"Mesmerical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... explain the mythical nature of material sense. Sleep shows material sense as either 490:30 oblivion, nothingness, or an illusion or dream. Under the mesmeric illusion of belief, a man will think that he is freezing when he is warm, and that he 491:1 is swimming when he is on dry land. Needle-thrusts will not hurt him. A delicious perfume will seem intolerable. 491:3 Animal ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... intervals, returned upon Crailey with devastating effect. Vanrevel was the one steadying thing in his life, and, at the same time, the only one of the young men upon whom he did not have an almost mesmeric influence. In good truth, Crailey was the ringleader in all the devilries of the town. Many a youth swore to avoid the roisterer's company for all time, and, within two hours of the vow, found himself, flagon in hand, engaged in a bout that would last ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... fixed upon him, like a trapped creature horrified beneath the mesmeric gaze of a great serpent, the girl watched the approach of the man. Her hands were free, the Swedes having secured her with a length of ancient slave chain fastened at one end to an iron collar padlocked about ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... PSYCHEISM; or, the Science of the Soul, and the Phenomena of Nervation, as revealed by Mesmerism, considered Physiologically and Philosophically; including Notes of Mesmeric and Psychical Experience. By JOSEPH WILCOX HADDOCK, M.D. Second and enlarged Edition, illustrated by Engravings of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... window and wave his hand gallantly as he had done on one or two previous occasions. Then she would beckon and he would run across and entering the room disconcert this odious Mr. Lyman B. Rattray and put an end to his stony wooing. But alas! for Miss Maria and her mesmeric powers! The harder she tried, the less she succeeded. On came Mr. Joseph, supremely unconscious of the injured heart beating behind the windowpane. At one moment it seemed as if he were about to turn ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... preaching peace. I heard him lecture once, and shall never forget his presumption, his ignorance, or his vulgarity. He is said to know many languages. I can answer for his not knowing his own, for I never, even upon the platform, the native home of bad English, heard so much in so short a time. The mesmeric lecturer and the sickly girl are almost equally disagreeable. In short, the only likeable person in the book is honest Silas Foster, who alone gives one the notion of a man of flesh and blood. In my mind, dear ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... would have borne almost death itself for the sake of being nursed by the young girl beside him, and he signified his willingness to proceed, while at the same time his hand involuntarily grasped that of Maggie, as if in the touch of her snowy fingers there were a mesmeric power to soothe his pain. In the meantime a hurried consultation had been held between Mrs. Jeffrey and Theo as to the room suitable for the stranger to ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... for charity. In his inebriated state his wild-looking eyes glowed like coals, and as he looked at me I experienced once more the strange sensation of being enthralled. Truly, there was something mesmeric about that gaze of his, a mystery ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... dwelling upon the space between the slightly parted doors that gave into the next room. But even as he spoke, the last line faltered and halted. His glance slowly stiffened out of widening eyes to the face it had caught there—a face new, strange, mesmeric, that all at once enchained him soul and body. With a splendid, reckless might it assailed him—left him dazed, ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... any attempt against such overwhelming odds seemed madness, for Lowrie's dominion was largely legitimate. He was one of those who are born to command—of splendid physique and dignified bearing, superior intellect and mesmeric fascination. His natural advantages had been increased by a liberal education; he had been brought up among slaves, lived among Indians as agent and interpreter, felt his own superiority, and asserted it with the full force ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... shuddering, nor could he call his mind to think. He was one shuddering turmoil. Yet he performed his purpose methodically and exactly. In every particular he was thorough, as if he were the servant of some stern will. It was a mesmeric performance, in which the agent trembled with ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... in childhood, he received religious impressions which might almost be described as mesmeric or hypnotic in their influence upon his nerves. These abode with him through manhood; and in later life morbid scruples and superstitious anxieties about his soul laid hold on his imagination. Yet religion did not penetrate Tasso's nature. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... that afternoon Crittenden saw the regiment come in for which Grafton had been waiting—a picturesque body of fighting men and, perhaps, the most typical American regiment formed since Jackson fought at New Orleans. At the head of it rode two men—one with a quiet mesmeric power that bred perfect trust at sight, the other with a kindling power of enthusiasm, and a passionate energy, mental, physical, emotional, that was tireless; each a man among men, and both together an ideal leader for the thousand ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... vision extended over all the surface of the globe; they could hear and see with their toes and fingers, and read unknown languages, and understand them too, by merely having the book placed on their stomachs. Ignorant peasants, when once entranced by the grand mesmeric fluid, could spout philosophy diviner than Plato ever wrote, descant upon the mysteries of the mind with more eloquence and truth than the profoundest metaphysicians the world ever saw, and solve knotty points of divinity with ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... crises accompanied by sobs, cries, and contractions, there was peaceful slumber. He recognized the rapport between operator and subject, and amnesia on awaking, and other phenomena now well known, but he still held to the Mesmeric theory of the existence