"Celtic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... household. The Romans also worshipped a goddess of the earth and of fire under the common name of Fornax, dea fornacalis. Grimm mentions a stone found at Cleves with the remarkable inscription—DEAE HLUDANAE SACRVM C. TIBERIVS VERVS, and remarks that Hludana was neither a Roman nor a Celtic goddess, and could be no other than Hlodyn, which shows the identity of the German and ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... changing the names of native children, and even adults, so soon as they go into their families to live, as though their own were not good enough for them. These native names are generally much more significant, and euphonious than the Saxon, Gaelic, or Celtic. Thus, Adenigi means, "Crowns have their shadow." This was the name of a servant boy of ours, whose father was a native cotton trader, it is to be hoped that this custom among Missionaries and other Christian settlers, of changing the names of the natives, will be stopped, thereby relieving ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... lip, and which with pure outlines and outspoken reliefs gives us some of our handsomest women,—the women whom ornaments of pure gold adorn more than any other parures; and again, but only here and there, one with dark hair and gray or blue eyes, a Celtic type, perhaps, but found in our native stock occasionally; rarest of all, a light-haired girl with dark eyes, hazel, brown, or of the color of that mountain-brook spoken of in this chapter, where ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... different countries in which the Romans made conquests or sent their monks and missionaries to establish churches, convents, and schools. Thus the mediaeval arts were practised in Gaul, Spain, Germany, and Great Britain. No wall-paintings or mosaics remain from the early German or Celtic peoples; but their illuminated manuscripts are very numerous: miniature-painting was extensively done in Ireland, and many Irish manuscripts remain in the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... the recent publication by Mr. Evans Wentz of a careful and enthusiastic work upon The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries which has inspired me to put these pages before the public. Some of them have appeared in the magazines as curious recitals and may have afforded pastime to the idle-minded, but without the courageous initiative of Mr. Wentz I don't ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... appreciated the company of Terry, who, in spite of a Celtic pedigree, was not enjoying this ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... largely-offended sibyl, whom nothing thereafter should ever appease. To forgive was a virtue unknown to Mistress Conal. Its more than ordinary difficulty in forgiving is indeed a special fault of the Celtic character.—This must not however be confounded with a desire for revenge. The latter is by no means a specially Celtic characteristic. Resentment and vengeance are far from inseparable. The heart that surpasses in courtesy, except indeed that courtesy, be rooted in love divine, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... in which Chaucer, Gower, and Wyckliffe wrote, and was spoken in East Kent and Surrey. There were also the Northern and Southern dialects, which, blending with the East Midland, formed the basis of modern English. But these three dialects are likewise compounds of the Saxon, Celtic, Danish, and Norman tongues. To get rid of the smell of paint, sprinkle some hay with chloride of lime and leave it in the rooms; also a basin of water, to be changed night and morning. You will perceive traces on the surface of ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... when not a moss trooper; but all the Border, on both sides, had the strongest ideas of persistent vendetta, such as happily had never been held in the midland and southern counties, where there was less infusion of Celtic blood. Anne was a good deal shocked at the doctrine propounded by the attendant Sister, a mild, good-natured woman in daily life, but the conversation confirmed her suspicions, and put her on her guard as she remembered Hob's warning. She had liked the shepherd lad far too much, ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... opposition than in power? Mr. Gladstone's position, as the man responsible for the conduct of affairs, is much less desirable than that of Lord Salisbury, for he has the better half of the country dead against him. How curious it is to trace on the map in the 'Times' the old traditions of Saxon, Celtic, Mercian, and Danish origin in the counties of England, Ireland, and Wales! Are the ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... eight hundred years ago since the story was transcribed from some old authority into the "Book of the Dun Cow," the oldest manuscript of Gaelic literature we possess.—Joyce's "Old Celtic Romances," ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... of commerce, on the language of the tribe, the origin of such words would be as indisputable as that of those introduced by the English into the various countries of the East where they have factories; e.g. governor, council, company. But these and numerous other traces of the Celtic language which have been found in Florida and Darien are not indicative of such impressions; most of them, from their universality, bespeak themselves to be primitive; and who can assure us that some may ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... blackcock extinct in Surrey? The last Lord Midleton wrote to The Times some years ago to state his belief that they were. At Frensham I was told that the last pair were shot in 1889. But Mr. E.D. Swanton, the curator of the Haslemere Museum, learned in everything that a museum should hold, from Celtic pottery to caterpillars, told me when I was at Haslemere that he had seen a pair (I write in 1908) only two years ago. He was not at all certain that there were no more blackcocks in the county. But I fear the villas have been too ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the mother to that claimed through the father. When the stronger and more civilised Celt came he drove before him these little dark men, he enslaved their survivors or wedded their women, and in his turn fell into slavery to the cruel Druidic religion of his subjects. To these Iberians, and to the Celtic dread of them, we probably owe all the stories of dwarfs, goblins, elves, and earth-gnomes which fill our fairy-tale books; and if we examine carefully the descriptions of the abodes of these beings we shall find them not inconsistent with the earth-dwellings, caves, circle huts, or even with ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... precisely the source of dissatisfaction My whole time, and that wholly insufficient. I have a friend, a man I envy intensely; he has taken up the subject of Celtic literature; gives himself to it with single-heartedness, cares for nothing that does not connect itself therewith; will pursue it throughout his life; will know more of it than any man living. My despair is the universality of my interests. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... ye can get men to do anything on God's earth an' sea?" Louis demanded with Celtic fire. "How d'ye find me aboard if 'twasn't that I was drunk as a pig when I put me name down? There's them that can't sail with better men, like the hunters, and them that don't know, like the poor devils of wind-jammers for'ard there. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... a wandering tribe built their huts upon the island now called la Cite. This was their home, and being surrounded by water, it was easily defended against the approach of hostile tribes. The name of the place was Lutetia, and to themselves they gave the name of Parisii, from the Celtic word par, a frontier ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... his cheek. As I looked round, I was reminded of a show I once saw at the Museum,—the Sleeping Beauty, I think they called it. The old man's sudden breaking out in this way turned every face towards him, and each kept his posture as if changed to stone. Our Celtic Bridget, or Biddy, is not a foolish fat scullion to burst out crying for a sentiment. She is of the serviceable, red-handed, broad-and-high- shouldered type; one of those imported female servants who are known in public by their amorphous style of person, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... darkness as that of the carven gloom of some Gothic cathedral or the Cimmerian depths of some ancient forest unpierced by sun-shafts. It is the Teutonic mystery which has us in its grip, a thing as readily recognizable as the Celtic glamour or the Egyptian gloom—a thing of the shadows of eld, stern, ancient, of a ponderous fantasy, instinct with the spirit of nature, of dwarfs, elves, kobolds, erlkings, the wraiths and shades of forest and flood, of mountain and mere, of castled height and swift whirlpool, the denizens ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... guessed her when the deep-blue eyes rested on his for an instant as she passed, and fortified his conjecture by the coloring of the clear-skinned face and the marks of the Celtic race delicately ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... parts of our country are richer in legend than any other part. Perhaps this is because of the Celtic love of poetry and symbolism inherent in the blood of the people of the West; perhaps because of inspiration drawn from the wild hills and bleak moors of the lands in which they live; perhaps because life is, and always was, quieter there, and people have more time to remember the tales of ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... and poetical a race, to be bothered with material questions of government and administration. They should leave such cares to the stolid, practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain to the further exercise and development of what someone had called "the starfire of the Celtic nature." Ireland should look upon England as her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of Irish saints to the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. "'T is an embarrassment of riches. If we were once to ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... the big dishpan with its piled dishes topped it, Sheila's arms and back were strained over her work. She usually pulled up a box on which she stood, but now she went to work blindly, her teeth clenched, her flexible red lips set close to cover them. The Celtic fire of her Irish blood gave her eyes a sort of phosphorescent glitter. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... monastery which still retains its Byzantine character and traditions. In Armenia (as at Ani, Etchmiadzin, etc.) are also interesting examples of late Armeno-Byzantine architecture, showing applications to exterior carved detail of elaborate interlaced ornament looking like a re-echo of Celtic MSS. illumination, itself, no doubt, originating in Byzantine traditions. But the greatest and most prolific offspring of Byzantine architecture appeared after the fall of Constantinople (1453) in the new mosque-architecture ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... than nine-tenths of the deliberately Celtic prose or verse. I mean that it is real and credible and yet insubstantial, the too too solid flesh is melted into something like the mist over the bogland, and it recalls to us times when an account of our physical self, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... protest) was unmistakably Irish, or at least part Irish. It is also worthy of note that Mrs. Bumbleburg ran away with an Irish policeman some weeks after the infant Fritz's advent into the world, which would go to show that the mother, at any rate, had Celtic ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... volumes sent to St. Augustine by Pope Gregory. However that may be, it is known as the Augustine Psalter, and the style of its ornamentation is of Roman origin. This ornamentation consists of initial letters in the Celtic manner; but gold, which was hardly ever used in the Lindisfarne school, and never in Irish MSS., is here seen in profusion, and this detail betrays a foreign influence. It belonged to the Abbey of St. Augustine at Canterbury, and ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... Christian infection in the North: the Christian ideal blossomed forth in France as much as ever the pale sun of the north would allow it. How strangely pious for our taste are still these later French skeptics, whenever there is any Celtic blood in their origin! How Catholic, how un-German does Auguste Comte's Sociology seem to us, with the Roman logic of its instincts! How Jesuitical, that amiable and shrewd cicerone of Port Royal, Sainte-Beuve, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... "You are very direct, captain—very blunt indeed. This is a characteristic more Teutonic than Celtic, I believe, so I shall experience no embarrassment in being equally frank with you. Your cargo of coal is designed ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... the wall are "The Triumph of the Fields" and "Abundance." This is well called archaeological sculpture, for the emblems are from the dim past, and can be understood only with the help of an archaeological encyclopaedia. In the first are the bull standard and the Celtic cross, which were carried through the fields in ancient harvest festivals. In the second, the objects heaped around ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Gaulish provinces preferred, like all early Celtic communities, to give their adherence only to clans or tribes, and to unite no further than impulse or expediency dictated, forming no towns larger than a village, living for the most part in poor huts scattered through forests, hills, marshes, and pasture land, and content to sleep on straw, if only ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Celtic music, At his violin's sound they grew, Through the moonlit eves of summer, Making ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the landlord, the poverty and the hospitality of the people, were all to be studied at first hand; and there were churches by the way at Swords and Rush which the archaeologist will seek in vain to match in any other country. The Bound Tower (Celtic no doubt) at the former place, and the battlemented fortalice, which is more like a castle than a church, at Rush, are both ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... Lambecius' account of the Emperor's library at Vienna. 'Tis wrote on a very thin plate of gold with a sharp-pointed instrument. It was in an urn found at Vienna, rolled up in several cases of other metal, together with funeral exuviae. It was thought by the curious, one of those epistles which the Celtic people were wont to send to their friends in the other world. The reader may divert himself with trying to ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... But April the 23rd is not a time of roses that we can pluck them as we pass, nor can we claim St George as a compatriot—Cappadocius nostras. We have, to be sure, a few legendary heroes, of whom King Arthur and Robin Hood are (I suppose) the greatest; but, save in some Celtic corners of the land, we have few fairies, and these no great matter; while, as for tutelary gods, our springs, our wells, our groves, cliffs, mountain-sides, either never possessed them or possess them no longer. Not of our landscape did it ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... in succession to the right and left, several of the rude erections, resembling the Celtic cromlechs, or cist-vaens, above alluded to, from Irby ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... over by Cuthbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 747, followed in his steps, taking in regard to rites "the model which we have in writing from the Roman Church." But none the less later English service-books show very considerable Gallican influence. Celtic missionaries, and the connection four centuries later with Gaul and Burgundy, left traces in the way in which the service was performed; and England, up to the Reformation, like all other countries indeed, had some distinct customs of its own. Throughout the long history of conversion which ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... early Saxon or English settlers, and with the still more primitive Celtic inhabitants, the Northmen founded a race extremely like that which now inhabits our own country. To this day, the Norman peasants of the Cotentin retain many marks of their origin and their half-forgotten kinship with the English race. ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... Asia, then swept North Africa. By the end of the seventh century it was threatening the Byzantine Empire on one side of Europe, and the Gothic dominion in Spain on the other. On the other hand, in the same period, Latin Christianity had decisively taken possession of England, driving back that Celtic or Irish Christianity which had been beforehand with it in making entry to the North. Similarly, it was the Irish missionaries who began the conversion of the outer Teutonic barbarians; but the work was carried out by the Saxon Winfrid (Boniface) of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... this, moreover and more poignantly, when the flame of responsibility on some high subject is blazing at your heart, and the young Elihu, even if he would, cannot keep silence? Is it not a wrong to find pearls unprized, because many a modern, like his Celtic progenitors, (for I must not say like swine,) would sooner crush an acorn? to know your estimation among men ebbs and flows according to the accident of success, rather than the quality of merit? to be despised ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the fiercest opposition) to reform the horrible abuses which had converted a well-intentioned charity into a hell upon earth. Mr. Higgins was the author of a book on Mahomet, the remarkable work on the Celtic Druids (1827), and ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... altered," said the scientist gravely. "I do not think this young lady is so Celtic as I had supposed. As I have nothing else to do, I will put on my hat and stroll down ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... you cold, because you are not prone To bursts of eloquence or flights of feeling; You do not emulate the fretful tone Of those who turn from boastfulness to squealing; Your temperament, I am obliged to own, Is not expansive, Celtic, self-revealing; But some of us admire you none the less For your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... do, child; and you fancy, naturally enough, that you would like ortolans every day for dinner; but my poor cold Greek temperament has none of the romantic warmth of your Celtic nature. I am very moderate in my hopes, very ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... The Celtic nerves of Hugh shuddered. Euphra laughed; and her voice echoed in silvery billows, that broke on the faces of the men and women of old time, that had owned the whole; whose lives had flowed and ebbed in varied tides through the ancient house; who had married and ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... bombardment, surrendered. Davis was then elected commander of the pirate fleet, but one night, when entertaining the other captains in his cabin, all having drunk freely of punch, they started to quarrel, and blows were threatened, when Davis, with true Celtic eloquence, hiccupped out ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... it comes to that," said Miss Macdonnell with a mischievous glance out of a pair of dark, flashing Celtic eyes, "I hope that our mistress will inspect carefully all pupils' work before we are asked to eat it. I don't want to sit down to another of Mr. Van der Roet's Japanese salads made of periwinkles ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... a hamlet in the province of Alava in the district of Penacerrada. According to Fernandez Guerra, it is an Iberian name derived from Asiatic Iberia. I believe that I have read in Campion that the word Baroja is compounded from the Celtic bar, meaning mountain, and the Basque otza, ocha meaning cold. In short, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... of our inquiry we are met by the ancient belief that the British Isles are divided by a racial frontier which separates the western or Celtic peoples from the eastern inhabitants of Saxon origin. It was my fortune to be born on the border of the Celtic fringe, and no one growing up under these circumstances can fail to realize that the Celtic spirit is a real and live force. Is it a racial antagonism ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... of his political statements, was that his English friends invariably spoke of him as "a typical Irishman." They looked upon him as so much comic relief to the more serious things of their own lives, and seemed constantly to expect him to perform some amusing antic, some innately Celtic act of comic folly. At such times, Mr. Quinn felt as if he ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... my brogue if you wish, I will not break your bones," she said good-humoredly, making use of an ancient Irish expression. "I am most Celtic when serious. Ah, well! Perhaps it is petty in us even to be discussing the Sans, since we can say ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... have been collected in modern times in a greater number than those of any nation. This has been due largely to the work of J.F. Campbell. Celtic tales are unusual in that they have been collected while the custom of story-telling is yet flourishing among the Folk. They are therefore of great literary and imaginative interest. They are especially valuable as the oldest of the European tales. The Irish tale of Connla ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... natural human pleasure in similar sounds. "It lies deep in our human nature and satisfies an universal need." It is an established phenomenon in Sanskrit and Persian prosody, in Arabic, in Chinese, in Celtic, in Icelandic. Greek prosody, and Latin, which was based upon Greek, rejected it, partly perhaps because it was too simple an ornament for the highly cultivated Greek taste, especially on account of the great frequency of similar ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... each two drams and a half: of cloves, opium, myrrh, cyperus, each two drams; of opobalsamum, Indian leaf, cinnamon, zedoary, ginger, coftus, coral, cassia, euphorbium, gum tragacanth, frankincense, styrax calamita, Celtic, nard, spignel, hartwort, mustard, saxifrage, dill, anise, each one dram; of xylaloes, rheum ponticum, alipta, moschata, castor, spikenard, galangals, opoponax, anacardium, mastich, brimstone, peony, eringo, pulp of dates, red and white hermodactyls, roses, thyme, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... problems of human nature and life, to find public instructors of the greatest pretension imputing the backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance in the Celtic race? Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... master and mistresses, do not regard them as thieves." Out of this there came a quarrel as furious as the ladies would permit it to be. For Mrs. Chump, though willing to condone the offence for the sum she had received, stuck infamy upon the whole list of them. "The Celtic nature," murmured Cornelia. And the ladies maintained that their servants should be respected, at any cost. "You, ma'am," said Arabella, with a clear look peculiar to her when vindictive—"you may have a stain on your character, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... settled, were steady assertors of the Protestant succession. The latter had, however, a pedigree of their own, on which they prided themselves as much as those who despised them valued their respective Saxon, Norman, or Celtic genealogies. The first Oldenbuck, who had settled in their family mansion shortly after the Reformation, was, they asserted, descended from one of the original printers of Germany, and had left his country in consequence of the persecutions directed against the professors ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... were advancing with many thousand men and dreadful threats, so that for a Roman to stand to his ranks at such a time, and to obey his general, was a great matter, Marius had the command, and Sertorius undertook to be a spy upon the enemy. Putting on a Celtic dress, and making himself master of the most ordinary expressions of the language, for the purpose of conversation when occasion might offer, he mingled with the barbarians, and, either by his own eyes or by inquiry, learning all that was important to know, he returned to Marius. For ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... close-fitting, dress clothes, made a rapid movement as though to lay hold on her and bear her bodily away. Then, recognising the futility of any such attempt, he turned upon the intruders, his high-spirited Celtic face drawn with emotion, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... that the public will read my pages with more zest from being told that I am a gentillatre by birth with Cornish blood {1b} in my veins, of a family who lived on their own property at a place bearing a Celtic name, signifying the house on the hill, or more strictly the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... her, but were thoughtfully looking down the checkered light and color of the street. She was passionate, she was vain, she was wayward, she was fierce as a little velvet leopard, as a handsome, brilliant plumaged hawk; she had all the faults, as she had all the virtues, of the thorough Celtic race; and, for the moment, she had in instinct—fiery, ruthless, and full of hate—to draw the pistol out of her belt, and teach him with a shot, crash through heart or brain, that girls who were "unsexed" could keep enough of the woman in them not ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... sharp corner which swings you into the Market Square of what is to me the grandest and most historic town of England. Why, it is England! Didn't the Romans get their Venta Belgarum, which finally developed into Winta-ceaster and Winchester, from the far older Celtic name for an important citadel? Wasn't there a Christian church before the days of Arthur, my alleged ancestor? Wasn't the cathedral begun by the father of AElfred on the foundations of that poor ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... sixth century was inhabited by a Celtic race, the Boii. After them the country was called Boiohemnum, i.e., home of the Boii; in German still Boeheim.[1] The Boii were driven to the south-west by the Markomanns; the Markomanns were conquered by the Lombards. After ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... Lorenzo's naked footsteps were heard pattering across the bare floor, Ambrose would drink the bat's blood he had collected, sniff the wolfbane he had ground to ash, and pronounce the obscure Celtic words that would alter the very atoms of his flesh, transforming them into an obscene travesty of life. Brother Lorenzo, when he opened the door, would be met not by a fellow human being, but by a snarling fanged wolf that would hurl its hairy bulk ...
— G-r-r-r...! • Roger Arcot
... be ascribed the origin of nationality as the prevailing form in the State system of modern Europe. For Roman policy was, so to speak, a Destiny, not merely to the present, but to the future world. Rome effaced the distinctions, the fretting discords of Celtic tribes, and traced the bounds of that Gallia which Meerwing and Karling, Capet and Bourbon, made it their ambition to reach, and their glory to maintain. To the cities of the Italian allies Rome granted immunities, privileges, of ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Irish hero, was once entrapped by a sorceress on a similar pretext into plunging into an enchanted lake, which changed him into an old man. (See Joyce's Old Celtic Romances, "The Chase of Slieve Cullin.") The story is also related in one of ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... your back," the man repeated, while his companions looked down at the Colonel with a strange fixedness. The Celtic nature, prone to sudden rage, stirred in them. The stranger who an hour before had been indifferent to them now wore the face of an enemy. The lake and the bog—ay, the secret grave yearned for him: the winding-sheet was high upon his breast. "Stay, and it's but once in your ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... observation with regard to the Celtic women, in Plutarch, on the virtues of women. The North Americans pay a similar ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... thousands own his sway. Some, as thou seest, are number'd with the dead, And some the bitter drops of sorrow shed Through lingering life, by viewless tangles bound, That link the soul, and chain it to the ground. There Caesar walks! of Celtic laurels proud. Nor feels himself in sensual bondage bow'd: He treads the flowery path, nor sees the snare Laid for his honour by the Egyptian fair. Here Love his triumph shows, and leads along The world's great owner in the ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... a scene at parting, when the warmhearted Irishwoman clung to Maren and wept against her bosom, calling her all the hundred words for "darling" in the Celtic and vowing ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... Ethnic divisions: Celtic base, with French and German blend; also guest and worker residents from Portugal, Italy, ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... opinions of the ancients on the subject of the eternity of matter, Higgins, in his learned work on Celtic ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... has made itself felt in many religions when they have progressed to a certain plane of thought. The ancient Egyptian gods were nearly all triune; Phanes, in the Orphic hymns the first principle of things, was tripartite; the Indian trinities are well known; the Celtic triads applied to divine as well as human existence; the Jews distinguished between Jehovah, his Wisdom and his Word; and in Christian religion and philosophy the doctrine of the trinity, though nowhere taught by Christ, has found ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... proud strength and sincerity expressed itself through every detail of attitude and gesture; yet perhaps the delicacy, or rather sensibility, mingling with the pride, would have been no less evident to a seeing eye. There was Highland blood in him, and a touch therefore of the Celtic responsiveness, the Celtic magnetism. The old man opposite to him in shadow, with his back to the light, had a crouching dangerous look. It was as though he recognised something in his son for ever lost to himself; and repulsed it, half ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend. To these two original diversities may be reduced all those impertinent classifications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upon earth, "Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites," flock hither, and do naturally fall in with one or other of these primary distinctions. The infinite superiority of the former, which I choose to designate as the great race, is discernible ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... book on Wales will be followed by the one which is called Wanderings in quest of Manx Literature. Now the title alone of that book is worth a library of commonplace works, for it gives the world an inkling of a thing it never before dreamed of, namely, that the little Celtic Isle of Man has a vernacular literature. What a pity if the book itself should be eventually lost! Here some person will doubtless exclaim, 'Perhaps the title is all book, and there is no book behind it; what can Mr. Borrow know of Manx literature?' ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... Now these were his auxiliaries: Franks, Sarmatians, Armoricians, Liticians, Burgundians, Saxons, Riparians Olibriones (once Roman soldiers and now the flower of the allied forces), and some other Celtic or German tribes. And so they met in the Catalaunian Plains, which are 192 also called Mauriacian, extending in length one hundred leuva, as the Gauls express it, and seventy in width. Now a Gallic leuva measures a distance of fifteen ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes
... times the high Alps were filled with Saracen brigands and other heathen freebooters, who celebrated in the mountain fastnesses their monstrous rites. In the mountains above Aosta the god Pen had long been worshiped; the word pen in Celtic meaning the highest. Later, Julius Caesar conquered these wild tribes, and imposed upon them the religion of the Roman Empire. A statue of Jupiter ("Jove optimo maximo") was set up in the mountain in the place of the idol Pen. Afterwards, by ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... the music he was already vaguely acquainted; and he had gathered, in a general way, that Ulick Dean was considered to be a man of talent. The British public might demand a new opera, and there had been some talk of Celtic genius in the newspapers lately. Dean's "Grania" might make an admirable diversion in the Wagnerian repertoire—only it must not be too anti-Wagnerian. Mr. Goetze prided himself on being in the movement. Now, if Evelyn Innes would sing the title role, "Grania" was ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... too, moves among kings without any ceremony. As Percy has pointed out, "The further we carry our enquiries back, the greater respect we find paid to the professors of poetry and music among all the Celtic and Gothic nations. Their character was deemed so sacred that under its sanction our famous King Alfred made no scruple to enter the Danish camp, and was at once admitted ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... aspect is Narbonne, the Celtic Venice, as it rises above the level landscape. The great seaport described by Greek historians six centuries before our own era, the splendid capital of Narbonese Gaul, rival of the Roman Nmes and of the Greek Arles, is now as dull a provincial town as any throughout France. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... known as the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were, at the opening of the Christian era, occupied by several Celtic peoples of whose customs and religion we know almost nothing. Julius Csar commenced the conquest of the islands (55 B.C.); but the Romans never succeeded in establishing their power beyond the wall ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... wind-swept heather on the lone summit of Craig Ellachie once whispered in Highland clansmen's ear the warcry, 'Stand fast! Craig Ellachie.' Many a year has gone by since kith of Charles Gordon last heard from Highland hilltop the signal of battle, but never in Celtic hero's long record of honour has such answer been sent back to Highland or to Lowland as when this great heart stopped its beating, and lay 'steadfast unto death' in the dawn at Khartoum. The winds that moan through the pine ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... permit themselves to hazard an expression at all on the subject, which they didn't, each could have done it by his own favorite motto, so admirably expressive of his individual nature. "Donnez tete baissee!" (Go it baldheaded!) showed Ardan's uncalculating impetuosity and his Celtic blood. "Fata quocunque vocant!" (To its logical consequence!) revealed Barbican's imperturbable stoicism, culture hardening rather than loosening the original British phlegm. Whilst M'Nicholl's "Screw down the valve and let her rip!" betrayed ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... sit listlessly expecting the arrival of our modest conveyance, suggest to our companion—a bare-legged Celtic brother of the gentle craft, somewhat at the wrong side of forty, with a turf-coloured caubeen, patched frieze, a clear brown complexion, dark-grey eyes, and a right pleasant dash of roguery in his ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... knowledge gained from other people's experiences—and surely the information thus gained cannot properly be termed knowledge—but from the sensations I myself, as a member of an old Irish clan, have experienced from the hauntings of the banshee—the banshee that down through the long links of my Celtic ancestry, through all vicissitudes, through all changes of fortune, has followed us, and will follow us, to the end of time. Because it is customary to speak of an Irish family ghost by its generic title, the banshee, ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... of the soil of Ireland—an event made possible by the Land Act of 1903. This event, as it represented the passing of Irish acres from an alien landlordism, was considered to be of national importance. "The Land" also dealt with a movement that ran counter to the rooting of the Celtic people in the soil—emigration—the emigration to America of the young and the fit. In "The Land" I tried to show that it was not altogether an economic necessity that was driving young men and women out of the Irish rural districts; the ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... said to show that the Irish ballet is assured in advance of a cordial reception from all admirers of the neo-Celtic genius. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... not impossible that there was a time when the western [213] or Celtic princes made themselves masters of Greece, of Egypt and a good part of Asia, and that their cult remained in those countries. When one considers with what rapidity the Huns, the Saracens and the Tartars gained possession of a great part of our continent ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... professors, who have so successfully undermined the ancient and venerable lore. And thirdly, and worst of all, Disraeli never suspected that the French Revolution, which in the same breath he once contemptuously denounced as "the Celtic Rebellion against Semitic laws," was, in spite of its professed attack against religion, really a profoundly Christian, because a democratic and revolutionary movement. What a pity he did not know all this! What a shower of splendid additional ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the owners prepare to abandon them,—not always, however, let us hope, without turning, at the expense of the invaders, a Parthian penny in their flight. In my walk from Dublin to North Charlesbridge, I saw more than one token of the encroachment of the Celtic army, which had here and there invested a Yankee house with besieging shanties on every side, and thus given to its essential and otherwise quite hopeless ugliness a touch of the poetry that attends failing fortunes, and hallows decayed gentility of however ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... formed but a small portion of the great Celtic race, here existed in the Irish branch a peculiarity of its own, which stamped it with features easy to be distinguished. The gross idolatry of the Gauls never prevailed among the Irish; the Bardic system was more fully developed among them than among any other Celtic ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... the work of the summer. While the Romans were in winter quarters on friendly ground the Tencteri and Usipetes, Celtic tribes, partly because forced out by the Suebi and partly because called upon by the Gauls, crossed the Rhine and invaded the country of the Treveri. Finding Caesar there they became afraid and sent to him to make a truce, asking for land or at least the ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... Celtic (Scottish and Irish) immigrants during the late 9th and 10th centuries A.D., Iceland boasts the world's oldest functioning legislative assembly, the Althing, established in 930. Independent for over 300 years, Iceland was subsequently ruled by Norway and Denmark. Fallout from the Askja volcano ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... nothing but 'Lorna Doone', and be unacquainted with any town larger than Plymouth, which he must regard with some awe, as the Central Babylon of the world. Again, I should expect the Prince of Wales always to be full of the mysticism and dreamy ardour of the Celtic fringe. ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... apartment was an exact reproduction of a room existing at Jerusalem in the time of Saint Louis; this was explained by inscriptions and devices in Gothic or Celtic. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... letters, but not the same word. Thus we have 'page,' the side of a leaf, from 'pagina,' and 'page,' a small boy; 'league,' a treaty (F. ligue), from 'ligare,' to bind, and 'league' (O. F. legue), from leuca, a Celtic measure of distance; 'host' (hostis), an army, 'host' (O. F. hoste), from the Latin hospitem, and 'host' (hostia), in the Roman Catholic sacrifice of the mass. We have two 'ounces' (uncia and Pers. yuz); two 'seals' (sigillum and seolh); ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... opened wide at the word, but the tenor of his thought it would have been hard for him to determine. Celtic in kindred and education, he had listened in his time to a multitude of strange tales, both indigenous and exotic, and, Celtic in blood, had been inclined to believe every one of them for which he could find the least raison d'etre. But at school he had been taught that ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... been assigned, viz, Athabascan and Nootka-Columbian, and finds that they have been given too high value, and that they are only equivalent to the primary subdivisions of stocks, like the Gothic, Celtic, and Classical, rather than to the stocks themselves. He further finds that the Athabascan, the Kolooch, the Nootka-Columbian, and the Cadiak groups are subordinate members of one large ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... a young man, born in the Bay of Arisaig, opposite Rum and the Isle of Skye. His high, hawklike features and snaky black hair bore the mark of that unknown historic thing which is crudely called Celtic, but which is probably far older than the Celts, whoever they were. He was in name and stock a Highlander of the Macdonalds; but his family took, as was common in such cases, the name of a subordinate sept as a surname, and for all the purposes which could be answered in London, he called ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... he began the round-up of details. There was, first of all, Captain Cronin to be visited in Bellevue. Here he was agreeably surprised to find the detective chief recuperating with the abettance of his rugged Celtic physique. The nurse told Shirley that another day's treatment would allow the Captain to return to his own home: Shirley knew this meant the executive office ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... merely scientific or literary point of view, but in one strictly practical, the world is not the same world as it was when men had not yet dreamed of the kindred between Sanscrit, Greek, and English, when it was looked on as something of a paradox to hint that there was a distinction between Celtic and Teutonic tongues and nations. Ethnological and philological researches—I do not forget the distinction between the two, but for the present I must group them together—have opened the way for new national sympathies, new national