the mid air. However, at last down ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... quarter of the heavens. With this circumstance Scott was much struck. "Your information," he writes on the 22d November, "was particularly interesting and acceptable, especially that which {p.006} relates to the supposed preternatural appearance of the fire, etc., which I hope to make some use of." What use he did make of it, if any reader has forgotten, will be seen by reference to stanzas 7-17 of the 5th Canto of the Poem; and the notes to the same Canto embody, with due acknowledgment, the more authentic results ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... monstrous; wonderful &c. 870; unexpected, unaccountable; outre[Fr], out of the way, remarkable, noteworthy; queer, quaint, nondescript, none such, sui generis[Lat]; unfashionable; fantastic, grotesque, bizarre; outlandish, exotic, tombe des nues[Fr], preternatural; denaturalized[obs3]. heterogeneous, heteroclite[Gram], amorphous, mongrel, amphibious, epicene, half blood, hybrid; androgynous, androgynal[obs3]; asymmetric &c. 243; adelomorphous[obs3], bisexual, hermaphrodite, monoclinous[obs3]. qualified &c. 469. singular, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... wisdom preternatural in a horse, opened and looked down upon us with the calm questioning reproach one might expect from a rude awakening of the Sphinx; then the tall ears straightened and the great bulk rose to the full majesty of its seventeen hands; ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... him still askance, puzzled, inquiring. Suddenly his great beautiful eyes opened to preternatural wideness, as if trying to grasp a new thought. He started, shifted his feet to and fro, his arms straight down by his sides, his fingers clutching after something. Then he looked up hurriedly again at Campbell; and Thurnall looked at ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... the man seemed enlightened, and, saying not another word, resigned himself with preternatural civility to the search- party, who, with their staves in their hands, surrounded him on all sides, and marched him back ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... river, after nightfall, and in that part of it over which the old bridge stood, at which the battle was fought. Sometimes, but rarely, his boat accompanied another up the stream, and I recall the silent and preternatural vigor with which, on one occasion, he wielded his paddle to counteract the bad rowing of a friend who conscientiously considered it his duty to do something and not let Hawthorne work alone; but who, with every stroke, neutralized all ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... dictates of humour and biassed wills are usually more violent and fierce than the dictates of conscience; for wanting the authority of God to back their assertions and prescriptions, they must make up that with an addition of preternatural force and strength. Hence, such as are purely led by conscience, are pliable, humble, and ready to hear and receive information; whereas, others are headstrong and pertinacious, unwilling to receive instruction, or to hear any thing contrary to their minds, lest their conscience, receiving more light, ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... true Hamlet fashion how resolution has been "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." In fact, as his wife says to him, he lets "'I dare not' wait upon 'I would' like the poor cat i' the adage." Even when whipped to action by Lady Macbeth's preternatural eagerness, he asks: ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Dabistan that in the 17th century Kashmir continued to be a great resort of Magian mystics and sages of various sects, professing great abstinence and credited with preternatural powers. And indeed Vambery tells us that even in our own day the Kashmiri Dervishes are pre-eminent among their Mahomedan brethren for cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms, etc. (Dab. I. 113 seqq. II. 147-148; Vamb. Sk. of Cent. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... next morning at an hour sufficiently preternatural to deprive us of a portion of our legitimate sleep. We rose early in Kimberley—long before the lark—to our credit be it sung; but four o'clock was too far removed from breakfast time, and four was commonly the hour chosen by the churlish Boers to commence operations ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... the illusions of hope. The men here assembled were the most illustrious of the nation. Noble sentiments passed from mind to mind. Madame Roland, pale with emotion, conscious of the perils which were so portentously rising around them, shone with a preternatural brilliance in the solemn rejoicing of that evening. The aged Roland gazed with tears of fond affection and of gratified pride upon his lovely wife, as if in spirit asking her if all the loftiest aspirations of their souls were not now answered. The ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... who are near death die generally at the change to dawn or at the turn of the tide. Anyone who has when tired, and tied as it were to his post, experienced this change in the atmosphere can well believe it. All at once we heard the crow of the cock coming up with preternatural shrillness through ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... and allowed herself to be drawn backwards by Delfina's clinging fingers, and instantly, with preternatural clearness, Andrea saw that smile wipe away all the obscure, delicious pain from her lips, efface every sign that might be construed into an avowal, put to flight the least lingering shadow of uncertainty that he might possibly have converted ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... book in its English dress not only absolutely literal in text but Oriental in tone and colour. He knows the tales almost by heart, and used to keep the Bedouin tribes in roars of laughter in camp during the long summer nights by reciting them. Sheiks to whom a preternatural solemnity of demeanour is usual were to be seen rolling on the ground in paroxysms of uncontrollable mirth. It was also Burckhardt's custom to read the stories aloud, but the Arabs would snatch the book from his hand because his pronunciation ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... twinkling beacons and its noble tent of stars, were great fields for me. Hampstead Heath, Wimbledon, even Richmond and Bushey have known me at their most secret hour. Such experiences as I have had of the preternatural will find their place in this book, but not their chronological place, for the simple reason that, as I kept no diary, I cannot remember in what order of time they befell me. But it was on the southern slope of Parliament Hill that I came again upon the fairy-woman ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... curious if it should turn out that nothing can possibly harmonise them but the statement of Genesis, that in order to prevent the natural tendency of the race to accumulate on one spot and facilitate their dispersion and destined occupancy of the globe, a preternatural intervention expedited the operation of the causes which would gradually have given birth to distinct languages? Of the probability of this intervention, some profound philologist have, on scientific grounds ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... by cries of "Good! good!" "That's so!" "Sound doctrine, that!" "The Judge knows what's what!" Only one person, the questioner, a young man with a preternatural head, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... led lightly into a belief in the marvelous—for what I have experienced is marvelous—and I have been forced by extraordinary evidence to credit that which ran counter, diametrically, to all my theories. I have been made the dupe of a preternatural conspiracy." ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... obedience to her vision, would not eat when she was hungry, nor drink when she was thirsty. However that was, I would risk the event of the prosecution on this single circumstance, that, without the interposition of some preternatural cause, this conduct of the prisoner's must appear to exceed all bounds ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... locking his door, the more probable conclusion seemed to be, that his disreputable intimacy in that quarter, if it ever existed, had been broken up, and that, in consequence, this ill turn had been done to Marner by somebody it was quite in vain to set the constable after. Why this preternatural felon should be obliged to wait till the door was left unlocked, was a question ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... of Lelia, which it is rather difficult to discuss seriously in the present day, both the personages and their environment being too preternatural for any direct application to be drawn from them, as reflecting modern society, found indiscreet champions as determined as its aggressors. Violently denounced by M. Capo de Feuillide, of the Europe litteraire, it was warmly defended by M. Gustave Planche, in the Revue des Deux Mondes. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... in passing to exchange a couple of words with Katerina Ivanovna, poor woman. That was sufficient to enable me to ascertain that she is in a position—preternatural, if one may so ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and Daisy not only maintained that solemn silence, but she looked grieved and hurt. Our little ones were not accustomed to be snubbed, and took it hard when such an experience did befall them; but there was a preternatural gravity about them now, which excited ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... an ideal of safety, gibbering strange monkey talk, pursued a scant arm's length behind by that infuriated cow. Did any one help him? Not any. Every man of that crew was hanging weak from laughter to the horn of his saddle or the top of the fence. The preternatural solemnity had broken to little bits. Men came running from the bunk-house, only to go into spasms outside, to roll over and over on the ground, clutching handfuls of herbage in the ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... clear-headed, had been conscious lately of two phases—one an almost preternatural illumination of intellect, and the other a sort of brain-inertia, more soul-and body-fatiguing than any pain. There were seasons when he was obliged to think when he could instead of when he would. He looked grave, alert, competent, but ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... cerements on such occasions, appeared to Herbert to have remote matrimonial designs, as far at least as a sympathetic deprecation of the vanities of the present, an echoing of her sighs like a modest encore, a preternatural gentility of manner, a vague allusion to the necessity of bearing "one another's burdens," and an everlasting promise in store, would seem to imply. To Herbert's vivid imagination, a discussion on the doctrinal points of ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... fits of the blues, And rims common-sense things with mystical hues,— E. sits in a mystery calm and intense, And looks coolly around him with sharp common-sense; C. shows you how every-day matters unite With the dim transdiurnal recesses of night,— While E., in a plain, preternatural way, Makes mysteries matters of mere every day; C. draws all his characters quite a la Fuseli,— Not sketching their bundles of muscles and thews illy, 600 He paints with a brush so untamed and profuse, They seem nothing ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... potatoes; looking at nothing else and trying to see nobody, and as far as possible contriving that nobody should see her. She hid behind the column of smoke, or sheltered herself at the further side of the great trunk of a tree; from the fire, she said to herself. But her face took on a preternatural gravity at those times, whenever she knew it was safe. She thought she did not look at anybody; yet she knew that Miss Masters had joined none of the groups under the trees, and seemed instead to prefer a solitary ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... criminal class who might have traced their origin back to the slums of London; hand-to-mouth tenants of the valley-aristocrat, hewers of wood for him in the lowlands and upland guardians of his cattle and sheep. And finally, walking up and down the earth floor—stern and smooth of face and of a preternatural dignity hardly to be found elsewhere—the ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... a most rational one, I would prefer to put it thus: that of many kinds of simplification they practise only one—omission, which does not always pay. They are imaginative, but incredibly uninventive. How different from the wily Hindu or Chinaman, with his almost preternatural sagacity in small practical matters! Scorn of theories is one of their chief race-characteristics, and that is why they end in becoming stoics—stoics, that is, as the beasts are, who suffer ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... what inexplicable fascination, as if they were riveted on some object unseen by other mortals! A glance sufficed to show to myself, at least, that he was in a state of tense nervous excitation, similar to that of a subject of mesmerism. A preternatural power seemed to possess him. He moved and spoke like a somnambulist, with the same insulation from surrounding minds and superiority to material obstacles. I had long known him as a brave officer; but here was something more than bravery, more than the fierce energy of the hour. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the good blacksmith must be explained. Possessed of great practical wisdom and sagacity, he was yet easily affected by preternatural influences. He was subject to very strong "impressions of mind", as he called them, by which he was urged to pursue one course of conduct instead of another; to follow out one plan of business in preference to another, even when there seemed to be no apparent ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... all over his face, which, as he sat, was not visible to his brother. Then with preternatural gravity he ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... feel it to be their duty to impart to the characters whom they are describing a glamour, which in many cases is more or less superhuman or super-diabolical as the case may be, and to represent circumstances as they happened in the light of the preternatural. Now and then there arises a writer who is gifted with the quality to see things as they really are, and who, to use a current phrase, 'calls a spade a spade.' In an age of pretence, it is to many more or less shocking to have such persons take up the pen and, with frankness born of native honesty, ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... question. Having come twice, in spite of all my precautions—and exactly on the same spot, too—it shows a confirmed disposition to habituate itself to its quarters, to effect a parochial settlement upon me; there is something awful and preternatural in it. I assure you that there is not a part of me that has not gone cr-cr-cr!—that has not crept, crawled, and forficulated ever since; and I put it to you what sort of a chapter I can make after such a—My good little girl, will you just take the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Whatever is not one's own by first possession is second-hand. That is what I am told my knowledge is. But my well-meaning friends come to my defence, and, not content with endowing me with natural first-hand knowledge which is rightfully mine, ascribe to me a preternatural sixth sense and credit to miracles and heaven-sent compensations all that I have won and discovered with my good right hand. And with my left hand too; for with that I read, and it is as true and honourable as the other. By what half-development of human power has the left ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... master of subtle chemistry had volatilized it into gas. Indeed, among the various conjectures which were put forward in the public Press, there were some which seriously asserted that supernatural, or, at least, preternatural, agencies had been at work, and that the deformed Monsieur Caratal was probably a person who was better known under a less polite name. Others fixed upon his swarthy companion as being the author of the mischief, but what it was exactly which he had ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... o'clock when the party broke up; Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Micklewham walked home together, and as they were crossing the Red Burn Bridge, at the entrance of Eglintoun Wood,—a place well noted from ancient times for preternatural appearances, Mr. Micklewham declared that he thought he heard something purring among the bushes; upon which Mr. Snodgrass made a jocose observation, stating, that it could be nothing but the effect of Lord North's strong ale in his head; and we should add, by way of explanation, that the ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... the margin of the basin, and sat down; but had not rested many moments, when to his astonishment he beheld descending from the sky a company of beautiful damsels, whose robes of light green silk floating in the air seemed their only support. Alarmed at such a preternatural appearance, he retired to the end of the alcove, from whence he watched their motions. They alighted on the brink of the water, and having thrown off their robes, stood to the enraptured view of Mazin in native ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... Treaty, abortional or realized, which got to parchment in that Century. For though it proved abortional, and no part of it, now or afterwards, could be executed, and even the subsidy and 30,000 Saxons (stipulated in the "UNION of Warsaw") became crow's-meat in a manner,—this preternatural "Treaty of Warsaw," trodden down never so much by the heel of Destiny, and by the weight of new Treaties, superseding it or presupposing its impossibility or inconceivability, would by no means die (such the humor of Bruhl, of the Two Majesties ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... eccentricity was very striking. His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other countenance. Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the intellectual, for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and especially (though this will surprise many) ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... every line of which they knew and loved—a face full of wisdom and resolve and deep-founded peace, showing marks of trouble, of trial, of endurance, of premature age; their eyes opened upon a face that shines with a preternatural radiance—a face expressing, more than ever face had done, the dignity and glory and joy of perfect harmony with God. He was God-possessed, and the Divine glory shone from His face. It was at the moment of his yielding all to ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods
... the little clerk with the shining face to be strangely new. The chief clerk, sitting at a dusty old roll-top desk in the corner, looked up at Mr. Neal sharply as he entered. The chief clerk always looked up sharply. There was a preternatural leanness about the chief clerk which was accentuated by his sharp hawk's nose, and when he looked up quickly from his position hunched over his desk, his sharp little eyes pierced his subordinate through and through, and his glasses, perched halfway down his nose, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... The Preternatural in Fiction ('The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night') A Journey in Disguise ('The Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Meccah') En ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Spirit, a correspondent degree of wickedness may effect a communion with evil intelligences? These are mere speculations which I advance for as little as they are worth. My serious belief amounts to this, that preternatural impressions are sometimes communicated to us for wise purposes: and that departed spirits are sometimes ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... 1862[886] that tidal influences are brought to bear on land as well as on water, although obedience to them is perceptible only in the mobile element. Some bodily distortion of the earth's figure must, however, take place, unless we suppose it of absolute or "preternatural" rigidity, and the amount of such distortion can be determined from its effect in diminishing oceanic tides below their calculated value. For if the earth were perfectly plastic to the stresses of solar and lunar gravity, tides—in the ordinary sense—would not exist. Continents and oceans ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... JOHNSON. 'Sir, I am not defending their credibility. I am only saying, that your arguments are not good, and will not overturn the belief of witchcraft.—(Dr. Fergusson said to me, aside, 'He is right.')—And then, Sir, you have all mankind, rude and civilized, agreeing in the belief of the agency of preternatural powers. You must take evidence: you must consider, that wise and great men have condemned witches to die[124].' CROSBIE. 'But an act of parliament put an end to witchcraft[125].' JOHNSON. 'No, Sir; witchcraft ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the active duties of life to an eager being, of preternatural sharpness, with a shelving forehead and a shabby snuff-coloured coat, who (from the wharf) brought me down with his eye before the boat came into port. He darts upon my luggage, on the floor where all the luggage ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... least, the marvellous Ethiope, Changing his skin by preternatural skill, Whom every setting sun's diurnal slope Leaves whiter than the last, and ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... Anga, called Vrikshaghata. In it there lived a rich sacrificing Brahman named Vishnusvamin. And he had a wife equal to himself in birth. And by her he had three sons born to him, who were distinguished for preternatural acuteness. In course of time they grew up to be young men. One day, when he had begun a sacrifice, he sent those three brothers to the sea to fetch a turtle. So off they went, and when they had found ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the better; and I want to find out my score or two of very dear friends who have eaten ice-cream at our house. I hope I may have a chance to wait on 'em. I'll do it with the air of a princess," she concluded, assuming a preternatural dignity, "and if they put on airs I'll raise the price of the goods, and tell them that since they are so much above other people they ought to pay double price for everything. I don't believe they'll all turn up their noses at me," she added, after a moment, her face becoming wistful and ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... the distance which separated us from this creature, a distance which must be estimated at not less than a dozen leagues, one could see the column of water spurting from the blow-hole of the great animal, his dimensions must be something preternatural. To fly is, therefore, the course to be suggested by ordinary prudence. But we have not come into that part of the world to be prudent. Such ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... subject much with Lyell and Hooker (for I shall have to treat of it) and wrote out my arguments in opposition; but you will be glad to hear that neither Lyell nor Hooker thought much of my arguments; nevertheless, for once in my life I dare withstand the almost preternatural sagacity of Lyell. You ask about land-shells on islands far distant from continents: Madeira has a few identical with those of Europe, and here the evidence is really good, as some of them are sub-fossil. In the Pacific islands there are cases of identity, which I cannot at present persuade ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... deserve, and the men are fond enough of wine; yet the number of both who can afford such expenses is so small, that the major part must refuse gratifying themselves, and the duties will rather be lessened than increased. But, allowing no force in this argument; yet so preternatural a sum as one hundred and ten thousand pounds, raised all on a sudden, (for there is no dallying with hunger,) is just in proportion with raising a million and a half in England; which, as things now stand, would probably bring that opulent kingdom under ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... that there is nothing in the undoubted plays of Jonson which would authorize us to suppose that he could have supplied the additions to Hieronymo. I suspected the agency of some more potent spirit. I thought that Webster might have furnished them. They seemed full of that wild, solemn, preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in the Duchess of Malfy. On second consideration, I think this a hasty criticism. They are more like the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus. The sorrows of the Duchess set inward; if she talks, it is little ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... equally without warning and without fading the smile ceased to be. Under its effulgence the observer unfamiliar with Mr. Rae's smile was moved, to a responsive geniality of expression, but in the full tide of this emotion he found himself suddenly regarding a face of such preternatural gravity as rebuked the very possibility or suggestion of geniality. Before the smile Mr. Rae's face was like a house, with the shutters up and the family plunged in gloom. When the smile broke forth every shutter was flung wide to the pouring ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... speaking, however, the term "grace" is reserved for what are commonly called the supernatural gifts of God, the merely preternatural as well as the strictly supernatural.(10) In this sense "grace" is as sharply opposed to purely natural favors as nature is ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... satisfaction. Then the first thought independent of personal sensations came into his head. He wondered when Therese would come in and begin talking. He saw vaguely a human figure in the room but that was a man. He was speaking in a deadened voice which had yet a preternatural distinctness. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... back. Her soft hands were torn by the jagged rock; her dress was in shreds; her golden hair fell down upon her shoulders. She might have been some preternatural ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... The almost preternatural solemnity induced by this injunction was at once put to flight by Sammy, at whom the whole family flew with one accord and a united shriek—pulling him down on a chair and embracing him almost ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... is a phase of insanity which may be called moral madness, in which all that is good or even human seems to disappear from the mind, and a fiend-nature replaces it. The sole aim and desire of the being thus possessed is to exasperate, to molest, to destroy, and preternatural ingenuity and energy are often exercised to that dreadful end. The aspect, in such cases, assimilates with the disposition—all seem demonized. It is true that profound pity ought to be the only sentiment elicited by the view of such degradation, and equally true is it that ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... ridiculous light; that he has little of the romantic glamor and none of the narrative energy of Scott; that Shelley's lyrical flights leave him plodding along the dusty highway; and that Byron's preternatural force makes his passion seen by contrast pale and ineffectual. All this and more may freely be granted, and yet for his influence upon English thought, and especially upon the poetic thought of his country, he ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... faltering and frail, is thrust this vast, remote notion—that he is bound to love something hidden and terrible, something that looks at him from the blank sky when he is alone among the garden beds, something which haunts empty rooms and the dark brake of the woodland. Moreover, a child, with its preternatural sensitiveness to pain, its bewildered terror of punishment, learns, side by side with this, that the God Whom he is to love thus tenderly is the God Who lays about Him so fiercely in the Old Testament, slaying the innocent with the guilty, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lifetime; the distracted ostrich thrust an advertising neck through the top of its cage, and the lion roared to himself in the darkness of his moving prison. I felt the old thrill of excitement, the vain hope of something preternatural and impossible, and I do not know what could have kept me from that circus as soon as I had done lunch. My heart rose at sight of the large tent (which was yet so very little in comparison with the tents of the three-ring and two- platform circuses); the alluring ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... replied, with preternatural cheerfulness. But I could have killed the Spider; for I suspected this was a part of the plot she had been weaving to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... and tender nature; indeed, I afterwards came to think so; but at that time, and up to the age of twelve, it is a strict truth that I did not regard Mr. Judson as properly a human being,—as a man at all. If he had descended from the planet Jupiter, he could not have been a bit more preternatural and strange to me. Indeed, I well remember the occasion when the idea of his proper humanity first flashed upon [15] my mind. It was when I saw him, one day, beat the old black horse he always rode, apparently in a ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... Chrysanthemums, especially of preternatural size and bizarre colors—the college colors at football games, for instance—are in great demand. They are extremely decorative, and their remarkable lasting quality insures their permanent popularity. ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... pictured to themselves no precise object. It would be difficult to depict, in words, the ingredients and hues of that phantom which haunted me. An hand invisible and of preternatural strength, lifted by human passions, and selecting my life for its aim, were parts of this terrific image. All places were alike accessible to this foe, or if his empire were restricted by local bounds, those bounds were utterly inscrutable by me. But had I not been told by ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... constabulary from Cashel soon after were seen approaching, and the people, who now saw the absolute uselessness of further resistance broke away to the hills. The game was up; the banner of Irish independence had again sunk to the dust; and O'Brien, who had acted throughout with preternatural coolness, and whose face gave no more indications of emotion than if it had been chiseled in marble, turned from the scene with a broken heart. For a length of time he resisted the entreaties of his friends and refused to leave ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... sentiment. The interest which you express in my thoughts, and their influence over you, I can explain in no other way than as arising from similarity of temperament and of taste, heightened exceedingly by an instinctive tendency— almost preternatural—to reverence whatever approaches, either in Spirit or Form, your standard of the Ideal. Of minds of this class it is impious to ask for tempered expressions. They admire, they marvel, they love. These are the law of their being, and to refuse them ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... was human. This divine Principle is discerned in Christian Science, as we advance in the spiritual under- [25] standing that all substance, Life, and intelligence are God. The so-called miracles contained in Holy Writ are neither supernatural nor preternatural; for God is good, and goodness is more natural than evil. The marvellous healing-power of goodness is the outflowing life of Chris- [30] tianity, and it characterized ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... stranger's form had been swallowed by the flood of misty light, which, by this time, rolled along the sea like drifting vapour, semi-pellucid, preternatural, and seemingly tangible. The ocean itself appeared admonished that a quick and violent change was nigh. The waves ceased to break in their former foaming and brilliant crests, and black masses of the water lifted their surly summits against ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... wider and wider among the multitude, and with less and less of control from the personal influence of Jesus, Christianity developed more and more its side of miracle and legend; until to believe Jesus to be the Son of God meant to believe other points of the legend—His preternatural conception and birth, His miracles, His bodily resurrection, His ascent into heaven, and His future triumphant return to judgment. And these and like matters are what popular religion drew forth from the records of Jesus as ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... reading proof; one of his many contributions to a scientific periodical, and, judging by the pile of galley sheets, an important article. He had a way of pursing his lips and glaring through his spectacles when he read that gave him a look of preternatural wisdom. He was never what Deena's ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... to have portended his death; and if the Roman historians are to be credited, more preternatural appearances and predictions announced this event, than its importance deserved.[30] The truth seems to be, that a belief in omens and prodigies was again become prevalent, as the people were evidently relapsing into pristine ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... of this criticism appears perfectly just and appropriate; but, from the concluding paragraph, Whewell evidently imagines that by "creation" Lyell means a preternatural intervention of the Deity; whereas the letter to Herschel shows that, in his own mind, Lyell meant natural causation; and I see no reason to doubt (The following passages in Lyell's letters appear to me decisive ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... William the Silent, two heroes of ancient German stock, who had learned the arts of war and peace in the service of a foreign and haughty world-empire. Determination, concentration of purpose, constancy in calamity, elasticity almost preternatural, self-denial, consummate craft in political combinations, personal fortitude, and passionate patriotism, were the heroic elements in both. The ambition of each was subordinate to the cause which he served. Both refused the crown, although ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... have reasoned, in discovering the nature and constitution of this earth: Therefore, there is no occasion for having recourse to any unnatural supposition of evil, to any destructive accident in nature, or to the agency of any preternatural cause, in explaining that which ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit "to bend the shows of things to ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... to speak. These runes were called galder, and another kind of magic, mostly practised by women, was called seid. It was thought that these wise women possessed the power of raising and allaying storms, and of hardening the body so that the sword could not cut it. Some charms could give preternatural strength, others the power of crossing the sea without a ship, of creating and destroying love, of assuming different forms, of becoming invisible, of giving the evil eye. Garments could be charmed to protect or to destroy the wearer. A horse's ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... faded, and the moon rose. The people were going away. The distant buzz of laughter had grown silent. I could dimly discern some few groups, but very few, still left, and one or two solitary figures. Even my preternatural eagerness could not discern who they were! The darkness, the long walk home, the probe at seven, which I should be too tired to attend, all had quite slipped from my mind; it was possible that among those figures which I still dimly saw, was yet remaining that of Courvoisier, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... a little older, Barbara's French nursery governess left her, and from that hour, almost without knowing it, the child took her education largely into her own hands, and her aunt stood too much in awe of her almost preternatural resoluteness, to interfere in any serious way. She provided masters for the child, but it was the girl herself and not the masters who decided ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... persecuted like Socrates; he may walk barefooted, and have domestic griefs, and be deprived of his comforts—but he is serene, for the soul triumphs over the body. Now, what motive so grand as to save the immortal part of man. This desire filled the ancient Christian orator with a preternatural enthusiasm, as well as gave to him an unlimited power, and an imposing dignity. He was the most happy of mortals when led to the blazing fire of his persecutors, and he was the most august. The feeling that he was kindling a fire which should never be quenched, even that which ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Consequently the detective officer who pierces the mystery—unravels it thread by thread, and by unerring sagacity penetrates its innermost depths and lays his hand on the criminal—is at once invested, in the popular mind, with qualities approaching the preternatural. The vivid and fertile imagination of the literary romancist magnifies the illusion. The detective of the successful novel resembles the Deity in his attributes of ubiquity and omniscience. In whatever city his functions are exercised we may be sure that he knows every man-Jack of the ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... "to ask her to my small annual gathering after the festival of Saint Dodekanus. To-morrow, you know. Quite an informal little affair. I may count on you, Bishop? You'll all come, won't you? You too, Mr. Keith. But no long words, remember! Nothing about reflexes and preternatural and things like that. And not a syllable about the Incarnation, please. It scares me. What's the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... hundred thousand more before morning, we should probably petition Government to receive the importing vessels with chain-shot. Not even Milton or Shakespeare could make head against such a Lopez de Vega principle of ruinous superfluity. Allowing for this one case of preternatural excess, assuming only that degree of limitation which any absolute past must almost always create up to that point, we say that there is no conceivable composition, or class of compositions, which will not be welcomed into literature provided, as to matter, that it shall embody ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... The Dauphin is not here a voluptuous weakling, nor is his court the centre of vice and cruelty and imbecility: the misery of the time is touched but lightly, and the Maid of Arc herself is invested with a certain faint degree of mysterious dignity, ultimately represented as being in truth a preternatural gift; though whether preternatural, and if so, whether sent from above or from below, neither we nor she, except by faith, are absolutely sure, till ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... prosecute it with the vigor which the colonies probably anticipated. His success, in the end, was glorious and unequivocal; but none other than he could have secured it, and not he, even, unless he had been sustained by a loftiness of character almost preternatural. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... than usual. It might have been imagination, but he fancied her whole manner was less cordial than before. And he said to himself, "She has heard I am going, and she is annoyed, and is not glad to see me." There was a preternatural solemnity about their conversation which neither of them could break through, and in a few minutes they both looked as though they had not ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... boldly to the small black door, studded with iron nails, which was standing open, guarded only by a black dwarf of preternatural ugliness. He turned as the beautiful fairy came floating towards him, and led the way silently through dark long passages, and up narrow winding stairs to his master's chamber. It was a small dark room, lighted only by a silver lamp of great brilliancy, which stood on a ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker
... struggle for existence. By thus concentrating all or most of the nerve force on the nerve-muscular mechanism for defense, a greater physical power is developed. Hence it is that under the stimulus of fear animals are able to perform preternatural feats of strength. For the same reason, the exhaustion following fear will be increased as the powerful stimulus of fear drains the cup of nervous energy even though no visible action may result.... Perhaps the most striking difference between man and animals lies ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... women she sat bolt upright, a red spot burning on either cheek-bone, her eyes bright with nervous excitement while she answered the careless small talk with preternatural seriousness. At such times Symes himself talked rapidly to hide the gaucheries of her speech, and they were ordeals which he took care should be ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... or melancholy, is that demoniacal (if I may so call it) obsession or possession of devils, which Platerus and others would have to be preternatural: stupend things are said of them, their actions, gestures, contortions, fasting, prophesying, speaking languages they were never taught, &c. Many strange stories are related of them, which because some will not allow, (for Deacon and Darrel have written large volumes on ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... sudden apparition—robed in mysterious splendour, and vanishing the moment its errand was fulfilled—gave additional effect to the words it had uttered. The whole character of that bold address became invested with a something preternatural and inspired; to the minds of the vulgar, the mortal was converted into the oracle; and, marvelling at the unhesitating courage with which their idol had rebuked and conjured the haughty barons,—each of whom they regarded in the light of sanctioned executioners, whose ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... is competent to furnish, from its own resources, an administrator of the kind I have imagined. The pigeons, in short, are to be their own Sir John Sebright.* A despotic government, whether individual or collective, is to be endowed with the preternatural intelligence, and with what, I am afraid, many will consider the preternatural ruthlessness, required for the purpose of carrying out the principle of improvement by selection, with the somewhat drastic thoroughness upon which the success of the method depends. Experience certainly does not ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... distance between the point he occupies and the place he would be? That also is a mystery, yet the least observant person familiar with the negro cannot have failed to note his wonderful—we had almost said his preternatural—power to discover, without guide or compass, the shortest possible distance between two given places—to make, as he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... by weak eyes and unexpectedness of forehead, may tend to make the Evil One but languid in his desire for the capture of its human exemplar. This may help account for the otherwise rather curious coincidence of frightful physiognomy and preternatural goodness in this world of sinful beauties[B]. Under such a theory, Mr. DIBBLE'S easy means of frightening the Arch-Tempter into immediate flight, and keeping himself free from all possible incitement to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... reform. I have sold off my horses, and I have not touched dice nor card these six months: I would not even put into the raffle for the last Derby." This last was said with the air of a man who doubted the possibility of obtaining belief to some assertion of preternatural abstinence and virtue. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the spirit of the waters, who, as is vulgarly believed, gives warning of those who are to be drowned within the precincts of his beat. This is indicated by preternatural noises and lights. He is supposed to appear in the form of a horse. Many wonderful exploits are attributed to ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... The union of the two pretensions is not at all surprising. It was to be expected that those who assumed a power so preposterous as that of prolonging the life of man for several centuries, should pretend, at the same time, to foretell the events which were to mark that preternatural span of existence. The world would as readily believe that they had discovered all secrets, as that they had only discovered one. The most celebrated astrologers of Europe, three centuries ago, were alchymists. Agrippa, Paracelsus, Dr. Dee, and the Rosicrucians, all ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... had vanished. There were no materials of conjecture; no probabilities to be weighed, or suspicions to revolve. Human artifice or power was unequal to this exploit. Means less than preternatural would not furnish a conveyance ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... gallery he was more humorous than impressive, and it is to be feared that they waited for the precentor's weekly performance with a delighted expectation that never flagged and that was never disappointed. It was only the flash of the minister's blue eye that held their faces rigid in preternatural solemnity, and forced them to content themselves with winks and nudges for the expression ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... remember what the poet Cowper says," and prepared to go on with other matter; but Deacon Smith had been watching his opportunity for twenty minutes, and was already on his feet. "Let us pray," he said in a deep voice, which broke on Brother Lewis's ears with preternatural power, and he was obliged to sit down while the senior deacon held forth. No sooner, however, had Deacon Smith's amen sounded than Mr. Eli Lewis started up. "O Lord," he cried in a tone of heartfelt satisfaction, "I remember now what the poet Cowper says;" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... said Colonel Everard; "I do not deny the existence of such preternatural visitations, because I cannot, and dare not, raise the voice of my own opinion against the testimony of ages, supported by such learned men as yourself. Nevertheless, though I grant the possibility of such things, I have scarce yet heard of an instance in ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... earth.' And after an attempt to reply to some of Lyell's arguments, which it would be cruel to reproduce, the writer continues:—'When, therefore, upon such slender grounds, it is determined, in answer to those who insist on its universality, that the Mosaic Deluge must be considered a preternatural event, far beyond the reach of philosophical enquiry; not only as to the causes employed to produce it, but as to the effects most likely to result from it; that determination wears an aspect of scepticism, which, however much soever ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... left side of the overskirt, and while Miss Willy rose from her knees, Virginia crossed to the window and gazed up at the pale stars over the tops of the paulownias. A joy so vibrant that it was like living music swelled in her breast. She was young! She was beautiful! She was to be loved! This preternatural certainty of happiness was so complete that the chilling disappointments of the last few days had melted before it like frost in the sunlight. It was founded upon an instinct so much deeper, so much more primitive than reason, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... disturbs the function of the brain and concurs to produce somnolence. The probability of this explanation is strengthened by the flowing of the blood from the nose to the ears, spontaneous haemoptysis, also by preternatural redness of the viscera, engorgements of the cerebral vessel, and bloody effusion, all of which conditions ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... ordinary; strange, monstrous; wonderful &c 870; unexpected, unaccountable; outre [Fr.], out of the way, remarkable, noteworthy; queer, quaint, nondescript, none such, sui generis [Lat.]; unfashionable; fantastic, grotesque, bizarre; outlandish, exotic, tombe des nues [Fr.], preternatural; denaturalized^. heterogeneous, heteroclite [Gramm.], amorphous, mongrel, amphibious, epicene, half blood, hybrid; androgynous, androgynal^; asymmetric &c 243; adelomorphous^, bisexual, hermaphrodite, monoclinous^. qualified &c 469. singular, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... her for a moment. Then a sudden veil fell across the clearness of her eyes, which had the preternatural size and brilliance of disease. Her expression changed. It became the slyness of the watching animal, that feels the enemy. She said ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... were equally slow to believe. They themselves had said to him, "Knowest thou that the Lord will take away thy master from thy head to-day?" Elisha came back to them from the scene of the translation. Of course he told them what had happened, describing minutely the whole of that preternatural scene; he probably related the conversation which Elijah had with him as they walked; and this inspired companion of the departed prophet, having himself no doubt that Elijah had gone to heaven, so instructed these sons of the prophets. But how hard it is ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... good deal more of this kind of thing, and we were beginning to feel rather out of it, when presently the preternatural gravity of the party was broken by a laugh, ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... looked up. His great face was yellow and seemed in that moment of a preternatural flabbiness; his beady eyes were beadier ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... and sky were so much of one colour by the snow, that it was difficult in a hasty glance to tell whereabouts the horizon occurred; and in general there was here, too, that before-mentioned preternatural inversion of light and shade which attends the prospect when the garish brightness commonly in the sky is found on the earth, and the shades of earth are in the sky. Over the west hung the wasting moon, now dull and ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... "that I refuse to accept the factitious aid your thoughts have lately been bringing to me. You see I have preternatural senses. Because I was born in the snows of the mountains I am no whit whiter than those born in the purlieus of the police stations of the cities. We are simply of the same human nature. When I win regard, it must be for no idle fancy, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... war begins again, up and down the wretched land, till Belisarius is recalled by some fresh court intrigue of his wicked wife, and another and even more terrible enemy appears on the field, Narses the eunuch, avenging his wrong upon his fellow-men by cunning and courage almost preternatural. He comes upon them with a mighty host: but not of Romans alone. He has gathered the Teuton tribes;—Herules, the descendants probably of Odoacer's confederates; Gepids, who have a long blood-feud against the Goths; and most terrible of all, Alboin ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... mother, though very affectionate and gentle, was a person whose society was apt to become wearisome any time after the first half-hour of social intercourse. At Hyde Lodge Charlotte had a great deal more of Lingard and condensed and expurgated Gibbon than was quite agreeable; she had to get up at a preternatural hour in the morning and to devote herself to "studies of velocity," whose monotony became wearing as the drip, drip, drip of water on the skull of the tortured criminal. She was very tired of all the Hyde-Lodge lessons and accomplishments, the irregular French verbs—the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... began to perceive what his uncle was driving at when he rebuked the coxcombry of the field, and spoke of the description of compliment your hero was paying Englishmen in affecting to give them examples of bravery and preternatural coolness. Nevil sent home humble confessions of guilt in this respect, with fresh praises of young Michell: for though Everard, as Nevil recognized it, was perfectly right in the abstract, and generally right, there are times when an example is needed by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is horribly broke in upon the place which is the Center, and after a sort, the First-born of our English Settlements: and the Houses of the Good People there are fill'd with the doleful Shrieks of their Children and Servants, Tormented by Invisible Hands, with Tortures altogether preternatural. After the Mischiefs there Endeavoured, and since in part Conquered, the terrible Plague, of Evil Angels, hath made its Progress into some other places, where other Persons have been in like manner Diabolically handled. These our poor ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... the truths which Mohammed, with preternatural earnestness, now declared,—doctrines which would revolutionize Arabia. And why not? They are the same substantially which Moses declared to those sensual and degraded slaves whom he led out of Egypt,—yea, the doctrines of David and of Job. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... the last links which bound him to lower things. He had felt that he could do without happiness, that it was no longer essential, and that he could live on, and still love God, and cling to Him. But he is not described as of preternatural, or at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all human tenderness and susceptibility. His old life was still beautiful to him. He does not hate it because he can renounce it; and now that the struggle ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... among the gaieties of my earliest and boyish acquaintance with mails. But alike the gayest and the most terrific of my experiences rose again after years of slumber, armed with preternatural power to shake my dreaming sensibilities; sometimes, as in the slight case of Miss Fanny on the Bath road, (which I will immediately mention,) through some casual or capricious association with images originally gay, yet opening at some stage of evolution into sudden capacities ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... preternatural gravity, he advances, seizes the arm of John Burrill, drags him toward Constance, and says, with ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... French Revolution, inspiring with preternatural energy that gallant people, turned the tide of events so long adverse to French aggrandizement. Still true to her hereditary hostility, England combined all Europe to resist the aggression of republican France. But soon, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... victorious monarch, and boldly denounced the indignation of heaven against the oppressors of the earth; but the saint himself was confounded by the solemn asseveration of Alaric, that he felt a secret and preternatural impulse, which directed, and even compelled, his march to the gates of Rome. He felt that his genius and his fortune were equal to the most arduous enterprises; and the enthusiasm which he communicated to the Goths ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... and of what was the matter with her, Ida had no very clear idea. She had visions of toiling through the wood over and over again, looking vainly for something that could never be found; of being suddenly surrounded and cut off by swollen streams; and of crawling, unclean beasts with preternatural feelers who got into her boots. Then these heavy dreams cleared away in part, and the stream seemed to ripple like the sound of church bells, and these chimed out the ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our fear of their consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness. We can no more take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all objects without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by their preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead, are not very ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... was a prey to preternatural superstitions. The Druids possessed, in the opinion of the people, a power beyond that of man; and history shows the same phenomenon in all pagan countries, not excepting those of our time. A real supernatural power was required to overcome that ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... uncommon that the nutrient arteries have their action so much increased in some parts, as to produce preternatural growth. Sometimes the vessels whose function it is to deposit fat, are increased in action, and wens of no inferior size are formed. Again, there may be a deposition of substances unlike any known to exist in the body. Occasionally, ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... cases on record will be cited. In the older times, when the knowledge of the etiology and pathology of dropsies was obscure, we find the records of the most extraordinary cases. Before the Royal Society, in 1746, Glass of Oxford read the report of a case of preternatural size of the abdomen, and stated that the dropsy was due to the absence of one kidney. The circumference of the abdomen was six feet four inches, and the distance from the xiphoid to the os pubis measured four feet 1/2 inch. In this ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... circumstance in connection with Abdurrahman that was not suspicious. Three distinct hypotheses seem to present themselves in relation to this selection as our nominee; that Lord Lytton had extraordinary, almost indeed preternatural foresight and sagacity; that he was extremely fortunate in his leap in the dark; that he desired to bring to the naked reductio ad absurdum the 'buffer state' policy. When Abdurrahman began his movement is uncertain. So early ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... time immemorial, those periodic phenomena known as solar and lunar eclipses have been occasions of mental disquietude and superstitious alarm. Though now regarded as perfectly natural and regular, they have seemed so preternatural and irregular to the unscientific eye that we cannot wonder at the consternation which they have caused. And it must be confessed that a total obscuration of the sun in the middle of the day casts such a gloom over the earth that men not usually timid ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... the eye is beautifully clear, and, for a little while, this clearness imposes upon the casual observer; but there is a peculiar pellucid appearance about the eye—a preternatural and unchanging brightness. In the horse, the sight occasionally returns, but I have never seen this in ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... of the tempest immediately died away, and a dead calm sullenly succeeded. A white flame still enveloped the building like a shroud, and, streaming far away into the quiet atmosphere, shot forth a glare of preternatural light; while a cloud of smoke settled heavily over the battlements in the distinct ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the tall bay, and the two were footing it nervously here and there, tugging at the tethers, and tossing up their heads, with many a start, as if they feared and sought to flee from some approaching catastrophe—some vast and preternatural change—some forest fire which came galloping faster than even their ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... affects the simplicity and openness of scientific experiment; and even if he profess to tread a step or two across the boundaries of the spiritual world, yet carries with him the laws of our actual life and extends them over his preternatural conquests. Twelve or fifteen years ago, on the contrary, all the arts of mysterious arrangement, of picturesque disposition, and artistically contrasted light and shade, were made available, in order to set the apparent ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... reached, in the Third Symphony, the pinnacle of greatness almost at a bound. He was now, at thirty-four, at the height of his colossal powers. His titanic genius in its swift development showed an ability almost preternatural. One immortal work of genius succeeded ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... words you can find. The occasional attempt to make his verses familiar and natural by the use of such abbreviations as "I've" or "can't" is as much a failure as the effort of an awkward man in a ball-room to make everybody think him at his ease by forcing an unhappy smile and a look of preternatural buoyancy. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... always ascend as nature descends:" And the truly poetic account of the writing in the inmost heaven, which, as it consists of inflexions according to the form of heaven, can be read without instruction He almost justifies his claim to preternatural vision, by strange insights of the structure of the human body and mind. "It is never permitted to any one, in heaven, to stand behind another and look at the back of his head; for then the influx which is from the Lord is disturbed." The angels, from the sound of the voice, know a man's love; ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... coldly, "I think you had much better spend your holidays here;" and he got up from the table, leaving Geoff in a tumult of feelings which words can scarcely describe. He had suffered a great deal during the past year, and had said little. A sort of preternatural consciousness that he must keep his own secret, that he must betray nothing to his mother, had come upon him. He sat now silent, his little face twitching and working, a sudden new, unlooked-for horror stealing over him, that he was to be separated from his ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... grafts upon a single document which is lost, and which the critics generally seem inclined to place not earlier than the latter part of the first century. The Synoptics all tell us that when Jesus expired the veil of the Temple was rent. One adds that there was preternatural darkness; a third that the earth quaked, that the rocks were rent, that the graves opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, came out of the graves after the resurrection of Jesus, went into ...
— The Religious Situation • Goldwin Smith
... advantage above us, that they can confirm their faith by continual miracles even to this day. But the truth is, they allege miracles which are calculated to unsettle a mind otherwise well established, they are so frivolous and ridiculous, or vain and false. Nor, if they were ever so preternatural, ought they to have any weight in opposition to the truth of God, since the name of God ought to be sanctified in all places and at all times, whether by miraculous events, or by the common order of nature. This fallacy ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... wonderful, and apparently preternatural effect arising from this cause, is the spectre of the Hartz Mountains in Hanover. There is one particular hill, called the Brocken, in which he appears, terrifying the credulous, and gratifying the curious to a very high degree. The most distinct and interesting account is given by Mr. ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... is done; but Macbeth receives no comfort, no additional security. He has by guilt torn himself live-asunder from nature, and is, therefore, himself in a preternatural state: no wonder, then, that he is inclined to superstition, and faith in the unknown of signs and tokens, and ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... matter of chastity!" wrote James Hinton forty years ago. "Think of that line: 'A woman who deliberates is lost.' We make danger, making all womanhood hang upon a point like this, and surrounding it with unnatural and preternatural dangers. There is a wanton unreason embodied in the life of woman now; the present 'virtue' is a morbid unhealthy plant. Nature and God never poised the life of a woman upon such a needle's point. The whole modern idea of chastity has ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis |
