Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Grail   Listen
noun
Grail  n.  One of the small feathers of a hawk.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Grail" Quotes from Famous Books



... thrown on the most characteristic spiritual product of the Middle Ages, the literature of Romance and the spirit of chivalry, from the Celtic folk-tales of the present day. Mr. Alfred Nutt has already shown this to be true of a special section of Romance literature, that connected with the Holy Grail, and it seems probable that further study will extend the field of application of this ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)

... be owing to me, if you fail in the former," said I. "As for the latter, naturally it will depend upon yourself. What shall you call it—'A Chiel takkin' Notes' or 'In Search of the Grail'?" ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... lieu of the older victims. But all along the line, while the new gods brought their spiritual conceptions, the older ones held men to a cruder and more fleshly way of thinking. There is a similar blend of new and old in all such movements as that of the Holy Grail and the Arthurian legends, where we can see the combination of Christian and pagan elements so clearly as to be able to calculate the moral and spiritual effect of each. Thus we have in the early Greek mythology ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... house. Acacia Avenue, with its tufted trees, with its rows of absurd and pathetic and diminutive villas, was for Winny a shining walk between heavenly mansions. She handled each one of Ranny's prize cups as if it had been the Holy Grail. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... the sick-chamber. When she heard a voice near the door of the shop asking first for Mr. Povey and then for Mrs. Baines, she rose, and seizing the object nearest to her, which happened to be a pair of scissors, she hurried towards the showroom stairs as though the scissors had been a grail, passionately sought and to be jealously hidden away. She wanted to stop and turn round, but something prevented her. She was at the end of the counter, under the curving stairs, when ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... Cynewulf's works. He adds to the poem a personal note, signing his name in runes; and, if we accept the wonderful "Vision of the Rood" as Cynewulf's work, we learn how he found the cross at last in his own heart. There is a suggestion here of the future Sir Launfal and the search for the Holy Grail. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... gave this explanation: Mr. Pole, a grain merchant of Bristol, had developed some sort of clairvoyant power, or at all events he had dreamed several times with great vividness the location of the true Grail. Another dreamer, a Dr. Goodchild, of Bath, was mixed up in the matter, and between them this peculiar vessel, which was not a cup, or a goblet, or any of the traditional things, had been discovered. Mr. Pole seemed a man of integrity, and it ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... doer; a flaw in character which one tends to think imperishable. He fitted so precisely into a certain pigeonhole of human kind.—What we had not counted on was the fierceness of the stimulus—like the taste of blood to a carnivore or, to the true knight, a glimpse of the veritable Grail. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... in these narratives. It was allowed, however, that Titurel the Chief had grown extremely aged, but it was not allowed that he could die in the presence of the Sangrail. He seemed to have been laid in a kind of trance, resting in an open tomb beneath the altar of the Grail; and whenever the cup was uncovered his voice might be heard joining in the celebration. Meanwhile, Amfortas, his ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis

... times one feels the awkwardness of their union and the imperfections of their form. Then again, perhaps two ideas of equal originality come together and spoil each other by making too strong a contrast. The fine lamentation of King Mark—that personification of a knight of the Grail—is treated with such moderation and with so noble a scorn for outward show, that its pure, cold light is entirely lost after the ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... how we pledged us in the fancies of our youth, We would run the quest forever for the Holy Grail of Truth! ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller

... champion sent by Heaven to espouse her cause, is accompanied on her entrance and sustained all through her scene of trial by the dulcet tones of the wood-winds, the oboe most often carrying the melody. Lohengrin's superterrestrial character as a Knight of the Holy Grail is prefigured in the harmonies which seem to stream from the violins, and in the prelude tell of the bringing of the sacred vessel of Christ's passion to Monsalvat; but in his chivalric character he is greeted by the militant trumpets in a strain of brilliant puissance and ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... Arthur's Seat overhangs Edinburgh, whose presence haunts the Lakes, and Wales, and Cornwall, and the forests of Brittany; the race that held up for us the image of the Holy Grail—that race can claim no small share in the moulding of ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... chansons de geste. Arthur may or may not be a greater figure in himself than Charlemagne; but when the genius of Map (or of some one else) had hit upon the real knotting and unknotting of the story—the connection of the frailty of Guinevere with the Quest for the Grail—complete developments of the fates of minor heroes, elaborate closings of minor incidents, became futile. Endless stories could be keyed or geared on to different parts of the main legend: there might be a Tristan-saga, a Palomides-saga, a Gawain-saga, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... paid a beautiful tribute to Miss Anthony, "the Sir Galahad in search of the Holy Grail," and closed with an eloquent prophecy of future success. Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake (N. Y.) gave a clever satire on The Rights of Men, which ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... the World's Fair by Thomas, is a "Processional of the Holy Grail." It is scored elaborately, but is rather brilliant than large. It complimentarily introduces a hint or two of ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... splendors of song there are in King Alfred's new volume,' he said. 'It is always a delight to get anything new from him. His "Holy Grail" and Lowell's "Cathedral" are enough for a holiday, ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields

... the Christian believer this represents the white dove of the New Testament which descended on the Son of Man when the heavens were opened. So in Parsifal the white dove descends, overshadowing the Grail. But ages before Christ the prolific white dove of Syria was worshipped throughout the Orient as the symbol of reproductive Nature: and to this day the Almighty is there believed to manifest himself under this form. In ancient Mesopotamia the divine mother of nature is often represented with this ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen

... quest solely for military glory. The Jacobin clubs, first by fair promises and then by the demand for his life blood, had sought to force him from liberty to license, from real freedom to debauched freedom. But like Sir Galahad, the Knight of the Holy Grail, he had stood true to his quest, true to his ideal, true to the inward light that unerringly marked the real from the false, true to genuine democracy in its fight against autocracy. And now, greater than all these lures and tests, stood before ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell

... away one summer day To fight the boastful Hun, In khaki clad, as fine a lad As ever carried gun, No braver knight e'er went to fight, In shining coat of mail, In days of old, for love or gold, Or for the Holy Grail. ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens

... mountain meres I find a magic bark; I leap on board; no helmsman steers: I float till all is dark. A gentle sound, an awful light! Three angels bear the holy Grail; With folded feet, in stoles of white, On sleeping wings they sail. Ah, blessed vision! blood of God! My spirit beats her mortal bars, As down dark tides the glory slides, And star-like mingles with ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore

... consecrating, Sad, serious, Sadly, heartily, earnestly, Salle, room, Samite, silk stuff with gold or silver threads, Sangreal, Holy Grail, Sarps, girdles, Saw, proverb, Scathes, harms, hurts, icripture, writing, Search, probe wounds, Selar, canopy, Semblable, like, Semblant, semblance, Sendal, fine cloth, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't a seeking for the grail it may be a damned ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... afar are dim 'Neath the tremulous tread of the seraphim, Shall not our querulous hearts prevail, That have prayed for the peace of the Holy Grail? ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... in the great Quests of the world,—the Argonauts, Helena in search of the Holy Rood, the Knights of the Holy Grail, the Pilgrim Fathers. There are the Victors in the intellectual wrestlings of the world,—the thinkers, poets, sages; the Victors in great sorrows, who conquer the savage pain of heart and desolation of spirit which arise from heroic human grief,—Oedipus and Antigone, Iphigenia, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... crawling with chains about them in the galleries of coal-mines. Was it really wrong to make children do that? Or was Ruskin only an impossible idealist? They were the happy years, radiant with the certain knowledge of the British that the Holy Grail would be recognized immediately it was seen, for over it would be proudly floating the confirmatory Union Jack. We had not even begun to suspect that our morals, manners, and laws were fairly poor compared with the standards of the Mohawks and Mohicans whom our settlers had displaced ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... workman, who for his part had largely at command a seriousness of conception lacking in the old Greek. Within the coffin lay an object of a fresh and brilliant clearness among the ashes of the dead—a flask of lively green glass, like a great emerald. It might have been "the wondrous vessel of the Grail." Only, this object seemed to bring back no ineffable purity, but rather the riotous and earthy heat of old paganism itself. Coated within, and, as some were persuaded, still redolent with the ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater

... avoid trouble and talk, to keep away from the 'Isle o' Man' for the future, but it turned out otherwise. I'd got leave from the Chief on Thursday afternoon to go up to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo to see the Holy Grail. They keep it in the Treasury there and show it on Thursdays for a franc. Most Englishmen laugh at these tales of the Church, and even Catholics I have met tell me they don't believe in miracles. I ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... countries, with the swan as symbol and token of all that is strange and beautiful where it has its source. It is less a theme capable of purely musical development to form pattern after pattern of entrancing beauty, like the Grail or Montsalvat theme, than the equivalent in music of tender colour. It never sings out from the orchestra without carrying the imagination for a moment from the scene before one's eyes to the fernem Land. It blends the actual with the dream, and imbues all the drama with ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman

... which Desnoyers had seen in Berlin reflecting the light on metal and leather straps, the magnificent and terrifying Hussars, the Cuirassiers in pure white uniform like the paladins of the Holy Grail, the artillerymen with breasts crossed with white bands, all the military variations that on parade had drawn forth the Hartrotts' sighs of admiration—these were now all unified and mixed together, of uniform color, all in greenish mustard like the ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great ...
— The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot

... Marcella with a shiver. "I like to think of the Last Supper, and the Holy Grail—mother used to read about it all to me—she used to tell me all about Parsifal and the ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... between them would seem to have been cemented, if not begun, during one of Tennyson’s visits to his and Browning’s friends, Mr. and Mrs. Knowles at the Hollies, Clapham Common. Here Tennyson read to Browning the ‘Grail’ (which the latter pronounced to be Tennyson’s “best and highest”); and here Browning came and read his own new poem ‘The Ring and the Book,’ when Tennyson’s verdict on it was, “Full of strange vigour and remarkable in many ways, doubtful if it will ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... forgive me," he cried, "that ever I have called myself a socialist, if this is what socialism means! But it does not! I will rescue the word! I will reclaim it for its ancient nobler sense—socialism the dream of the world, the light of the grail on the marsh, the mystic city of Sarras, the vale of Avalon! Socialism the soul of liberty, the bond of brotherhood, the seal of equality! Who is he that with sacrilegious hands would seize our Ariel and prison him in that tree ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... the "Holy Grail" of selfhood and in the light of our higher understanding we look downward and outward and upward, and the length and the breadth and the height are equal. We pass from the old race thought of limitation and live in a divine ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.

... Rosicrucians. The same author submits considerable evidence to indicate that the Order of the Garter is of much greater antiquity than is generally believed and that phallic principles were associated with it. A similar contention was made regarding the symbolism associated with the Holy Grail, a sacred vessel apparently connected with primitive rites at a time far antedating Christianity. Associated with the old Churches in Ireland similar phallic emblems have been found, as well as in Europe. These emblems were used as charms by the ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II

... the erotic ideal. She is both positive and negative, a blind tool of the element of evil which prompts man to forget his higher mission (reminiscent of the second mediaeval period), and passionately yearning for salvation. She dies before the Holy Grail, the religious ideal made visible. Beside Kundry there are the flower-maidens, naively sensuous beings, who blossom like the flowers and fade again, unconscious and irresponsible. I refrain from a discussion of this work, which would lead too far, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... Scrymgeour: he might be a pain in the neck to "the family"; but he did know how to stop a dog fight. From the first moment of his intervention calm began to steal over the scene. He had the same effect on the almost inextricably entwined belligerents as, in mediaeval legend, the Holy Grail, sliding down the sunbeam, used to have on battling knights. He did not look like a dove of peace, but the most captious could not have denied that he brought home the goods. There was a magic in his soothing hands, a spell in his voice: and in ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... Holy Grail I caught an eagle when I caught that dove, For now you are the queen of all the dames, Even King Constantine, who seldom marks A lady of the court, comes to your side And flatters you with royal courtesies, Which you receive with far too proud a grace; For, wit ye well, I would not let it slip, This ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask

... the new direction, a longing for something new, a yearning for art, for poetry, for beauty, began to stir the hearts of men and women. It found expression in the ideal of chivalry, the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy Grail, and suddenly love, bursting out in a brilliant flame, shed its radiance on the sordid relationship which had hitherto existed between the sexes, and transfigured it. Woman, the despised, to whom at the Council of Macon a soul had been denied, all at once became a queen, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... inn the suit case became a knapsack. Kenny went forth into a world of old houses, apple blossoms and winding roads, likening himself to Peredur who had gone in search of the Holy Grail. The Grail in this case was the holy boon ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... woes, the vision of the prophet of a loving and perfect humanity, the reason of logic—all these and more are to him inspirations, and strengthen him in his great quest. He is a knight of the Holy Grail that is filled from the river of ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... which we meet with very frequently in Celtic lore, and the introduction of this feature in itself is sufficient to convince us of the Celtic or Breton origin of Marie's tale. We have such a craft in the Grail legend in the Morte d'Arthur, in which Galahad finds precisely such a bed. The vessel in the Grail legend is described as "King Solomon's Ship," and it is obvious that Marie or her Breton original must have borrowed the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... music and had studied it scientifically, had now crunched his last leaf of salad. Wiping his lips with his napkin, he joined our tete-a-tete. 'Gracious madam, I agree with you. He who seeks from music more than music gives, is on the quest—how shall I put it?—of the Holy Grail.' 'And what,' I struck in, 'is this minimum or maximum that music gives?' 'Dear young friend,' replied the professor, 'music gives melodies, harmonies, the many beautiful forms to which sound shall be fashioned. Just as in the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... great and noble as these must ever be? Did not one or more of their number feel that there was yet another and a holier quest asked of a true knight? Did not Sir Galahad leave all else to seek after the Holy Grail? Thou knowest all the story; have we not read it often together? And seems it not to thee to point us ever onward and upward, away from things of earth towards the things of heaven, showing that even chivalry itself is but an earthly thing, unless it have its final ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... contemporaries, and in his satirical poems scourged the greed and vices of the clergy, whilst on the other hand he took a principal part in spreading a knowledge of the legend of the high-souled King Arthur and of the quest of the Holy Grail. Giraldus Cambrensis again, or Gerald of Wales, wrote on all sorts of subjects with shrewd ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... properly so—of their Copley Square, with its Public Library, rich with the mural paintings of Puvis de Chavannes, with Abbey's "Quest of the Holy Grail," and Sargent's "Frieze of the Prophets"; with its well-loved Trinity Church and with much excellent sculpture by Bela Pratt. Copley Square is the cultural center of modern Boston. The famous Lowell lectures—established about seventy-five years ago as free gifts to the people—are enthusiastically ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery

... feel," he said, "that nothing is impossible—to have you here beside me. I said, that day at Surbiton, 'There's many good things in life, but there's only one best, and that's the wild-haired girl who's pulling away at that oar. I will make her my Grail, and some day, perhaps, if God wills, she shall become ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... from the pale-pink granites and brown Spanish tiles without to the St. Gauden lions who guard the great marble staircase within. Sargent's "Religions of the World" is a noble decoration, and Abbey's frieze of the Holy Grail is beautiful, but the panel paintings of Puvis de Chavannes—"The Muses Greeting the Genius of Enlightenment"—are worth while coming from London or Paris to Boston ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... caressed and transplanted, then slighted and left to wither, is not so satisfactory. Of the upper middle class, indeed, at that time, Gissing had very few means of observation. But this defect, common to all his early novels, is more than compensated by the intensely pathetic figure of Gilbert Grail, the tender-souled, book-worshipping factory hand raised for a moment to the prospect of intellectual life and then hurled down by the caprice of circumstance to the unrelenting round of manual toil at the soap and candle ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... up and leant against the mantel-piece, pushing a place clear for my elbow on it between a bottle of liqueur and a copy of "The Holy Grail." ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... errant knight reached Philip's court, where he was received with the highest honors. Then to his paternal castle he wended his way, to be welcomed by his proud parents as gladly as if he had won the Holy Grail. Dancing and rejoicing followed, in which all the neighboring noble families participated, and many a fair damsel shed her smiles—in vain it seems—on the famous and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris

... their connection with the mystic Grail is here the subject of Mr. William Henry Frost's translation into child language. Many volumes have been prepared telling these wonderful legendary stories to young people, but few are so admirably written as this ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White

... necessary result of our finite senses, that the only Reality is the Spiritual, the Here and the Now; that the Riddle of the Universe is not to be solved by the Intellect but by that method which is employed by those who are earnestly following the "Quest of the Grail"—namely, by realising that our True Personality or Transcendental Ego is an emanation from the Absolute; that we are one-with Him, and that it is by following the old Hellenic command "[Greek: ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... now sponged on Dorfling just as he had previously done on Wilhelm, giving them in fact turn and turn about, had the bad taste to make jokes continually about the book, at one time calling it the Holy Grail, another time comparing it to the diamond country of Sindbad's tale, and in a hundred ways making vulgar and sceptical jokes. On one of his outbreaks of dissipation he had disappeared far longer than ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... prest A bride, in gratitude For service done; and though the quest Of sacred grail subdued His full heart-beat of smothered heat— He loved ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... men entered with enormous dignity bearing plates of oysters as if offering the Holy Grail and the head of Saint John the Baptist on a charger. Impossible to associate class-consciousness with beings who looked as impersonal as fate, and would have regarded a fork out of alignment as a stain on their private 'scutcheon. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... conflict between the higher and lower, both on the social and the individual side; the victory of the Round Table would have meant not only pure knights but a regenerate state. Here, however, the externalization of the Divine will in the Holy Grail, and, as in the Christian epic generally, its confusion on the marvellous side with a world of enchantment passing here into the sensuous sphere of Merlin, are felt to be inadequate. The war of "soul with sense" was the subject-matter, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... to the mythology of the Romancers, the San Greal, or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus Christ partook of the last supper with his disciples. It was brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, an object of pilgrimage and adoration, for many years in the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... naturally: of the old forced operatic business of sending out or bringing in characters as seems advisable there is not a sign. The story is on the whole simpler than that of Tannhaeuser. Lohengrin is son of Parsifal, head of the mystic Montsalvat monastery where the Holy Grail is kept; where the monks never seem precisely to die; and where, without marriage and even without women, children are somehow born to the favoured ones. He comes in a magic boat drawn by a swan to aid Elsa against Telramund ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... expectation. Perhaps to-night he may realise it; certainly in the morning it will be much nearer; and as for the third day, it will be realised in some great festival of delight. There is, too, a subtle selfishness in this quest after the ideal—the Holy Grail of the imagination. The artist keeps the secret from his brother artists until he can startle them with some gracious surprise. He almost pities them, as he thinks of the revelation that is about to dawn upon unsuspecting and slumberous minds. Postponement of this surprise ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... and the Lady Anne'' at the Royal Academy in 1896, and in that year was elected A.R.A., becoming a full R.A. in 1898. Apart from his other paintings, special mention must be made of the large frescoes entitled "The Quest of the Holy Grail,'' in the Boston Public Library, on which he was occupied for some years; and in 1901 he was commissioned by King Edward VII. to paint a picture of the coronation, containing many portraits elaborately ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... fought out in the arena of Tannhaeuser's mind; the cosmic glories of the Ring with the resplendent figures of Siegfried and Brunhilde; the self-dedication of Parsifal, the Sir Percival of our Arthurian legends, whom "The sweet vision of the Holy Grail drew from all vain-glories, rivalries and earthly heats." Into the glowing music of Wagner my son read lessons in renunciation, the sordidness of the lust for gold, the sublimity of pure human love, the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... light lay on moss and fern. He did not need to remember Ruth's kisses. For each breath of hilltop air, each emerald of moss, each shining mahogany surface in the room, repeated to him that he had found the Grail, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... by God's grace, the free— Thy woe is transient; joy shall come to thee; It cannot fail. The darkest night gives way to rosy dawn, And thou, perchance, shalt see on Easter morn, The Holy Grail. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... on lonely mountain-meres I find a magic bark; I leap on board: no helmsman steers: I float till all is dark. 40 A gentle sound, an awful light! Three angels bear the Holy Grail; With folded feet, in stoles of white, On sleeping wings they sail. Ah, blessed vision! blood of God! 45 My spirit beats her mortal bars, As down dark tides the glory slides, And star-like mingles with ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty

... into it. I never heard the prayer sung like that before. That look that came in her eyes; it went right out through the back of the roof. Of course, you get an ELSA who can look through walls like that, and visions and Grail-knights happen naturally. She becomes an abbess, that girl, after LOHENGRIN leaves her. She's made to live with ideas and enthusiasms, not with a husband." Fred folded his arms, leaned back in his chair, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... or the cold northern sky. At the fall of night, exhausted, trailing their long ears almost to the ground, they returned to the cook, who fed them and made much of them. Next morning they were at it as hard as ever. To them it was the quest for the Grail,—hopeless, but glorious. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... had not her weak life become one flame of love—a cup of the Holy Grail, beating and pulsing with the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... pass to the next century a word must be devoted to a not unimportant class of books which seem to have been manufactured chiefly in Picardy and Artois, the illustrated Romances—e.g. the Grail and Lancelot—of great bulk, usually in prose, which served to pass the winter evenings of persons of quality. A few of these, and a book of devotions to take to church (oftenest a Psalter at this time; later on a ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James

... inscription, "In case of death, send unopened to Jane Mathers, Boston, Massachusetts," on the back, committed to a cause as crazy and as serious as anything since the Pilgrimages, or the Quest of the Knights for the Grail. It also looks slightly like trying to produce a modern Don Quixote, feminine edition, and my cheeks are flaming so that I wouldn't look at them for worlds. And to write it all, too! I have always had my opinion of women who spill their souls ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess

... of the seven liberal arts—the trivium and the quadrivium—and the three philosophies were to be kept in a chest called the "chest of the three philosophies and the seven sciences"; a name suggesting a talisman, like the golden fleece or the Holy Grail, for which one would exchange the world and all its ways. The librarian had charge of this wonderful chest. From it, by indenture, he could lend books—apparently these books were excepted from the general rule—to masters ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... the bold-faced heroines and sensual amours of some of the old French romances, an ideal of exaggerated asceticism, of stainless chastity, notoriously pervades the portion of Malory's work which deals with the Holy Grail. Lancelot is distraught when he finds that, by dint of enchantment, he has been made false to Guinevere (Book XI. chap. viii.) After his dreaming vision of the Holy Grail, with the reproachful Voice, Sir Lancelot ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... one's meditations, and her presence a temple wherein we cleanse our souls. She is mysterious, worshipful, and inaccessible, something perhaps of the woman, possibly even propitious and helpful, and yet something of the Holy Grail as well. You have no rights with her, nor she with you; you owe her no definite duties, and yet she is singularly yours. A smile is a favour, a touch of her fingers, a faint pressure of your hand, is an infinite ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells

... Prose romances also appeared, vast formless compilations, which gathered up into themselves story after story, according to the fancy of each successive editor. Greatest of the additions to the substance of the cycle was the story of the Holy Grail, originally an altogether independent legend. Important changes necessarily developed. Arthur himself, in many of the romances, was degraded from his position of the bravest knight to be the inactive figurehead of a brilliant ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... and conquering king, Of Knights of the Holy Grail, Of wonders of winter, and glories of spring, Always and ever the poets sing; But the great God-Force, in a lowly thing, I sing, in my song of ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... reviews; in music, he was a Wagnerian, which debarred him from writing of it except in German; but the little Court Theatre at Carlsruhe has Wagner's portrait over the drop-curtain, and the consul's box was never empty when the mighty heathen legends were declaimed or the holy music of the Grail was sung. In fiction of the earnest sort, and poetry, Pinckney's critical pen showed a marvelous magic, striking the scant springs of the author's inspiration through the most rocky ground of incident or style. He had a curious sympathy with youthful tenderness. ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... a deputation from Guyenne, Royergue, and Poitou, appeared before the Languedoc synod, requesting preachers and pastors to be sent to them. The synod agreed to send Maroger as preacher. Betrine (the first of the Lausanne students) and Grail were afterwards sent to join him. Protestantism was also reawakening in Saintonge and Picardy, and pastors from Languedoc journeyed there to administer the sacrament. Preachers were afterwards sent to join them, to awaken the people, ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... who investigate and teach within the university walls must respond to the injunction of the church, "Sursum corda"—lift up the heart to high thinking and impartial search for the unsullied truth in the interests of all the people; this is the holy grail ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... about what they did; I haven't thought that out—but anyway she married the red duke Wolfang who spurned her task and took her by night with his retainers away from the tower, saying her love was his Holy Grail and to get her was the object of his pilgrimage. Oh, it's ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... New Yorkers from many concert performances. Once, indeed, there was a "Parsifal" festival in Brooklyn, under the direction of Mr. Seidl, in which all the music was sung by the best singers of the Metropolitan Opera House on a stage set to suggest the Temple of the Grail. Only the action and the pictures were new to the city's music lovers. Nevertheless the interest on the part of the public was stupendous. The first five representations were over on January 21st, but before then Mr. Conried had already announced five more, besides ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... upon me helmet, 'n' no red cross on me chest, 'N' so fur they haven't dressed me in a swanking load of metal; We've no 'Oly Grail I know of, but we do our little best With a jamtin, 'n' a billy, 'n' a battered ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson

... among the heathen Saxon invaders. Accretions naturally are added, and a miraculous origin and a mysterious death throw a superstitious halo around the hero. When the brilliant personality of Lancelot breaks into the tale, and the legend of the Holy Grail is superadded, the theme exercised an irresistible fascination upon the imagination ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... their singularity, were as solidly set as the plans of a building contractor. In Arthur's time Sir William Keogh would have been a Knight of the Round Table. In these modern days he rides abroad, seeking the Graft instead of the Grail. ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... in a high state of satisfaction, even to Miss Cynthia Grail; who, having some lurking suspicion that Mrs. Plumfield might design to cut her out of her post of tea-making, had slipped herself into her usual chair behind the tea-tray before anybody else was ready to sit down. No one at ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... on lonely mountain-meres I find a magic bark; I leap on board: no helmsman steers: I float till all is dark. A gentle sound, an awful light! Three angels bear the holy Grail: With folded feet, in stoles of white, On sleeping wings they sail. Ah, blessed vision! blood of God! My spirit beats her mortal bars, As down dark tides the glory slides, And ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... got well, he notified me that there was a little account to settle between us, and he named a day three or four years in the future; place of settlement, the lists where the offense had been given. I said I would be ready when he got back. You see, he was going for the Holy Grail. The boys all took a flier at the Holy Grail now and then. It was a several years' cruise. They always put in the long absence snooping around, in the most conscientious way, though none of them had any idea where the Holy Grail really was, and I don't think any of them actually expected to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... of the building that was open to the public. I spent rapt hours studying the Abbey pictures. I repeated to myself lines from Tennyson's poem before the glowing scenes of the Holy Grail. Before the "Prophets" in the gallery above I was mute, but echoes of the Hebrew Psalms I had long forgotten throbbed somewhere in the depths of my consciousness. The Chavannes series around the main staircase I did not enjoy for years. I thought the pictures looked faded, and their symbolism somehow ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... enchantment of human beings into swans, and the taboo whereby, as in the case of Cupid and Psyche, the husband forbids the wife to question him as to his identity or to look upon him. The myth has been treated by both French and German romancers, but the latter attached it loosely to the Grail legend, thus turning it ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... 952; telling of beads, processional; thurification^, incense, holy water, aspersion. relics, rosary, beads, reliquary, host, cross, rood, crucifix, pax [Lat.], pyx, agnus Dei [Lat.], censer, thurible, patera^; eileton^, Holy Grail; prayer machine, prayer wheel; Sangraal^, urceus^. ritualism, ceremonialism; sabbatism^, sabbatarianism^; ritualist, sabbatarian^. holyday, feast, fast. [Christian holy days] Sabbath, Pentecost; Advent, Christmas, Epiphany; Lent; Passion week, Holy week; Easter, Easter Sunday, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... which gained currency. Of these the most famous were the Veronica, a cloth on which Christ, on His way to Calvary, was supposed to have left the impress of His face, and a vessel of a green colour which was identified with the holy grail, the cup which our Lord used at the Last Supper. Of garments purporting to be the seamless coat of Christ there were a considerable number shown in different places; but the most famous to this day remains the Holy ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley

... unreasonable quickness of city men, they soon arrived at Mrs. Grail's. The good lady was sitting at one of her front windows, sewing. As she looked into the street, her face was seen to have a sad and thoughtful expression. She came to the door in response to a sharp ring by Wesley Tiffles, who was tentative of bellpulls. Mrs. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... conquer. His first phrase, "Das weiss ich nicht" which is about all he has to say in the first act, was coldly received. However, his bare legs and arms were admired from the rear as he stood his half-hour looking at the Holy Grail. In the second act, where he resists Kundry's questionable allurements, he did passably well, though he gave the impression that even for a reiner Thor—the German for a virtuous fool—she had no charms. She was ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone

... will deprive many gluttons for punishment of the opportunity to hear "Parsifal." We remember one lady who was concerned because Dalmores stood for a long time with his back to the audience. "Why does he have to do that?" she asked her companion. "Because," was the answer, "he shot the Holy Grail." ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor

... rose softly and went to the window, staring out into the night. A few moments later he turned back wearing a strange uplifted sort of look, a look perhaps such, as Percival bore when he beheld the Grail. ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... some lugging, no one knew but herself. Sitting with it between her heavy boots and breeched legs, the eternal cigarette drooping from her mouth, she looked more than ever like Galahad, her blue austere gaze seeming to search beyond the noble mountain tops of her own pictures for some Holy Grail she would never find. No complicated music was hers, just grand, simple things like Handel's "Largo," Van Biene's "Broken Melody," "Ave Maria," or ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... heart is strongly stirred By clink of plate or flight of bird, He has a plumy tail; At night he treads on stealthy pad As merry as Sir Galahad A-seeking of the Grail. ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley

... all Those shafts the fierce sun had shot over its wall In his siege of three hundred summers long, And, binding them all in one blazing sheaf, Had cast them forth; so, young and strong And lightsome as a locust leaf, Sir Launfal flashed forth in his maiden mail To seek in all climes for the Holy Grail.—Lowell. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... What Holy Grail lures errants pale Through the wastes of yonder star? What fables sway the Milky Way? ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis

... enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshipped by these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the crusades was revived in this quest of the holy grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of pagan authors were valued like precious gems, revelled in like odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed on like the eyes of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... place, the pictures are a mine of subjects for description. The pictures themselves may be described, and many of them will suggest other subjects for similar tasks. For instance, in Volume V, on page 219, is a picture of Sir Galahad when the Holy Grail appears to him. Some of the topics for ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... Belgium! Honour's own! Ye who saved the Holy Grail, Ye who died for Freedom's Crown, Hail, ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... antagonistic attitude toward this knowledge. But that which must come to pass will do so in spite of all temporary antagonism. That "hidden knowledge" which is taking possession of humanity more and more may be called symbolically, the "wisdom of the Holy Grail." ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... suppose that the dreams of our modern youth are entirely commercial. In the morning of life they are rapt by intoxicating visions of some great haberdashery business, beckoned to by the voluptuous enticements of the legal profession, or maybe the Holy Grail they forswear all else to seek is a snug editorial chair. These quests and dreams were not for me. Since I was man I have had but one dream,—namely, Woman. Alas! till this my thirtieth year I have found only women. No! that is disloyal, ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... nearer and nearer to his royal or ruinous destiny,—strange spells cast upon bewitched houses or places, that could be removed only by the one hand appointed by Fate. So I pored over the misty legends of the San Grail, and the sweet story of "The Sleeping Beauty," as my first literature; and as the rough years of practical boyhood trooped up to elbow my dreaming childhood out of existence, I fed the same hunger for the hidden and mysterious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... Buddha. The History of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat; a Christianised version thereof. 3. High Estimate of Buddha's Character. 4. Curious Parallel Passages. 5. Pilgrimages to the Peak. 6. The Patra of Buddha, and the Tooth-Relic. 7. Miraculous endowments of the Patra; it is the Holy Grail of Buddhism. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... of misery and wandering, he had not once admitted to himself the true nature of this fog-cottoned grail. He knew it, and he did not know it. It was patrolling the edge of his mind, circling a far-off periphery, recognizable by a crude silhouette but nameless. Any time he wanted to, he could have summoned it closer and said, You are it, and ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer

... golden Christmas legend and it relates how Joseph of Arimathea—that good man and just, who laid our Lord in his own sepulcher, was persecuted by Pontius Pilate, and how he fled from Jerusalem carrying with him the Holy Grail hidden beneath a cloth ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... serious thought or energy should be given to any other end, struck Beatrice as necessarily insincere and absurd. As for duty, the word had no more real application to her own life as Beatrice saw it than the counsels of old-time chivalry for the pursuit of the Holy Grail. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... them. And it was said that at that supper, He used a beautiful golden cup in which He passed the wine to them, and when He went away from earth, the disciples loved everything He had touched, and they seemed to love most of all this golden cup. They called it the Holy Grail, and it was given to a very good man, who cared for it carefully, and for years it passed from one good man to another, for it was said that if it ever fell into the hands of a man who was not good and Christ-loving ...
— A Child's Story Garden • Compiled by Elizabeth Heber

... the siege of the noble prince, Sir Galahad." Straightway the young man seated himself there where none other had ever sat without danger to his life; and all who saw it said, one to another: "Surely this is he that shall achieve the Holy Grail." Now the Holy Grail was the blessed dish from which Our Lord had eaten the Last Supper, and it had been brought to the land of Britain by Joseph of Arimathea; but because of men's sinfulness, it had been withdrawn from human sight, only that, from time to time, it appeared ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)

... vote was a panacea for all human ills, and the ballot-box an object as sacred as the Holy Grail to a knight of the ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce

... of its wooing. It is doubtful whether any Christian life ever passes through this period without considering the ministry or the mission field, or whether every life does not at some moment long to go in quest of a Holy Grail. ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux

... Grail. Henry I, King of Germany. Frederick of Telramund, a noble of Brabant. The Royal Herald. Gottfried, Elsa's brother, and mute. Four nobles of Brabant. Elsa von Brabant. Ortrud, wife of ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon

... previous to the Golden Age of their literature (1550-1700), drawing their subjects from the history or legends of France and Spain, and treating mainly of questions of chivalry and love. Arthur, the Round Table, and the Quest for the Holy Grail, were their stock subjects, previous to the appearance of Amadis de Gaule, a work of original fiction remodelled and extended in the fifteenth century by Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo. During the ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... take Herbert back to our little nest in London. There's no place like home, as I always say. From there we might work together for the great cause of Peace—what I call 'My Grail.'" ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson

... that there can be no sublimer vocation for men of action than to extend the boundary of human knowledge in the face of perils and obstacles more formidable and more mysterious than those encountered by the knights of old in the cause of the Lord's sepulchre or the holy grail—they have thus embodied in a form which will ever awaken enthusiasm in imaginative natures, the noble impulses of our latter civilization. To win the favour of that noblest of mistresses, Science; to take authoritative possession, in her ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... with love, my dear, but they turned on me; I came with gentleness, with my heart 'twixt my hands like a bowl, Like a loving-cup, like a grail, but they spilt it triumphantly And tried to break the vessel, and ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence

... gone a full step beyond those of the religious type. Societies like the Knights of King Arthur, Knights of the Holy Grail, Modern Knights of St. Paul, and others of such ilk have in symbolism sought to teach and find expression for the religious impulse. The method has been more or less the religious type in disguise—ancient titles, elaborate ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander

... me, "she answered, and opened the book before her. "It was the story of the Holy Grail," she added, "and we left off here. Oh, those brave days of King Arthur! It ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... their elder comrades of the quest and the joust, and the merry wars. These modern lads, pilgrims seeking their olden, golden comrade Danger, sallied forth upon the highroads of our civilization, and as the grail was found, and the lands were bounded and the journeys over and the trumpets seemed to be forever muffled, these hereditary pilgrims of the vast pretense, still looking for Danger, played blithely at seeking justice. It was a fine game and they found their ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... prove his courage and his strength to all men . . . and that after he has proved these, he has—as his last, highest act of service in the world. . . to lay them all down, give them all up, for the sake of—of his spirit. You meant that I too, in my life, am to go in quest of the Grail: is it ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen

... of the essays is to acquaint the reader with the spirit, purpose, and tendency of these writings, in order that he may have a comparative view of the continuity of thought and the value of tradition in the world. Some subjects, like the Arthurian Legends, the Nibelungen Lied, the Holy Grail, Provencal Poetry, the Chansons and Romances, and the Gesta Romanorum, receive a similar treatment. Single poems upon which the authors' title to fame mainly rests, familiar and dear hymns, and occasional and modern verse of value, are also grouped together under ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... on the south side, while his fellow performed a like duty on the north side. On every Sunday and holy day the latter had to read the epistle. At Faversham the clerk was required to sing at every Mass by note the Grail at the upper desk in the body of the choir, and also the epistle, and to be diligent to sing all the office of the Mass by note, and at all other services. Very careful instructions were laid down for the proper musical arrangements ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... and tender or the fierce and bright, Youth's rosy blush or Passion's pearly bite? You hardly know perhaps; but Chloe knows, And pours you out the necessary dose, Meticulously measuring to scale, The cup of Circe or the Holy Grail— An actress she at home in every role, Can flout or flatter, bully or cajole, And on occasion by a stretch of art Can even speak the language of the heart, Can lisp and sigh and make confused replies, With baby lips and complicated eyes, Indifferently apt to weep or wink, Primly pursue, provocatively ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... suddenly struck her that this was the very situation with which that 'Romance of the Middle Ages' film ended. You know the one I mean. Sir Percival Ye Something (which has slipped my memory for the moment) goes out after the Holy Grail; meets damsel in distress; overcomes her persecutors; rescues her; gets wounded, and is nursed back to life in her arms. Sally had seen it a dozen times. And every time she had reflected that the days ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... Man is redeemed. The Christ is here! The Soul Now claims its own! Nor hope nor fear Nor prayer nor hunger now, for lo! 'tis here, The expected Kingdom—God's and Man's! 'Tis here! Day-dawn has come! The world-wide quest is o'er! The Grail was never lost! 'Twas folded safe Within the petals of my heart, and thou Enchanter wise, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... lived long ago," say some of the boys. "Then I might have killed dragons, and fought for my Queen, and sought for the Holy Grail. Nobody does those things now. Though I can be a soldier and fight for the King, that is ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang

... my feet. Ah, no, I did not mean it thus; I would not get away alone. I loved that corpse. It was the sweetest bit of human frailty that to man e'er brought a blessing or a curse. I turned from Dias' holy grail to taste its nectar. Hell, throw a-wide your sulphur-blazoned gates, I'll grasp it in my arms and make the plunge! Hist! what was that? I heard him laugh again. Laugh, fiend, you cannot hurt me more. Ah! Reyenita, ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris

... romances of chivalry, wherein valiant knights did all kinds of impossibilities at the behest of fair damsels, rescued enchanted princesses, slew two-headed giants, or wandered for months over land and sea in quest of the Holy Grail, which few of them were sufficiently good even to see, and none to bring back to Arthur's Court. But Mr Benden found that the adventures of Sir Isumbras, or the woes of the Lady Blanchefleur, were quite incapable of making him forget the very disagreeable ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt

... Now he was at Sawston, preparing to work a beneficent machine. No man works for nothing, and Rickie trusted that to him also benefits might accrue; that his wound might heal as he laboured, and his eyes recapture the Holy Grail. ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... heroism is beginning to stir men's breasts, and that the passion for justice and for liberty, which thrilled through the veins of the world's greatest in the past, and woke our pulses to responsive throb, has not yet died wholly out of the hearts of men. Still the quest of the Holy Grail exercises its deathless fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven, nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on the agonising ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... doesn't give us half a chance,' said Livingstone, 'she guards her day and night. It's like the monks and the Holy Grail. ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller

... of it composed of a white, felt-like substance, probably the down of some plant or the wool of some worm, and toned down in keeping with the branch on which it sits by minute tree-lichens, woven together by threads as fine and grail as gossamer. From Robin's good looks and musical turn, we might reasonably predict a domicile of him as clean and handsome a nest as the king-bird's, whose harsh jingle, compared with Robin's evening melody, is as the clatter of pots and kettles ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... of monotonous days we lost account, In fitful dreams remembering days of old And nights—th' erect Archangel on the Mount With sword that drank the dawn; the Vase of Gold The moving Grail athwart the starry fields Where all the ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q

... and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire. All about me were nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and nights were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with before my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ's own Grail, the warm human, long-suffering and maltreated, but to be rescued and saved ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... it will strike you as a dull and stinking little town, and so I dare say it is. But after lunch we shall go up the hillside to where the theatre stands, at the edge of the pine-woods, and from the porch the trumpets will give out the motif of the Grail, and we shall pass out of the heat into the cool darkness of the theatre. Aren't you thrilled, Comber? Doesn't a holy awe pervade you! Are you ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson

... you have seen this vision, and in this spirit have come to help us. Sir Launfal, in searching for the Holy Grail, found it in ministering to the suffering and diseased at his own door. Ye who are in search of God's best gift can find it to-day in lifting up these ten millions of people at your door, broken by slavery, bound ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... right to expect the man she is about to marry to regard their troth as a sacred obligation that shall keep him as pure as a young knight who has dedicated himself to the quest of the Holy Grail. And I find you in a public restaurant, dancing with a creature with yellow hair, upsetting waiters, and staggering about with pats ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... and Sir Bedivere May pass beyond the pale, And wander over moor and mere To find the Holy Grail; ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson

... great cycles of legend,—(1) the Arthur, Guinevere, and Merlin cycle, (2) the Round Table cycle, (3) the Holy Grail cycle, (4) the Launcelot cycle, (5) the Tristan cycle,—which at first developed independently, were, in the latter half of the twelfth century, merged together into a body of legend whose bond of unity was the idealized Celtic hero, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... suffered and questioned came to him, and threw themselves upon him; often getting more buffeting than balm for their pains; but always conscious of some mysterious attractions in him, as of one who, like Sir Boris, had seen the Grail, but might ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Thy keeping hands; As safe as Heaven kept the guarded Grail— So safe, so pure, so compassed as with mail— The soul committed, e'en through Death's dark ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various



Words linked to "Grail" :   aim, chalice, goblet, objective, Sangraal, legend, fable



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com