antipathies, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... rather puzzled. Are the English people, as existing now, Teutons, or Danes, or Celts, or what? Can we be Teutons when the aborigines of these islands were not Teutonic? I feel that my own genius—and I have a lot—is Celtic; at the same time I have always prided myself on my Norman blood; yet from my liking for the sea, which never makes me sick, at least at Herne Bay, I fancy I must be descended from a Scandinavian Viking. What is the ethnological name ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... [The Celtic nations, however, afforded him neither pleasure nor any pretence of cleverness or courage but proved him to be nothing more nor less than a cheat, a simpleton, and an arrant coward. Antoninus made a campaign among the Alamanni and wherever he saw a spot suitable ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... we,' said Theodormon; 'it is quite a recent eruption due to the Celtic movement. The rock you see, however, is not a real rock, but a sham rock. Mr. George Moore has been turned out of the cave, and is ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... May I ask the Prime Minister if it is true that victims of the Celtic pogrom are to be refused ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... sprang up under the shadow of the bishop's palace. Brittany contained two distinct orders of nobility. The first derived its titles from the King of France and displayed in a very marked degree the defects and the qualities which characterised the French nobility. The other was of Celtic origin and thoroughly Breton. This latter nobility comprised, from the period of the invasion, the chief men of the parish, the leaders of the people, of the same race as them, possessing by inheritance the right of marching at their head and representing them. No one was ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... practical treatises, that have come down to us from the Middle Ages, contain examples of such glosses, sometimes few, sometimes many. It may naturally be supposed that this glossing of MSS. began in Celtic and Teutonic, rather than in Romanic lands. In the latter, the old Latin was not yet so dead, nor the vulgar idioms that were growing out of it, as yet so distinct from it, as to render the glossing of the one by the other needful. The relation ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... express a mild regret that our native school, though by no means excluded, does not make so good a show as its energy and talents would seem to warrant. Our native composers are especially noticeable for their wide range of themes, for the Celtic and Gaelic glamour which they infuse into their treatment of them, and for their realistic titles. We have drawn up a list of instrumental works which illustrate these characteristics, but which are unfortunately conspicuous by their absence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... Englishman or American who knows how rapidly his language has become the language of commerce over the world; how it has almost extinguished the ancient Celtic tongues in Scotland and Ireland; how quickly in the United States it has driven Spanish out of the South West, and has come to be spoken by the German, Scandinavian, and Slavonic immigrants whom that country receives, it is surprising to find that Dutch holds its ground stubbornly ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... Feudal Europe, a piece of France, in short; and though in time she did grow into another England again, she missed for ever in her laws, and still more in her language and her literature, the chance of developing into a great homogeneous Teutonic people infused usefully with a mixture of Celtic blood. ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... that Anglo-Irish stories preserve best those current in Shakespeare's time in English. On the other hand, it is possible that some, nay many, of the Anglo-Irish stories have been imported from the Celtic districts, and are positively folk-translations from the Gaelic. Further research is required to determine which is English and which Celtic among Anglo-Irish folk-tales. Meanwhile my collection must ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... conceptions of popular fancy, but the gloomy figures with which the folk-tales of the Slavonians render us familiar may be distinguished at a glance among their kindred monsters of Latin, Hellenic, Teutonic, or Celtic extraction. Of those among the number to which the Russian skazkas relate I will now proceed to give a sketch, allowing the stories, so far as is possible, ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... was not to be secured save by adroit flatteries. The day was past for the extermination of the Goths by Roman soldiers, who had already thrown away their defensive armor; nor was it possible that they would amalgamate with the people of the Empire, as the Celtic barbarians had done in Spain and Gaul after the victories of Caesar. Though the kingly power was taken away from them and they fought bravely under the imperial standards, it was evident from their insolence and their contempt of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... and character of the Celtic element in our population, walk down this thronged avenue on a holiday, when the Irish crowd the sidewalks, waiting for a pageant; and all you have ever read or dreamed of savagery will gleam, with latent fire, from those myriads of sullen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... lot of knocking about a sturdy Irishman can put up with, and what whacks he can receive on the head without any apparent damage. One cannot help thinking that the Celtic skull must be thicker than the Saxon. The brains in the former are certainly more capable than those in the latter of producing brilliant and amusing, if incorrect, ideas and expressions. The history of the Emerald Isle swarms with Boyle-Rocheisms ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... processes of polishing, burnishing, and pipe-claying a soldier's boots and buttons and belts. As he worked at his valeting, the man kept time with his foot to rude ballads that he sang in such a hissing Celtic that Bobby barked, scandalized by a dialect that had been music in the ears of his ancestors. At that Private McLean danced a Highland fling for him, and wee Bobby came near bursting with excitement. When the sergeant came up to make a magnificent toilet for tea and for the evening ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... to be respectfully offered and graciously returned. The ancient institution of the Royal Archer Guard, one of the chief glories of the situation, was only straggling by twos and threes to its muster-ground. The Celtic Society was in a similar plight, headed in default of the Duke of Argyle by the Marquis of Lorn, a golden-haired stripling in a satin kilt of the Campbell set, who looked all the slighter and more youthful, with more dainty calves ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... who sees his own funeral belongs to the realm of folk-lore. Like superstitions are to be found wherever the Celtic race has settled. In Spain they are especially prevalent in Galicia and Asturias. There the estantigua or "ancient enemy" appears to those soon to die. These spirits, or almas en pena, appear wearing winding-sheets, bearing candles, a cross, ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... to be rid of the precision and order of everyday life drove them to the mountains, and to the literature of Wales and the Highlands, to Celtic, or pseudo-Celtic romance. To the fashion of the time mountains were still frowning and horrid steeps; in Gray's Journal of his tour in the Lakes, a new understanding and appreciation of nature ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... a space has been traversed, what progress accomplished in the language of France! It was, at first, nothing but a coarse and irregular mixture of German and Latin, the former still in a barbarous and the latter already in a corrupted state; and amidst this mixture appear some fragments of the Celtic idioms of Gaul, without any literary tradition to regulate this mass of incoherence and confusion. As for following the development, regulation, and transformation of the French national language during these three ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... reached simultaneously east and west from sea to sea was also felt as far north as the estuary of the Tay. This may be inferred from the Celtic name of Inch being attached to many hillocks, which rise above the general level of the alluvial plains, implying that these eminences were once surrounded by water or marshy ground. At various localities also in the silt of ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... explorer and trader in the Lake Superior district and knew the fur traders' route as few others did. His well-nigh thirty years of service made him a man of outstanding influence in the Company. Moreover, he could be bland and jovial. He had the Celtic adroitness. He knew how to ingratiate himself with every class and possessed all the devices of an envoy. His appearance and dress at Red River were notable. Having had some rank as a U.E. Loyalist leader in the war of 1812, he came to the Forks dressed in a scarlet military coat with all the ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... layers only; the Romanesque layer and the Gothic layer; for the Roman layer had disappeared long before, with the exception of the Hot Baths of Julian, where it still pierced through the thick crust of the Middle Ages. As for the Celtic layer, no specimens were any longer to be found, even ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... wanders about the park and the woods in the evenings. Damp evenings for choice. She calls it the Celtic twilight. I've no use for the Celtic twilight myself. It has a tendency to get on the chest. But what is worse, she is always talking about meeting somebody, some elf or wizard or something. I don't ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... under those strange horsemen Still thicker lay the slain: And after those strange horses Black Auster toiled in vain. 640 Behind them Rome's long battle Came rolling on the foe, Ensigns dancing wild above, Blades all in line below, So comes the Po in flood-time 645 Upon the Celtic plain:[61] So comes the squall, blacker than night, Upon the Adrian main. How, by our Sire Quirinus,[62] It was a goodly sight 650 To see the thirty standards Swept down the tide of flight. So flies the spray of Adria When the black squall doth blow, So corn-sheaves in the flood-time ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... me as I write, saved I know not how out of the wreck of boyhood. I have searched it in vain for a single quotation of lyric song, a single scrap of verse that paints the world in rosy colors and lets moral platitudes go hang, a single strain of "Celtic magic." Instead, I learn that as a boy ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... and watchers struggled vainly to keep back this crowd of relatives and friends. The Celtic blood was up, and the Celtic faction spirit ran high. The air was filled with cries of cheer, advice, warning, and threat. Many elected to leave the side of their own team and go to the side of the other team with the intention ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... states that it was the custom at coming of age to tonsure the head and offer the hair to some god, and describes the young Theseus as adopting what we know as the Celtic tonsure, thenceforth ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... Chartres, sprang from an ancient Celtic hill fort, and, through successive stages, has since grown to a Roman, a mediaeval, and finally a modern city. It crowns the top of a very considerable eminence, the like of which, says Professor Freeman, does not exist ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... however, another opinion with respect to the Basque which deserves more especial notice, from the circumstance of its being extensively entertained amongst the literati of various countries of Europe, more especially England. I allude to the Celtic origin of this tongue, and its close connexion with the most cultivated of all the Celtic dialects, the Irish. People who pretend to be well conversant with the subject, have even gone so far as to assert, that so little difference exists between the Basque and Irish tongues, that individuals ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the moment of eating. The fire played on the thin legs and pinched faces of the children; on the baby's cradle in the further corner; on the mother, red-eyed still, but able to smile and talk again; on the strange Celtic face and matted hair of the dwarf. Family affection—and the satisfaction of the simpler physical needs—these things make the happiness of the poor. For this hour, to-night, the ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Parnell was revered with a devotion such as was scarcely ever rendered to any leader who had gone before him. A halo of romance had woven itself around his figure and all the poetry and passion of the mystic Celtic spirit went forth to him in the homage of a great loyalty and regard. The title of "The Uncrowned King of Ireland" was no frothy exuberance as applied to him—for he was in truth a kingly man, robed in dignity, panoplied in power, with a grand and haughty bearing ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... critic, as is sufficiently shown by his essay on The French Play in London.[17] Hebrew he mastered sufficiently to "follow and weigh the reasons offered by others" for a retranslation of the Old Testament; and into Celtic literature he made at any rate ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... the Celtic soul of Terry, who told of the sister of his Ould Counthry master who had once been taken to a hospital. And just at dusk on the third day after that his young master was walking down the dark hall. As he passed his sister's door, there she stood all in white, quietly brushing her hair, as plain ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... hard to follow in detail, since datable evidence is scanty. In general, however, the instances of really native fashions or speech which are recorded from this or that province belong to the early Empire. To that age we can assign not only the Celtic, Iberian, and Punic inscriptions which we find occasionally in Gaul, Spain, and Africa, but also the use of the native titles like Vergobret or Suffete, and the retention of native personal names and of that ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... instinct is reason. They are the negative and positive of mental volition. The man who retains the animal gift of unreasoning divination, preserving that clear power against the handicaps which mind training and education impose, is necessarily psychic, or, as they say in certain Celtic ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... orbit. They come here feeling that this is somehow a land of liberty, and with very dim and confused notions of what liberty is. They are very extensively the raw, untrained Irish peasantry, and the wonder is, that, with all the unreasoning heats and prejudices of the Celtic blood, all the necessary ignorance and rawness, there should be the measure of comfort and success there ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Panjoebang. He found her enticing tones of quavering sweetness from the gamelan, an instrument well-loved in Old Bali. Soek Panjoebang had the delicate features and transparent skin of Sumatra, the supple long limbs of Arabia and in a pair of wide and golden eyes a heritage from somewhere in Celtic Europe. Murphy bought her a goblet of frozen shavings, each a different perfume, while he himself drank white rice-beer. Soek Panjoebang displayed an intense interest in the ways of Earth, and Murphy found it hard to guide the conversation. "Weelbrrr," she said. "Such a funny name, Weelbrrr. Do ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... regular—a straight nose, wide brow, thin lips, and square, massive chin. His complexion was olive, and his eyes were of a dark hazel color, with a peculiarity about them which is not usually seen in the eye of the Teutonic or Celtic race, but is sometimes found among the people of the south of Europe, or in the East. It is difficult to find a name for this peculiarity. It may be seen sometimes in the gipsy; sometimes in the more ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... her side a fair one rode— Fair, but not by Grecian lines Was she fair; for all her features Shone with wondrous Celtic glow. ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... read of priests of Celtic day, Ancient Druids, holding sway By smattering of Occult law And man's eternal sense of awe. Stonehenge They used Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain Reputed Prehistoric Fane; Note each megalithic boulder; No Monument in ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... stripping the paneling, that I got hold of a sound notion of the beginnings of that beastly development. Over the great fireplace, after the great oak panels had been torn down, I found that there was let into the masonry a scrollwork of stone, with on it an old inscription, in ancient Celtic, that here in this room was burned Dian Tiansay, Jester of King Alzof, who made the Song of Foolishness upon King Ernore of the ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... to our consciousness. There was new life, heart, and vigour and, in some curious way, our mentalities seemed merged together. No longer puzzled, we were vibrant with a common purpose. I was angry and disgusted; Mick was moved to the inmost sanctuary of his Celtic being. He manifested the last degree of outrage and insult, of agonised anger. For the moment we were cleansed of all the pettiness and grossness common to manhood, inspired only with a new-born worship of the inviolable right ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... cause to take so brave or noble a form as among the Cornishmen. Cornwall stood apart from the general life of England: cut off from it not only by differences of blood and speech, but by the feudal tendencies of its people, who clung with a Celtic loyalty to their local chieftains, and suffered their fidelity to the Crown to determine their own. They had as yet done little more than keep the war out of their own county; but the march of a small ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... small moss-grown cairn, probably the resting-place of some Celtic chief of other times, and the call of "Officers to the front," soon ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... that we must back to Fairyland. Other waters we knew well, and loved: the little salmon-stream in the west that doubles through the loch, and runs a mile or twain beneath its alders, past its old Celtic battle-field, beneath the ruined shell of its feudal tower, to the sea. Many a happy day we had there, on loch or stream, with the big sea-trout which have somehow changed their tastes, and to- day take quite ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... fatter appendage continually swept the ground,—an inconvenience which I once undertook to remedy by trimming it off short with scissors. No Turk could have more indignantly resented the process than did that small quadruped,—his Celtic feelings being so severely wounded by it, in fact, that he abstained from sustenance for three days, putting himself into moral sackcloth and ashes for that period by retiring into his penitential cell under ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... "Christian von Troyes Yvain und die Brandanuslegende" in "Ztsch. fur vergleichende Literaturgeschichte" (Neue Folge, xi. Brand, 1897), pp. 442-448, has pointed out other striking allusions in the Latin "Navigatio S. Brandans" (ed. Wahlund, Upsala, 1900) and elsewhere in Celtic legend to trees teeming with singing birds, in which the souls of the blessed are incorporated. A more general reference to trees, animated by the souls of the dead, is found in J.G. Frazer, "The Golden Bough" (2nd ed. 1900), vol. I., p. ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... fortress, is fast losing the mystery which made it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St. Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism of Egypt first ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... and tradition preached throughout the globe is as uniform as if the Church consisted of one family, possessing one soul, one heart, and as if she had but one mouth. For, though the languages of the world are dissimilar, her doctrine is the same. The churches founded in Germany, in the Celtic nations, in the East in Egypt, in Lybia, and in the centres of civilization, do not differ from each other; but as the sun gives the same light throughout the world, so does the light of faith shine everywhere the same and ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... me merry, merry men," boomed the voice of Gerald Moore, with a slightly Celtic roll of the "r's," as he drummed impatiently on the shutter of the cabin window, while his companion, Jack Blake, performed a similar tattoo on the adjoining window. "Faith, and it was daylight hours ago, and ye ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... the Celtic Renaissance was a surprise, and even to Irish writers deeply interested in their country the phenomenon or movement, call it which you will, was not appreciated as of much significance at its beginning. Writing in 1892, Miss Jane Barlow was not ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... darkly dubious moment the little man hung back. To his quick Celtic instinct there seemed to inhere, in that open, dark, and silent window, something as sinister and repellent as the inscrutable, soundless menace of a revolver presented ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... of England may be divided into three periods: the first, extending from the departure of the Romans to the Norman Conquest (448- 1066), comprises the literature in the Celtic, Latin, and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Mr. Miller, or "Old Red," as he was familiarly named by his scientific friends, will not be forgotten by any who have seen him. A head of great massiveness, magnified by an abundant profusion of sub-Celtic hair, was set on a body of muscular compactness, but which in later years felt the undermining influence of a life of unusual physical and mental toil. Generally wrapped in a bulky plaid, and with a garb ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... was greatly reproached by a correspondent for misusing the word 'Celtic,' and informed that to call Mr. Yeats or Mr. Trench a Celt is a grave abuse of ethnical terms; that a notable percentage of the names connected with the 'Celtic Revival'—Hyde, Sigerson, Atkinson, Stokes—are not Celtic at all but Teutonic; that, in short, I have been following the multitude to ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... for some time head of the Theological College at Chartres, a cathedral town of France, anciently the capital of Celtic Gaul, and afterwards he was consecrated as Bishop of that diocese. ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... of the manana spirit in our tribe now, even with the Celtic admixture," he had declared forcibly. "I believe that like begets like in the human family as well as in the animal kingdom, and we know from experience that it never fails there. An infusion of pep is what our family needs, and I'll be hanged if I relish the job of rehabilitating two decayed ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... itself in similar conditions of society, French, Norse, Celtic, and Achaean. "We never hear anything bad" of Diomede, Odysseus, or Aias, and the evil in Achilles's resentment up to a certain point is legal, and not beyond what the poet thinks natural and pardonable in ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... hand, a name was a vital thing; a child that was lovely under one name might be unendurable under another. She had been reading Ossian, and the poems of the neo-Celtic enthusiasts; so after much pondering and consultation she announced that Cedric and Eileen were the two names ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... just effected, had taken a grand position among the powers of the world. But it is nevertheless clear at first sight that the constituent elements of the population were far from being completely fused. In many places in the two great islands the old Celtic stock still existed with its original character unaltered. The Germanic race, which certainly had an indubitable preponderance and was sovereign over the other, was split into two different kingdoms, which, despite the union of the two crowns, still remained ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... a burning shame of Prick!—'Prick' we call her, in our genial moments, hearing as the 'k' is hard in Celtic language; and all abroad about her husband. My very first saying to you was, not to be too much okkipied with her. Look at the pinafore on her! Lord be with me! If his lordship, as caught me, that day of this very same month fifty years, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... sofas and inspect embroideries to her heart's content. So lounging, rapt in the contemplation of Egyptian appliqus, Syrian gold-thread borders, Spanish linen-work, silk flower patterns from Cos, Parthian animal designs and Celtic cord-labyrinths after originals in leather thongs, Utta could glance up from time to time and make sure that her charge was safe ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... size—overtook her, and fired a shot across her bow to bring her to, Longford, the captain of the America, stood on the gunwale of his own ship politely urging the captain of the Licorne to return with him. With a burst of Celtic passion the French captain fired his whole broadside into the big Englishman, and then instantly hauled down his flag so as ...
— The Junior Classics • Various |
