"Divination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... divination &c. (prediction) 511; sortilege[obs3], ordeal, sortes Virgilianae[obs3]; hocus-pocus &c. (deception) 545. V. practice sorcery &c.n.; cast a nativity, conjure, exorcise, charm, enchant; bewitch, bedevil; hoodoo, voodoo; entrance, mesmerize, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... instinct or power of divination might indeed have given me a passing glimpse of the things which lay beyond, through the portals of that day, for I answered ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the Bronte sisterhood should convince the literary aspirant that the creative imagination is sufficient unto itself and independent of the stimulus of contact with the busy hum of men. If it be necessary, the literary genius by divination can portray life without seeing it. Bricks ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... take nothing," replied Berthelini; "we shall feed upon insults. I have an eye, Elvira; I have a spirit of divination; and this place is accursed. The landlord has been discourteous, the Commissary will be brutal, the audience will be sordid and uproarious, and you will take a cold upon your throat. We have been besotted enough to come; the die is cast—it will be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... children by Angurbodi, a giantess of Jotunheim (the giants' home). The first of these was Fenris, the wolf; the second was Joermungand, the Midgard serpent; and the third was Hela, death. Very soon did the gods become aware of this evil progeny which was being reared in Jotunheim, and by divination they discovered that they must receive great injury from them. That they had such a mother spoke bad for them, but their coming of such a sire was a still worse presage. All-father therefore despatched certain of the gods to bring the children ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... the street of St. Genevieve, toward the Ozarks, where once she had traveled—true, against her will, but yet through scenes which she now remembered. And always there came up in her mind a question which she found no way to ask. It was Jeanne herself who, either by divination or by ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... after the fall of Troy, were overtaken by a storm, Calchas is said to have been thrown ashore at Colophon. According to another story, he foresaw the storm and did not attempt to return by sea. It had been predicted that he should die when he met his superior in divination; and the prophecy was fulfilled in the person of Mopsus, whom Calchas met in the grove of the Clarian Apollo near Colophon. Having been beaten in a trial of soothsaying, Calchas died of chagrin or committed suicide. He had a temple and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... hit, and never mark when they miss; as they do generally also of dreams. The second is, that probable conjectures, or obscure traditions, many times turn themselves into prophecies; while the nature of man, which coveteth divination, thinks it no peril to foretell that which indeed they do but collect. As that of Seneca's verse. For so much was then subject to demonstration, that the globe of the earth had great parts beyond the Atlantic, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... Adresteia and the land of Apaesus, with Pityeia, and the high mountain of Tereia—these were led by Adrestus and Amphius, whose breastplate was of linen. These were the sons of Merops of Percote, who excelled in all kinds of divination. He told them not to take part in the war, but they gave him no heed, for fate ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... theories of mankind have often found their way into popular speech, and their terms have remained there long after the rejection of the beliefs they embodied: as—lunatic, augury, divination, spell, exorcism: though, to be sure, such words may often be turned to good account, besides the interest of preserving their original sense. Language is a record as well ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... in our day are very naturally ignorant, since we do not ransack science for the same secrets; and thus, in the selection or preparation of the material employed, mainly consisted whatever may be referrible to natural philosophical causes in the antique science of Rhabdomancy, or divination and enchantment by wands. The staff, or wand, of which you tell me, was, you say, made of iron or steel and tipped with crystal. Possibly iron and crystal do really contain some properties not hitherto scientifically analyzed, and only, indeed, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... court of judges was called upon to decide whether this man or that other was most fit to perform the work in hand. Such a trial was called "Divinatio," because the judges had to get their lights in the matter as best they could without the assistance of witnesses—by some process of divination—with the aid of the gods, as it might be. Cicero's first speech in the matter of Verres is called In Quintum Caecilium Divinatio, because one Caecilius came forward to take the case away from him. Here was a part of the scheme ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... sight of the fact that since abandoning her work-girl existence Clara had been constantly educating herself, not only by direct study of books, but through her association with people, her growth in experience. Where in the old days of rebellion she had only an instinct, a divination to guide her, there was now just enough of knowledge to give occupation to her developed intellect and taste. Far keener was her sense of the loss she had suffered than her former longing for what she knew only in dream. The activity of her ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... understand sex, being himself only half a man: that is, only man and nothing more. But all the really great imaginative men are bi-sexual: they have a large ingredient of woman in their composition, which gives to their divination an extra touch of something that others cannot reach. And so, with equal poetry, yet with a pathos infinitely deeper, our Milton makes Love the child of Loneliness:[2] a parentage evinced by the terrible melancholy of Love when he cannot ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... still found. However deficient his knowledge of the art, his passion for music was extraordinary. After hearing a fine performance "he was unable for [Page 92] three months to enjoy his food." A fifth task was the editing of the Yih-King,[*] the book of divination compiled by Wen-wang. How thoroughly he believed in it is apparent from his saying, "Should it please Heaven to grant me five or ten years to study this book, I would not be in danger of falling into great errors." He meant that he would then be able ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... cunning knavery imposing on ignorance and credulity; and I expressed my opinion to the Brahmin; but he assured me that the class of persons in the moon, who were resorted to on account of their supposed powers of divination, was very different from the similar class in Asia or Europe, and that oracular art was here regularly studied and professed as a branch of philosophy. "You would be surprised," said he, "to find how successful they have been in investing ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... lie not; but we have here a work Wrought counter to the stars and destiny. The science is still honest: this false heart Forces a lie on the truth-telling heaven, On a divine law divination rests; Where nature deviates from that law, and stumbles Out of her limits, there all science errs. True I did not suspect! Were it superstition Never by such suspicion to have affronted The human form, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... They then having departed said this; and after this the son of Aetion grew, and because he had escaped this danger, the name of Kypselos was given him as a surname derived from the corn-chest. Then when Kypselos had grown to manhood and was seeking divination, a two-edged 85 answer was given him at Delphi, placing trust in which he made an attempt upon Corinth and obtained possession of it. Now ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... terms, allowing me, besides a handsome retaining fee, two horses, and such travelling attendants as might be found necessary. There were also certain emphatic stipulations which are worth recording. I was not, on any pretext whatever, to attempt the divination, much less the revelation, of the future. I was never, upon any consideration, to be seduced into lengthy descriptions of things that I did not see, or minute particulars about matters which I did not know. I was utterly to ignore, and refuse to be influenced ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... be observed in little folks at a very early age. With some children they are not very pronounced, and the child seems like hundreds of others without any particular inclination, artistic or otherwise. It is then that the teacher's powers of divination should be brought into play. Before any real progress can be made the nature of the child must be studied carefully. In the case of other children, the individuality is very marked at an early age. As a rule, the child with the marked individuality is the one from ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... at once, either by remembrance or some divination of his personality, and he rose to meet him saying, "I think you are Ralph Lugur. I am glad to see ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... apprehension which nothing but the old house could have inspired. This, at least, we believed, and our faith in the fancy remains unshaken, now that Mr. Denton, the geologist, has expounded the theory of "Psychometry," which he tells us is the divination of soul through the contact of matter with a psychometrical mind. Had we in those days been better versed in this theory of "the soul of things," we should have made a gentle application of forehead to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... almost invariably of straight lines, in the shape of little sticks either singly or put together. Such sticks were in early times used by the northern nations for the purpose of ascertaining future events. The sticks were shaken up, and from the figures that they formed a kind of divination ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Sid ('the Fairy Mound') of Cruachan, [2]a poetess of Connacht[2] am I." [3]"Whence comest thou?" asked Medb. "From Alba, after learning prophetic skill," the maiden made answer. "Hast thou the form of divination?"[b] "Verily, have I," the maiden said.[3] [4]"Look, then, for me, how will my undertaking be." The maiden ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... "be not wrath with your servant. Pharaoh, as you know, I have skill in divination, the spirits of the dead whisper at times in my ears of things that are to be. It seemed to me just now when having left the presence of the Queen, my foster-child, I stood a while alone in the darkness, that the divine Majesty of the great lady, ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... historians like Barante and Augustin Thierry, were Scott's professed disciples. The latter confesses, in a well-known passage, that "Ivanhoe" was the inspirer of his "Conquete d'Angleterre," and styles the novelist "le plus grand maitre qu'il y ait jamais eu en fait de divination historique." [45] ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... familiarized itself with all the relics of an ancient period can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic divination, restore the missing notes in the "music of humanity," and reconstruct the fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote past nearer to us, and interpret it to our duller apprehension—this form ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... means, and near her, an agreeable situation, having sent me word that she had procured one that would suit me, and by which I should not be obliged to quit her. I exhausted all my conjectures in guessing what this occupation could be, but I must have possessed the art of divination to have hit it on the right. I had money sufficient to make my journey agreeable: Mademoiselle du Chatelet persuaded me to hire a horse, but this I could not consent to, and I was certainly right, for by so doing I should have lost ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... during sickness the soul departs from the body; and the medicine-man attempts to arrest it and to bring it back to the body of the patient. In this and other rites the blood of fowls (which they are said to venerate) (2) is smeared on the participants. Divination by means of the bones of fowls and the viscera, especially the liver of the pig, is in common use (5). The souls of the dead go to a place in which they live much as in this world. It is called ABU LAGAN[200] (3). In this abode ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... that the serious avocations of the fathers often serve as games for the children. So it comes about that in the games of chance we have a survival of the ancient custom of divination. As, according to Indian belief, song was the medium through which man communicated with the mysterious powers, we find all his games of ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... old ballads and popular tales.[69] His researches sometimes extended into the vain province of judicial astrology, in which he was a firm believer; and there is reason to think that he also credited divination by dreams. In the country, he delighted in the pastime of fishing, and used, says Mr. Malone, to spend some time with Mr. Jones of Ramsden, in Wiltshire. D'Urfey was sometimes of this party; but Dryden appears to have ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... seem that divination is not a sin. Divination is derived from something divine: and things that are divine pertain to holiness rather than to sin. Therefore it seems that divination is not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... interest even in these days. It is true that no importance attaches now even to the discussion of the considerations which led to the rejection of judicial astrology. None but the most ignorant, and therefore superstitious, believe at present in divination of any sort or kind whatsoever. Divination by the stars holds no higher position than palmistry, fortune-telling by cards, or the indications of the future which foolish persons find in dreams, tea-dregs, salt-spilling, and other absurdities. But there are two reasons ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... because, the Earl had not already laid down the government. The Lord Treasurer ventured to remonstrate, but was bid to bold his tongue. Ever variable and mutable as woman, Elizabeth was perplexing and baffling to her counsellors, at this epoch, beyond all divination. The "sparing humour" was increasing fearfully, and she thought it would be easier for her to slip out of the whole expensive enterprise, provided Leicester were merely her lieutenant-general, and not stadholder for the Provinces. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit." Yet Browning had never seen Rome until a few months before this poem was published. It is an example, not of careful study, but of the inexplicable divination of genius. Browning permits a delirious old Bishop to talk a few lines, and a whole period of ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... power for usefulness. To feel that this ever-flowing current of events is something entirely outside one's own choice or volition is to stand helpless—if not hopeless—before the spectacle of life. It is out of this aimless and chaotic state that resort is had to the seeking of all kinds of divination, omens, prophecies, and foreshadowings, with the result of more and more completely separating the individual from his legitimate activities and endeavor, and leading him to substitute for spiritual ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... would sometimes be accompanied by the slim, fair-haired Court pages, with their floating mantles, and gay fluttering ribands; but more often he would be alone, feeling through a certain quick instinct, which was almost a divination, that the secrets of art are best learned in secret, and that Beauty, like ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... have been erected between 471 and 500 A.D. I have not seen any statement that the locality was sacred in pre-Buddhist times, but it was probably regarded as the haunt of deities, one of whom—perhaps some spirit of divination—was identified with the wise Manjusri. It is possible that during the various inroads of Graeco-Bactrians, Yueeh-Chih, and other Central Asian tribes into India, Manjusri was somehow imported into the pantheon of the Mahayana from China or Central Asia, and he has, especially ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax of his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. "No more, no more, ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... late. Even as the physician turned to intercept his daughter, she crossed the threshold of the study. She stopped short at perceiving Exel; then, with a woman's unerring intuition, divined a tragedy, and, in the instant of divination, sought for, and found, the hub of the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... him shudder. Writing with him is an exhausting process, which probably accounts for the fact that his literary output has been small. But the same power of analysis and attention to detail have been most effective in his political activities. In these his divination has been prophetic and in his manipulation of contending elements he shows a dexterity that has baffled even the ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... to you, O people, that I am not a Sovereign that deceives. I find that, in spite of my commands, many of my people revile the idols and treat divination as a trifle, and worship the Christians' God, and pray, and baptize, and sing—which things I abhor. They are unlawful. I detest them, and they are not to be done, saith Ranavalo-Manjaka. I will not suffer it. Those who dare to disobey my commands shall die. Now, I order that all ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... fine cases of intro-determination in a series of experiments in basin divination (lecanomancy) which I have carried on for several years. Lecanomancy resembles crystal gazing, except that the gazer looks into a basin of water. In the visions of my subject, Lea, typical forms were ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... Henderson, don't be absurd. After her wonderful divination about me, of course I couldn't help asking her a few questions as to how she developed the gift—and so on—and she told ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... inscriptions on these bones have already furnished a list of nearly 2500 separate characters, of which not more than about 600 have been so far identified. They appear to be responses given by professional soothsayers to private individuals who came to them seeking the aid of divination in the affairs of their daily life. It is difficult to fix their date with much exactitude. The script, though less archaic than that of the earlier bronzes, is nevertheless of an exceedingly free and irregular ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... home, Kamehameha called his chief priest, and announced he was about to break the tabus and to change his faith. The Kahuna replied that he was the King's servant, but the step was grave, and it would be wiser to proceed by divination. Kamehameha consented. Each built a new heiau over against the other's; and when both were finished, a game of what we call French and English or The Tug of War was played upon the intervening space. The party of the priest prevailed; the King's men were dragged in a body into the opposite ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... It was strange, her pointed interest in his answer. It might have been her own fate she was inquiring after. Her dark, dilated eyes rested on Birkin, as if she could conjure the truth of the future out of him, as out of some instrument of divination. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... she took it she smiled "sillily," and made some banal speech about the blazing, brazen sea below. For she felt that he had guessed her secret, timid hope. . . . Now, recalling the episode (it is he who has given the signal for such reminiscence), she asks him what effect his divination of her trembling heart had had on ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... I. Introduction to the Art of Divination from Tea-Leaves 13 II. Ritual and Method of Using the Teacup 25 III. General Principles To Be Observed in Reading the Cup 29 IV. An Alphabetical List of Symbols with Their Significations 39 V. Specimen Cups, with Interpretations ...
— Tea-Cup Reading, and the Art of Fortune-Telling by Tea Leaves • 'A Highland Seer'
... the elements, rendered the precaution almost unnecessary. In any case, there was no one near enough to act the part of eavesdropper, and Brett, exercising the rapid decision which frequently impressed others as a gift of divination, determined that to let such a man as the King's messenger into the secret could not possibly be harmful to the interests of his client, whilst his help ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... her late husband, so inquisitive of mind, had left on matters much more occult than the manufacture of yellow starch and skin lotions. "It was also rumoured,'' says Mr Sabatini, "that she amassed gold in another and less licit manner: that she dabbled in fortune-telling and the arts of divination.'' We shall see, as the story develops, that the rumour had some foundation. The inquiring mind of the late Dr Turner had led him into strange company, and his legacy to Anne included connexions ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... Thymaetes, being delivered on that day of a son, he ordered them both to be killed; thinking thereby to escape the realization of the prediction. Servius, on the authority of Euphorion, relates the story in much the same manner; but a poet quoted by Cicero in his first book on Divination, says that it was the oracle of Zelia, a little town at the foot of Mount Ida, which gave that answer as an interpretation of the dream of Hecuba. Pausanias says it was the sibyl Herophila who interpreted the dream, while other ancient writers ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... hand, is a non-reflex movement of a voluntary muscle, executed in the waking state but not controlled by the ordinary waking consciousness. Phenomena of this kind play a large part in primitive ceremonies of divination (q.v.) and in our own day furnish much of the material of Psychical Research. At the lowest level we have vague movements of large groups of muscles, as in "bier-divination," where the murderer or his residence is inferred from the actions of the bearers; of a similar character but combined ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... all, fortune was merciful, and I was gone; the Major had summoned me—his brother had come. I went circuitously and alone. As I started, some fellow writhing on the grass cried, "Charlie Tol—oh, this is better than a tcharade!" and a flash of divination enlightened me. While I went I burned with shame, rage and nervous exhaustion; the name Scott Gholson had gasped in my ear was the name of her in the curtained wagon, and I cursed the day in which I had ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... ready to renounce, and accuses Teiresias of having in view only some fresh source of professional profit to himself in connexion with some new-fangled oracle; his petty spite avenges itself on the prophet by an order to root up the sacred chair, where he sits to watch the birds for divination, and disturb the order of his sacred place; and even from the moment of his entrance the mark of his doom seems already set upon him, in an impotent trembling which others notice in him. Those of the women who still loitered, he has already caused to be shut up ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... is transferred, we hope not improperly from Roman to British Superstition. The Latin alludes to Augury, and very justly ridicules the Folly of Divination by ...
