"Mystic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... among them this very word, Nahuatl, all of them containing the idea "to know," or "knowledge." The early missionaries to New Spain often speak of the naualli (plural, nanahualtin), masters of mystic knowledge, dealers in the black art, wizards or sorcerers. They were not always evil-minded persons, though they seem to have been generally feared. The earliest source of information about them is Father Sahagun, who, in his invaluable History, has ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... wove bright fables in the days of old, When reason borrowed fancy's painted wings; When truth's clear river flowed o'er sands of gold, And told in song its high and mystic things! And such the sweet and solemn tale of her The pilgrim heart, to whom a dream was given, That led her through the world,—Love's worshipper,— To seek on earth for ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... of life and strength to the surface, thus materially tending to insure good health to persons who indulge therein. The blood moves more rapidly, and conveys a different impression to all the organs of the body, as it visits them on that particular mystic journey when the man is laughing, from what it does at other times. For this reason every good, hearty laugh in which a person indulges lengthens his life, conveying as it does a new and distinct stimulus ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti's dream, the long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of 'The Golden Stair,' the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the 'Laus Amoris,' the passion-pale ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... yet these other wonderful features distinguish the supernatural records of Christianity from those of both Patriarchal and Jewish times. The undying power of the Cross is manifested in the peculiar sufferings of the Saints, in their mystic communion with the invisible world, and in that especial sanctity to which alone miraculous gifts are for the most part accorded under the Gospel. Not that all these three peculiarities are to be observed in the life of every Saint under ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... man of sense, he will make no change in anything which the oracle of Delphi, or Dodona, or the God Ammon, or any ancient tradition has sanctioned in whatever manner, whether by apparitions or reputed inspiration of Heaven, in obedience to which mankind have established sacrifices in connexion with mystic rites, either originating on the spot, or derived from Tyrrhenia or Cyprus or some other place, and on the strength of which traditions they have consecrated oracles and images, and altars and temples, and portioned ...
— Laws • Plato
... where a rather light weight was required who at the same time had head and strength enough to steer the boat among the perplexing currents. Our excursions were sometimes long. Once we went down the Back Bay, thence around Charlestown up the Mystic to Medford, during which trip I steered the Orion without a single rub, going and coming under I think some forty draw-bridges. I have scarcely ever received a compliment in which I took more pride than when Eliot at the end, as ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... the loved, ones of home though they be widely separated from each other, some on earth, and some in eternity. There is a mystic chain which binds them together, and brings them in spirit near to each other and infuses, as it were, with electric power, a realizing sense of each other, while their past life under the same roof, "like shadows o'er them sweep." In the light of memory their faded forms are vividly brought back ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... of worship, from a greasy, round stone, before which the lowest classes prostrated themselves, to an image of one of the supreme gods of Hinduism. There is not a phase of worship, however high or mystic, or however mean or degraded, which has not its ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... little of magic during his wanderings, while the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman had seen a great deal of many sorts in their lives, yet all three were greatly impressed by Mrs. Yoop's powers. She did not affect any mysterious airs or indulge in chants or mystic rites, as most witches do, nor was the Giantess old and ugly or disagreeable in face or manner. Nevertheless, she frightened her prisoners more than any witch could ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... schools of philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection, indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history of the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terrible deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which he himself regarded as representative—Paracelsus. The poem shows an enormous ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... formed a sort of oracle parallel with pagan institutions, and says that the breastplate and sardonyx, with which he identifies them, ceased to shine two hundred years before he wrote his book[2] (i.e. at the time of John Hyrcanus). The Talmud understands the mystic names of the Bible in a similar way,[3] but represents that the oracle ceased with the destruction of the first Temple, and was not known in the second Temple. Josephus enlarges, in a way common to the Hellenistic-Jewish ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... known' thus suits the highest Self very well; and also the clause which denotes immediate perception ('is seen') appears quite suitable, since the highest Self is directly intuited by persons practising mystic ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... colossal. The legends of Aeschylus seem to harmonise less with the fragrant groves and graceful porticoes in which his countrymen paid their vows to the God of Light and Goddess of Desire, than with those huge and grotesque labyrinths of eternal granite in which Egypt enshrined her mystic Osiris, or in which Hindustan still bows down to her seven-headed idols. His favourite gods are those of the elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth, compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... insisted on being led to battle on that day. And it so happened that, of all Fridays in the year, it fell on the Friday before Easter: that awful anniversary when the altars of the Church are veiled throughout Christendom, and the dark stone is rolled to the door of the mystic sepulchre. ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... grim a picture as any limner of the weird could wish to look upon. The twilight shadows were empurpling the mountains and gathering in dusky pools here and there where the trees stood thickest in the valley. The hush of nature's mystic hour was abroad, and even the swiftly flowing river, rushing sullenly along its rocky bed no more than a stone's cast beyond the Indian path, seemed to pretermit its low thunderings. There was never a breath of air astir in all the wood, and the leaves of the silver poplar that will ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... With his mystic wand he mesmerized all, And peasants transformed to kings; While age after age in cottage and hall, He soars with ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... XXIV., 169. See also Waitz, VI., 774; Macgillivray, II., 8; Hasskarl, 82. They have a peculiar rattle with mystic sculpturing, and Eyre says that its sound libertatem coeundi juventuti esse tum concessam omnibus indicat. Maclennan (287) cites G.S. Lang, who cites the fact that the old men get most of the young women. Connubium profecto valde est liberum. Conjuges, puellae, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... poetry, and with the composition, secondarily, of prose articles and short stories. Her poetry is limited almost entirely to the lyrical expression of her spiritual experiences, much of it is explicitly religious, and all of it is religious in feeling. It is tinged with the Pre-Raphaelite mystic medievalism; and a quiet and most affecting sadness is its dominant trait; but the power and beauty of a certain small part of it perhaps entitle her to be called the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... do not loiter in their passing or come again. Soon enough Robert saw himself very far gone from the undissembled sternness of his old resolutions. If he could but be rid of that altogether! He thought he had obtained a mystic recognition of the terrorless but uncommunicating Joy of life which while men live they pursue, desiring it with the one human craving which survives every misfortune, every thwarted hope, all enslavement of the heart's small freedom—the thirst for happiness. Was man, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... girls a man has loved, whom she has never seen, than of any number of attractive rivals. In the blind adoration which he yields her, she takes no thought of immediate defection, for her smile always makes him happy—her voice never loses its mystic power over his senses. ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... 'Children of the Open Air' Who once in Orient valleys lived aloof, Loving the sun, the wind, the sweet reproof Of storms, and all that makes the fair earth fair, Till, on a day, across the mystic bar Of moonrise, came the 'Children of the Roof,' Who find no balm 'neath Evening's rosiest woof, Nor dews of peace beneath the Morning Star. We looked o'er London where men wither and choke, Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies, And lore of woods and ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... saints and their lives, not sparing one miracle or miraculous virtue we may be sure, and telling them all in her simple, matter-of-fact language, with details drawn from her daily life to give a touch of reality, which invested the mystic old Eastern and Southern legends with a quaint naive homeliness not without its own charm—like the same subjects as interpreted by some of the old Dutch and Flemish masters, in contrast with the high-wrought, idealised conceptions of the earlier Italian schools. ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... within the last few years," suggests but slight cause for his love of Richmond, the home of his childhood, the darkening clouds of which, viewed through the softening lens of years, may have shaded off to brighter tints, as the roughness of a landscape disappears and melts into mystic, dreamy beauty as we ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... America. Some may deem it commonplace. For my part, I cannot regard it in this light. I have never looked upon this primitive homestead of the pioneer without receiving from it an impression of romantic pleasure. Something seems to impart to it an air of vague and mystic grandeur. Perhaps I associate the picture with the frame in which it is set—the magnificent forest that surrounds it, every aisle of which is redolent of romance. Such a scene is suggestive of hunter lore and legend—of perils by flood and field, always pleasant to ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... Prefiguring the beastly rage Of Church-rule in this latter age; 1120 As is demonstrated at full By him that baited the Pope's Bull. Bears nat'rally are beasts of prey, That live by rapine; so do they. What are their orders, constitutions, 1125 Church-censures, curses, absolutions, But' sev'ral mystic chains they make, To tie poor Christians to the stake, And then set heathen officers, Instead of dogs, about their ears? 1130 For to prohibit and dispense; To find out or to make offence; Of Hell and Heaven ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... b[)i]g[)i]'n, besides being a merrymaking for the young people, has a much more solemn significance for the elders. If it be not observed soon after the house is built bad dreams will plague the dwellers therein, toothache (dreaded for mystic reasons) will torture them, and the evil influence from the north will cause them all kinds of bodily ill; the flocks will dwindle, ill luck will come, ghosts will haunt the place, and the house ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... of the door represented on Plate V., enlarged. I intended, in the Lecture on Marble Couchant, to have insisted, at some length, on the decoration of the lintel and side- posts, as one of the most important phases of mystic ecclesiastical sculpture. But I find the materials furnished by Lucca, Pisa, and Florence, for such an essay are far too rich to be examined cursorily; the treatment even of this single lintel could scarcely be enough explained in the ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... That leer as geysers boil and flow, Feazing imps on serai's dome, Drink from olpes icy philters cold, Whilst scarn assails the morning light— And gumps haste to the Dawn's first show. Then pyres don mystic sklayres agleam, A faffling fool leads gawks thro' hall Where fays, in stones of ancient art, Dance as Scorpions shake with glee: Infernal pomps spread tawny sheen, Strange figgum, amid unholy pall, Pierce Sorrows with its poisoned dart Whence horrors shake their limbs and flee. And scenes, profound ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... if his practical mystic had already had a vision of their meeting? Had some native carried Millicent's plans to meet him to the Valley? Had the birds of the air brought the news to Freddy's ears? Was Margaret now tortured by a vision of this sumptuous desert picnic? Could she ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... honestly it ought to bring out an honest conclusion. When people say that you can prove anything by logic, they are not using words in a fair sense. What they mean is that you can prove anything by bad logic. Deep in the mystic ingratitude of the soul of man there is an extraordinary tendency to use the name for an organ, when what is meant is the abuse or decay of that organ. Thus we speak of a man suffering from 'nerves,' which is about as sensible as talking about a man suffering from ten fingers. ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... restless water, touched here and there with white, as a wave combed and broke. Then Dan's gaze wandered to her face. Seen thus, in the dim light, framed by her dark hair, it, too, seemed wonderful to him; there was about it a mystic allusiveness, a subtle charm, far more compelling than mere beauty ever is; her eyes had ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... Addressing the Southerners, he said: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you.... We are not enemies but friends.... The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... "Al-Kutb al-Ghauth" lit. the pole-star of invocation for help; or simply "Al-Ghauth" is the highest degree of sanctity in the mystic fraternity of Tasawwuf. See v. 384; and Lane (A. N.) i. 232. Students who would understand these titles will consult vol. iii. chapt. 12 of The Dabistn by Shaw and Troyer, Paris and London, 1843. By the learned studies of Dr. Pertsch the authorship of this work of the religious eclecticism ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... of holding conventions at the seat of government in mid-winter has many advantages. Congress is then in session, the Supreme Court sitting, and society, that mystic, headless, power, at the height of its glory. Being the season for official receptions, where one meets foreign diplomats from every civilized nation, it is the time chosen by strangers to visit our beautiful capital. Washington is the modern Rome ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... two spirits dwell, The sweetest and the purest That ever wove Love's mystic spell, Or plied his arts the surest: No smile of morn, Though heaven-born, Nor sunshine earthward straying, E'er charmed the sight With half the light That round ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... recall the image his young mind had cherished, the personality he had heard whispered about in the gossiping groups of Acredale. This was not the gay, the brilliant, the fascinating bon viveur who had been the life of society from Warchester to Bucephalo, from Pentica to New York. Ah! what were the mystic terrors of the night, what the oppressive surroundings of this charnel-house of Nature, to the awful spectacle of this unmanned mind, this delirious echo of past guilt, past cowardice, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... crossettes, nay, even shattered them to fragments and then held fast to their ruins, indeed even went so far as to find these caricatures and ruins more beautiful than the original. The Rococo is violent in chains, insolent in constraint, drunken in sobriety. It is the art of a rich, voluptuous, mystic, restless age. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... 1848 saw four volumes from Lowell's pen—a book of "Poems," the "Fable for Critics," "The Biglow Papers," and the "Vision of Sir Launfal." The second of these exhibited the author as wit and critic, the third as political reformer, the fourth as poet and mystic; and these various sides of his personality continue to appear with ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... his beautiful desire for apostrophizing the Mother-Valley so all the world might hear. And then suddenly it came over me in a great warm, uplifting, awe-inspiring rush that a woman who takes on herself voluntarily the responsibility of marrying a poet and an orator and a mystic, who is the complete edition of a Mossback that all those qualities imply, must square her shoulders for a long, steady, pioneer march ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... they had called it, in their foolish jargon? Destruction, extermination rather—this rending of a myriad fibres interwoven with another's being! Another? But he was not other! He and she were one, one in the mystic sense which alone gave marriage its significance. The new law was not for them, but for the disunited creatures forced into a mockery of union. The gospel she had felt called on to proclaim had no bearing on her own case.... She sent for the doctor and told him she was ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Upon its curious couches, though not of silk or down. The stately seven-hilled city may boast her ancient birth, But this was old and hoary ere she had place on earth. Some tremble when they see it; some its secrets would explore, And, peering through its shadows, they seek its mystic lore. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... Dragon, obtained a chaise, harnessed Jenny, took in Berinthia, and crossed the ferry to Charlestown, for a ride in the country. They drove along a wide street at the foot of Bunker Hill, and came to a narrow neck of land between Charles River on the south and Mystic River on the north. The tide was flowing in and covering the marsh lands. They gained the summit of Winter Hill, gazed upon the beautiful landscape, then turned southward toward Cambridge. Reaching the college, they entered ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... down before thy King, My soul! Earth's kings, before Him bow ye down; Before Him monarchs humbly roll,— Height, might, and splendor, throne and crown. He in the mystic Land divine The sceptre wields with valiant hand. In vain dark, evil powers combine,— He, victor, rules the better Land." —Ingleman.—Trans. Hymns ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... God's high praises, Brethren! let our tongues unite; Chief the heart when duty raises God-ward at his mystic rite. ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... with the hum of the great city rising below her—at times even in theatres or crowded assemblies of men and women—she forgot herself, and again stood in the weird brilliancy of that moonlight night in mute worship at the foot of that slowly-rising mystic altar of piled terraces, hanging forests, and lifted plateaus that climbed forever to the lonely skies. Again she felt before her the expanding and opening arms of the protecting woods. Had they really closed upon ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... mystic; and since the materialistic world looks with suspicion on mysticism, it is probable that even Anstice, who knew and respected him, would have heard his last speech with a passing wonder that a man should hold so unpractical and untenable a view of existence as the words ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... them in the starry darkness the divine Huntress was abroad, and about the base of AEtna she and her forest maids drove the chase with horn and hound. In the cities ladies sang the psalm of Adonis brought back from 'the stream eternal of Acheron.' Under the mystic moon love-lorn damsels did their magic rites, and knit up spells of power to bring home the men they loved. Among the vines and under the grey olives songs were singing of Daphnis all day long. There were junketings and dancings and harvest-homes ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... swift of deed the traces fade From earth, before the enlivening ray; As o'er the brow the transient shade Of thought, the hues of fancy flit away:— Yet in the mystic womb unseen, Of the dark ruling hours that sway Our mortal lot, whate'er has been, With new creative germ defies decay. The blooming field is time For nature's ever-teeming shoot, And all is ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Raymond together wrote the dialogue and lyrics. It was wonderful how they could do things together! Missy felt she never could get into such a glow and find such lovely rhymes popping right up in her mind if she were working alone. And Raymond said the same. It was very strange. It was as if a mystic bond fired them both with new talents-Missy looked on mixed metaphors as objectionable only to ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... "beautified with comely ornament and girded about with a robe of glory," seemed a high priest fit for the whole world. Upon his head the mitre with a crown of gold engraved with holiness, upon his breast the mystic Urim and Thummim and the ephod with its twelve brilliant jewels, upon his tunic golden pomegranates and silver bells, which for the mystic ear pealed the harmony of the world as he moved. Little wonder that, inspired by the striking ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... of the mystic Orient or of the glowing South that he oftenest thought and dreamed. With Heine he might have cried: "O Firdusi! O Ischami! O Saadi! How do I long after the roses of Schiraz!" As for Italy, who of all our truest poets has not loved her: but who has worshipped her with so manly a passion, so loyal ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... enormous value, especially a huge carbuncle, as large as an egg, which had been offered to the memory of St. Thomas by Louis VII. of France, who visited the shrine in A.D. 1179, after having thrice seen the Saint in a vision. A curious legend, thoroughly in keeping with the mystic halo of miraculous power which surrounds the martyred archbishop's fame, relates that the French king could not make up his mind to part with this invaluable gem, which was called the "Regale of France;" but when he visited the tomb, the stone, so runs the story, leapt forth from the ring ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... hideous in war-paint and plumed for battle. Their ceremonies began. The woods rang back their songs and yells, as with frantic gesticulations they brandished their war-clubs and vaunted their deeds of prowess. Then they drank the black drink, endowed with mystic virtues to steel them against hardship and danger; and Gourgues himself pretended ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... indicated in the Leonine Elegiacs, in Claribel, and several other poems. Qualities which were not for long to find public expression, speculative powers brooding, in various moods, on ultimate and insoluble questions, were attested by The Mystic, and Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind not in Unity with Itself, an unlucky title of a remarkable performance. "In this, the most agitated of all his poems, we find the soul ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... of the worn-out evil passions that troubled old creation before the coming of man, and the fresh order of spiritual and carnal bewilderment. Why should I go on and seek further amazement, while from the lowest to the highest I can read not one of the mystic figures of the solitude around me? What is my relation to them, and theirs to me? Why should that beetle in the grass, upon whose back all the colours of the prism change and glow like supernatural fire, trouble me with the cause and motive of its beauty? Why should yonder rock, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... middle parts, second tenor and first bass)—and then, above all, religious absorption, meditation, expansion, ecstasy, shadow, light, soaring—in a word, Catholic devotion and inspiration. The "Credo," as if built on a rock, should sound as steadfast as the dogma itself; a mystic and ecstatic joy should pervade the "Sanctus;" the "Agnus Dei" (as well as the "Miserere" in the "Gloria") should be accentuated, in a tender and deeply elegiac manner, by the most fervent sympathy with the Passion of Christ; and the "Dona nobis pacem," expressive of reconciliation and full ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... started down the great Arctic slope into the black bosom of the north. As we waved our hands in parting at southern civilization we hailed with a new delight the mystic and unruly regions of the north. The first day of our descent the weather lost controll of its furious temper, and how things did hum, Cyclones in Iowa and Colorado, Blizzards in Newbraska and the Dakotas, all which have raged for a thousand ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... (cat. 39538) is made of vanadium steel rather than of silver. This too is a three-handled cup. It measures 7 inches in diameter and 12-1/2 inches in depth and is decorated with the emblem of the Masonic Order of the Mystic Shrine and ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... primitive purity. That which in some regions of the earth manifested itself as the rudiments of natural philosophy, only to a small number of persons endowed with superior intelligence, appears in other regions, and among entire races of men, to be the result of mystic tendencies and instinctive intuitions. An intimate communion with nature, and the vivid and deep emotions thus awakened, are likewise the source from which have sprung the first impulses toward the worship and deification of the destroying and preserving forces of the universe. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... "Adventures of Bulukiya": the latter is an Israelite converted by editor and scribe to Mohammedanism; but we can detect under his assumed faith the older creed. Solomon is not buried by authentic history "beyond the Seven (mystic) Seas," but at Jerusalem or Tiberias; and his seal-ring suggests the Jam-i-Jam, the crystal cup of the great King Jamshid. The descent of the Archangel Gabriel, so familiar to Al-Islam, is the manifestation of Bahman, the First Intelligence, the mightiest of the Angels who enabled ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... deepened to darkness. The woods were full of gloom. A timorous star palpitated in the sky. In the sudden stillness when the bark-mill ceased its whir, the mountain torrent hard by lifted a mystic chant. The drone of the katydid vibrated in the laurel, and the shrill-voiced cricket chirped. Two of the men were in the shed examining a green hide by the light of a perforated tin lantern, that seemed to spill the rays in glinting white rills. As they flickered across ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... two battles—the one on earth, the other in the air, according to the legend that warriors, after their death, continue fighting incessantly as spirits. In the middle of the picture appears the Cross and its mystic light; on this my "Symphonic Poem" is founded. The chorale "Crux fidelis," which is gradually developed, illustrates the idea of the final victory of Christianity in its effectual love to God ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... new dialogues exchanged, between such keen minds as Marsilio, Pulci, Landini, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Leon Battista Alberti, the architect and scholar, Pico dell a Mirandola, the precocious disputant and aristocratic mystic, Poliziano, the tutor of Lorenzo's sons, and Lorenzo the Magnificent himself. It was thus from the Greek invasion of Florence that proceeded the stream of culture which is known as Humanism, and which, no doubt, in time, was so largely concerned in bringing about that indifference to spiritual things ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... natural appetites, even that for food, must be suppressed, or at least minimized; until all that remained of a man was the impassive, extenuated, mendicant monk, self-hypnotised into cataleptic trances, which the deluded mystic took for foretastes of the final union ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... in a mystic condition—uncertain of purpose, serious, and studious, and he called one night at the Treaty tavern to see Duff Salter. Duff had gone, however, up the Tacony, and in a listless way Andrew sauntered over to the ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... have been well, but for the fact that it was not. In following her deliverer, Simprella observed that his golden collar was inscribed with the mystic words—HANDS OFF! She tried hard to obey the injunction; she did her level best; she—but why amplify? Simprella ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... disguises, and that our only safety lies in flying from falsehood to truth, and becoming in harmony with the "divine idea." There is much fanciful, grotesque description in "Sartor," with deep thought and beautiful imagery. "In this book," wrote John Sterling, "we always feel that there is a mystic influence around us, bringing out into sharp homely clearness what is noblest in the remote and infinite, exalting into wonder what is commonest in the dust and toil of ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... The mystic solemnity of time is that it is made up of 'seasons.' We shall walk heedfully in the degree in which we are awake to the moment's meaning, and grasp opportunity by the forelock, or, as Paul says, 'buy up the opportunity.' But wise heed to our walk is not enough, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... life—a golden-haired girl, blue-eyed, white-skinned, red-lipped, tall and slender and beautiful. He had never forgotten, and an old, sickening remorse knocked at his heart. He rose and climbed out of the canyon and to the top of a mesa, where he paced to and fro and looked down into the weird and mystic shadows, like the darkness of his passion, and farther on down the moon track and the glittering stretches that vanished in the cold, blue horizon. The moon soared radiant and calm, the white stars shone serene. The vault of heaven seemed illimitable ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... little sadly. His handsome mouth, with its blond mustache, was almost like that of a youth. His blue eyes were dreamy for an instant, then little by little he began to confide to me his thought, his recollections and all that was mystic and ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... she lowers her voice and subdues her brilliance, intimating that she is not what she seems; when she makes herself unearthly and insubstantial, veiling her grossness in the half-transparent night. Like some consummate temptress, she plays the mystic, clothing herself with light and darkness, skirting the intangible, hinting at the infinities, flinging out the eternal spiritual lure, so that she may better seduce the senses through the soul. And Rickman was too young a poet to distinguish clearly between his ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... said, 'Mamma, I wish you were as much like Jesus as my teacher is'" The lesson, the music, the prayer and all the differentiation of the day and place tend to elevate the teacher above those who share his daily life, and envelop her with an atmosphere more mystic and holy. She is connected not with clothes and bread and butter episodes, but wholly with the thought of Jesus, and stands by His side in the child's thought and love, and if he love not the teacher whom he has seen, he can not love God whom he has not seen. Even the physical charm ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... that the loyalty of Bryan Bowntance, the host of the Garter, had exhibited itself in an arch thrown across the road opposite his house, adorned with various coloured ribbons and flowers, in the midst of which was a large shield, exhibiting the letters, b. and h. (in mystic allusion to Henry and Anne Boleyn) intermingled and ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to the Princess where she sat High in the hall: above her drooped a lamp, And made the single jewel on her brow Burn like the mystic fire on a mast-head, Prophet of storm: a handmaid on each side Bowed toward her, combing out her long black hair Damp from the river; and close behind her stood Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men, Huge women blowzed with health, ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... like a child's in its simplicity, like a man's in its earnest solemnity and depth! Heaven lies over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the Earth; making all the Earth a mystic Temple to him, the Earth's business all a kind of worship. Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common sunlight; angels yet hover doing God's messages among men: that rainbow was set in the clouds by the hand of God! Wonder, miracle encompass the man; he lives in an element ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the Mystic, with introspection, asks the question in the form "Can the Absolute find me out and possess me and thus make me feel that that which is within me is akin to, is, in fact, a part of Him and that I am possessed ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... became immersed in a deep love for the priest. The virtuous and mystic race to which she belonged knew nothing of the frenzy which overcomes all obstacles and which accounts nothing accomplished so long as anything remains to be accomplished. Her aspirations were very modest, and if he would only have admitted the fact of her existence ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... power of the human soul. When Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed its potency from the hilltops of Palestine, he gave to mankind the key to health and heaven, and earned the title of Saviour of the World." Whittier, grandest of mystic poets, saw ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... scorner; they had always been well dressed. His coat might do for such a ragamuffin as he had been, but they needed no garment but their own righteousness-the forms of their church. The mark, or certificate of the new birth, was an object of scorn to them. Probably they pitied him as a harmless mystic, weak in mind and illiterate. Alas! how soon was their laughter turned into mourning. Fear and calamity overwhelmed them. They trusted in themselves, and there was none ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... although on the one side we find the heretical Brahmin followers of Bhakti, and Ramananda and his great disciple, Kabir, who taught that man was the supreme manifestation of God; and on the other, occasional lapses into Quietism and repudiation of the body. See The Mystic, Way, by ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... left her and came and sat down by the new-comer, who let him play with the fringe of her scarf. Was she in a manner playing him with it? A thoroughly equipped society fiction, such as the English now lack, would have instructed me, and taught me the mystic meaning of the young girls who fluttered up and down the paths by twos and threes, exquisite complexions, exquisite shapes, exquisite profiles, exquisite costumes, in a glad momentary freedom from chaperonage. It would fix even the exact social value of that companion of a lady stopped in chat ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... member of any mystic brotherhood, and, as I have explained, no Mahatma, although I have called myself thus for present purposes because the name is a convenient cloak. I repeat that I am ignorant if there are such people as Mahatmas, though if so I think Jorsen must be one of them. Still he never ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... hundred and sixty-five times, without variation. From the indistinct utterance, elevated voice, and rapid manner in which it is pronounced, it certainly has a wild effect, and is more strongly impressed with the character of a mystic rite, or incantation, than with any other religious ceremony with ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... these was a necklace composed of amulets, or charms, which, it will be observed, are all attributes of Isis and her attendant, Anubis, or of her husband Osiris, here considered as Bacchus. The mystic articles kept in the Isiac coffer were, says Eusebius, a ball, dice, (turbo) ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... character I had been led to believe was apparent to me from the first glimpse I had of these rooms; there being in every little object that marked his taste a certain individuality and purpose that betrayed a stern and mystic soul; one that could hide itself, perhaps, beneath a practical exterior, but which, in ways like this, must speak, and speak loudly too, of its own inward promptings ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... lost in the Mystic woods, and came at night to an Indian hut in a tree and climbed into it, and was ordered out of it at a later hour when the squaw came home—took a very charitable view of life. He liked to reform wrongdoers by changing ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... imprisonment; And a snake's tooth cut Cleopatra's band. In this way died one valiant Maccabee; Brutus feigned madness; prudent Solon hid His sense; and David, when he feared Gath's king. Thus when the Mystic found that Jonah's sea Was yawning to engulf him, what he did He gave to God—a ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... Hindu mind is visible in the Veda also, but his mystic tendencies are not yet so fully developed. Of philosophy we find but little, and what we find is still in its germ. The active side of life is more prominent, and we meet occasionally with wars of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... in the Pavilion of Flora, led the life of an anchorite, with all the modesty and piety of an old monk, fasting every day as in his convent, and edifying even the impious by the nimbus that shone around his pale and mystic face. It was impossible to approach this worthy Vicar of Christ without a filial feeling of tenderness. The crimes of the French Revolution—the massacre or the execution of the priests, the profanation of the altars, the persecutions ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... suggestion of what we have already experienced within us. We have seen people who were like Hedda Gabler; we have been people who were like Hamlet. The drama of facts stimulates us like our daily intercourse with the environing world; the drama of ideas stimulates us like our mystic midnight hours of solitary musing. Of the drama of imitation we demand that it shall remain appreciably within the limits of our own actual observation; it must deal with our own country and our own time, and must remind us of our daily inference from the affairs we ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... gather, Half in wonder, round his knees; And the faithful dog, mute, watchful, In the mystic glass he sees; And the voice of song, and pictures, And the simplest homestead flowers, Unforgotten, crowd before him In the ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... can discern and comprehend. The young doctor stood sympathetically by, conscious that he had given his last aid and must stand aside. Gladys knelt by the bed with folded hands, her golden head bowed in deep and bitter silence. She saw her last friend drifting towards the mystic sea, and felt as if the blackness of ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... tree of good and evil, and the tree of life, has been the origin of many superstitious notions regarding trees. The notion that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was an apple tree, caused the apple to have a great many mystic meanings, and gave it a prominent place in many legends, and also brought it into prominence as a divining medium. In many parts of Scotland the apple was believed to have great influence in love affairs. If an apple seed were shot between the ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... there he remained, naked, erect, silent, and motionless, exposed to the elements and forces of His arming, for a night and a day to two days and nights, but rarely longer. Sometimes he would chant a hymn without words, or offer the ceremonial "filled pipe." In this holy trance or ecstasy the Indian mystic found his highest happiness and the motive ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... added. Nothing, you felt, as you first caught sight of that coy, retired place,—surely nothing could happen there, without its full accompaniment of thought or reverie. White-nights! so you might interpret its old Latin name.* "The red rose came first," says a quaint German mystic, speaking of "the mystery of so-called white things," as being "ever an after-thought—the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material—the white queen, the white witch, the white mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... theories.[126] The peculiar forms adapted for the exposition of his thoughts contribute to the difficulty of obtaining a methodical view of Bruno's philosophy. It has, therefore, been disputed whether he was a pantheist or an atheist, a materialist or a spiritualist, a mystic or an agnostic. No one would have contended more earnestly than Bruno himself, that the sage can hold each and all of these apparent contradictions together, with the exception of atheism; which last is a simple impossibility. The fragmentary ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Kempis into English vary in value. Certain dissenters have cut out the very soul of ['A] Kempis in deleting the passages on the Holy Eucharist. Think of Bowdlerizing Thomas ['a] Kempis! He was, above all, a mystic, and all the philosophy of his love of Christ limps when the mystical centre of it, the Eucharist, is cut out. If that meeting in the upper room had not taken place during the paschal season, if Christ had not offered His body and blood, soul and divinity ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... they meet with, and do not understand, among a strange people, is also resolved into a mystery. Thus, the following figure, which the Chinese, in allusion to the regular lines described on the back-shell of some of the tortoises, metaphorically call the mystic tortoise, has been supposed by some of these gentlemen to contain the most sublime doctrines of Chinese philosophy; that they embrace a summary of all that is perfect and imperfect, represent the numbers of ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... till the setting sun. He then beheld their rites in connection with sacrifice to fire, the drilling for sparks and the fanning into flame, also the sprinkling of the butter libations, also the chanting of the mystic prayers, till the sun went down. The prince considering these acts, could not perceive the right reason of them, and was now desirous to turn and go. Then all those Brahmakarins came together to him to request him to stay; regarding with reverence the ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... in the strange dead night, Under the vast dead sky, Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell, And the ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... strength; her dark face stamped with features that bespoke her Highland ancestry, her black hair shot with silver threads, parting in waves over her forehead; her eyes deep set, black and sombre, glowing with that mystic light that shines only in eyes that have for generations peered into the ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... both of us are knit by bonds which in this life can never be severed. When you read these lines, the hand that writes them will be cold in the grave. But Nature allows nothing to be lost, and somewhere in the wide universe the better part of me (the mystic EGO) will still exist; and if there be any truth in the doctrine of the affinity of souls, then shall you and I meet again elsewhere. Till that time ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various |