of a universal fluid which saturated all bodies, especially the human body. It was electric in nature, and man could display and diffuse this ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... always striking in appearance, but dress, for one thing, altered her very much, and the state of her mind still more. People who met her on one occasion admired her exceedingly, and on the next wondered why they had thought her good-looking at all. She had the mesmeric quality which makes it impossible to escape observation, and her personality never failed to interest the intelligent whether it pleased them or not; but she was only at her best in mind, manner, and appearance when her fitful further faculty was active; ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... book has just been placed on our table; we know its reputation of old; it is an admirable discourse on the subject of supernaturalisms, such as mental illusions, dreams, ghosts, mesmeric phenomena, &c. If any one will but read the first half dozen pages, we will vouch for it he will not neglect the rest of the volume: it is one of the best written books on one of the most curious range of topics that could engage the pen of a writer, or ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... this city, we understand, but with very infrequent success. Pulling teeth while the patient is asleep is not 'practised to a very great extent in this community;' for no sooner is the glittering instrument of torture 'placed in communication' with the jaw, than it is found to 'disturb the Mesmeric function' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... a little start, as if awakened out of a kind of trance. The sheer vacuity of his mind might naturally slide into mesmeric sleep. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... ascribed to certain persons in a mesmeric state of seeing and describing events at a distance ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... rail until it touched hers. In her deep absorption she did not notice it, or pretended that she did not; but when he took a step nearer she drew her hand away gently. The star held her gaze as though it possessed some mesmeric power. A smile was upon her face as the situation at the soda-water counter took form, became a veritable drama in ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... These old Greeks made such beautiful things, because they did not imitate. That mysterious vitality which still imbues their remains, and which seems to enchant even the fragments of their marbles, is the mesmeric vitality of fresh, original conception. Art, built upon this, is just like what the shadow of a beautiful woman is to the woman. One gets tired in these galleries of the classic band, and the classic headdress, and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... hours without a dream. It was four o'clock in the afternoon of Monday when I awoke, and only then, I believe, from the mesmeric influence of being gazed at. Eleanor! there is only one such pair of eyes in all the world! George Manners was kneeling by ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... that it is not material to what sublimated sphere they may have ascended; it is merely a mesmeric influence which they exert over their disciples, and this influence can penetrate through all ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... seven pullets, first mesmerising them with its eyes and then biting them as they stood helpless. The seventh pullet was one of that French sort, with feathers all over its eyes, so it escaped the mesmeric snare, and just flew at what it could see of the snake and ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... dream-meetings—the great encounters which all of us feel might be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so marvellously uttered in Mesmerism. Here, in these breathless stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in his room at dead of night, and wills the woman ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... at the third, catnip. The crises became mitigated, then disappeared. It was truly a miracle. The nasal addigitation did not succeed with the others, and, in order to bring on somnambulism, they projected the construction of a mesmeric tub. Pecuchet already had even collected the filings and cleaned a score of bottles, when a scruple ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... the history of the human race itself that holds him with a mesmeric spell, as century after century it unrolls its acts and scenes, under the indifferent stars. The continuity of life! The long, piteous "ascent of man," from those queer fossils in the Portland Quarries—to ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... a horrible description of some mesmeric experiments by a M. Delafontaine, by which a boy was deprived of all sensation. We suspect that some one has been operating upon the Poor Law Commissioners, for their total want of feeling is a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... had the address to intimate that the mesmeric crises manifested themselves only in persons endowed with a certain sensitiveness. From that moment, in order not to be ranged among the insensible, both men and women, when near the rod, assumed the appearance ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... greater or less degree leaves in his works, whatever their design, traces of his personal character: elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives the person. While we read the pages of the 'Fall of the House of Usher,' or of 'Mesmeric Revelations,' we see in the solemn and stately gloom which invests one, and in the subtle metaphysical analysis of both, indications of the idiosyncrasies of what was most remarkable and peculiar in the author's intellectual ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Mormon matrimony—at least that indulged in by the dignitaries of the church—there were no statutes, except such as they had chosen to set up for themselves. The ceremony is simply a farce; and consists in the sprinkling of a little water by some brother apostle, with a few mock-mesmeric passes—jocosely termed the "laying on of hands!" The cheat is usually a secret performance: having no other object than to overcome those natural scruples—not very strong among women of Mormon training—but which sometimes, in the case of young girls of Christian education, ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... of butter grieve others. They cannot attend to conversation because of the annoyance occasioned by the habit which some people have of invariably taking more butter than they want. Have you not seen the anxious look (almost mesmeric) which such persons fix on the article? They would feel it a relief if they might bury it out of their sight by popping it into their own mouths and swallowing it down; and they are really made happy if the person on whose plate ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... leaning on two brawny arms. His feet followed the mesmeric influence of their movement. Was he going into the clouds, he wondered? They stopped to open a gate, the gate leading to the gardens of Mainsail Haul. How did he get there? He had no idea. More movements of his feet, and then unexpected warmth. He looked around ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... should judge that these effusions emanated from earthly minds, but had undergone some process that had deprived them of solidity and warmth. In the communications between my wife and her mother, I cannot help thinking that (Miss ——— being unconsciously in a mesmeric state) all the responses are conveyed to her fingers from my wife's mind. . ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... considered, as already noted, that spirits do their work through mesmeric power, it is easy to understand how the medium is made to believe that such and such a spirit is communicating when it is not so at all. This question of identity came up in the very early stages of Spiritualism, and is no nearer settled, on ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... true to myself. Yielding to some influence, mesmeric or otherwise—an influence unwelcome, displeasing, but effective—I again glanced round to see if M. Paul was gone. No, there he stood on the same spot, looking still, but with a changed eye; he had penetrated my thought, and read my wish to ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... attempt to account for the extreme predilection which I, an old woman in comparison, immediately imbibed for you before we had been an hour in company. Some feelings are unaccountable and inexplicable, but I felt a sympathy, a mesmeric attraction, if I may use the term, which was uncontrollable at our first meeting, and which increased every day during our residence together. It was not the feeling of a mother towards a child—at least I think not, for it was mingled with a certain degree of awe and ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... half-past nine I sat down to endeavour to fix my mind so strongly upon the interior of a house at Kew, where Miss V. and her sister lived, that I seemed to be actually in the house. I was conscious, but I was in a kind of mesmeric sleep. When I went to bed that night I willed to be in the front bedroom of that house at Kew at twelve, and make my presence felt by the inmates. Next day I went to Kew. Miss V.'s married sister told me, ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... "Undiscovered Country" with a yearning cry; but he could get no answer from reason, and would not seek it in any form of superstition, least of all the latest, that of stealing into heaven "by way of mesmeric and spiritualistic trances." His question and answer ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... partly round in my seat, I observed the little fellow standing bent forward, his hands stretched out before him as if shielding his face from a bush, while his whole body worked to and fro like the subjects in certain mesmeric experiments that I nave observed when first they are brought under 'the influence' of the operator. His face was partly turned from me, but the cheek, which I saw was pale as death, and his cloth cap was trembling on ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... and take tea with me. I want to talk to you all the evening. You have just the same mesmeric strength that used to soothe me when a boy. What a milk-and-water cub I must have been! I wonder you did not throw ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... "nature," but to kings, priests, and institutions. Shelley's missionaries of liberty preach to a nation of slaves, as the apostles of the Salvation Army preach in the slums to creatures reared in degradation, the same mesmeric appeal. Conversion is a psychological possibility, and the history of revolutions teaches its limitations and its power as instructively as the history of religion. It breaks down not because men are incapable of the sudden effort that can "arise and will," ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... though the tones of morning were feeble and wan, and it was long before the sun would be perceptible in this overshadowed vale. Not a sound came from any of the out-houses as yet. The tree-trunks, the road, the out-buildings, the garden, every object wore that aspect of mesmeric fixity which the suspensive quietude of daybreak lends to such scenes. Outside her window helpless immobility seemed to be combined with intense consciousness; a meditative inertness possessed all things, oppressively contrasting with her own active emotions. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... she had suggested that her life had been prolonged far beyond our mortal span, for hundreds and hundreds of years, indeed; which, as Euclid says, is absurd, and had pretended to supernatural powers, which is still more absurd. Moreover, by a clever use of some hypnotic or mesmeric power, she had feigned to transport me to some place beyond the earth and in the Halls of Hades to show me what is veiled from the eyes of man, and not only me, but the savage warrior Umhlopekazi, commonly called Umslopogaas ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... General G.? He is a weazen-faced warrior, and in his dotage. I had him for a fellow-passenger on board a steamboat. I had also a statistical colonel with me, outside the coach from Cincinnati to Columbus. A New England poet buzzed about me on the Ohio, like a gigantic bee. A mesmeric doctor, of an impossibly great age, gave me pamphlets at Louisville. I ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... direct look into your own. Even in the painted representation of that gaze, almost too calm in its absolute mastery to be called searching or scrutinising, yet seeming to look through the eyes into the soul, there was an almost mesmeric influence; as if, across the abyss of ten thousand years, the Master could still control the wills and draw forth the inner thoughts of the living, as he had dominated the spirits of their ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... needn't grin like that," he added, a little irritably. "There is a legitimate side, and a very wonderful side, only a brain like yours is not capable of assimilating it. You should have heard my paper to-night upon self-directed mesmeric waves." ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hush her crying infant, would ever fear that he would be annoyed or wish her and her child in Jericho. On the contrary, she would, if necessary, ask him to hold her baby for a moment, and the child would go to him unhesitatingly, so great was the mesmeric power he exercised over his fellow-creatures. This influence or power was inborn, and he could no more have helped it than he could have helped his heartbeats. But, added to this, was a constant effort on his part to make those with whom he came in contact happy, to sympathize ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... four and five, Barty had his interview with the doctor—a splendid, white-haired old man, of benign and intelligent aspect, almost mesmeric, with ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... absolutely necessary to a valid marriage—just as they have persuaded the landlady class that no house is complete without a big mirror over the fireplace and a bulgy sideboard. There is a very strong flavour of mesmeric suggestion about a woman's attitude towards these matters, considered in the light of her customary common sense. Do you know, George, I really believe there is a secret society of tradesmen, a kind of priesthood, who get hold of our womenkind and muddle them up with all these ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... night before was real. The biological or hypnotic power that I had felt that very night was real, and, above all, a feeling of dread that had gripped my being was real. I could not explain it, and I could not throw it off, but ever since I had awoke out of my mesmeric sleep, or whatever the reader may be pleased to call it, I felt numbed; weights seemed to hang on my limbs, and my whole being was in a ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... at a man with those ripe, red, perfect lips, and give him one glance from those mesmeric eyes, and he was straightway her slave. And she gloried in ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... painting in his hand, literally transfixed him in an attitude of surprise and consternation. Like the Ancient Mariner, he held him by his glittering eye, but the spell was not an enduring one. 'Truly,' remarked Dr Garland, as he found the kind of mesmeric influence he had exerted beginning to fail, 'not so very bad a chance resemblance; especially about the eyes ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... you that I was thinking, my beloved, when I wrote that name on the cards," he continued, as he still smoothed her hair with his light mesmeric touch. She did not repel his caresses, but neither did she reply to his words. And he saw, by the heaving of her bosom and the quivering of her lips, that the storm ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the nerves or ribs of the leaf. Days pass. The ants are there all the time, examining the leaf and communicating with each other whensoever they meet. Imperceptibly the leaf begins to curl. The ants continue to make mesmeric passes over ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the war-wolves on our trail, Their gaunt fangs sluiced with gouts of blood; Till the Past, in a dead, mesmeric veil, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... At the same time, the mesmeric theory (if you could believe in it) would carry the explanation further still. Mesmerism would assert, not only that you and the child influenced each other, but that—in spite of the distance—you ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... man sat up in his chair and by what mesmeric magic it happened I know not, but before my eyes grew the living image of the gross, shapeless creature who had put me to bed in wringing ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... she made a few passes, the Fairy sank into a mesmeric trance. Then, CINDERELLA desired that her Godmother should imagine that she had been the heroine ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... can't do," said Howard, with a whimsical smile. "I am drawn, into the vortex; I am dragged at the chariot wheels of that wonderful father of yours. I am the victim of a peculiar kind of fascination which is as irresistible as the mesmeric influence or hypnotism. I feel towards Sir Stephen as I should feel towards Napoleon the Great, if he were alive. I follow and gaze at him, so to speak, with my mouth agape and a fatuous smile over a countenance which I once flattered myself was intelligent. I am dazed, bewildered by ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... pretend to when awake,—tell you what money you had in your pocket, nay, describe your very thoughts,—it is not necessarily an imposture, any more than it is necessarily supernatural. I should be, unconsciously to myself, under a mesmeric influence, conveyed to me from a distance by a human being who had acquired power over me ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a man under a mesmeric spell, he went through the motions of eating. His mind was far away, his eyes eager, alert, forever upon ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... from the gloom of motion, sound- lessly, somnambule Moans and booms the soul of a people imprisoned, asleep in the rule Of the strong machine that runs mesmeric, booming the spell of its word Upon them and moving them helpless, mechanic, their will ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... not heard him enter, but presently some mesmeric rapport between them, told her he was near. She turned her head and saw him. Aunt Chatty caught sight of him, in her semi-sleeping ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... indicates the existence of a supernormal perceptivity such as theory would suggest? It is known to readers of the Society for Psychical Research Proceedings that we do find such indications, scattered at first, and appearing unsought-for amid the phenomena of mesmeric or somnambulic states; but now to some slight extent isolated into distinctness, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... far back now that his shaggy head rested against the shanty boards. Burnett was piercing him with a strange, mesmeric gaze. ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... is opened. CLARE DEDMOND in a cream-coloured evening frock comes in from the hall, followed by GEORGE. She is rather pale, of middle height, with a beautiful figure, wavy brown hair, full, smiling lips, and large grey mesmeric eyes, one of those women all vibration, iced over with a trained stoicism of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... graceful in form and moulding, with that indescribable air of high breeding which marks the polished man of the world. His beautifully-formed head, delicate profile, fascinating sweetness of smile, and, above all, an eye which seemed to have an almost mesmeric power of attraction, were traits which distinguished one of the most celebrated men of the time, and one whose peculiar history yet lives not only in our national records, but in the private annals of many ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... self-discipline and culture, and the other through the efforts of another person called a healer. Often there is a combination of both. The power does not lie in the personality of the healer, nor in the exercise of his will-power. Neither hypnotism nor mesmeric control are elements in true mind-healing. The healer, in reality, is but an interpreter and teacher. The divine recuperative forces which exist, but are latent, are awakened and called into action. The patient is like a discordant instrument containing great capabilities, only waiting ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... satisfactory; but it only illustrated the powers and relations of the soul in its present state of existence; it threw no light upon that future which I was not willing to take upon faith alone. Though sensible to mesmeric influences, I was not willing that my spiritual nature should be the instrument of another's will,—that a human being, like myself, should become possessed of all my secrets and sanctities, touching the keys of every passion with his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... higher psychological mysteries. He has in rare hours the power of producing the portraits of persons whom you have loved, but whom he has never seen. For this it is necessary that you should concentrate your whole attention on him, as is always needful to secure the best results of mesmeric power. It must also be late and still. In the day, or in a storm, I have never known him to succeed in this. For these portraits he uses only shadowy gray tints. He begins with a hesitating outline. If you are not tenderly and closely ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... we hear the rumor that the seer has arrived, and his tale is told. But there is no beauty, no heaven: for angels, goblins. The sad muse loves night and death, and the pit. His Inferno is mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the same relation to the generosities and joys of truth, of which human souls have already made us cognizant, as a man's bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is indeed very like, in its endless power of lurid pictures, to the phenomena of dreaming, which nightly turns ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... her face with a pair of compelling, mesmeric eyes that made her stagger back to the wall. Then he advanced a step nearer, covering the ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... spirit of the keen eyes that had always burned with an eagle fierceness and an unyielding aggressiveness. Now they were different, and as the guests who had brought the chair and its occupant up the stairs and into the room withdrew in silent respect, the daughter's gaze was held by them with a mesmeric force. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... attributed, among others, to Harold Frederic and Robert Buchanan. Since then "A Dead Man's Diary"—of which Mr. J.M. Barrie, in reviewing it, said, "The vigour of the book is great, and the author has such a gift of intensity that upon many readers it will have mesmeric effect"—has gone through innumerable editions, in England and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... while I was living at headquarters. I had a long talk with Perreira, but could not shake his statement, nor that of the three others; nevertheless, I remained a sceptic as to this alleged charming or mesmeric power of the snakes, at least so far as ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... form of government and of its modification, the City Manager plan, the aim of which is to centralize governmental authority and to entice able men into municipal office. And there are many other manifestations of the new civic spirit. The mesmeric influence of national party names in civic politics is waning; the rise of home rule for the city is severing the unholy alliance between the legislature and the local Ring; the power to grant franchises is being taken away from legislative ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... story, for which it is difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... change the very direction of all spirit life in us. But here, we know accurately what the needs are; and any sort of wisdom that fails to provide us with the right way of dealing with one another is defective. Thus your Buddhism seems to me more mesmeric than satisfying. It is a way men have of murdering themselves, while continuing to live, into peace and oblivion. There is a surrender, a negation of life, a denial of total responsibilities, or human obligations, which to my ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... "Silence!"—but from no human voice this time. The whispering, shuffling, and clicking of the court typewriter ceases, the scene darkens, and the court is blotted out as a scene is blotted out from the sight of a man who has thrown himself into a mesmeric trance. And: ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... downy couches; the cook, on a shady bench under the trellis, nodded as she seeded the raisins for the frozen pudding of the six-o'clock dinner; the waiter had succumbed in clearing the lunch-table and made mesmeric passes with the dish-rag in a fantasy of washing the plates; the stable-boy slumbered in the hay, high in the loft, while the fat old coachman, with a chamois-skin in his hand, dozed as he sat on the step ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... of his wild lands. He is a man of will and of strong physique, with an inquiring and scientific turn of mind, which inclines him chiefly to metaphysical studies. It is not to be wondered at, that, having lately discovered that he possesses the mesmeric gift, he should not sufficiently discriminate as to its application. Later he will see that it is an agent not to be tampered with, and never to be used on healthy subjects, but applied only to invalids. To-day he is like a newly-armed knight-errant, bounding off on his steed at sunrise, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... headache, induced by strong excitement, drove him nearly wild with pain. He had been subject to headaches all his life, but he had never suffered as he was suffering now but once, and that was on a rainy day in Rome, when, boasting of her mesmeric power, Lucy had stood by him, and passed her dimpled hands soothingly across ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... which so nearly overthrew three Prussian armies. He brandished his razor and swept the Boches back over the Marne, he swept them through Senlis, he swept them across the Aisne. His intensity was inspiring. The smouldering fires of bygone battles leapt into his eyes. But it was not the mesmeric shave of 1914. He apologised humbly and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... magic is usually exercised for the good of his fellow-creatures, which indeed might be expected as he gets his livelihood from them, and he is also less powerful than the tonhi. The Baiga cures ordinary maladies and the bites of snakes and scorpions by mesmeric passes fortified by the utterance of charms. He raises the dead in much the same manner as a witch does, but employs the spirit of the dead person in casting out other evil spirits by which his clients may be possessed. One of the miracles performed by the Baiga ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... stories, which contain much interesting information on Indian customs and manners. It also alludes to that state, which induces Hindu devotees to allow themselves to be buried alive, and to appear dead for weeks or months, and then to return to life again; a curious state of mesmeric catalepsy, into which they work themselves by concentrating the mind and abstaining from food - a specimen of which I have given a practical illustration in the Life of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... beneath me, which, since the evident occupancy of that long-deserted hall, had been wound and put in running order, struck twelve, with its deep-mouthed, melodramatic tones, and at the very moment I heard sounds indicative of the resurrection of the mesmeric sleeper. ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... tones of tireless Time Thrills the silvery air; The multitudinous world sleeps, Pope and beggar alike— In the land of lingering dreams— Oblivious of glory, Poverty, or war, destructive; Sleep, the daily death of all Throws her mesmeric mantle Over prince and pauper; And care, vulture of fleeting life Folds her bedraggled wings To rest a space, 'till first cock crow Hails the glimmering dawn With piercing tones triumphant; Father ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... that it is unlawful in Heaven for any person to look at the back of the head of another, as by so doing he interrupts the divine influx. The foundation of this idea is perhaps the desire to avoid mesmeric ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... thus mourned. At any rate, she was an excellent comforter, in the sympathy that was neither too acute nor too obtuse; and purely to oblige her, Ethel for the first time submitted to her favourite panacea of hair brushing, and found that in very truth those soft and steady manipulations were almost mesmeric in soothing away the hard oppressive excitement, and bringing on a gentle and ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was a sore shock to Richard Gray. When Douglas found him on the trail and broke the news to him as gently as possible, he seemed at first hardly to comprehend it. He was stunned. He said little, but followed Douglas back to the cabin like one in a mesmeric sleep. A few days before he had gone away happy and buoyant, now he shuffled ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... body being flabby and pliable as in natural sleep; third, Somnambulism, so called from its analogies to the ordinary sleep-walking condition to which many persons are subject. This last covers the phenomena of ordinary mesmeric exhibitions at which travelling mesmerists "control" persons before audiences and make them obey their commands. While other scientists properly deny that these three stages are really distinct, they may yet be taken ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... in death; alike in that commanding presence which seems to be the signature of Heaven sometimes placed on a great soul when to that soul is given a fit dwelling-place; alike in that noble carriage and commanding dignity, exercising a mesmeric influence and a hidden power which could not be repressed, upon all who came within its charm; alike in the remarkable combination and symmetry of their intellectual attributes, all brought up to the same equal level, no faculty of the mind overlapping ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... for the nameless fascination he exercised over the young Scotchman? We speak lightly of mesmeric influence, but, after all, there is only one mesmerist for youth—a good woman or a good man. Depend upon it, that is why so many "mesmerists" have mistaken their vocation. Andrew took to prowling about the streets looking for this man, like a dog that ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... Philosophy and General Information." This work has a vast circulation, and is respected by eminent men. Sometime in November, 1845, it copied from the "Columbian Magazine" of New York, a rather adventurous article of mine, called "Mesmeric Revelation." It had the impudence, also, to spoil the title by improving it to "The Last Conversation of a Somnambule"—a phrase that is nothing at all to the purpose, since the person who "converses" ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... early marriage. That odious letter decided her; and now it only remained to make her choice. There are women—and these, though sometimes the most fascinating, by no means the most trustworthy of their sex—who possess over mankind a mesmeric influence, almost akin to witchcraft. Without themselves feeling deeply, perhaps for the very reason that they do not, they are capable of exercising a magic sway over those with whom they come in contact; and while they attract more admirers ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... brambles now, and we can go on. Are you comfortable?" He looked up, read her answer in her burning eyes and the warm lips pressed to his forehead at the roots of his straight dark hair, and again moved onward as in a mesmeric dream. But he did not swerve from his direct course, and with a final dash through the undergrowth parted the leafy ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... be no mistake that there is a specific action from something. It cannot be personal magnetism or mesmeric influence exerted by me, for such cases are rare, averaging about 10 per cent, only of all classes. Besides, in mesmeric influence the time has nothing to do with it; whereas, in my cases, it cannot last over a half minute or minute at most. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... reddened soil to gaze, and, gazing, fell back dead. Slowly, mechanically, silently, the living gave way, the weapons dropping from their nerveless grip. Step by step they drew back as if compelled by some strange mesmeric power. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... three or four years later, as already mentioned, I was king-bee and sole "subject" in the mesmeric show; it was the beginning of the second week; the performance was half over; just then the majestic Dr. Peake, with his ruffled bosom and wristbands and his gold-headed cane, entered, and a deferential citizen ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... anecdote of a 'cute Yankee, who won invariably and immensely at the game. There seemed to be a sort of magical or mesmeric attraction for the flies to his lump. At length it was ascertained that he touched the lump with his finger, after having smeared it with something that naturally and irresistibly attracts flies whenever they ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... to Mesmerize. Knowing this, you can place any person in a mesmeric sleep, and then be able to do with him as you will. This secret has been sold over ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey
... prisoners were there to tell on him. He had nothing to depend upon but the audacity and address which never failed him, and a quality even higher than courage—I can describe it only as the faculty of subjecting every one to his will, whom he tried to influence; it was almost mesmeric. The prisoners fifty or sixty in number, were paroled in the course of the day and started back to Kentucky by a route which would enable them to avoid meeting detachments of their own army. Our party encamped ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... believe a word she said. I loved her blue eye, her golden hair, her delicious voice, that was true in song, though when she spoke, false as Eblis! You are aware that I possess in rather a remarkable degree what we have agreed to call the mesmeric power. I set the unhappy girl to sleep. THEN she was obliged to tell me all. It was as I had surmised. Goby de Mouchy, my wretched, besotted, miserable secretary, in his visits to the chateau of the Marquis de Bechamel, who was one of our society, had seen Blanche. I ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lascelles shall not come near me, and Bertie shall." She excluded every other thought from her mind, and willed steadily. Du Meresq became restless, rose from his chair, and stood aimlessly looking at something on a table. Bluebell continued her mesmeric efforts, every fibre quivering. He was coasting in her direction; in another instant he would be close, and have sat down on the sofa by her. Then she looked up, and their eyes met and mingled. It might have been for half-an-hour to her overwrought sensations; ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... There was something mesmeric in his touch that overpowered Ideala. She felt a change in herself at the moment, and she was never the same ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... he revelled in it. When he offered a free box of the cure to the first lady who confessed the need thereof, and a blushing wench came forward, the rascal revelled in the opportunity for badinage which set the good-humoured crowd in a roar. He loved to exert his half-mesmeric power. He had not the soul of a mountebank, for Aristide's soul had its high and generous dwelling-place; but he had the puckish swiftness and mischief of which the successful mountebank is made. And he was a success because he treated it as an art, thinking nothing during its practice ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... particular bumps in his cranium, the professor could make him sing, dance, and fight all in a breath, or transport him to California, and set him to picking gold. I was very curious to witness this man's conduct under his alleged mesmeric state, and went accordingly. After a long lecture, during which the professor put into a deep sleep a Kentuckian giant, who travelled with him, the blacksmith was called upon to satisfy the curiosity of the spectators. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... needs with a physician's art, doing all that funeral talk can do to raise the final tears from among the heartstrings and pour them in oblation upon the corpse, the pastor's consolation had the effect of some mesmeric hand that weakens our systems while it sublimates our feelings, and Vesta's female nature was ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... I was at Southall. At half-past nine I sat down to endeavor to fix my mind so strongly upon the interior of a house at Kew, where Miss V. and her sister lived, that I seemed to be actually in the house. I was conscious, but was in a kind of mesmeric sleep. When I went to bed that night, I willed to be in the front bedroom of that house at Kew at twelve; and to make my presence felt by the inmates. Next day I went to Kew. Miss V.'s married sister ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... measured tread, he wept, and with many sighs of grief adjusted the head with much care, caught rain in his shield and poured it over the body; then rubbed and shook the limbs, which by degrees became alive by his mesmeric-like passings and chafings from the feet upwards. Each limb as it revived beat time to the music, first faintly, then with more vigour, till it came to the head; and when that nodded satisfactorily, and the whole body of his friend was in motion, he gave ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... on her back, and after waiting to satisfy himself that she was in a fast mesmeric sleep, he placed one throbbing hand on her hip, and gradually raising it till he found the lovely prominence of one charming bosom, then his other hand sought its companion, and he pressed those heaving hills ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... great mesmeric powers, and this force, combined with rather clumsy juggling and ventriloquism, enabled them to perform a semblance of "miracles". The Iroquois offered much opposition to Christianity, thinking it would tame their warriors too quickly and affect their national independence; ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... Gave him no instructions. Thought of course he was going to cut it; and so fell asleep. I almost always fall asleep when under the mesmeric influence of a capillary administrator. I should like him to keep on doing it; cut and comb again. So soothing! Woke up and found myself—like this. (See Hair Cut.) Herewith please receive portrait, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... away from the mesmeric influence of the fire-watchers, he ran quickly with Alec to the knoll where a metal hoop and hammer were kept for the purpose of alarm in case of fire. Almost before the two reached the spot, Alec ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... influence of the same mesmeric sleep of amazement, went up the large oaken stairs after the respectful attendant. He entered a splendid suite of apartments that seemed to be designed specially for him. He walked up to a long mirror with the ordinary ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... kind permission, put my daughter into a mesmeric or hypnotic trance; and while she is in it, I hope to show you some particularly interesting experiments. Look at ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... grasping a Troglodyte tablet covered with half-effaced hieroglyphics—his fingers livid with the fixity of his grip—he bent on it that strenuous inquisition, that ardent questioning gaze, till, by a species of mesmeric dominancy, he seemed to wrench from it the arcanum it hid from other eyes; then he lay back, pale and faint from ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... would have seemed fantastic if it had not been for the sound of the machine guns and the rifles and the deeper-throated chorus of the heavy guns, which proved that this was no mesmeric, fantastic spectacle but a game with death, precise and ordered, with nothing that could be rehearsed left to chance any more than there was in the regulation of the traffic which was pressing forward, column after column, to supply the food which fed the artillery-power ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... magnet. anim.) came across madmen who became sane just before death, i.e., when consciousness was passing into the astral body. He also mentions a servant girl, quite uneducated and of ordinary intelligence, who nevertheless became a veritable philosopher during mesmeric somnambulism and delivered learned discourses on ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... he felt so superior, exercised a peculiar and almost mesmeric effect on Soames, for he had never felt anything like it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a return to Vallabha's purer faith, which had been corrupted. Probably most of the older reformers have had much the same career as had Sv[a]mi N[a]r[a]yana. Exalted by the people, who were persuaded by his mesmeric eloquence, he soon became a political figure, a martyr of persecution, a triumphant victor, and then an ascetic, living in seclusion; whence he emerged occasionally to go on tours "like a bishop visiting his diocese" (Williams). ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Thompsons—a six months' infant in the wicker cradle. How, obedient to his mother's wish, like a little man at first, he rocks with all his might, and then irregularly, and at long intervals—by fits and starts—and ceases altogether very soon, bobbing his curly head, and falling gently into a deep mesmeric sleep. The older lads are making wooden boats, and two, still older, stand on either side their mother. A book is in the hands of each, full of instruction and fine learning. It was the source of all their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... to discover the secret of a great doctor's success," she pursued. "What is your charm? There is something mesmeric about you, I think, something inimical to disease at all events. There is healing in your touch, and your very manners make an ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... countenance which you love, which you would recognise again, meet it where you will; it marks the whole landscape; it determines probably the geography and the society of a whole district. It draws you, too, to itself by an indefinable mesmeric attraction. If you stop in a strange place, the first instinct of your idle half-hour is, to lounge by the river. It is a person to you; you call it—Scotchmen do, at least—she, and not it. How do you know that you ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... ground and raises the cover. Then he rouses and provokes the snake to make it lift up the upper part of its body and expand its hood with the spectacles. All the time he plays his flute with one hand. With the other he makes waving, mesmeric passes. The snake gradually becomes quiet and calm, and the charmer can press his lips against the scales of its forehead. Then the charmer throws it on one side with a sudden movement, for the snake may have waked up again and be just on the point ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... frayed beyond reason or forgiveness. He saw all there was to be said about it; he could imagine Baumgartner himself putting the case with irresistible logic, with characteristic plausibility, and all the mesmeric wisdom of a benevolent serpent; but for once, the boy felt, he would not be taken in. It was not coming to that, however, for he had quite decided not to betray his knowledge of the fraud—if only he had not ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... the robber: but the conclusion was so far varied, that the jewel having been judiciously hidden, the poet made use of his voice and his guitar to throw the Lady Fiordespina into a mesmeric sleep before the court, and then to cause a table to rap out the letters, which she interpreted so as to lead to ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge |
