|
|
|
More "Ecstasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Dean was a singularly simple-minded man. Reverence for the aristocracy had become with him almost a religion. When he was brought—or believed himself to be brought—in contact with the aristocracy, his intellectual vision closed in a swoon of ecstasy. Snob? Oh, dear, no! Of course not. What can have made you think that? It was simply that the aristocracy appealed to him very much as romance did—he was outside it, but liked ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... my oar and hand, Touching to glory sea and sand. A glint, a sparkle, a flash, a flame, An ecstasy above all name. What art thou, strange, mysterious flame? Art thou some flash of central fire, So pure and strong thou wilt not expire Tho' plunged in ocean's seething main? Mayest thou not be that sacred flame, Creative, moulding, purging fire. Aspiring, abandoning all desire Shaping perfection ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... Yesterday ecstasy over new church; to-day in the depths again. Joy shortlived. This way: very stormy night; soaking rains; morning whirlwind, frightful; hurried to the church; one side already blown loose; mighty burst wind; whole show laid low. ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... unlike anything he had ever before experienced ... a great wave of passion that went on and on, rising to a peak he had never dreamed of until his body shivered with the sensations, and he pressed on, rising still higher in an ecstasy beyond measure.... ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... again? He threw away his staff and shoes; he went forth with literally a single garment; he was girt with a common rope round his loins. He no more doubted of his mission, he no more feared for the morrow than he feared for the young ravens that he loved and spake to in an ecstasy of joy. ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... that the chief investigations were made in the summer of 1906, when the new "messiah craze" was at its height, thus affording exceptional opportunity for observing an interesting wave of religious ecstasy ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... "This is the good-by kiss. This is good-by." And once again he felt the swift lambent ecstasy of a love that he had never till now guessed at; a joy beyond words, beyond dreams, beyond belief. "Now, you must go;" and he slowly released himself, and held her at arm's length. "That was our good-by. Good-by, my Norah—my darling—good-by." ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... in a subordinate degree, the tendency to violent action under extreme suffering. A man cannot think deeply and exert his utmost muscular force. As Hippocrates long ago observed, if two pains are felt at the same time, the severer one dulls the other. Martyrs, in the ecstasy of their religious fervour have often, as it would appear, been insensible to the most horrid tortures. Sailors who are going to be flogged sometimes take a piece of lead into their mouths, in order to bite it with their utmost force, and thus to bear the pain. Parturient women ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... snow enveloped her soul as well as the earth, and she became a beneficiary of the white storm; the graceful droop of the pine boughs extended to her thoughts, and the clamor of the birds aroused in her a winged freedom, so that she felt at once peace and a sort of ecstasy. She walked in the track of a stolidly plodding man before her, as different a person as if she were an inhabitant of another planet. He was digesting the soggy, sweet griddle-cakes which he had eaten for breakfast, and revolving in his mind two errands for his wife—one, ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... inclination. We know very few persons engaged in active life, who, even if they were to procure stools to be melancholy upon, and were to sit down with all the premeditation of Master Stephen, would be able to enjoy much of what somebody calls the "ecstasy ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... just as though for some treason to their corporate enmity toward men. Niura, with very great versimilitude, mimics her sighs, groans, outcries and passionate words, from which she can never refrain in the moments of ecstasy and which are to be heard in the neighbouring rooms through two or three partitions. There is a rumour afloat about Pasha, that she got into a brothel not at all through necessity or temptation or deception, but had gone into it her own self, voluntarily, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. It affirms, with no little sublimity, something that is not merely the singleness but rather the solitude of ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... language after all; for have I not heard it rampant with lungs, and hoarse with disciplined harmony in Exeter Hall, as Hullah cut capers with his tiny truncheon, with Royalty itself, heroic field-marshals, and grave ministers of state, in seeming ecstasy at the sleight of hand? Just as I have heard and seen in the barracones of Bozal negroes for sale, when, at the crack of the black negro-driver's whip, and not unfrequent application of the lash, the flagging gang of exhausted slavery has ever and again ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... stands. Once there, you overlook the fairest sight in all Christendom—"the loveliest valley in the world," as Humboldt called it—for the Yumuri nestles right at your feet, a vale of pure delight, a glimpse of Paradise that bewilders the eye and fills the soul with ecstasy. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... out over the shimmering half-moon of harbour, across the moaning white feather of reef, out to the illimitable sea, and drank in the essence of the beauty of the night. Just so, at first, had it clutched him with the pain of ecstasy, and he had never forgotten it. There would be no voicing that feeling; it must ever remain inarticulate. Nor was the girl trying to voice it. Her exquisite pantomime alone spelled her delight in it ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... her eyes, and tremble violently as she kissed my hands. I did not take my hand away because it made her happy to have it, and so she would sit and cry quietly. Sometimes she tried to speak; but it was very difficult to understand her. She was almost like a madwoman, with excitement and ecstasy, whenever I came. Occasionally the children came with me; when they did so, they would stand some way off and keep guard over us, so as to tell me if anybody came near. This was ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... quickly and gladly afterwards, as an old friend comes back to the place where he is sure of a welcome; and lastly, with a sound of ten thousand pattering feet, with a whirring of innumerable wings, with a roar of triumph and ecstasy, Prosperity poured ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... not be so many children coming out in the world with boorish proclivities. If parents knew more of Christ, and practised more of His religion, there would not be so many little feet already starting on the wrong road, and all around us voices of riot and blasphemy would not come up with such ecstasy ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... gaiety," he said laughingly. "Last night I beheld him at the Palace of Mirrors—and with an attractive young lady of your club, Miss Dumont—the charming young Russian lady with whom you came once to pay me the rent—" He kissed his hand in an ecstasy of recollection. "So beautiful a young lady! So gay were they in their box! Ah, youth! youth! Ah, the happiness and folly when laughter bubbles in our ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... that nature to which the world was now resolved to return,—it was sacred, and superior to all human conventions. It belonged to the sphere of the rights of man. Its enemy was everywhere the corrupt heart and the worldly, calculating mind. Fortunately the new ecstasy associated itself with a strong enthusiasm for the simplification of life; for the poetry of nature and of rustic employments; for the sweetness of domestic affection. In Germany public sentiment had already been prepared for a certain idealization of the bourgeoisie. Enlightened ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the king in ecstasy. "Give them to me at once." And Louis broke the seal of a little letter, inclosing the verses which history has preserved entire for us, and which are more meritorious in intention than in execution. Such ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... the Spirit paused in ecstasy. Yet soon she saw, as the vast spheres swept by, Strange things within their belted orbs appear. 255 Like animated frenzies, dimly moved Shadows, and skeletons, and fiendly shapes, Thronging round human graves, and o'er the dead Sculpturing records for each memory In verse, such as malignant gods ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... me away, and the Captain pushed me back into the little room, quickly fastening the door. But my feeling was still one of ecstasy rather than horror, for still I saw the Countess's tender eyes in grief for me, still saw her arms reaching out toward me, still heard her voice full of wild protest at my sentence. It was to surprise her real feelings that she had been brought ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... She was crazy with delight over her little friend's good fortune, so she took several steps forward and cried in an ecstasy, 'O Brownie, ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... eyes toward the city. The cheers of the people sounded in her ears like the early greetings of her happiness, and filled her soul with ecstasy. As the king, between his sons, rode into the gateway, the bells rang, and the cannon shook the ground. When the queen's carriage entered, the soldiers formed in line on both sides of the street, and behind them surged a dense crowd of men and women. Nothing was to be ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... prophetic vision of the one, his honest pride in his native town would have risen almost to ecstasy. Could he have known of the other, his patriotic soul would have sunk within him, and the pleasure of his day's journey would ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... also scrutinised more carefully than Englishmen the precise words used by the Nationalist leader. Englishmen, both in the House of Commons and in the country, were carried off their feet in an ecstasy of joy and wonder at Mr. Redmond's confident offer of loyal help from Ireland to the Empire in the mighty world conflict. Ireland was to be "the one bright spot." Ulstermen, on the other hand, did not fail to observe that the offer was limited to service at home. "I say to the Government," ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy—there goes ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... giant!" repeated Sweet Fern, in an ecstasy at the precision of these measurements. "And how broad, I wonder, were the shoulders ...
— The Three Golden Apples - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ball must travel, often far away from the direct line, but which carries it at last delightfully to the opening into which it sinks just as its strength is ebbing away? We all know the thrilling ecstasy that comes from such a stroke as this, but it has always been helped by a little good luck, and I would not call it the master stroke. There are inferior players who are good putters. Which, then, is the master stroke? ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... flushed in an ecstasy of gratitude and passionate feeling beneath the endearing epithets and the ...
— A Little Hero • Mrs. H. Musgrave
... hears at prayer-meetings, "Blessed Jesus," "Dear Jesus," "Loving Jesus," "Elder Brother," "Patient, gentle Jesus," etc., were first used by women in an ecstasy of religious transport. And the thought of Jesus as a loving, "personal Savior," would die from the face of the earth did not women keep it alive. The religious nature and the sex nature are closely akin: no psychologist ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... by the cries of his aunt, stood in an ecstasy of childish delight before the splendid Christmas gifts, shouts of laughter were heard outside. The woman and child ran out to see what all this meant, and behold! all the gossips of the town were standing around the public fountain. What could have happened? Oh, a most ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... mocking apes. It was pleasant to see the morning sun and feel no sickness in my stomach, no sense of depression in my tired brain. Across the room my brother gurgled and choked in his sleep, and in some subtle way contributed to my ecstasy of tranquillity. I was no longer concerned for the duration of my happiness. I felt that this peace that I had desired so long must surely last ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... to descend upon the altar. The priest kissed the altar-cloth, clasped his hands, and multiplied signs of the cross over host and chalice. The prayers of the canon of the mass now fell from his lips in a very ecstasy of humility and gratitude. His attitude, his gestures, the inflections of his voice, all expressed his consciousness of his littleness, his emotion at being selected for so great a task. Vincent came ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... them sobbing with ecstasy, and her tears splashed their hands like holy water. It was all outrageously illegal, and sentimental, and harmful to the sanctity of the law. And yet, is it entirely desirable that men should ever grow unmindful of the ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... fitted very easily into the two canoes, and we divided our personnel, six in each, taking the obvious precaution in the interests of peace of putting one Professor into each canoe. Personally, I was with Challenger, who was in a beatific humor, moving about as one in a silent ecstasy and beaming benevolence from every feature. I have had some experience of him in other moods, however, and shall be the less surprised when the thunderstorms suddenly come up amidst the sunshine. If it is impossible to be at your ease, it is equally impossible to be dull in his ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Whilst I was thus evolving from the depths of my inner consciousness a satisfactory solution to this conundrum in King's English, his Majesty's private secretary lolled in the sunniest corner of the room, stretching his dusky limbs and heavily nodding, in an ecstasy of ease-taking. Poor P'hra-Alack! I never knew him to be otherwise than sleepy, and his sleep was always stolen. For his Majesty was the most capricious of kings as to his working moods,—busy when the average man should be sleeping, sleeping while letters, papers, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... penalty that awaited him, he brought his judges to the smouldering ruins, and discovering the secret, invited them to eat; which having done, with tears of gratitude, the august synod embraced him, and, with an overflowing feeling of ecstasy, dedicated a statue to the memory of the man ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... drugs and cannabis; transit point for US-bound ecstasy; source of precursor chemicals for South American cocaine processors; transshipment point for cocaine, heroin, hashish, and marijuana entering Western Europe; despite a strengthening of legislation, the country remains vulnerable to money laundering related to narcotics, automobiles, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... constancy of rational desire, watching adverse circumstance as one beast of prey watches another. She keeps hold on the bird she has caught, the ideal that perhaps she will never fully enjoy. Michael Angelo pictures for us freedom from trammels, the freedom that action, thought and ecstasy give, the freedom that is granted to beauty by all who recognise it; Duerer shows us the constancy that bridges the intervals between such free hours, that gives continuity to man's necessarily spasmodic effort. Thus he typifies for us the Northern genius: as Michael ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... mythical stuff which we will no more grant to be historically true than Niebuhr will admit the validity of the legends of early Rome." The poets of every land have enjoyed a sort of rhapsody when in their highest flights. This rhapsody or ecstasy is all that these idolaters of reason will concede. Doederlein's views of inspiration were much more elevated than those held by many of his confreres; but he too speaks of poetical excitement, and draws a line of distinction between the inspired and uninspired parts of Scripture. But Ammon ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... idea of repeating that blissful sensation seized upon him he was mad for it. To go out of life like that, to take that way of opening the window into eternity, into another phase of existence or into oblivion, what ecstasy! He remembered that when under the chloroform, a wonderful certainty, a comprehension, seemingly, of the true import of life and death and of the hereafter, had seized him. He remembered a tremendous ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... said the mamma, restraining the impetuosity of the darling, whose little fat legs were kicking, and stamping, and twining themselves into the most complicated forms, in an ecstasy of impatience. 'Be quiet, dear, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... with Bone Stillman in the lecture, exultantly glanced about, and found the class staring at one another with frightened anxiety. He saw the grim Plain Smith, not so much angry as ill. He saw two class clowns snickering at the ecstasy in ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... his angels are resistless in their soft serenity; his virgins are pure from all earthly stain; his redeemed spirits in meek rapture glide into Paradise; his martyrs and confessors are absorbed in devout ecstasy. Well has he been named IL BEATO E ANGELICO, whose life was participate with the angels even in this world. Is it not clear that Fra Angelico had found the Realm of the Artist; the fair and happy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... opened and Nancy came in. At the sight of Pitcairn she stopped on her way toward me, and her black brows came together in an ecstasy of rage. Putting her little body directly in front of him she looked him full ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... bewitching beauty, and I had no tongue to chide, as she said in the sobriety of loveliness,—'My son, have I not answered thy prayer? yet but in part; behold, I have good store of precious things to show thee:' with that, she kissed my brow, and I fell into an ecstasy. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... into their hearts with an unmoved countenance, and walk like strangers through the general rejoicing. But let him feign never so carefully, there is not a man but has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the white troops, justified the Government in employing them, stirred the North to unbounded enthusiasm, and made the rebel army feel that the Negro was the equal of the Confederate soldier under all circumstances. Secretary Stanton was in a state of ecstasy over the behavior of the Colored troops at Petersburg, an unusual thing for him. In his despatch on ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... She was profoundly conscious of an escape wholly due to his forbearance, but she was terrified at finding that her thankfulness was of a very doubtful quality. She knew now that this man loved her, and the knowledge was at once an ecstasy and a torture. And how wise he was, how considerate, how worthy of the treasure that her overflowing heart would heap on him! But it could not be. She dared not face her father, her relatives, her host of friends, and ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... my wet fingers in an ecstasy of gratitude; "shall I ever live to thank you for the poor life ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... the way home from their walk, become any easier to tell him; but her secret decision to do so before he left gave her a kind of factitious calm and laid a melancholy ecstasy upon the hour. Still skirting the subject that fanned their very faces with its flame, they clung persistently to other topics, and it seemed to Anna that their minds had never been nearer together than in this hour when their hearts were so separate. In the glow of interchanged love ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... the ecstasy and anguish of that likeness, but of his sayings and of the wonders he wrought in that time ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... symbols always mark the dawn of a religion, incarnation and realism its full growth." So after a time when the first vague wonder and ecstasy are over, symbols no longer content people; they want to bring religion home to them in a more tangible form, to humanize it, in fact. From this want it arises that nature next to religion inspires art, and finally takes its place. For it follows as a matter of course ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... envious of my mighty joy, rendered me a shameful object of his raillery? Snatched my (till then) never failing power, and left me dying on thy charming bosom. Heavens, how I lay! Silent with wonder, rage and ecstasy of love, unable to complain, or rail, or storm, or seek for ease, but with my sighs alone, which made up all my breath; my mad desires remained, but all inactive, as age or death itself, as cold and ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... enchanted him, but most of all, perhaps, the chimes of the village church-bells. It may have been partly owing to the associations which they awakened. He would stop in his rambles if he heard them, lest his foot-fall should drown the sound—he would remain as if entranced, in a kind of ecstasy, till they ceased. "Ah! how they remind me of the first years I ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... backward flit On wings of happy mem'ry to that hour When we, amid the plaudits of the hosts, Did well proclaim to all the happy words Which Caesar to expectant ears did send. My heart doth overflow, when I recall The ecstasy that spoke in thunder tones And like to period rhetorical Did ever punctuate each proper pause. Quick did I note in what well ordered ranks Our party friends did form before the stand. Quezox: ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... manners. That would be pretext sufficient for having him constantly with her under the very eyes of her tiresome courtiers. What an interest in her life! She took up music again for her poet's sake, and revealed the world of sound to him, playing grand fragments of Beethoven till she sent him into ecstasy; and, happy in his delight, turned ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the drink prepared of the young leaves and florets of Cannabis Sativa. The word literally means "day grass" or "herbage." This intoxicant was much used by magicians to produce ecstasy and thus to "deify themselves and receive the homage of the genii ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... and the food good and the charges low. I'd rather stop at 'The Red Pig,' small as it is, than at the big hotel. The curries—oh, they are delightfully hot!" Miss Qian screwed her small face into a smile of ecstasy. "But, ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... and wanted to help him forget his troubles—he would see the white drifts overhead shift and change, and there would be the vision of a magnificent man larger and more beautiful than any mortal; and then Larry would hold his breath in ecstasy, while the man's face grew graver and darker, and his strong arm seemed to lift and beckon to something from afar, and then from out a great stack of clouds would break one milk-white one which, when Larry looked closer, would prove to be a colossal ...