— The Lovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love • Henry Fielding
... had taught himself to read and write; everything that he knew, he had learned by himself. Feuilly had a generous heart. The range of his embrace was immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples. As his mother had failed him, he meditated on his country. He brooded with the profound divination of the man of the people, over what we now call the idea of the nationality, had learned history with the express object of raging with full knowledge of the case. In this club of young Utopians, occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside world. He had for his specialty ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... pardonable in the belief, that the Irish and their priesthood were rather prone to be irreverent; but observe, under this exterior, the deep sources of feeling that lie hidden and wait but the wand of divination to be revealed. In a thousand similar ways are the actions and the motives of the Irish understood by those who are careless of them; or worse, misrepresented by those whose interest, and too often business, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... (it was supposed) the sun, or leaning on his staff, motionless and rapt, meditating death and mutability. He lost nothing by such change apparitions; on the contrary, he gained the name of a wise man who had powers of divination and healing. In the cottage whither he went once a week for bread, a child had been sick of a burning fever. His hands, averred the mother, had cured it. Groping and making passes over its stomach, rubbing in oils, relief had ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... three enemies, was at a loss to decide upon which to make his first attack. Ezekiel, whose place of exile put him in a favourable position for learning what was passing, shows him to us as he "stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination: he shook the arrows to and fro, he consulted the teraphim, he looked in the liver." Judah formed as it were the bridge by which the Egyptians could safely enter Syria, and if Nebuchadrezzar could succeed in occupying ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... you would often have supposed her; for Teufelsdroeckh, and Teufelsdroeckh only, would she serve or give heed to; and with him she seemed to communicate chiefly by signs; if it were not rather by some secret divination that she guessed all his wants, and supplied them. Assiduous old dame! she scoured, and sorted, and swept, in her kitchen, with the least possible violence to the ear; yet all was tight and right there: hot and black came the coffee ever at the due moment; and the speechless Lieschen herself ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the far-off song. Slowly she raises her instrument. I almost shudder to see the tawny wood touching her white shoulder; yet that cannot be common or unclean which she so loves and carries with almost a caress. Still intent, she raises the bow with a slow sweep, as were a wand of divination. Nearer and nearer comes the heavenly voice, pouring around her a flood of mystic melody. And now at last it breaks upon our ears,—softly at first, only a sweet faint echo from that other sphere, but ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... of their sentiments and folklore, superstitions, symbolism, mysticism, use in protection, prevention, religion and divination, crystal gazing, birth-stones, lucky stones and talismans, ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... hall were set several cells. Women who wished for children had to be of vigorous age and free from malady. They used to fast for seven days, and then go into the temple to prostrate themselves before Fo, and to consult the wands of divination. ...
— Eastern Shame Girl • Charles Georges Souli
... time in his life, Bedient learned what America liked to read.... All the finer expressions of the human mind and hand gave him deep joy. His love and divination for the good and the true were the same that characterized the rarest minds of our ancestors, who had access only to a few noble books in their formative years. And Bedient's was the expanded and fortified intelligence of one who has ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... gold-embroidered jacket of civil or military rank, with the kris thrust into a brilliant sash, here supplements the universal sarong, itself of bolder design and glowing colour in this old-world realm of Mataram, the centre of Java's historic interest. The crooked blade of the kris is still used in divination, light and shadow playing over the wavy steel, ever suggesting cabalistic signs inscribed by an invisible hand on the azure surface. The kris is popularly endowed with healing efficacy, and the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... smile played round Aspasia's lips, when she saw the wreath of ivy and grape leaves placed on the head of Alcibiades. "Son of Aristo," she exclaimed, "the Phoenician Magii have given you good skill in divination. You have bestowed every ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... New-Netherlanders had escaped the infatuation which prevailed so generally in the religious provinces of New-England, a credulous superstition, of a less active quality, possessed the minds of the most intelligent of the Dutch colonists, and even of their descendants so lately as in our own times. The art of divination was particularly in favor; and it rarely happened, that any inexplicable event affected the fortunes or comforts of the good provincialists, without their having recourse to some one of the more renowned fortunetellers of the country, for an explanation. Men of slow ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... foolish and vile and hurtful which believes there is no other life after this." "And I so believe, so affirm, and so am certain that we pass to another better life after this" (Convito, Tr. II. c. 9). It is a fine divination of Carlyle from the Non han speranza di morte that "one day it had risen sternly benign in the scathed heart of Dante that he, wretched, never resting, worn as he was, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... walk'd within the field, To see what comfort it would yield; And as I went my private way, An olive-branch before me lay; And seeing it, I made a stay, And took it up, and view'd it; then Kissing the omen, said Amen; Be, be it so, and let this be A divination unto me; That in short time my woes shall cease, And love shall ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... With the unerring divination which was the natural fruit of so many years of ceaseless conjecture, she instantly suspected the worst. All that busy conversation which her appearance had interrupted, all those smiles which her presence had seemed ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... retrieve the honor of Munster, which he considered tarnished by his master having been duped by a stripling; when one morning a hand-bill was found in the area, intimating the residence in Town, pro bono publico, of a celebrated professor of the Occult Sciences; to whom was given the sublime art of divination, and who, by astrological and intuitive knowledge, would discover lost or stolen property, with infallible precision. Thady, whose credulity was of no inferior order, elate with the idea of consummating ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... less sanguine; he had come to entertain a considerable respect for Marrineal's capacity. And he had another and more immediate complication on his mind, which fact his companion, by some occult exercise of divination, perceived. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... answer that the God Returned to us who sought his oracle, The messengers have doubtless told thee—how One course alone could rid us of the pest, To find the murderers of Laius, And slay them or expel them from the land. Therefore begrudging neither augury Nor other divination that is thine, O save thyself, thy country, and thy king, Save all from this defilement of blood shed. On thee we rest. This is man's highest end, To others' service all ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... studies. Difficult as the language seems to be upon one's first introduction to it, it was not long before I was able to understand much of what was said to me, and to express myself in a vague roundabout way. In the latter operation I was much assisted by a peculiar faculty of divination which the Russian peasant possesses to a remarkably high degree. If a foreigner succeeds in expressing about one-fourth of an idea, the Russian peasant can generally fill up the remaining three-fourths from his own intuition. ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... were charged with a significance that Brodrick himself was not aware of; as if the powers that worked in him obscurely had used him for the utterance of a divination not his own. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... his powers. The long rest on the oasis had restored all his physical vigor. Every nerve and muscle was flexible and strong, as if made of steel wire. His eye had never before been so clear, nor his ear so acute, and above all, that sixth sense, the power of divination almost, which came from a perfect correlation of the five senses, developed to the utmost degree, was alive in him. Nothing could stir in the brush without his knowing it, and, welcoming the pursuit, the spirit of challenge was so strong in him that he threw back ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... was quite sure "Old Mag," as she called herself, possessed no powers of divination, he knew she did have certain knowledge that he considered she had no ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... as well as very chilly, to attempt to stray out alone at the stroke of twelve, robed merely in a nightgown, and fetch three pails of water to place by one's bedside. Gowan's north country recipe for divination was equally impracticable—to go out at midnight, and "dip your smock in a south-running spring where the lairds' lands meet," then hang it to dry before the fire. They discussed it quite seriously, however, ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... as the direct speech of New York has it, I want to pay tribute to the sagacity, the clarity of vision, the sure divination of the truth amidst a fog of deceit, which has characterized almost the whole Press of the United States since those feverish days at the end of July, 1914, when the nightmare of war was so quickly ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... deal in mummies himself, though he had a stuffed crocodile very much at my service; but would I call to-morrow, and bring Leonora? He added that he had known of our coming by virtue of his secret art of divination. 'And thyself,' he added, 'shalt gaze without extra charge in ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... is susceptible of a division into several classes or sections: Religious Cults, Necromancy, Magic, Second Sight, Divination, Astrology, Palmistry, of which all have their special literatures and bibliographies. Major Irwin recently sold an extensive series of works on these and kindred topics. Cornelius Agrippa, Ashmole, Bulwer, Lilly, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... governeth a multiplicity, Being essential uniform in all Not to be severed or dividual; But in her function holdeth her estate By powers divine in her ingenerate; And so by inspiration conceiveth, What heaven to her by divination breatheth. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... do, seeing thee so indeed, That tremble at the imagination? 668 The thought of it doth make my faint heart bleed, And fear doth teach it divination: I prophesy thy death, my living sorrow, If thou encounter with the ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... hours," repeated Galeotti firmly, "if there be one sparkle of true divination in those bright and mysterious intelligences, which speak, each on their courses, though without a tongue. I wish ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... superstitions current among that people. They have no buildings set aside as temples, although they sometimes celebrate, in a temporary edifice, a sort of worship. Their chief idol is Badhala, but they also worship the sun and the moon, and various minor divinities. They believe in omens, and practice divination. A detailed account is given of the various classes of priests, sorcerers, witches, etc., in which the natives believed; also of the burial rites of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... out. Nothing happened. There were no lighted windows, nor had lights appeared and disappeared in any of the windows. Yet it was the central point of his consideration. He rallied to it each time after a divination of the state of ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... meditate or hear sermons. But in the temples used by the Chinese, a lower standard is painfully obvious and the atmosphere is different. Visitors are there in plenty, but their object is to "get luck," and the business of religion has become transformed into divination and spiritual gambling. The worshipper, on entering, goes to a counter where he buys tapers and incense-sticks, together with some implements of superstition such as rods or inscribed cards. After burning incense he draws a card or throws the rods up into the air and takes an augury from ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... "prophecy" being so constantly, in ordinary use, restricted to "foretelling." Strictly, however, the term prophecy applies as much to outspeaking as to foretelling; and, even in the restricted sense of "divination," it is obvious that the essence of the prophetic operation does not lie in its backward or forward relation to the course of time, but in the fact that it is the apprehension of that which lies out of the sphere of immediate knowledge; the seeing ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... And they compute the time of the death of the son nearly as we do the appearance of the Redeemer on earth. They believe in a hell as we do, and burn lamps that God may light them in the right road in the other world: Yet do they use divination after a ridiculous manner. The country of Thibet produces several fruits of the same kinds with those grown in Europe, together with rice and wheat, and has abundance of cattle; but a great part of the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... being stronger, have yet more power to work evil. This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men, he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages, he have still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the divination by the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him at command; he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not; he can, within his range, direct the elements, the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... after the cursory look and plunged again into the unbroken wilderness. Two or three hours later he decided that he was being followed. He had not seen or heard anything, but it was a sort of divination. He sought to throw it aside, telling himself that it was mere foolishness, but he could not do it. The thought stayed with him, and then he knew that ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... chicanery and malice? No more than was Paul, when in consequence of a vision he had seen at Troas, he went over to Macedonia to help the Christians there, and was beaten and imprisoned, because he cast out a spirit of divination from a young damsel which had brought much gain to her masters. Paul was as much a foreign emissary in the Roman colony of Philippi, as George Thompson was in America, and it was because he was a Jew and taught customs it ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke
... of Moab and Midian would appeal for aid to the God of their enemies instead of to their own divinity, for in those days the principal business of a deity was to wage war in behalf of his worshipers. Balaam was a Midianite, and Balak sent messengers to him "with the reward of divination in their hand," and begged that he would kindly come over and knock the Israelites off the Christmas tree with one of his smooth-bore, muzzle-loading maledictions; "for," said he, with a pious fervor that proves he was addressing a priest of his own faith, "I wot that he whom ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... claimed, justly, a knowledge of men. He prided himself upon it, and from a certain point of view he was right. Others have the power of divination; he had the faculty of scent. It is brute-like, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... whereon to write, so that the adaptation of the forms would not have been necessary. That the Germans were familiar with some sort of marks on wood at a much earlier period is shown by Tacitus's Germania, chap. x. There we are told that for purposes of divination certain signs were scratched on slips of wood from a fruit-bearing tree (including, no doubt, tile beech; cp. book, German Buch, and Buchstabe, a letter of the alphabet); the slips were thrown down promiscuously on a white cloth. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... appoints two Kami to procure from Mount Kagu a "five-hundred branched" sakaki tree (cleyera Japonica), from whose branches the mirror together with a "five-hundred beaded" string of curved jewels and blue and white streamers of hempen cloth and paper-mulberry cloth are suspended, and causes divination to be performed with the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... could recall that when the little sufferer had been but a baby in his cradle his eyes would frequently be fixed upon his own—and even then those eyes had been rendered so sharp by suffering, endowed, too, with such an extraordinary power of divination, that they had seemed able to dive into the unconscious thoughts buried in the depths of his brain. And by a singular counter-effect all the things that he had never owned to himself he now found in his child's eyes—he ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... or diviner, had various means of reading the secrets of futurity, such as the flight of birds, and the movements of water and fire. There was a peculiar practice of divination very general in the Algonquin family of tribes, among some of whom it still subsists. A small, conical lodge was made by planting poles in a circle, lashing the tops together at the height of about seven ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... passed by. The shape resolved itself into a woman's; she was looking on the ground, and walking slowly as if searching for something that had been lost, her course being precisely that of Mr. Melbury's gig. Fitzpiers by a sort of divination jumped to the idea that the figure was Grace's; her nearer approach ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... the idea that astronomy began with the Greeks. "Several centuries before the days of Alexander the Great," he says, "the Greeks had begun to cultivate the study of the heavens, not for purposes of divination, but prompted by a scientific spirit as an intellectual discipline that might help them to solve the mysteries of the universe." It is possible, however, to overrate the "scientific spirit" of the Greeks, who, like the Japanese in our own day, were accomplished borrowers from other civilizations. ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord." ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... physiologist the existence of an intangible fluid which is the basis of the phenomena of the human will, and from which result passions, habits, the shape of faces and of skulls. Magnetic facts, the miracles of somnambulism, those of divination and ecstasy, which open a way to the spiritual world, were fast accumulating. The strange tale of the apparitions of the farmer Martin, so clearly proved, and his interview with Louis XVIII.; a knowledge of the intercourse of Swedenborg with the departed, carefully ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... escaped, and Perronel drew near to the party round the fire, where the divination of the burning of nuts was going on, but not successfully, since no pair hitherto put in would keep together. However, the next contribution was a snail, which had been captured on the wall, and was solemnly set to crawl on the hearth by Dennet, "to see whether it would ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are delegated to servants and school teachers. The child and the parent are strangers to one another necessarily, because their ages must differ widely. Read Goethe's autobiography; and note that though he was happy in his parents and had exceptional powers of observation, divination, and story-telling, he knew less about his father and mother than about most of the other people he mentions. I myself was never on bad terms with my mother: we lived together until I was forty-two years old, absolutely without the smallest friction of any kind; yet ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... future especially is sought on Hallowe'en. It is a famous time for divination in love affairs. A typical eighteenth century party in western Scotland is described ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... corruptions of the Athenian state, and of all human society. It seems rather a harmless display of merry pranks, which hit alike at gods and men without any particular object in view. Whatever was remarkable about birds in natural history, in mythology, in the doctrine of divination, in the fables of Aesop, or even in proverbial expressions, has been ingeniously drawn to his purpose by the poet; who even goes back to cosmogony, and shows that at first the raven-winged Night laid a wind-egg, out ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Divination by means of the divining stalks (the divining plant, milfoil or yarrow) and the tortoiseshell has been carried on from time immemorial, but was not originally practised with the object of ascertaining future events, but in order to decide doubts, much as lots are drawn or a coin tossed ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... wife, his daughter, his nephews, his sons-in-law his sister, Agrippa, his kinsmen, his domestics, his friends; Areus, Maecenas, his slayers of beasts for sacrifice and divination: there thou hast the death of a whole court together. Proceed now on to the rest that have been since that of Augustus. Hath death dwelt with them otherwise, though so many and so stately whilst they lived, than it doth use to deal with any one particular ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... and long afterwards practised in England, and that have scarcely yet died out in Scotland. As she told of tricks she had often played, of the apple eaten facing a mirror, of the dripping sheet, of the basins of water, of the nuts burning side by side, and many other such innocent ways of divination, by which laughing, trembling English maidens sought to see the form of their future husbands, if husbands they were to have, then Faith listened breathlessly, asking short, eager questions, as if some ray ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... commercial, found room for a cult or two of superstition. He had consulted Mrs. Puce's oracle time and time again. He had had recourse to his boy Jim's father, Tom Nyoka, twice before. He had got him to use for him a rude and illegal form of divination. He had been helped by it before, at least so he opined. He might be helped again. He sat looking at the sun dropping smoothly in a cloudless sky. As he watched, Jim came out to him to tell him that his father was in the kitchen. 'I'll come ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... in the secret of the communications with Lord Derby, but the intrinsic probabilities of a case often give to the public a trick of divination. In the middle of December (1856) articles actually appeared in the prints of the day announcing that Mr. Gladstone would at the opening of the next session figure at the head of the opposition. The tories, they said, wanted a leader, Mr. Gladstone wanted a party. They ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... do we find Pharaoh in the midst of his troubles calling for a priest. It is always for the wise men, magicians, and sorcerers. Were they not the priests?—were they not those who controlled the mysteries—who practised divination? When Moses and Aaron cast down their rods, the magicians of Egypt "also did in like manner with their enchantments," and the result was the same.[21] When Moses smote the waters that they became blood, the acuteness of the priests, or magi, in their ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... their own price;—his conversation will seldom be taken in exchange for theirs without a large discount,—and this, by the by, eternally driving him into the hands of more equitable brokers, for such conversation as he can find, it requires no great spirit of divination to ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... being quickened at this flame, grew keener, more acute, acquired a marvellous sensibility, a sort of clairvoyance, a faculty of divination which caused her endless torture. Hardly a deception of Andrea's but seemed to send a shadow across her spirit; she felt an indefinite sense of disquietude which sometimes condensed itself into a suspicion. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... with spirits to a service of gods who were ideal heads of human communities, and friends of individual men. It was not a mere system, as the world has been accustomed to think, of astrology and of divination of other kinds. But when Babylon and Assyria ceased to be independent powers, and became provinces of Persia, Bel bowed down and Nebo stooped, not to rise again. The world of that day had no need of them. It had already attained in more than one country ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... opinion that by burning Tobacco they could send up their prayers to the Great Spirit with the ascending incense, thus maintaining communication with the spirit world; and Dr. Daniel Wilson suggests that "the practice of smoking originated in the use of the intoxicating fumes for purposes of divination, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... who had just lost her third husband—by divorce—had received from Mr. Yahi-Bahi a glimpse into the future that was almost uncanny in its exactness. She had asked for a divination, and Mr. Yahi-Bahi had effected one by causing her to lay six ten-dollar pieces on the table arranged in the form of a mystic serpent. Over these he had bent and peered deeply, as if seeking to unravel their meaning, and ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... which fugitively fluttered away when she saw that it was observed, and now that it was bent so unwaveringly on him he saw shining through it what he had never seen before, namely, the mother-love which he had missed all his life. Now, for the first time, he saw it; recognising it, as by divination, when, with ray serene and untroubled, it burst through the mists that seemed to hang about his mother's mind. Before, noticing her change of manner, her restless questions, he had been vaguely alarmed, and as they went on the alarm had become more pronounced; but ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... be referred to in connection with Babylonian medicine. Our first recorded observations on anatomy are in connection with the art of divination—the study of the future by the interpretation of certain signs. The student recognized two divisions of divination—the involuntary, dealing with the interpretation of signs forced upon our attention, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... they were on the point of sailing away, when an eclipse of the moon, which was then at the full, took place. Most of the Athenians, deeply impressed by this occurrence, now urged the generals to wait; and Nicias, who was somewhat over-addicted to divination and practices of that kind, refused from that moment even to take the question of departure into consideration, until they had waited the thrice nine days prescribed by ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... tirade against Caesar, for which he was banished. He recanted in a work called Querelae, and by the intercession of his friends, above all, of Cicero, obtained pardon from Caesar. Caecina was regarded as an important authority on the Etruscan system of divination (Etrusca Disciplina), which he endeavoured to place on a scientific footing by harmonizing its theories with the doctrines of the Stoics. Considerable fragments of his work (dealing with lightning) are to be found in Seneca (Naturales Quaestiones, ii. 31-49). Caecina ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... ball, she had suddenly amazed him by the challenge: "Gueth how many pairth of thtockingth I have on." (Her ladyship lisped, and her particular graciousness to Mr. Harness was the result of Lord Byron's school intimacy with and regard for him.) Finding her partner quite unequal to the piece of divination proposed to him, she put forth a very pretty little foot, from which she lifted the petticoat ankle high, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... month. Every white individual has one or more of them; even the tiny children with their ridiculous little sun helmets are followed everywhere by a tall, solemn, white-robed black. Their powers of divination approach the uncanny. About the time you begin to think of wanting something, and are making a first helpless survey of a boyless landscape, your own servant suddenly, mysteriously, and unobtrusively appears from nowhere. Where ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... reportage of fact. Of course Rousseau's art of another kind, his mere mastery of style and presentation, does redeem this reportage to some extent; but this would remain if the thing were wholly fiction, and the other art of invention, divination, mimesis—call it what you will—would come in. Yet it is not worth while to be idly unlike other people and claim it as an actual novel. It may be worth while to point out how it displays some of the great gifts of the novel-writer. The first of these—the greatest and, in fact, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... it lightly with his lips. Little Lucy felt very proud and happy. She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion,—when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent. The explicitness of an engagement wears off this finest edge of susceptibility; it is jasmine gathered and presented in ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... many that are appointed only to learning, yet all in childhood be instructed therein; and the more part do bestow in learning their spare hours. In the course of the stars and movings of the heavenly sphere they be expert, but for the deceitful divination thereof they never ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Dryfooses, as owner and publisher, was not to be discussed with his wife. He might drag it in, but he was aware that with her mind distracted by more immediate interests he could not get from her that judgment, that reasoned divination, which he relied upon so much. She would try, she would do her best, but the result would be a view clouded and discolored by the effort ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Dr. Burnet, that these presages they had in their minds, made some impression on him that there were separate beings; and that the soul either by a natural sagacity, or some secret notice communicated to it, had a sort of divination. But this gentleman's never appearing was a snare to him during the rest of his life: Though when he mentioned this, he could not but acknowledge, it was an unreasonable thing for him to think that beings ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... the service I have done you] I am afraid, that after all the learned commentator's [Warburton's] efforts to clear the argument of Calchas, it will still appear liable to objection; nor do I discover more to be urged in his defence, than that though his skill in divination determined him to leave Troy, jet that he joined himself to Agamemnon and his army by unconstrained good-will; and though he came as a fugitive escaping from destruction, yet his services after his ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... that hour When near the dawn the swallow her sad song, Haply remembering ancient grief, renews; And when our minds, more wanderers from the flesh And less by thought restrained, are, as 't were, full Of holy divination in their dreams. ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... without an interpreter. One of these singular creatures demanded of me a piece of meat; when I gave it to her, she looked at me steadily for a time, and said: you will soon become a hero, and rule over mighty nations! I laughed at this divination, for I considered it empty flattery, although the sailors swore to it, that the mermaids' prediction seldom failed. At the end of eight days we came in sight of land; which the seamen called Picardania. As we entered the harbor, ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... more or less at random. Vital questions were pounding through his brain and demanding an answer. Who knew but that with regard to Rosie she was right—and yet wrong? Women, with their remarkable powers of divination, didn't always hit the nail directly on the head. It might be the case with Lois now. She might be right in her surmise that Rosie was in love, and mistaken in those light and cruel words: "Oh, not with you!" He didn't suppose it was with him. And ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... of two kinds, according as it is done with or without a material instrument. The first kind is in full practice in China, where, like other rites of divination, it is probably ancient. It is called 'descending of the pencil,' and is especially used by the literary classes. When a Chinese wishes to consult a god in this way, he sends for a professional medium. Before the image of the ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... of using the latter quality with consummate industry, she had not lived in the family five years when she triumphantly declared that she had heard, or rather overheard, sufficient to enable her to say what had been the former fate of her associates. Could Katy have possessed enough of divination to pronounce upon their future lot, her task would have been accomplished. From the private conversations of the parent and child, she learned that a fire had reduced them from competence to poverty, and at the same time diminished the number of their family to two. ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... easily into Mrs. Vanderpool's life. There was little she knew of her duties, but little, too, that she could not learn with a deftness and divination almost startling. Her quietness, her quickness, her young strength, were like a soothing balm to the tired woman of fashion, and within a week she had sunk back contentedly into ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... More than once, while contemplating the brilliant groups and throngs flowing on before him, has he yielded to the strange charm of some isolated figure, arresting it in its course by the magic of his gaze, and, suffering the gay crowds to pass on, he has given himself up with delight to the divination of its mystic revelations, while he continued to weave his incantations and spells only for the ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Laird of Ellangowan was not so preceese as he might have been in clearing his land of witches (concerning whom it is said, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"), nor of those who had familiar spirits, and consulted with divination, and sorcery, and lots, which is the fashion with the Egyptians, as they ca' themsells, and other unhappy bodies, in this our country. And the Laird was three years married without having a family; and he was sae left to himsell, that it was thought ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... whom I have already quoted, after admitting that there was not a breath against his character either at school or Trinity, goes on to write that "at Trinity he did not strike us as a very exceptional person," and yet there must have been some sharp eyes at Trinity, for our Don adds with surprising divination: ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... the most ancient Babylonians, held the same station and dignity in the State as did the priests in Egypt, and spent all their time in the study of philosophy and astronomy, and the arts of divination and astrology. They held that the world of which we have a conception is an eternal world without any beginning or ending, in which all things are ordered by rules supported by a divine providence, and that the heavenly bodies do not move by chance, nor by their own will, but ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... alone— The wild Chaudiere's eternal jubilee Has such sweet divination in its tone, And ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... regarded Martin. Then, with a flash of divination, he saw the situation. The expression on his face turned to ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... disbelieved in the immortality of the soul. Plato has not advanced quite so far as this in the path of toleration. But in judging of his enlightenment, we must remember that the evils of necromancy and divination were far greater than those of intolerance in the ancient world. Human nature is always having recourse to the first; but only when organized into some form of priesthood falls into the other; although in primitive as in later ages the institution of a priesthood may claim probably to be an advance ...
— Laws • Plato
... thought) the French Revolution has excommunicated the church from the power of working miracles; she has not been able, with the assistance of all her saints, to work one miracle since the revolution began; and as she never stood in greater need than now, we may, without the aid of divination, conclude that all her former miracles are tricks and lies. [Boulanger in his life of Paul, has collected from the ecclesiastical histories, and the writings of the fathers as they are called, several matters which show the opinions that ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... along ter listen ter the fiddle,—ef ye hev enny call ter know." Mrs. Bedell replied to his unspoken thought, as if by divination. ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... a certain wise man, Tremonius, Archbishop of Caerleon, praying him to send for Merlin, and build according to his bidding, since there was none so skilled in counsel or labour, more truthful of word or apter in divination. The king desired greatly to behold Merlin, and to judge by hearing of his worth. At that time Merlin abode near the Well of Labenes. This fountain springs in a hidden place, very deep in Wales, but I know not where, since I have never been. ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... never put in a word it was because she had perfect confidence in her parent's ability to come out straight. It was suggested to me, I scarcely knew how, that this confidence between the two ladies went to a great length; that their union of thought, their system of reciprocal divination, was remarkable, and that they probably seldom needed to resort to the clumsy and in some cases dangerous expedient of communicating by sound. I suppose I made this reflexion not all at once—it was not wholly the result of that first meeting. I was with ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... make themselves felt, urging those who experience this desire to search out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directing them not only to the discovery of old and forgotten sources of this enjoyment, but to the divination of fresh sources thereof—new experiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art. Of such feeling there was a great outbreak in the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the following century. Here and there, under rare and happy conditions, in Pointed architecture, in the doctrines ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... superstition. Instead of astronomy, it gave astrology; instead of science, it gave magic and incantations and dreams—poison which perverted the intellect. [Footnote: Sir G. G. Lewis, Hist. of Anc. Astron., p. 293.] They connected their astronomy with divination from the stars, and made their antiquity reach back to two hundred and seventy thousand years. There were soothsayers in the time of Daniel, and magicians, exorcists, and interpreters of signs. [Footnote: Dan. i. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord |
