"Mirage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... imitation, and not a very good imitation. The true genius of the East breathes in Meredith's pages, and the Arabian Nights, at all events in the crude literality of Sir Richard Burton, pale before them like a mirage. The variety of scenes and images, the untiring evolution of plot, the kaleidoscopic shifting of harmonious colours, all these seem of the very essence of Arabia, and to coil directly from some bottle of a genie. Ah! what a bottle! ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... glimmers through the Worst, She feels the sun is hid but for a night, She spies the summer through the winter bud, She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, She hears the lark within the songless egg, She finds the fountain where they wailed "mirage." ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... remarkable thing, and I fancy you will find, when we do know the explanation, that anyone else standing where you were at that time would have seen exactly the same thing. The rock stands out of the water; it is just above a deep pool, and probably it was a sort of mirage effect, and not by any means a figment ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... there was certainly no help to be obtained. On the one side he saw the birch wood indistinctly; the white trunks half vanished from sight against the white ground, but the brush of upper branches hung like the mirage of a forest between heaven and earth. All round was the wild region of snow. From his own small house the lamp which he had left on the table shot out a long bright ray through a chink in the frostwork on the window. It occurred to him that when he had fetched ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... say that Brigitte did not get her farm in Beauce. That was only a mirage, by help of which Thuillier was enticed out of Paris long enough for la Peyrade to deal his blow,—a service rendered to the government on the one hand, but also a precious vengeance for the many humiliations he ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... that keeps me going is a mirage of Rose Ranch ahead of me," declared Nan's chum, shaking her head over the text books piled upon their study table. "Oh, dear me, Nan! if anything should happen to make it impossible for us to go with ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... themselves in line to the west, fronting its sister wall, the grand block El-Shar' (Seir); while in the middle lies the southern section of the "Ghor," the noble and memorious Wady el-'Akabah, supposed to have given a name to Arabia.[EN126] The surface-water still rolls down it after rains; and the mirage veiling the valley-sole prolongs the Gulf-waters far to the north, their bed in the old geologic ages. The view was charming to us; for the first time since leaving Suez we saw the contrast of perpendicular and horizontal, of height and flat. Nothing could ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... holds his sway, With blows and cries and stockwhip crack We take the stock away. As they fall we leave them lying, With the crows to watch them dying, Grim sextons of the Overland that fasten on their prey; By the fiery dust-storm drifting, And the mocking mirage shifting, In heat and drought and hopeless pain ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... the margin of the water-plants, we found ourselves on a glassy surface, extending away towards the west as far as the eye could see, and bordered on all sides by gorgeous mountains and ranges of snow. Around the edges of the lake a sunny mirage was playing tricks with the cattle and the objects on the banks, and as we glided lazily on with the stream, and the splashing paddles, and even the foiled mosquitoes, made music about us, we began ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... camel topped a rise in the river-bank, a considerable pool came into view, tree-shaded, heron-haunted, too incredibly beautiful and alluring for belief. Was it a mirage?... ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the woods wrapt in the evening gloom there came forth a simultaneous murmur, as though they were awakening from a black dream. Call it reality or dream, the momentary glimpse of that invisible mirage reflected from a far-off world, 250 years old, vanished in a flash. The mystic forms that brushed past me with their quick unbodied steps, and loud, voiceless laughter, and threw themselves into the river, did not go back ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... possibilities that, if set in motion, would move mountains and revert the course of rivers. But we can't work up enough energy to consummate our aims and carry things to a finish. Perhaps we may be able to do so some day. Oh, Some Day, you are a mirage on the desert of life that ever lures us on to things that can only be attained in the land where dreams ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... before, they were toiling through sand. A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilisation. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in very skies, Making the stars but eyets of thy port, Must thou compact thee to a little earth, Displace some few small tenants of the sod, And find thou 'st room enough?... (Looks up) City of dream! Time's far ghost inn! Eternity's mirage! Desire's dim temple fashioned out of prayer, Builded and jointured by no carpenter But captious Fancy!... O Carlotta, wife! Thou wert my Christian heart! Faith, faith, my God! Death to the unbeliever is to land Upon a coast dumb in the moonless dark, Where no hands wave a welcome, no eyes ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... the beflowered home she had left rose mirage-like in the window of her memory, she sobbingly ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... itself, at least part of it, that very night; the remaining part of the problem was to be solved months later under conditions so strange that, had the girls been able to vision them lying away, like a mirage on the horizon of the future, they would have been tempted to change their plans for the ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... hill, and was in the fields again near running water, and drinking wine from a cup carved with Roman emblems, I began to wonder whether the Desert had not put before my mind, as they say it can do before the eye of the traveller, a mirage. Is there such an influence? ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... the island is to land, as we did, at Waimea; ride to a singular spot called the "barking sands"—a huge sand-hill, gliding down which you hear a dull rumble like distant thunder, probably the result of electricity. On the way you meet with a mirage, remarkable for this that it is a constant phenomenon—that is to say, it is to be seen daily at certain hours, and is the apparition of a great lake, having sometimes high waves which seem to submerge the cattle which stand about, apparently, in ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... mirage Across the hot, white sand, And choke and die, while gazing on Its green and ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... it seems to me, that we can ever know, Are those the fancy brings to us of days of long-ago, When rainbow-tinted pictures all are like a mirage flung Upon the canvas memory weaves—of days when we ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... in white, with a white lace head-dress, half veil, half turban, binding her hair and falling on her shoulders, she made him think, in her inappropriateness and splendour, of her own Bouddha, who, in his glimmering shrine, lifted his hand as if in a gesture of bland exorcism before which the mirage of a vulgar and trivial age must presently fade away. The Bouddha looked permanent and the room looked transient; the only thing in it that could stand up against him, as it were, was Karen. To her husband's eye, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... brown, sunburned coat, while the masses of black lava show here and there patches of pink, yellow, and red. The air is often so wondrously clear that distant mountains seem much nearer than they really are. During the hot summer days the mirage forms apparent lakes and shady groves, illusions which have lured many a thirsty traveller ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... old friend, Our warm fellowship is one Far too old to comprehend Where its bond was first begun: Mirage-like before my gaze Gleams a land of other days, Where two truant boys, astray, Dream their ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... had nursed the sick down there in La Navidad knew feebly what it was. He saw in a mist the naked priest, his friend and rescuer, seated upon the sandy floor regarding him with a wrinkled brow and compressed lips, and then he sank into fever visions uncouth and dreadful, or mirage-pleasing with ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... lonely lake, I thought that I was looking upon a vision of a spectral nature. In spite of all my belief that I was alone on this remote beach, there sat the man in the boat, only a few rods off shore. He was as a mirage, as silent as the very lake itself. A few eerie moments passed; then the boat began to move slowly toward me, gently propelled by a skillful paddle. As it approached, the light of the full moon streaming upon it made it easy for me to study its occupants. Near the bow I could discern ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... mouse! That's not quite civil, Porphyrius Petrovitch; I won't quite allow that yet! I'll make a stand and tell you some plain truths to your faces, and then you shall find out my real opinion about you!" He had some difficulty in breathing. "But supposing that all this is pure fancy?—a kind of mirage? Suppose I had misunderstood? Let me try and keep up my nasty part, and not commit myself, like the fool, by blind anger! Ought I to give them credit for intentions they have not? Their words are, in themselves, not very extraordinary ones— so much must be allowed; ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... would follow the multitude to do all the evil which he saw being done around him; it looked a joyous and delightful prospect. He gazed on the bright vision of sin, on the iridescent waters of pleasure; and did not know that the brightness was a mirage of the burning desert, the iridescence a film of corruption over a ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... the more solemn and wonderful it became to me. It seemed, contrarily to Pope's saying, that the vanity of it WAS indeed given in vain; but that there was something behind the veil of it, which was not vanity. It became to me not a painted cloud, but a terrible and impenetrable one: not a mirage, which vanished as I drew near, but a pillar of darkness, to which I was forbidden to draw near. For I saw that both my own failure, and such success in petty things as in its poor triumph seemed to me worse than failure, ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... pleasure and pursued self, the more cynical and bitter he became. Pessimism set a cold, hard stamp upon his face, and marred his beauty. Cynicism lies like a black mark across his pages. At last, in his bitterness, the philosopher tells us the whole universe is a mirage, and that yonder summer-making sun is a bubble that repeats its iridescent tints in the colors of the rainbow. Despair ate out his heart. He became the most miserable of men, and knew no freedom from sorrow and pain. And lo, now the man's philosophy has perished like a bubble, his influence ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... their thoughts, and supply the content of their spiritual life. The irony, latent in their endeavour, gives them no pause; they are in some way content to pursue what they call phantoms, and to try to satisfy their thirst with the waters of a mirage. This comes from the presence of the ideal within them, that is, of the implicit unity of reality and thought, which seeks for explicit and complete manifestation in knowledge. The reality is present in them as thinking activity, working towards complete revelation ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... last limit of doubt, the spontaneous affirmation of the good and of the beautiful which is to be found in the female conscience delights us and settles the question for us. This is why religion is preserved to the world by woman alone. A beautiful and a virtuous woman is the mirage which peoples with lakes and green avenues our great moral desert. The superiority of modern science consists in the fact that each step forward it takes is a step further in the order of abstractions. We make chemistry from chemistry, algebra from algebra; the very indefatigability ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... summoning whistle conveyed to my mind the idea of the exhaustion of air in a ship-compartment, and the opening and shutting of the elevator door completed the illusion of a ship fast going to pieces. But the ship my mind was on never reached any shore, nor did she sink. Like a mirage she vanished, and again I found myself safe in my bed at the hospital. "Safe," did I say? Scarcely that—for deliverance from one impending disaster simply meant ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... were on the north-eastern extremity of the island of Baru, with the whole of the harbour of Cartagena before them, the roofs and spires of the town just showing waveringly, in a sort of mirage, over the low land which forms the easternmost extremity of the island of Tierra Bomba. It is this same island of Tierra Bomba, by the way, which converts what would otherwise be an open roadstead into a landlocked harbour, for it forms ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... wires and telephone lines. Their dreaming tops were in the sky; their feet were in the sluicings of the stamp-mill that reared its long brown back in a semi-recumbent posture, resting one elbow on the hill; and beneath the valley smouldered, a pale mirage by day, by night a vision of color transcendent and rich as the ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... seeds, Thy sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest! White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of palaces and strips of sky; I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting In ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... seldom obscured. When standing in the middle of one of these desert plains and looking towards the interior, the view is generally bounded by the escarpment of another plain, rather higher, but equally level and desolate; and in every other direction the horizon is indistinct from the trembling mirage which seems to rise from ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... for by scientific speculation; each seventh year, from some inscrutable cause, the waters reach to an unusual height, and again subside, mysteriously as they arose. The beautiful illusion of the mirage spreads its dreamy enchantment over the surface of Ontario in the summer calms, mixing islands, clouds, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... again. For a breath she waited to see her further way. She had not planned this as the issue, but the moment was obviously crucial, and offered what, in international politics already awry, would constitute a good technical opportunity. If her mirage of regeneration, her hope of an understanding, perhaps even her love, had flung up any last afterglow in this home-coming, it was over now. Indeed, now it seemed an old grief, the present but confirmation concerning a lover ten years lost at sea. ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... possibly do?" wailed the First Lord, who saw his prospect of a brilliant coup wilt away like a fair mirage. "The secret will get out, our plans will fail, and MY Administration, my beautiful Administration, will have to stand the racket. How shall I defend myself ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... followed quietly, making no further objection for fear of irritating the old man. At the same time he fervently hoped that General Sokolovitch and his family would fade away like a mirage in the desert, so that the visitors could escape, by merely returning downstairs. But to his horror he saw that General Ivolgin was quite familiar with the house, and really seemed to have friends there. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... earth which in its essence remains ever the same whether you call it the pot, plate, or Jug. So it is that the ultimate cause, the unchangeable Brahman, remains ever constant, though it may appear to suffer change as the manifold world outside. This world is thus only an unsubstantial appearance, a mirage imposed upon Brahman, ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... no milestones or other landmarks to show the progress you are making. Still, it is not so overwhelmingly wearisome as might be supposed. In the morning you may watch the vast lakes, with their rugged promontories and well-wooded banks, which the mirage creates for your amusement. Then during the course of the day there are always one or two trifling incidents which arouse you for a little from your somnolence. Now you descry a couple of horsemen on the distant horizon, and watch them as they approach; and when they come alongside you may have ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... good oak "wattle" did he discover it to be only one of those wild, gray frontages of living rock that rise here and there in picturesque tiers along the slopes of those solitary mountains. And so, till dawn, pursuing this mirage of the castle, through pools and among ravines, he wore out a night of ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... woman's name was Heva—and the man said to Heva: "I believe I'll look about a little;" and he went to the northern extremity of the island, where there was a little, narrow neck of land connecting it with the mainland; and the devil, who is always playing pranks with us, got up a mirage, and when he looked over to the mainland, such hills and dells, vales and dales; such mountains, crowned with silver; such cataracts, clad in robes of beauty, did he see there, that he went back and told Heva: ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... "beckoning mountains" returned to Madeline. She could not see or feel so much as that. Her impression was rather that these mountains were aloof, unattainable, that if approached they would recede or vanish like the desert mirage. ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... seemed to float behind a veil of sparkling gauze, unreal as a mirage; but toward noon it brightened and sharpened in outline, until at last the tall trees took individual form, bunches of unripe dates beneath their spread fan of plumes hanging down like immense yellow fists at the end of limp, thin arms cased in ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... thoughts of Phil Abingdon to be susceptible to the influence of those delicate etheric waves which he had come to recognize as the note of danger. Practically there had been no development whatever in the investigation, and he was almost tempted to believe that the whole thing was a mirage, when the sight of the typewritten report translated him mentally to the luxurious chambers ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... safety!" these were the pleasant words that lulled a pleasure-seeking and money-making generation into self-satisfied rest and the mirage of ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... Voyage. Yucatan. Slave-trade in Natives. The Ten Tribes. Vera Cruz. Don Ignacio Comonfort. Mexican Politics. Casualties. The City of the Dead. Turkey-buzzards. Northers. The "temperate region." Cordova. The Chipi-chipi. The "cold region." Mirage. Sand-pillars. The rainy season. Plundered passengers. Robber-priest. Aztec remains. Aloe-fields. Houses of mud-bricks. Huts of aloes. Mexican churches. ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send word along the file that water is in sight. Though each little party that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water to which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less has it been true in all ages and for human beings of every creed which recognized a future, that those who have fallen worn out by their march through the Desert have dreamed at least of a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... coherent, so thinkable and possible even in its most gorgeous details, should have had behind it something, probably a great deal, of fact actually seen and known, than that it should have been the mere mirage of a poet's dream? 'The picture presented to us of the Homeric heroes and their surroundings,' says Father Browne, 'is not merely vivid and complete; it is grand, though with a grandeur which is homely and simple. Hence the fascination which ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... of truth, and which may even be capable of being analysed into its elements; but there is no means of distinguishing the elements taken from reality from those which are the work of imagination. To use Niebuhr's expression, a legend is "a mirage produced by an invisible object according to an ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... or seven miles. It might have been two or twenty. The deceit of rarefied air was intensified by the dazzle of the merciless sun beating down on powdered alkali, on snaky flows of weathered lava, on mock lakes that sparkled and dissolved in mirage. The broken mesa, across which ran the road to the deserted mining camp, mysteriously changed form before their eyes; unsubstantial masses in pastel lights and shades of saffron, mauve and rose. Over all was the hard vault of ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... some apprehension; not knowing how far it carries into the hearts of others its affecting power; how vividly it calls up before them that mood of desolate loneliness when the whole vision of human love and joy hangs like a mirage in the air, and only when it seems irrecoverably distant seems also intolerably dear. But, however this particular passage may impress the reader, it is not hard to illustrate by abundant references the potent originality of Wordsworth's ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... presented a wavering appearance, as though the island and all upon it consisted of an infinite number of separate and distinct particles, each revolving in a spiral direction upwards. I called Ella on deck to see the singular phenomenon, for it was a more perfect example of mirage than I had ever before witnessed or could have believed possible. As we continued to gaze upon the curious spectacle, a faint foamy appearance revealed itself between us and the island, but still ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... desire to meet the loved and lost, the horror of endless death—account for these phenomena. People often mistake their dreams for realities—often think their thoughts have "happened." They live in a mental mist, a mirage. The boundary between the actual and the imagined becomes faint, wavering and obscure. They mistake clouds for mountains. The real and the unreal mix and mingle until the impossible becomes common, and ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the teachings of this school is pure nihilism, or the non-existence of both self and of matter. There is an utter absence of substantiality in all things. Life itself is a prolonged dream. The objects about us are mere delusive shadows or mirage, the product of the imagination alone. The past and the future are without reality, but the present state of things only stands as if it were real. That is to say: the true state of things is constantly ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... it pleased her, when she brushed out her hair before going to bed, to see that its electricity, which had departed for a while, was out in it again, so that it would snap and stand out horizontally from her head. The little spark of a smile was constantly over her face like a mirage before her lips and her eyes and seeming to hover on the very peak of her brows when she ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... like wine to the senses, the floods of sunshine, the waves of color, the translucent atmosphere that aids the imagination to create in the distance all architectural splendors and realms of peace. It is all like a mirage and a dream. We pass swiftly, and make a moving panorama of beauty in hues, of strangeness in forms, of sublimity in extent, of overawing and savage antiquity. I would miss none of it. And when we pass to the accustomed again, to the fields of verdure and the forests and the hills of green, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... sure, Mr. Macready—and I address myself to you with the sternness of a man in the pit—are you quite sure, sir, that you do not view America through the pleasant mirage which often surrounds a thing that has been, but not a thing that is? Are you quite sure that when you were here you relished it as well as you do now when you look back upon it. The early spring birds, Mr. Macready, do sing in the groves that you were, very often, not over well pleased ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... me, the heat was not oppressive. The woods, dense and tangled though they were, threw up no exhalations of mud or rotting leaves, but a clean, aromatic odour. It seemed to give them a substance without which they had been but a mirage, a scene painted on a cloth, so motionless and apparently lifeless they stood, with the long vines hanging from their boughs, and the hot, rarefied air ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... never be discounted; it is far rarer than facts, and often does more to lead to truth. This slight book is in verse and drawings, type integrated with delectable black-and-white representations of the prairie dog, armadillo, sanderling, mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this list to which it is akin is ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... Gentile, old Timocles was not devoid of sense. Though blind, he knew he was deprived of light. His reasoning was much better than that of these idolaters, who cry from the depths of their thick darkness, 'I see the day!' Everything in this world is mirage and moving sand. God ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... hand to soothe her dying moments, for her people, too, were dead. The palace, half-completed, stands in the midst of this desolation, and sometimes it seems to lift into view of those at a distance in the shifting mirage that ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... and the bodies of men and horses were bathed in perspiration. Not a cloud hung in the blue sky; no wing of a bird broke the monotony of distance, no living animal crept across the blazing surface of the desert. Occasionally a distant mirage attracted the eye, making the dead reality even more horrible by its semblance to water, yet never tempting them to stray aside. After the first mile conversation ceased, the men riding grimly, silently forward, intent only on covering ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... two-masted steamer and, cut off by the play of reflected light, floated like a mirage between sky and sea. After studying her for a minute, ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... Said. There is iniquity in many parts of the world, and vice in all, but the concentrated essence of all the iniquities and all the vices in all the continents finds itself at Port Said. And through the heart of that sand-bordered hell, where the mirage flickers day long above the Bitter Lake, move, if you will only wait, most of the men and women you have known in this life. Dick established himself in quarters more riotous than respectable. He spent his evenings on the quay, and ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... impossible life would be without dreams—waking dreams, I mean—the dreams that we call "castles in the air," built by the kindly hands of Hope! Were it not for the mirage of the oasis, drawing his footsteps ever onward, the weary traveler would lie down in the desert sand and die. It is the mirage of distant success, of happiness that, like the bunch of carrots fastened an inch beyond the donkey's nose, seems always just within ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... into a pine wood and climbed for another two hours, the summit always vanishing before them like a mirage. At the end of that time they were apparently no nearer their goal than when they had started. They had followed first one path, then another, until they had lost all sense of direction, and finally when they came to a place where three ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... hushed except to give necessary orders; every eye swept the hills and valleys around; every ear was intensely strained to catch the faintest noise, in momentary expectation of the unearthly war-whoop and of seeing dusky forms with gleaming tomahawks uplifted. In the moonlight mirage of the prairies, every taller clump of grass, every blacker hillock grew into a blood thirsty Indian, just ready to leap upon them. But, by faith, they were able to sing in ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... least imaginative with pride in the Empire and a sense of the illimitable issues at stake in Europe. We had left England ringing with the legendary passage of the Russians from Archangel, the snow still clinging to their furs, just as the British Army in Spain, in 1812, had been cheered by a similar mirage of Russians streaming to their aid through Corunna. The first paper that we read on reaching Egypt announced in giant headlines the arrival of 250,000 no less shadowy Japanese at Antwerp. But the ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... been a sudden embarkation, it brought about a swift change: he was no longer Murat the exile; he was Joachim, the King of Naples. The exile's refuge disappeared with the foundered boat; in its place Naples and its magnificent gulf appeared on the horizon like a marvellous mirage, and no doubt the primary idea of the fatal expedition of Calabria was originated in the first days of exultation which followed those hours of anguish. The king, however, still uncertain of the welcome which awaited him in Corsica, took the name of the Count of Campo Melle, and it was under ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a Prairie. Encamping for the Night. Singular incident. A Mirage on the Prairie. The Prairie on fire. Flight to the Sand Hills. Their final escape. Finding a stream. ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... explanation is simple enough. Of the mirage the dictionary says it is "an optical illusion arising from an unequal refraction in the lower strata of the atmosphere, causing images of remote objects to be seen double, distorted or inverted as if reflected in a mirror, or to appear ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... extent, power or duration, that it is impossible, in the actual circumstances of the case, to frame experiments in order to verify a deductive explanation, it may still be possible to reproduce a similar phenomenon upon a smaller scale. Thus Monge's explanation of mirage by the great heat of the desert sand, which makes the lowest stratum of air less dense than those above it, so that rays of light from distant objects are refracted in descending, until they are actually turned upwards again to the eye of the beholders, giving him inverted images ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... those tears he saw the mirage of his own fireside. Perhaps for the moment his homing spirit rested there, and it was only the body from which the soul had fled that was in the saddle here before us riding through a hostile land. Perhaps more powerfully than the fulminations of any orator had this greeting of a little ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... country of Captain Grey, like the water-pools seen in the mirage of the desert, when approached, vanishes from the ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... Bruno. All conditions are lacking to form the mirage of the desert. And, too; everything was so distinct and clearly outlined that ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... gallant General P. Crandall!'—yes, even though the aristocratic brown-stone mansion, which was to have been a testimonial of esteem from admiring friends; though all these fade before me like the beautiful mirage that proves only an illusion of the senses, yet I am equal to this act of self-denial, and submit to pass my life in obscurity, unknown ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... was beautiful, and yet eight or ten feet of snow covered the ground all through the long winter. As we left Holy Island, it was past ten o'clock at night, and yet what could that be? We were far away from land, and still there seemed to be land quite close to us. What could it mean? It was a mirage. Such a mirage is sometimes seen on the vast Ladoga lake as in the plains of Egypt, and vastly beautiful it was. A fitting ending to a strangely beautiful day we thought, as we softly glided ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... walk along the same path with you, you will seem to see a vast plain strewn with garlands where a happy throng of dancers trip the gladsome furandole standing in a circle, each a link in an endless chain; it is but a mirage; those who look down know that they are dancing on a silken thread stretched over an abyss that swallows up all who fall and shows not even a ripple on its surface. What foot is sure? Nature herself seems to deny you her divine consolation; trees and flowers are yours no more; you have broken ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... maybe I was out of my head, and I only saw a vision," answered Jack. "You know—a sort of mirage. It was ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... of mirage," was the reply. "We are able to bring any earth scene before us whenever we wish. Sometimes these scenes are reflected above the water so that mortals ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... lowered the canvas wagon-covers and soothed their crying children, and the drivers turned the oxen back toward the trail which they had forsaken for the lure of the mirage. There was no word of grief among the men, no outcry of despair; but the shoulders of some were sagging when they made their dry camp that night, and there was a new hardness in the eyes of all of them. For they ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... Ingersoll breathed deeply, staring into the blackness, searching for a glimmer, a glint, some faint reassurance that it had not been a mirage they had seen. And then Ingersoll felt a hand in his, Tom Shandor's hand, gripping his tightly, wringing it, and when the lights snapped on again, he was staring at Shandor, tears of happiness streaming from his pale, tired eyes. "You ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... probably in a temper of fretfulness and exasperation. A sudden knock at the door may drive an artist into hysterics. He is always working at the end of his tether. There is nothing more tantalising than an eternal quest after the ideal; like the horizon, it recedes from the traveller; like the mirage, it vanishes before the claims of hunger and thirst. On the other hand, it has enjoyments all its own. The idealist is always face to face with a great expectation. Perhaps to-night he may realise it; certainly in the morning it will be much nearer; and as for the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of the thin forests of Queensland, the open plains, and the interminable downs whereon the mirage plays with the fancies of wayfarers; and of the dust, heat and sweat of cattle stations. Has not the "Never Never Country" inspired many a traveller and more than one poet? It is well to realise that we have such bountiful ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the reverse of apposite; but Orientals have their own ways of application, and all allusions to Badawi partings are effective and affecting. The civilised poets of Arab cities throw the charm of the Desert over their verse by images borrowed from its scenery, the dromedary, the mirage and the well as naturally as certain of our bards who hated the country, babbled of purling rills, etc. thoroughly to feel Arabic poetry one must know the Desert (Pilgrimage ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... duration of love and fidelity which he promises the object of his appetites, as well as of the reality of the celestial qualities under which this object appears to him, or with which it pleases him to adorn it. Two persons mutually excited by sexual passion are fascinated by the illusions of a mirage, which often vanishes soon afterward, so that it is not rare to see them on the following day hurling the most violent abuse at ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... fled to Dardai to live as she could by her beauty; and the murderers, taking with them, in a rage of haste and terror, camels, water, and provisions, had disappeared. The caravan of the great explorer had vanished like a mirage; and the Lost Oasis lay hidden forever from despoiling eyes and hands ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... "That was not a mirage: it was a miracle," muttered the young man to himself. "Forty miles at least, and it seemed scarcely three hundred yards! ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... passed like a dream to Carrigan. He permitted himself to live and breathe it as one who finds himself for a space in the heart of a golden mirage. He was sitting so near Marie-Anne that now and then the faint perfume of her came to him like the delicate scent of a flower. It was a breath of crushed violets, sweet as the air he was breathing, violets gathered in the deep cool of the forest, a whisper of sweetness about her, as if on her ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... their breath, reflecting that this is the greatest happening of the age, and perhaps of all ages. Even on the lucid landscape at which they gaze the news casts something like a vague and somber mirage. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Taoist priest, told the Emperor that an enormous oyster vomited from the sea a mysterious substance which accumulated in the form of a tower, and was known as 'the market of the sea' (Chinese for 'mirage'). Every year, at a certain period, the breath from his mouth was like the rays of the sun. The Emperor expressed a wish to see it, and Po Shih said he would write a letter to the God of the Sea, and the next day the Emperor could ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... her life and glory but a memory, is still the citta nobilissima,—a city of moods,—all beautiful to the beauty-lover, all mystic to the dreamer; between the wonderful blue of the water and the sky she floats like a mirage—visionary—unreal—and under the spell of her fascination we are not critics, but lovers. We see the pathos, not the scars of her desolation, and the splendor of her past is too much a part of her to be forgotten, ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... scotomy[obs3]; cataract; ophthalmia. [Limitation of vision] blinker; screen &c. (hider) 530. [Fallacies of vision] deceptio visus[Lat]; refraction, distortion, illusion, false light, anamorphosis[obs3], virtual image, spectrum, mirage, looming, phasma|; phantasm, phantasma[obs3], phantom; vision; specter, apparition, ghost; ignis fatuus &c. (luminary) 423 specter of the Brocken magic mirror[Lat]; magic lantern &c. (show) 448; mirror lens &c. (instrument) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... name of sense is it?" I told them that what they saw was nothing more than merely buffalo at a distance on the plain; that what they saw that resembled water was simply an optical illusion, called the "mirage." Webster describes the word as follows: "An optical illusion arising from an unequal refraction in the lower strata of the atmosphere and causing remote objects to be seen double, as if reflected in a mirror, or to appear ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... he stops he will fall, and I had a sort of bet with myself not to lie down—not at any rate just yet. If I lay down I should feel the pain in my head worse. Once I had ridden for five days down country with fever on me and the flat bush trees had seemed to melt into one big mirage and dance quadrilles before my eyes. But then I had more or less kept my wits. Now I was fairly daft, ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... interested courtiers and speculators for the voice of your time, nor imagine that you precede your generation because you stand alone. He dreamed of far-away glory, and his flatterers told him his dreams were prophetic. He saw across the seas the mirage of a great Latin empire in the West, and beheld the Muse of history inscribing his name beside that of his great kinsman as the restorer of the political and commercial equilibrium of the world, as well as the benefactor who ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... surging mass, while the earth, or rather the snow, all around was filled with men who had fallen or been overtaken, and now in the last throes of a desperate snow battle. I dared not look behind, but kept bravely on. My breath grew fast and thick, and the camp seemed a perfect mirage, now near at hand then far in the distance. The men who had not yet fallen in the hands of the reckless Georgians had distanced me, and the only energy that kept me to the race was the hope that some mishap might befall the wild-eyed man in my rear, otherwise I was gone. No ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... wave swept over the Spray until she reached Cape Virgins nothing occurred to move a pulse and set blood in motion. On the contrary, the weather became fine and the sea smooth and life tranquil. The phenomenon of mirage frequently occurred. An albatross sitting on the water one day loomed up like a large ship; two fur-seals asleep on the surface of the sea appeared like great whales, and a bank of haze I could have sworn was high land. The ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... air castle again, floating alluringly before his eager imagination, like a mirage lake in the desert. Johnny's eyes stared ahead through the shimmering heat waves—stared and saw not the monotonous neutral tints of sand and rock and gray sage and yellow weeds and the rutted, dusty trail that wound away across the desert. ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... soon. I am almost afraid that I shall lose her. I shall see how she is in the morning, and, if she is no better, I will endeavour to get her on to some permanent water or creek running to the south. I think we have now made the dip of the country to the south, but the mirage is so powerful that little bushes appear like great gum-trees, which makes it very difficult to judge what is before us; it is almost as bad as travelling in the dark. I never saw it so bright nor so continuous as it is now; one would ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... them it was a question of manhood, of life, and of that which gives the highest value and incentive to life. It was inevitable, therefore, that Marian Vosburgh should become a mirage to more than one man; and when at last the delusion vanished, there was usually a flinty desert to be crossed before the ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... any hills he had yet encountered. Slowly, deliberately, without excitement or more than the most casual interest, he followed the course of the strange stream toward the sky-line and saw it emptying into a bright and shining sea. He was still unexcited. Most unusual, he thought, a vision or a mirage—more likely a vision, a trick of his disordered mind. He was confirmed in this by sight of a ship lying at anchor in the midst of the shining sea. He closed his eyes for a while, then opened them. Strange how the vision persisted! Yet not strange. He knew there were no seas ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... movement was caused by a spiral haze of smoke so vague that one could only tell of its existence from the mirage-like tremor of the mast ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... seen battalions of men just out of battle stripping themselves and hunting in their shirts for the foul beast. They had a technical name for this hunter's job. They called it "chatting." They desired a bath as the hart panteth for the water—brooks, and baths were but a mirage of the brain to men in Flanders fields and beyond the Somme, until here and there, as at Nieppe, officers with human sympathy organized a system by which battalions of men ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... water-snakes raise their slimy heads a couple of feet above the sea; the tiny nautilus floats in myriads upon the undulating waves, and at times the ship is surrounded by a shoal of the indolent jelly-fish. Mirage plays us strange tricks in the way of optical delusion in these regions. We seem to be approaching land which we never reach, but which at the moment when we should fairly make it, fades into ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... are frequently observed at sea, such as the reflection of the sun, ripplings occasioned by the meeting of two opposite currents, whales asleep upon the surface of the water, shoals of fish, fog-banks, and the extraordinary effect of mirage, than which, as an optical illusion, nothing is more deceiving, have doubtless given birth to many of these non-existing shoals and islands. Were charts to be published (one does exist in manuscript, in the Hydrographical Office at the Admiralty) with all the islands ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... would have needed if his armor had been manufactured in the sixth century—and inserted the red pommel of his spear in the stirrup socket. Then, activating the Yore's lock, he rode across the imaginary drawbridge that spanned the mirage-moat, and set forth into the forest. As the "portcullis" closed behind him, symbolically bringing phase one of Operation Sangraal to a close, ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... the spiritual philosophers has been the idea that by isolating the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it in space, as high as possible above the earth, they were placing it beyond attack; as if they were not, thereby, simply exposing it to be taken as an effect of mirage! Certainly they are right to believe in the absolute reality of the person and in his independence of matter: but science is there which shows the inter-dependence of conscious life and cerebral activity. When a strong instinct assures the probability of personal survival, they are right not ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... immediately, leaving D'Artagnan alone in the midst of the suspended sentence. The king appeared at a distance, surrounded by ladies and horsemen. All the troop advanced in beautiful order, at a foot's pace, the horns of various sorts animating the dogs and the horses. It was a movement, a noise, a mirage of light, of which nothing now can give an idea, unless it be the fictitious splendor or false majesty of a theatrical spectacle. D'Artagnan, with an eye a little weakened, distinguished behind the group three carriages. The first was intended ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... She, Janet, was conscious of a deliberate effort to widen and deepen the sympathy between them. An obscure desire to make reparation, she hardly knew for what, combined itself with a great longing to see their friendship the altogether beautiful and perfect thing its mirage was, and pushed her on to seize every opportunity to fortify the place, she had retaken. Elfrida had never found her so considerate, so appreciative, so amusing, so prodigal of her gay ideas, or so much inclined to go upon her knees at shrines before which she sometimes ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... of men; while they walk along the same path with you, you will see a vast plain strewn with garlands where a happy throng of dancers trip the gladsome farandole standing in a circle, each a link in an endless chain. It is but a mirage; those who look down know that they are dancing on a silken thread stretched over an abyss that swallows up all who fall and shows not even a ripple on its surface. What foot is sure? Nature herself seems to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... my late canto? Something, I believe Of gratitude. Now this same gratitude Is a fine word to play on. Many a niche It fills in letters, and in billet-doux,— Its adjective a graceful prefix makes To a well-written signature. It gleams A happy mirage in a sunny brain; But as a principle, is oft, I fear, Inoperative. Some satirist hath said That gratitude is only a keen sense Of future favors. As regards myself, Tis my misfortune, and perhaps, my fault, Yet I'm constrain'd ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... these parts, and the plain was dry and bare, with great cracks in the black soil. The grass had not sprung up, not a breath of air was stirring, and the heated air quivered over the parched ground, forming in the distance an imperfect mirage. ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... to look through these great masses of bloom; it is enough simply to live in an hour which brings such an overflow of beauty from the ancient fountains; but Nature herself lures one to deeper thoughts, and, through the vision which spreads like a mirage over the landscape, hints at some hidden loveliness at the root of this riotous blossoming, some diviner vision for the eye of the spirit alone. "Look," she seems to say, as I stand and gaze with unappeased hunger of soul, "this is my holiday. In the coming weeks ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... every possible element of fictional excitement—buried treasure, and spies, and abductions, and secrets—somehow the result was not wholly up to the expectation thus created. To borrow an appropriate simile, the great thrill remained something of a mirage, always in sight and never actually reached. Also I wish to record my passionate protest against stories of treasure-trove in which the treasure is not taken away in sacks and used to enrich the hunters; I am all against ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... the poet,[71] irradiating and vivifying, gleaming through in a picturesque phrase, or touching things unexpectedly with that ideal light which softens and subdues like distance in the landscape. The stern outline of his system wavers and melts away before the eye of the reader in a mirage of imagination that lifts from beyond the sphere of vision and hangs in serener air images of infinite suggestion projected from worlds not realized, but substantial to faith, hope, and aspiration. Beyond the horizon of speculation ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... who knows that this body is like froth, and has learnt that it is as unsubstantial as a mirage, will break the flower-pointed arrow of Mara, and never see ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown
... perceived the contents of this glass case a sense of fantasy claimed me, and I ceased to know where reality ended and mirage began. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... from God. I sometimes wonder if in a less simple world he could have been so happy or if his life would have been so unmarred, away from the songs of birds and the lilt of mountain breezes. But among us he, too, lived and died—because Hamilton Burton turned his back on the lure of the mirage his dreaming eyes had seen. Even now when Paul has gone, those chimes, which you put there above our church in memory of him, seem to sing of the things for which he stood. When their notes peal out on the Sabbath and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... and allegiance to justly constituted authorities in government and society: jealousy of the rights of the people was the ostensible motive of a political opposition to Jay, which, at this day and with all the evidence before us, seems inexplicable until we remember how the mirage of party fanaticism distorts the vision and perverts the sympathies ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... now," she explained slowly, "we have no past nor future. We live in a fantasy. We are cold and hungry, but life is so strange that we forget our bodies. It is all as unreal as a mirage. When it is over, we part. If we part knowing nothing of each other, it will ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... other and all the others, that are, that are not, that always flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as other appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of countless appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know is mirage. You know mirages of desire. These very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past, and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... he looked this fantastic creation of his disordered mind would be gone. Again he glanced up in the direction of the kopjie. The apparition was still there, a horrible, monstrous, distortion of himself, standing still, speechless, staring at him. That it was only a mirage there could be no doubt. He had heard of such mirages at sea and also in the Sahara where wandering Arabs have beheld long caravans journeying in the skies. But he had never heard of a mirage lasting as long as this one. Would it never disappear? It must be a nightmare ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... lakes. In the garish light of day they show for what they are, the light yellow hard-baked soil of the desert, without even the ordinary sage brush; but in early morning and, less frequently, toward evening, these lakes take on a semblance of their former state, sometimes (so strong is the mirage) almost deceiving those best acquainted with the region. Years ago—how many it would be difficult to say—these dry lakes were veritable bodies of water; indeed, at an earlier period than that, they were, without doubt, and including ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... Law of Cyclic Backwashes, that the rise of Yueh Chi should have stirred up Persian feeling in them everywhere. Thus: the impulse of Han Wuti's westward activities passed as a quickening into the Yueh Chi; and on from them, not into the Parthians, who were but an unreality and mirage of empire, but into these Persians, the true possessors of the land whose turn it was to be quickened. They began remembering, now, their ancient greatness; and turning their eyes to their still half-independent ancestral mountains, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... sleeping sea; but, unlike the last, without water—not a sheet to cheer their eyes, not a drop to quench the thirst, almost choking them. Only its resemblance, seen in the white mist always moving over these arid plains—the deluding, tantalising mirage. Lakes lay before them, their shores garlanded by green trees, their bosoms enamelled with islets smiling in all the verdure of spring—always before them, ever receding; the trees, as the water, never ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... manifested in London's dingy, pitiful Ghetto quarter. "This Ghetto London of ours," he says, "is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English reality, a world of dreams as fantastic and poetic as the mirage of the Orient where ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Hope wanders lost where no mortal can find it, Since Love is a mirror we break in a minute In snatching the image our soul has cast in it, What is the use of the Summers and Springs, The wave of the woods and the waft of the wings— Since all means nothing, and good things and ill Make madness,—a mirage tormenting ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... one thing everything becomes known (as the text quoted above declares). We therefore must adopt the following view. In the same way as those parts of ethereal space which are limited by jars and waterpots are not really different from the universal ethereal space, and as the water of a mirage is not really different from the surface of the salty steppe—for the nature of that water is that it is seen in one moment and has vanished in the next, and moreover, it is not to be perceived by its own nature (i.e. apart from the surface of the desert[280])—; ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... spot save the lizard. A desert forty miles wide is not a particularly large one; but when one is in the middle of it, it might as well be as extensive as Sahara itself, for anything he can see to the contrary, and away off to the right I behold as perfect a mirage as one could wish to see. A person can scarce help believing his own eyes, and did one not have some knowledge of these strange and wondrous phenomena, one's orbs of vision would indeed open with astonishment; for seemingly but a few miles away is a beautiful ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... alternatives happened did not appear to him to matter seriously. The whole affair was fantastic; it was unreal, in addition to being silly. But, real or unreal, he would finish it. If he was a phantom and Kingswood a mirage, the phantom would reach the mirage or sink senseless into astral mud. He had Colonel Hullocher in mind, and, quite illogically, he envisaged the Colonel as a reality. Often he had heard of the ways of the Army, and had scarcely credited the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... things now through the mirage of his vivid self-delusion, they came to his vision distorted through the lens ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... which meet the horizon on every side. The plains of Hungary, where I traversed them on the frontiers of Germany, between Presburg and Oedenburg, strike the imagination of the traveller by the constant mirage; but their greatest extent is more to the east, between Czegled, Debreczin, and Tittel. There they present the appearance of a vast ocean of verdure, having only two outlets, one near Gran and Waitzen, the other between ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... at first to do, was to trace with slow and unexpecting step the narrow margin of the lake. Sometimes a heavy swell gave it expression; at others, only its varied coloring, which I found more admirable every day, and which gave it an air of mirage instead of the vastness of ocean. Then there was a grandeur in the feeling that I might continue that walk, if I had any seven-leagued mode of conveyance to save fatigue, for hundreds of miles without an obstacle and without ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... mentally see the arrow as it was turned round. In these circumstances it was found that when the arrow-head pointed to the right, it was read off as pointing to the left, and so on. This led some to imagine that there was a mirage in the inner as well as on the outer plane of optical sensation. But the real explanation of the phenomenon ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various |