— Dreamland • Julie M. Lippmann
... a quick breath of delight; and when Mr. Opp nodded, she closed her eyes and smiled as if heaven were within sight. For Miss Kippy was like a harp across which some rough hand had swept, snapping all the strings but two, the high one of ecstasy and the ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... by one, out of the shadows, old joys and old loves came toward her; forgotten hopes and lost dreams. Hands long since mingled with the dust clasped hers once more with perfect understanding—warm lips were crushed upon hers with the old ecstasy and the old thrill. Even the sorrows, from which the bitterness had strangely vanished, came back out of the darkness, not with hesitancy, but with assurance, as though already welcomed by ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... clean, fine ecstasy of death, A mightier wind shall strike the shrinking earth, An exhalation of creative breath Wake the white wonder of the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... establish, substance, obstacle, obstinate, destiny, destination, destitute, substitute, superstition, desist, persist, resist, insist, assist, exist, consistent, stead, rest, restore, restaurant, contrast; (2) stature, statute, stadium, stability, instable, static, statistics, ecstasy, stamen, stamina, standard, stanza, stanchion, capstan, extant, constabulary, apostate, transubstantiation, status quo, armistice, solstice, interstice, institute, restitution, constituent, subsistence, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... expensive; she could linger in ecstasy all the morning over piles of wonderful furs without envy, without even thinking of them for herself; but when Kathleen mentioned the reason of their shopping, Geraldine always indicated sables as her choice, any single piece of which ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... broken weapons, and fell. The audience lost self-command from delight; and intoxicated with death breathed it, sated their eyes with the sight of it, and drew into their lungs the exhalations of it with ecstasy. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... encouraging the men. The army is rushing up under an opening of the rock to the left, while the advanced guard of cavalry are trotting down the shelving top of a precipice, the horses excited and snuffing up the sea air with ecstasy." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... hill among the olives, while still a cool twilight hung about the streets of Lerici, the sun stood up over the sea, awakening it to the whole long day of love to come. Far away in the early light, over a sea mysterious of blue and silver and full of ecstasy, the coast curved with infinite beauty into the golden crest of Porto Venere. Spezia, like a broken flower, seemed deserted on the seashore, and Lerici itself, far below me, waking at morning, watched the sleeping ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... by promotion to the grade of sergeant, he was as proud of his stripes as he would have been of a throne. His father's career continually occupied his thoughts and filled his imagination with a sort of ecstasy. ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... little faster as the lithe figure swayed and bent and curved into wonderful lines, which melted ever into new ones. It was young, elemental joy, every step of it; sexless, no Bacchante dance, but rather a paeon of ecstasy, such as a dryad might have danced in the woods. At the climax she stood poised, her arms lifted in exultation. Then she dropped ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... pleases it substitutes a new for the more solid reality of our practical mood. Moreover, as a state of perceptual absorption in which one loses consciousness of the ordinary self and its world, it has a certain resemblance to the state of ecstasy and of the hypnotic trance.30 It is favourable to the play-like indulgence in a fanciful transformation of what is seen or heard, which may be described as a "willing self-deception,'' more or less complete. Yet as we have seen, something of the real everyday world survives ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... I don't believe in these Don Juans who are Byrons at the same time. Don Juan did not make poems and Byron made, so they say, very poor love. He must have had sometimes—one can count such emotions in one's life—a complete ecstasy of heart, mind and senses. He knew enough about them to be one of the poets of love. Nothing else is necessary for the instrument of our vibration. The continual wind of little ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... were also filled with scenic and musical effects. For instance one showed the ecstasy of David, dancing before the ark "to the sound of a large lute, a violin, a trombone, but more especially to his own harp." These references to the employment of many instruments in accompanying the voice or the ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... so happy that she went through the opera in the state of some one drugged to ecstasy. She sang and danced and laughed, and helped Phyllis whenever she could in her difficult task of assuming a leading part at one day's notice, and felt as if the play had carried her into a veritable ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... the sunsets when the sky was "crimson, golden red, and blue," and the hills "looked purple and lilac," till the hues grew softer and the outlines dimmer. Prince Albert, an ardent admirer of natural scenery, was in ecstasy with the mountain landscape. But her Majesty has already permitted her people to share in the halcyon days ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... solace me with soft sweet speech, but I was drowned in the deeps of passion, fearing even in union the pangs of disunion, for excess of longing and ecstasy of passion; and I bethought me of the lowe of absence and estrangement and repeated these ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got these broken words out of myself, I don't know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from an inward wound, and gushed out. I held her hand to my lips some lingering moments, and so I left her. But ever afterwards, I remembered,—and soon afterwards with stronger ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... growth of young birches and oak near the church. The Hills dwelt intermediate between the Bull's Head and the ecclesiastical establishment. The school and schoolmaster's house were behind the Bull. The show was surrounded by the children of the place, who looked on silent with ecstasy, while a burly showman piped his pipes and beat his drum. A couple of ostlers, with their shirt-sleeves rolled up to their shoulders, and one of them with a pail in his hand, stood arrested in their work. And in the front of the spectators was Alick Hudson, ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... that this non-resistance was unconditional surrender and through him in a current of fluid fire, ran the fierce ecstasy of victory. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs, the cracking of the driver's whip, and his "Hi-yi! ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... for the flower-seller was wizened and unsteady of foot, and she had sent him spinning about in a dizzy fashion. She put out a steadying hand. "Oh . . . !" This time it was in ecstasy; she had spied the primroses in the basket just as the sunshine splashed over the edge of the corner building straight down upon them. Margaret MacLean dropped to one knee and laid her cheek against them. "The happy things—you can hear them laugh! I want all—all I can carry." She looked up quizzically ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... comparison,—and the old question of preexistence and transmigration rises afresh in my mind, and something like a dim recognition of kinship passes. I turn this Thrush in my hand,—I remember its strange ways, the curious look it gave me, its ineffable music, its freedom, and its ecstasy,—and I tremble lest I have slain a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... with the fruit he crammed his mouth full. Then he raised his eyes upwards in ecstasy and did it again. He repeated it! After which he paused to sigh, and leaped up to cheer and sat down again to—guzzle! Pardon the word, good reader, it is appropriate, for there is no disguising the fact that Tyrker was ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... and pleasure, and thought his mad idea one of the most delightful and most reasonable things in the world. It was blowing almost a gale, and the weather was very cold—it being late in October. I sprang out of bed, nevertheless, in a kind of ecstasy, and told him I was quite as brave as himself, and quite as tired as he was of lying in bed like a dog, and quite as ready for any fun or frolic as any Augustus Barnard ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... lives!' continued he, exultingly; laying the nest on the ground, and standing over it with his legs wide apart, his hands thrust into his breeches-pockets, his body bent forward, and his face twisted into all manner of contortions in the ecstasy of his delight. ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... strange, halting cadences and haunting recurrences, it was not beautiful. 'Fearful' may inadequately express it. At the lower end, under the eye of the Shaman, danced half a score of women. Stern were his reproofs of those who did not wholly abandon themselves to the ecstasy of the rite. Half hidden in their heavy masses of raven hair, all dishevelled and falling to their waists, they slowly swayed to and fro, their forms ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... took up a hump-backed position near at hand, his bright little eyes fixed on his friend's activities. Funny Face would nibble relishingly at his prune for a moment or so; then an altogether astonishing butterfly would flitter by just overhead. Funny Face, lost in ecstasy would gaze skyward after the departing marvel. This was Darwin's opportunity. In two hops he was at Funny Face's side. With great deliberation, but most businesslike directness, Darwin disengaged Funny Face's unresisting fingers from the prune, seized it, and retired. Funny Face never knew ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... imposing. If the pure spirit of Christianity finds a bright comment and illustration in the Madonnas and Cherubim of Raffaelle, it seems to shine out in still more truthful vividness from the brow of a young person rapt in religious ecstasy. The hands clasped in prayer,—the upturned eyes,—the expression of humble confidence and seraphic hope, (displayed, let me suggest, on a beautiful face,) constitute a picture of which, having witnessed it, I can never forget the force. Yet I knew it was only a trance. So one knows ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... of the terrible human past was heavy to her, but that of something altogether contemporary would suddenly give it wings that it could wave in the blue. Her consciousness was so mixed that she scarcely knew where the different parts of it would lead her, and she went about in a repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there, and yet not seeing many of the items enumerated in her Murray. Rome, as Ralph said, confessed to the psychological moment. The herd ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... ethereal look. Her hair reminded him again of what marvels he had seen in the sunlight of Sunday afternoon. And looking at her form and the small head so gracefully capping it, he could think only of the simile that had always come to him in his moments of ecstasy—the ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... bold words, indeed, but my voice played the coward and shook so vilely that it bereft them of half their boldness. But, ah, Dieu, what joy, what ecstasy was mine to see how they were read by her; to remark the rich, warm blood dyeing her cheeks in a bewitching blush; to behold the sparkle that brightened her matchless ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... towers in sunset lie, Her face oblivious of all else I'll ponder long. My body thrills with ecstasy! My heart beats with the ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... to his own satisfaction, fixed the child's attention on the morbid and over-sensitive workings of her own heart, the good and truly kind-hearted man dismissed her with a fatherly benediction. But where was the joyous ecstasy of that beautiful Sabbath morning of a year ago? Where was that heavenly friend? Yet was not this as it should be, and might not God leave her "to make herself as miserable as she had made ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... guffawed the Major, beating his thigh in ecstasy. "Kolossal!" echoed one of the dug-outs. The lame man smiled wanly and said it was "incredible how humorous ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... the jeweller's, and Lady Honoria bought ornaments to the value of L150, and carried them home and hung over them, as another class of woman might hang over her first-born child, admiring them with a tender ecstasy. Whenever he had a sum of money that he could afford to part with, Geoffrey would take her thus to a jeweller's or a dressmaker's, and stand by coldly while she bought things to its value. Lady Honoria was delighted. It never entered into her mind that in a sense he was taking ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... of face; the complete, surrendered, and anxious subservience and devotion of which it is difficult to describe, otherwise than by the awkward combination which I have attempted. The fellow's voice seemed choking in his ecstasy, and only could express itself in such interjections as "Oigh! oigh!—Ay! ay!—it's lang since she's seen ye!" and other exclamations equally brief, expressed in the same unknown tongue in which he had communicated with my conductor while we were on the outside of the jail door. ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... as our zephyrs sing That they bring us in the Spring, Even as our bird grows musical in ecstasy of flight— We see the serpent crawl, With his slimy coat o'er all, And blended with the song is ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... try and have some sense about it." Babbitt paid his bill, said adequately, "Oh, keep the change," and drove off in an ecstasy of honest self-appreciation. It was with the manner of a Good Samaritan that he shouted at a respectable-looking man who was waiting for a trolley car, "Have a lift?" As the man climbed in Babbitt condescended, "Going ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... sympathy with the fantasies he imagines. There is no trace of make-believe in his designs. On the contrary, he makes the old legends become vital, not because of the personalities he bestows on his heroes and fairy princesses—his people move often in a rapt ecstasy—but because the adjuncts of his mise-en-scenes are realised intimately. His prince is much more the typical hero than any particular person; his fair ladies might exchange places, and few would notice the difference; but when it comes to the environment, ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... undertone of sound that seems to pervade the whole being as the voice of the Almighty,—all these bewilder and enchant the discriminative and prosaic part of us, and bring us into that cloudy region of ecstasy where the soul comes nearest to Him whom no eye hath seen, or can see. I have sometimes asked myself if, in the countless ages of the future, the heirs of God shall ever be endowed by him with a creative power, by which they shall bring into being things like these? In this ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... writers have the power of giving a new and special significance to a common word, by impressing on it a wealth of meaning which it cannot claim for itself. Three obvious examples of this peculiar power may be cited. Among poets, Chaucer infused into the simple word "green" a poetic ecstasy which no succeeding English poet, not even Wordsworth, has ever rivalled, in describing an English landscape in the month of May. Jonathan Edwards fixed upon the term "sweetness" as best conveying his loftiest conception of the bliss which the soul of the ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the club's catholicity of membership. Contrary to his impeccant habit, Average Jones bore the somewhat frazzled aspect of a man who has been up all night. Further indication of this inhered in the wide yawn, of which he was in mid-enjoyment, when a hand on his shoulder cut short his ecstasy. ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a bad evening. For when two people are beaming with pleasure and through your means, a little reflection of the pleasure, at least, falls upon you. And Mrs. Coles and Prim were in a state of ecstasy; a fulness of satisfaction which at the moment left nothing to be wished for. It was not the same in the two. Mrs. Coles feeling herself for the time bien place and foreseeing varieties of social and other delights attainable ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... hear me? I can sing!" And it floated up, up, up, crying, "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" to the sun. "Oh, mother, do you see me? I am flying!" And being but a baby, it soon was gasping, but still it trilled the same ecstasy, and when it fell panting to earth it still trilled, and the distracted mother called to it to take breath or it would die, but it could not stop. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" it sang to the sun till ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... pantheist, and so are the Mevlevites, but that seems only to earn them the dislike of the Ulema, and not to affect their standing in Islam. They are the most broad-minded and tolerant of all. There are also the performances of the Rif[a]'ites or "howling dervishes." In ecstasy they cut themselves with knives; eat live coals and glass, handle red-hot iron and devour serpents. They profess miraculous healing powers, and the head of the Sa'dites, a sub-order, used, in Cairo, to ride over the bodies ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... some for sledge-hammers; some ran with torches to and fro as if to seek them, and still came back and roared again; some spent their breath in impotent curses and execrations; some pressed forward with the ecstasy of madmen, and thus impeded the progress of those below; some among the boldest attempted to climb up by the water-spout and crevices in the wall; and all waved to and fro, in the darkness beneath, like a field of corn ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... poet," cried Syme in a sort of ecstasy. "I knew my intuition was as infallible as the Pope. It was the spectacles that did it! It was all the spectacles. Given those beastly black eyes, and all the rest of him his health and his jolly looks, made him a live devil among ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... pulsated with a roar like that of a great waterfall in a deep gorge, salvo after salvo of cheers swelling and merging. The deep boom of their applause pursued Brinnaria and made her cower. The people would never forget her now. They were in ecstasy. ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... redder and cheerier in Adam's little cottage; the lamp was lighted; Jinny had set out a wonderful table, too. Benny had walked around and around it, rubbing his hands slowly in dumb ecstasy. Such oranges! and frosted cakes covered with crushed candy! Such a tree in the middle, hung with soft-burning tapers, and hidden in the branches the white figure of the loving Christ-child. That was Adam's fancy. Benny sat in Jinny's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... last instance is perhaps the worst. I can imagine no more wicked desecration than that the sacrilegious hand of the Anarchist should be laid upon the Indian song of songs, and that a masterpiece of transcendental philosophy and religious ecstasy should be perverted to the base uses ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... not the surprise, but ecstasy that prevented Gaud from answering; no words at all came to her relief. So it really was true that he was good and kind-hearted. She knew him aright—the same true Yann, her own, such as she never had ceased ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... heart at one time. Now it weeps not for fear and through torment, but by virtue of constraining grace and mercy, and is at this very time, so far off of disquietness of heart, by reason of the sight of its wickedness, that it is driven into an ecstasy, by reason of the love and mercy that is mingled with the sense of sin in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... with hisses when she appeared, and discharged with hisses and laughter when she had finished—then instantly encored and insulted again! And how the high-born knaves enjoyed it! White-kidded gentlemen and ladies laughed till the tears came, and clapped their hands in very ecstasy when that unhappy old woman would come meekly out for the sixth time, with uncomplaining patience, to meet a storm of hisses! It was the cruellest exhibition—the most wanton, the most unfeeling. The singer would ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... ecstasy, cocaine, and heroin abuse; drugs arrive in country from Lebanon and, increasingly, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... a dramatic time that still seems brighter than this—when he could exult in the fairy splendour and comic humour of Aladdin and weep over the sorrows of The Drunkard, when he was thrilled and frightened by J.B. Booth in The Apostate, and could find an ecstasy of pleasure in the loves of Alonzo and Cora and the sublime self-sacrifice of Rolla. Thoughts of such actors as Henry Wallack, George Jordan, John Brougham, John E. Owens, Mary Carr, Mrs. Barrow, and Charlotte Thompson, together ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... broke restraint. With unthinking swiftness, he threw his arm over her and drew her tight to him. His lips found hers in a long kiss—clung in ecstasy for another, ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... of the moment dominated one and all. It was their hour—a brief, mad ecstasy in short lives of ceaseless toil. To-day they desisted from their labours, and the wild-flowers of the waste places, and the old-world flowers in cottage gardens were alike forgotten. Yet their year had already seen much work and would see more. Sweet pollen from many a bluebell and anemone was ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... returned, evenly. "Even as it brings joy, and ecstasy and happiness untold.... And it does bring that," she purred, sibilantly. "Doesn't it, ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... with a sense of its supreme folly, yet with a refusal in their souls to acknowledge defeat or to stop this side of victory. In each battle there were officers and men who risked death deliberately, and in a kind of ecstasy did acts of superhuman courage; and because of the number of these feats the record of them is monotonous, dull, familiar. The mass followed their lead, and even poor coward-hearts, of whom there were many, as in all armies, had courage enough, as a rule, to get as far as the center ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... later that, his ambition newly fired by reading of Andree's plans for reaching the Pole in a balloon, Santos-Dumont took up anew his ambition to become an aviator. His own account of his first ascent does not bear precisely the hall-mark of the enthusiast too rapt in ecstasy to think of common things. "I had brought up," he notes gravely, "a substantial lunch of hard-boiled eggs, cold roast beef and chicken, cheese, ice cream, fruits and ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... and know her, and doubt not I shall find your glowing statements all confirmed, and that in your height of joy you need not be ashamed to 'blush it east and blush it west.' There is a certain 'Maud'-like ecstasy in your note that makes me think ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... simple trustfulness in her love running through them all—on which her marriage shortly afterward is a strange comment; the "Moonlight Sonata," vibrating, as it is throughout, with a lover's supremest ecstasy of devotion, these are the only records of that one blissful epoch in the poor composer's life; but how much it affected his after life, how it mingled in the dreams from which his loveliest creations of later ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... caprice. There is an intemperance even in melancholy and mirth. The temperate man is not mastered by his moods; he will not be driven or enticed into excess; his steadfast will conquers despondency, and is not unbalanced by transient exhilarations, for ecstasy is as fatal as despair. Temper is subjected to reason and conscience. How many people excuse themselves for doing wrong or foolish acts by the plea that they have a quick temper. But he who is king of himself rules his temper, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... to have all the superlatives, in and out of the English language, at her tongue's end; and when she has exhausted these, then she must invent new. She must have tones of admiration, and looks of ecstasy, for every occasion. At reading parties,—especially at her own house, she must cry—"charming!"— "delightful!" "quite original!" in the right places even in her sleep.— Awake or asleep she must read every thing that comes out that has a name, or she must talk as ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... adds nothing to the terror of the man's death, which it was your business to heighten, not diminish by a phrase which takes away all terror from it, I like that line, "They closed their eyes in sleep, nor knew 'twas death," Indeed, there is scarce a line I do not like, "Turbid ecstasy" is surely not so good as what you had written,—"troublous." "Turbid" rather suits the muddy kind of inspiration which London porter confers. The versification is throughout, to my ears, unexceptionable, with no disparagement to the measure of the "Religious Musings," ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... unerringly hit the mark; and then, when some unwary youth fired his piece into the ground at half-cock, such infinite guffawing and delight, such rolling over and over on the grass, such dances of ecstasy, as made the "Ethiopian minstrelsy" of the stage appear a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubim! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... could buy at the time. It made me shiver to think what the bill for them must have been, while their appearance when they were put together and stood in a long line against the wall of my sitting-room, moved old Hans to a kind of ecstasy. For a long while he contemplated them, patting the stocks one after the other and giving to each a name as though they ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... woman forty dollars to make a salad dressing like that—and the whole town knows that was the price—the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get their Indian ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... felt, however, from the inspiration of faith a feeling of spiritual joy that he was called to the higher destiny of a favorite of Heaven. Had the fire of divine love glowed more fervently in her heart, she would feel the joy of ecstasy, such as consoled the death-bled of the mothers of the saints when the revelation of the sanctity of their children was the last crown of earthly joy. Anticipating the privilege the fond maternal heart would fain claim even in the kingdom free from all care, Madeleine often found herself contemplating ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... lay on her back, her hands clasped, her head raised on her pillows, her eyes fixed upon the sky, in a sort of ecstasy. She seemed unconscious of Roland's arrival. It was as though her soul were floating between heaven and earth, while the body still belonged to ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... blessed Granite!" cried the old lady, stretching out her hands in a sort of ecstasy. "Oh, my! but I'm glad to see you! Come right straight here. No, shut the door first. Lucinda, you go and do 'most anything. An' how is ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... finished, and the buzz and rustle of the people shifting in their seats told of the tension that had been broken. Faces that had been distorted with the tremors of fear, or contracted with the quiverings of remorse, or glorified with the lights of ecstasy, ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... idyllic in their quietness, dewy in their serenity—how many travelers, how many lovers of art, superficial or profound, yearly seek out these paintings in the South Kensington Museum or the Louvre, and stand before them wrapt in gentle ecstasy? ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... the leading spirit of the Society for Psychical Research resumed that formidable mass of data relating to presentiments, apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism, ecstasy, and all the rest that goes to furnish the spiritualist arsenal. I entered upon the reading of it not only without that temper of cautious suspicion which men of science maintain in investigations of this character, but even with a predisposition ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... interval, a dramatic story such as that of Maud, so was it a modern composer who carried to completion, in 'Tristan und Isolde', the dramatic expression of passion at the highest point of lyrical utterance. It is no more unnatural for the raptures of Wagner's lovers, or the swan-song of ecstasy, to be sung, than for the young man whose character Tennyson assumes, to utter himself in measured verse, sometimes of highly complex structure. The two works differ not in kind, but in degree of intensity, and to those ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... of their wine, As they toss it in ecstasy down, But the bowl I call for is thine, With its deepening amber ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... primal ecstasy, Within her depths where revels never tire, The olden Beauty shines; each thought of me Is veined through ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... beloved King recovered the use of his invaluable senses, thus escaping the snares set for him and the Queen by enemies the most difficult to subdue. This enabled us to return in triumph to Windsor—in triumph, do I say? No, but ecstasy—a kind of rapture which pervaded the whole nation, excepting the party of the Opposition. The inhabitants of every place we passed flooded out to greet their King. The people, stirred as by an earthquake, broke upon him ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... sent headlong on to the rocks beneath. From that day he was always to be found on the tragic spot, and when a stranger passed he would make unearthly sounds of delight, and pointing down to the beach, dance and throw himself about in ecstasy. ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... to it. In some mysterious way, she seemed set free from bondage. Unsuspected fetters loosened; she had a sense of largeness, of freedom which she had never known before. She was quivering in an ecstasy of emotion ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... to be misunderstood. If I can create out of my own brain something that is pure and beautiful, that gives happiness, that draws coarse natures away from their coarseness, to feelings more elevated, that can bring to some an ecstasy of delight, to others a sweet calm. If I follow a pursuit which injures no human being, no living creature, why am I to endure displeasure? Is it more manly, more noble to hunt the poor, panting deer till it falls gasping on the ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... Plymouth so speedily with her second prize, and he heard of my being wounded, he posted down from town, determined to see Captain Brisac for himself, and ascertain by actual word of mouth how I had behaved. My kind skipper was so lavish with his praises that Sir Peregrine was in an ecstasy of delight; and from that time he became a different man; in consequence, I presume, of his having stumbled upon an object which excited within him a genuine interest. During the week of my stay with him in town he went everywhere with ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... and far below, the noise of cowhorns blown by the street boys gathered at the foot of the tower and beyond the bridge. Close beside him a small urchin of a chorister was singing away with the face of an ecstatic seraph; whence that ecstasy arose the urchin would have been puzzled to tell. There flashed into Taffy's brain the vision of the whole earth lauding and adoring— sun-worshippers and Christians, priests and small children; nation after nation prostrating itself and arising to join the chant— "the differing world's agreeing ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... rose in dazzling spirals overhead, Whence, to wild sweetness wed, Poured marvellous melodies, silvery trill on trill: The very leaves grew still On the charmed trees to hearken; while for me, Heart-thrilled to ecstasy, I followed—followed the bright shape that flew, Still circling up the blue, Till as a fountain that has reached its height Falls back, in sprays of light Slowly dissolved, so that enrapturing lay Divinely melts away Through tremulous spaces ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... moonbeam on a sleeping rose was no more gentle than was Diana's touch, yet it was sufficient to wake Endymion. And as, while one's body sleeps on, one's half-waking mind, now and again in a lifetime seems to realise an ecstasy of happiness so perfect that one dares not wake lest, by waking, the wings of one's realised ideal should slip between grasping fingers and so escape forever, so did Endymion realise the kiss of the goddess. But before his sleepy eyes could be his senses' witnesses, Diana had hastened ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... quietly took up one corner of her mantilla, and with a little movement, apparently all innocence, flashed a message back to the entranced Enrique. I was aware of the flirtation, but before I had made more of it Enrique sprang down from the abutment of the well, dragged me from my horse, and in an ecstasy of joy, crouching behind the abutments, cried: Had I seen the sign? Had I not noticed her token? Was my brain then so befuddled? Did I not understand the ways of the senoritas among his people?—that they always answered ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... ingenious, and sailors were so expert! He then talked to me of the arrangements he intended to make for her reception, of the new house he would build for her, and of the pleasures and surprises which he would contrive for her every day, when she was his wife. His wife! The idea filled him with ecstasy. "At least, my dear father," said he, "you shall then do no more work than you please. As Virginia will be rich, we shall have plenty of negroes, and they shall work for you. You shall always live with us, and have no other care than to amuse yourself and be ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... Her heart was beating in full, thick throbs against his, which kept time to it. Her closed eyes were against his throat, and she would not move so much as an eyelash. She gave herself up utterly to this ecstasy of content. ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... down and wrote another letter—another in such an ecstasy of eagerness to remove the evil impressions which she had made, that she wrote it almost with the natural ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... voice I thought I knew; and, sure enough, I found the dear old Dominie Sampson close at my elbow—his large, gray eyes rolling in ecstasy—his mouth open, and grasping in his hands a huge folio, while Davie Gellatly, with cap and bells, stood mincing and grimacing behind him—now rolling up the whites of his eyes—now pulling the skirts of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... paused and listened, as if in an ecstasy, to a sound which seemed to me no better than a tiny chirping from an innumerable ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... back to emphasize his speech with an out-flung arm, Jeb lost his balance, and the stool being treacherous on its three legs, promptly turned over and sent both lovers from ecstasy down to earth. As Sary and Jeb managed to get upon their feet, they thought they heard sounds of smothered laughter and scampering feet over the brick walk, but when they got from behind the lilac bushes to reconnoiter, everything between the kitchen and the Shrubbery Walk ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Max Dalahaide, to meet his eyes, tragic no longer, but bright with passionate gratitude; to know that he was out of danger, that he would live, and owe his life to her and hers; to hear the thanks, spoken stammeringly, but straight from his heart, filled her with an ecstasy such as she had never known. It was akin to pain, and yet it was worth dying for, just to have felt ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... the sea intoxicates—its sparkle, its mobility, its translucence excite the fancy, as wine does the blood—it combines those elements which produce at once awe and ecstasy in the soul—the unknown, the resistless, the beautiful. One may be melancholy by the sea, but never morbid or supine. Between it and the land there are no gradations; you do not come imperceptibly under its influence, as, in ascending ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... receptivity towards all sublime chances. The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... grace of Heaven that restoreth thee, dear Mother," quoth the angel. "Presently thou shalt be filled with the new life, and thou shalt be young again; and thou shalt sing with rapture, and thy soul shall know the endless ecstasy of Heaven." ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... altogether contemporary would suddenly give it wings that it could wave in the blue. Her consciousness was so mixed that she scarcely knew where the different parts of it would lead her, and she went about in a repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there, and yet not seeing many of the items enumerated in her Murray. Rome, as Ralph said, confessed to the psychological moment. The herd ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... toil has ceased; now the gloom has disappeared; now the firmament is bounded only by the horizon; and what a vast expanse of constellations can be seen! The river rolls by us in silent majesty; the quiet of the camp is sweet; our joy is almost ecstasy. We sit till long after midnight talking of the Grand Canon, talking of home, but chiefly talking of the three men who left us. Are they wandering in those depths, unable to find a way out? are they searching over the desert-lands above ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... I went home to my lodgings in a state of perfect ecstasy. The vague half presentiment, half suspicion, which had been arising within me, had vanished. The sudden constraint in Liza's manner towards me I ascribed to maidenly bashfulness, timidity.... Hadn't I read a thousand times over ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... warning causing us to think. The touch of Nature that makes the whole world kin is nowhere more manifest than in sex; that absorption of the male by the female to which life owes its continuation, its ecstasy, and its pain. It has seemed to me it is here in the primitive relations of the sexes that we may find the clue to many of those wrongs which women have suffered at the hands of men. Man, acting instinctively, has rebelled, not so much, I think, against woman as against this driving hunger ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... listen; he had excavated a passage direct from one ear to the other for such remarks. And now he drank up the conversation of Mr. Oxford, and perceived that he had long been thirsty. And he spoke his mind. He grew warmer, more enthusiastic, more impassioned. And Mr. Oxford listened with ecstasy. Mr. Oxford had apparently a natural discretion. He simply accepted Priam, as he stood, for a great painter. No reference to the enigma why a great painter should be painting in an attic in Werter Road, Putney! No inconvenient queries about the great painter's previous history and productions. ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... steeped in the marvellous ecstasy which all high summits develop in the mind; and now without giddiness, for I was beginning to be accustomed to these sublime aspects of nature. My dazzled eyes were bathed in the bright flood of the solar rays. I was forgetting where ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... something of the nature of these people within her. She had a certain turn of mind that was peasant-like, her slowness to take things in, her dislike of speech when thinking, her thoughts taking the form of "a series of reveries which gave her a sort of tranquil ecstasy, whether awake or asleep."(47) It does not seem as though there has ever been such an ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... that to behave as she might have behaved before would be to act, for Amerigo and Charlotte, with the highest hypocrisy. She saw in these days that a journey abroad with her father would, more than anything else, have amounted, on his part and her own, to a last expression of an ecstasy of confidence, and that the charm of the idea, in fact, had been in some such sublimity. Day after day she put off the moment of "speaking," as she inwardly and very comprehensively, called it—speaking, that is, to her father; and all the more that she was ridden by a strange suspense as to ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... ready hands soon managed to get rid of all obstacles, and to expose in a state of nature all the beauties which are generally veiled by troublesome wearing apparel. Two whole hours were devoted to the most delightful, loving ecstasies. At last we exclaimed together in mutual ecstasy, "O ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... never in his life before, lifted Billy to his shoulder and trotted up and down the room. "Nice little boy!" he laughed, Billy's damp fists hitting at him in ecstasy. "I'll just take him to the sitting-room while you finish your dinner." He did his best to pretend that the situation was not unusual, to act as if, in his own home, a man could be nothing but at home. All these confounded hirelings, acting as if they owned the place, had the cheek to be amazed ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... unconscious ecstasy at this vision, so amazing that it seemed to have strayed into his existence from beyond the limits of the conceivable. It was impossible to guess her thoughts, to know her feelings, to understand her grief or her joy. But she knew all that was at the bottom ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... about that; when Kitty's head is on my shoulder, I am not capable of any consecutive train of thought. When she puts it there I see stars, then myriads of stars, then, oh! I can't begin to enumerate the steps by which ecstasy mounts to delirium; but at all events, any operation which demands exclusive use of the intellect is beyond me at these times. Still I gathered my stray wits ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... putting it presently in tune, played and sung with such an air, as charmed the very soul of the caliph. Afterwards she played upon the lute without singing, but with so much strength and softness, as to transport him into an ecstasy. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... soft ecstasy and boundless relief of the moment, "how I have learned to love you during the fears and agonies ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... fields took on the aspect of a triumphal procession, while His popularity waxed with familiarity and the increasing years. Indeed, full oft the rapture men felt toward Him amounted to an intoxication and an ecstasy of devotion. True it is that men now look upon Him through a blaze of light, and, remembering His achievements for art, liberty and learning, have stained His name through and through with lustrous colors. As at eventide we look out upon the sun through white ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... but she did not speak. Trevor had taken her hand, and she did not withdraw it. She was stunned for a moment. The next instant there came over her, sweeping round her, entering her heart, filling her whole being, a delicious and marvellous ecstasy. The pain and the trouble vanished. The treachery, the deceit, and the fall she had undergone were forgotten. She only knew that, if Trevor loved her, she loved him. She was about to speak when her eyes fell for a moment on a page of the manuscript she had just ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... then it had rolled all the wild clamour away into a sustained magnificence of prayerful chords which seemed to plead for all things grand, all things true, all things beautiful,—and to list the soul of man in panting, labouring ecstasy up to the very threshold of Heaven! And she—the 'goblin' who evoked all this phantasmagoria of life set in harmony—she too changed as it seemed, in nature and aspect,—her small meagre face was as the face of a pictured angel, with the dark ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... found yourself, at the age of eighteen, a prisoner in your own bedroom you will be able to feel with Betty. Not otherwise. Even your highly strung imagination will be impotent to present to you the ecstasy of rage, terror, resentment that fills the soul when locked door and barred windows say, quite quietly, but beyond appeal: "Here you are, and here, my good ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... was making him shake from head to foot like a leaf, and that tears were streaming down his cheeks. The swaying crowd hid Marco from him, and he began to fight his way towards him because his excitement increased with fear. The ecstasy-frenzied crowd of men seemed for the moment to have almost ceased to be sane. Marco was only a boy. They did not know how fiercely they were pressing upon him and keeping away ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... supposed in itself to have. "We move to multiplicity," says Mr. Robert Buchanan. "If there is one quality which seems God's, and his exclusively, it seems that divine philoprogenitiveness, [239] that passionate love of distribution and expansion into living forms. Every animal added seems a new ecstasy to the Maker; every life added, a new embodiment of his love. He would swarm the earth with beings. There are never enough. Life, life, life,—faces gleaming, hearts beating, must fill every cranny. Not a corner is suffered to remain empty. The ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... that stentorian clearing of the throat which served for a warning that he was about to speak, and also a notification that he had spoken and would permit no difference of opinion. In the midst of her religio-dramatic ecstasy, Sissy heard that sound behind her, and jumped to her feet as though brought painfully back to a ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... though I had done something wrong; and where I, descending on my snow-shoes into some valley, would pause as though bewitched by a loveliness, by a longing, which I had not the power to explain, but which was so great that above the highest ecstasy of joy I would feel the deepest apprehension and distress—here in the parsonage of Naesset ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... with thorns and brambles (Cic. Tusc. Quest lib. v. cap 23.) But if they had cause to be delighted, much more surely had Philip the apostle reason to be so when addressing Nathanael, he cried out in ecstasy—We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... she said, and stood dumb with parted lips. She looked and felt as if she had been standing there in silent ecstasy from the beginning. ...
— Harper's Young People, December 9, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... instrument that God has created. It is capable of a cultivation beyond the dreams of those who have given it no thought. It maybe made to express every emotion in the gamut of human sensation, from abject misery to boundless ecstasy. It marks the man without his consent; it makes the man if ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... excited—her father and she were together. It might be an hour, or it might be two hours, that they were to spend together, but the time was only beginning now. They were together, and she felt all the warm glow of love, all the ecstasy of perfect ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... gain on gain! In sooth, for mortals, the tongue's utterance Bewrays unerringly a foolish pride! Hither stalks Capaneus, with vaunt and threat Defying god-like powers, equipt to act, And, mortal though he be, he strains his tongue In folly's ecstasy, and casts aloft High swelling words against the ears of Zeus. Right well I trust—if justice grants the word— That, by the might of Zeus, a bolt of flame In more than semblance shall descend on him. Against his vaunts, though reckless, I have set, To make assurance sure, a warrior stern— Strong ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... grass to grow over the graves of the dead; the dew forming upon the mounded turf is less like tears than like glistening jewels to deck the earth in the joyous time of her bridehood in the spring; the flight of birds over it and their little bursts of melody are eloquent of an ecstasy which does not remember. How little time then must pass to wipe out the memory of the passing of a David Drennen from the busy ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... from Clara's room, it so happened that Prince Ernest opened his door, just as she came up to it, to let out the smoke, and then began to walk up and down, playing softly on his lute. Sidonia stood still for a few minutes with her eyes thrown up in ecstasy, and then passed on; but the Prince stepped to the door, and asked her did ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... some cave, to remain in a hypnotic or mesmeric state until the moon was full. Then, returning to the tribe quite emaciated, he excited himself, as others do who pretend to the prophetic AFFLATUS, until he was in a state of ecstasy. These pretended prophets commence their operations by violent action of the voluntary muscles. Stamping, leaping, and shouting in a peculiarly violent manner, or beating the ground with a club, they induce a kind of fit, and ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... for some time in this state of religious ecstasy as he improvised prayers and repeated again and yet again, "Lord, have mercy upon me!" Each time that he said, "Pardon me, Lord, and teach me to do what Thou wouldst have done," he pronounced the words with added earnestness and emphasis, as though he expected ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... entirely ceased. One of their number now called aloud, in words that were far from appalling, tho not more intelligible to those for whose ears they were intended than their expressive yells. It would be difficult to convey a suitable idea of the savage ecstasy with which the news thus imparted was received. The whole encampment in a moment became a scene of the most violent bustle and commotion. The warriors drew their knives, and flourishing them, they arranged themselves in two lines, forming ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... to me with open arms. "Come to my arms!" he cried, and embraced and kissed me hard upon both cheek. "David," said he, "I love you like a brother. And O, man," he cried in a kind of ecstasy, "am I no ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Bloomfield pike. She found he was from Bloomfield and trilled away in a high, shrill cackle that she loved every stick and stone in that adorable country. And when she found that he was the nephew of Mrs. Mosby, or, rather, Loraine Fawcette, that was, her ecstasy knew no bounds. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... sitting-room, where lamps had been lighted, they found the lady of the house in an ecstasy of admiration, gesticulating with her tiny brown hands, as she gloated over a length of rose and silver brocade. Standing beside her was the proud owner of this magnificence; a slim, graceful girl, ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... strangers obtruded, these had been the just apprehensions of the afflicted family, they knew where to find consolation; and she who held the babe in her arms, and pressed it to her bosom, was no doubt prepared to adopt a similar strain with that by which Simeon afterward proclaimed his ecstasy—"Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." But fear not, Mary! It is no ruffian band that approaches thee! These are no idle strangers, impelled by a vague curiosity; but they are the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... twenty-six, which was a long time ago, and that I took train to a place called my home, whose whereabouts I see not in my waking hours, and when I alighted at the station a dear lost love was waiting for me, and we went away together. She met me in no ecstasy of emotion, nor was I surprised to find her there; it was as if we had been married for years and parted for a day. I like to think that I gave her some of the ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... of strong waters rippled at his feet, freely to be partaken of did he choose, it is true that his face showed lines of restraint, a serene restraint, like unto that which the great old painters limned so beautifully upon the face of the martyr. But the martyrs of old in their ecstasy were not more resolute than Potts. It is probable that he looked forward to a period of post-election refreshment; but pending the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, his determination was such that it stamped his face with something ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... said, as if he returned to his original idea; "it does not matter, you are a delightful little monk; but that you visit hostelries is certain, and what hostelries too! Those where beautiful ladies are to be found, and you stop outside in a state of ecstasy before the window, where you can see their shadow. Oh! little one, little one, I shall tell Dom ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... there was a life of perfect love and purity for the soul; in which there would be no uneasy hunger after pleasure, no tormenting questions, no fear of suffering. Before I knew the history of the saints, I had a foreshadowing of their ecstasy. For the same truth had penetrated even into pagan philosophy: that it is a bliss within the reach of man to die to mortal needs, and live in the life of God as the Unseen Perfectness. But to attain that I must forsake the world: ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to heroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of Scaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... colors—diamonds, sapphires, pearls, rubies, opals, topazes, all as large as the fruits they were intended to represent and of such brilliancy that Rosalie was completely dazzled by them. But scarcely had she seen this rare and unparalleled tree, when a noise louder than the first drew her from her ecstasy. She felt herself lifted up and transported to a vast plain, from which she saw the palace of the king falling in ruins and heard the most frightful cries of terror and suffering issue from its walls. Soon Rosalie saw the prince himself creep from the ruins bleeding and his clothing ...
— Old French Fairy Tales • Comtesse de Segur
... the people wild with delight. Even on the dry pages of Niles's "Weekly Register" occurs the triumphant paragraph: "Who would not be an American? Long live the Republic! All hail! last asylum (p. 097) of oppressed humanity! Peace is signed in the arms of victory!" It was natural that most of the ecstasy should be manifested concerning the military triumph, and that the mass of the people should find more pleasure in glorifying General Jackson than in exalting the Commissioners. The value of their work, however, was well proved by the voice of Great Britain. ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... pinnacles of the church, and felt his heart beating, and knew, without being told by any one, whither he had at length arrived—well, then the feeling which had been growing within his soul burst forth, and he cried in ecstasy: ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of those old days? There's the pit that has swallowed them all! I remember it all now. Forty-five years of my life lie buried there, and what a life, Nikitushka! I can see it as clearly as I see your face: the ecstasy of youth, faith, passion, the love ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... unconscious of, or indifferent to, the close proximity of the velvet curtains. A thrifty housewife, could she have seen the smoke rise and curl and lose itself in the folds above, would have experienced the ecstasy of anxiety and perturbation. But there was no thrifty housewife at the Red Chateau, nothing but dreams of conquest ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... him to say of the one, 'I am not this,' and of the other, 'that, I am.' Wonderful encounter of thoughts across the distance of ages and the distance of races! The meditation of this young French soldier, in face of the enemy who is to attack on the morrow, resumes the strange ecstasy in which was rapt the warrior of the Bhagavad Gita between two armies coming to the grapple. He, too, sees the turbulence of mankind as a dream that seems to veil the higher order and the Divine unity. He, too, puts his faith in that 'which knows neither birth nor death,' ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... goods!" gasped Keogh, in ecstasy. "Talk about coals to Newcastle! Why didn't he take a ship-load of palm-leaf fans to Spitzbergen while he was about it? Saw the old codger on the beach. You ought to have been there when he put on his specs and squinted at the five hundred or ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... bent down over the Child are the ox and the ass—for those good animals helped with their breath through that cold night to keep him warm. In the foreground are the two ravi—a man and a woman in awed ecstasy, with upraised arms—and the adoring shepherds. To these are added on Epiphany the figures of the Magi—the Kings, as they are called always in French and in Provencal—with their train of attendants, and the camels on which they have ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... and massively like a violoncello, and America—played more lightly, is full of the sweeps and the lulls, the ecstasy, the overriding ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... arches. Then the organ intoned the massive Gregorian, and the chant of the mass moved amid the opulence of gold vestments; the Latin responses filled the ear; and at the end of long abstinences the holy oil came like a bliss that never dies. In the ecstasy of ordination it seemed to him that the very savour and spirit of God ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... alive!" I cried, a-clasping my hands in a sweet ecstasy of gratitude. "Did he attempt ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... below, making polite laughter, warned him that already some of the bidden party had arrived, and, as he completed the fastening of his third consecutive collar, an ecstasy of sound reached him through the open window—and then, Oh then! his breath behaved in an abnormal manner and he began to tremble. It was the voice of Miss Pratt, ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... other passions fleet to air, As doubtful thoughts and rash embrac'd despair, And shuddering fear, and green-ey'd jealousy. O love, be moderate; allay thy ecstasy. ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... know not what I am, nor where I am; My soul's transported to an ecstasy, For hope and joy confound ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... suddenly perceiving the little animal which was clinging close to their brother, in alarm at the tumult of voices, shouted in ecstasy: ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... tricks of friend or foe; or the things he could never utter before, he finds words for now; the secrets of life are on his lips. It is in this loosening of the lips and heart, strictly, that Dionysus is the Deliverer, Eleutherios; and of such enthusiasm, or ecstasy, is, in a certain sense, an older patron than Apollo himself. Even at Delphi, the centre of Greek inspiration and of the religion of Apollo, his claim always maintained itself; and signs are not wanting that ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... long absent from Fanny; it is time to return to her. The delight she experienced when Philip made her understand all the benefits, the blessings, that her courage, nay, her intellect, had bestowed upon him, the blushing ecstasy with which she heard (as they returned to H——, the eventful morning of her deliverance, side by side, her hand clasped in his, and often pressed to his grateful lips) his praises, his thanks, his fear for her ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The ecstasy of the monk's terror could be endured no longer; his head grew dizzy, and, after staggering a few steps onward and running himself against a wall, he sunk down in a state ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... at equal speed in the opposite direction. The younger boy asked if he might have a ride in the aeroplane; the girl begged Smith to write his name in her album. The governess sat with clasped hands, gazing at him with the adoring ecstasy that she might have bestowed on a godlike visitant from another sphere. ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... child in ecstasy as she hurried up the hill. "That's the first time a lady ever kissed me, except Mrs. Carson. It is so nice to have friends! And Mrs. Vane is right, it does feel good when you've told folks you are sorry. I wonder—there's Dad—I sassed him and stole his watermelon. But he's hated ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... willing too often to expose his faculty to the mercy of chance. For, in fact, the orations which were spoken by him had much more of boldness and confidence in them than those that he wrote. Eratosthenes says that often in his speaking he would be transported into a kind of ecstasy, and Demetrius, that he uttered the famous metrical adjuration ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... carried on in the girl's absence, the high-strung Edith Harnham lived in the ecstasy of fancy; the vicarious intimacy engendered such a flow of passionateness as was never exceeded. For conscience' sake Edith at first sent on each of his letters to Anna, and even rough copies of her replies; but later on these ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... an aim that we are at liberty to seek directly and without periphrasis. Provided men do not lose their balance by immersing themselves in their pleasures, they are right, according to Emerson, in pursuing them. But joy is no neighbour to artificial ecstasy. What Emerson counsels the poet, he intended in its own way and degree for all men. The poet's habit of living, he says beautifully, should be set on a key so low that the commonest influences should delight him. 'That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... would she have been any happier? Marriage was not the poetic dream of perfect union that a girl imagines it; she herself had found that out. It was a state of trial, of probation; it was an ordeal, not an ecstasy. If she and Basil had broken each other's hearts and parted, would not the fragments of their lives have been on a much finer, much higher plane? Had not the commonplace, every-day experiences of marriage vulgarized them both? ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the good soul in an ecstasy of giggles, and crossed to Lady Hannah. She welcomed him with a glitter of eyes and teeth and discovered the reserve-chair that had been covered by her somewhat fatigued and wilted draperies of maize Liberty-silk, veiled with ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... consuming a cutlet and a pint of Moselle in the plain downright fashion of a man so democratic that he is practically a revolutionary socialist, and doesn't mind saying so; and the young rector of St. Asaph's was sitting opposite to him in a religious ecstasy over a salmi ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... first act, asserting itself whenever rage, irony, tenderness, or other emotion call for expression; omnipotent in the great love-duet, culminating in the nocturne, and once more soaring in highest ecstasy in Isolde's dissolution, with endless gradations in the portions between. Hearers who are not accustomed to the dramatic expression of music attend only to those moments of intense lyric expression, just as in the opera they attend only to the arias; all ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... account,—privateers and condottieri of Enlightenment,—who have filled their pockets with Lucifer matches, and have a sublime contempt for their neighbour's barns and hay-ricks, I don't see why I should throw myself into the seventh heaven of admiration and ecstasy. ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... future generations. Year after year the language of the art grows richer and more complex, and work after work sinks into ever-deepening oblivion, until music that once thrilled men with delirious ecstasy becomes a dead thing, which here and there a student looks back upon in a mood of scarcely tolerant antiquarianism. In the temple of the art a hundred statues of the gods are overthrown; and a hundred others stand with ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... all the others. At this distance you cannot say if any softer color steals into that placid face; you cannot tell if his survey lingers longer upon her than upon the rest. Yet she was Gretchen once, and he was Faust. There is no moonlight romance, no garden ecstasy, poorly feigned upon the stage, that is not burned with eternal fire into their memories. Night after night they come. They do not especially like this music. They are not infatuated with these singers. They have seats for the season; she with her husband, he in the orchestra ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... admired, for often those who are so loud about a thing are not the ones who know the most upon a subject. Yet it is all very important, and many things should be done; and, when they are done, we are all embowered in ecstasy." ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... pucker that could sometimes alight between her eyes. Scarcely a shadow, rather the shadow of a shadow. A lute, played in a western breeze? Once a note of music, not from a lute however, but played on a cheap harmonica, had caught Marylin's heart in a little ecstasy of palpitations, but that doesn't necessarily signify. Zephyr with Aurora playing? Laughter holding both ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... leave the parlor, a woman's voice near the grating breathed the word "Casanova." Nothing but his name, in a tone that seemed to him quite unfamiliar. From whom came this breach of a sacred vow? Was it a woman he had once loved, or a woman he had never seen before? Did the syllables convey the ecstasy of an unexpected reencounter, or the pain of something irrecoverably lost; or did it convey the lamentation that an ardent wish of earlier days had been so late and so fruitlessly fulfilled? Casanova could not tell. All that he knew was that his name, ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... growing celebrity, did not enter into his speculations. He was a man's man. If he was ever to be interested in a woman it would be in the practical way of making her his wife. He could be a husband, never a lover. His genius, though fed by passion and virility, entertained no visions of romantic ecstasy. His instinct was for ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... bow across the strings, and lo! forthwith there arose such harmonies as Eloise had never heard before. Gently, persuasively, they stole upon her senses and filled her soul with an ecstasy ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... scolded during his little choleric outbursts or untempered enthusiasms, and yet, somehow, after a talk with his father he had so often found himself feeling much calmer or really happier. Anger in some way or other came to seem a foolish thing; and even if he had come in from an ecstasy of play, it was certainly pleasant to have the beating throbs in his head die away and to feel his cheeks grow cool again. In looking back, Horace knew that no philosophy had ever so deeply influenced him to self-control and to mental temperance as had the common, kindly, shrewd ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... the ashes from his pipe, pocketed it, and prepared for action. As the buggy came nearer he recognized his ancient enemy in the person of the man who sat at Hannibal's side, and stepping nimbly into the road seized the horses by their bits. At sight of him Hannibal shrieked his name in an ecstasy of delight. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... topic for a chapter on this subject, in the present day, would be the history of the Seeress of Prevorst, the best observed subject of magnetism in our present times, and who, like her ancestresses of Delphos, was roused to ecstasy or phrensy by ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Youth! Why must we spend these lonely nights? The poets hardly speak the truth,— Despite their praiseful litany, His season is not all delights Nor every night an ecstasy! ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... did not consciously seek the mountains to find there the release of imprisoned powers of utterance. The mountains sought her by their beauty and called forth the true mystic's ecstasy of communion. Mystics of all times and all religions have found inspiration and strength of spirit on the hilltops; they have forsaken the haunts of men for the silence of the heights, preparing themselves by meditation and self-purification to receive the Beatific Vision. They have gone ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... altar of the transept is to be seen a group carved in marble, representing the ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Caesar gazed at it absorbed. The saint is an attractive young girl, falling backward in a sensual spasm; her eyes are closed, her mouth open, and her jaw a bit dislocated. In front of the swooning saint is a little angel ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... Shomu's Empress, and whose name had been changed to Komyo (Refulgence) in token of her illustrious piety. The daughter inherited all the mother's romance, but in her case it often degenerated into a passion more elementary than religious ecstasy. Shomu, having no son, made his daughter heir to the throne. Japanese history furnished no precedent for such a step. The custom had always been that a reign ceased on the death of a sovereign unless the Crown Prince had not yet reached ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of the will, she sang in a voice of bell-like purity the canticle to the Virgin attributed to Stradella,—sang it so devoutly, so ethereally, that the dying man, "artist and lover of the beautiful to the very last," whispered in ecstasy, "How exquisite! ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... fellow, who held his arms to heaven, and sang in a great throaty voice the wild dirge I had been listening to. He held a book in one hand, from which he would pluck leaves and cast them on the fire, and at every burnt-offering a wail of ecstasy would go up from the hooded women and kneeling men. Then with a final howl he hurled what remained of his book into the flames, and with upraised hands began some ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... standing on the window-ledge, peering down—to the best of our ability—into the square and into the area depths below. Like a snow-flake in summer, we saw our paper-twist lying on the pavement; but our delight rose to ecstasy when a portly passer-by stooped and picked up the ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Listen: A sunbeam lingered under a leaf in the forest at sunset, loath to leave so fair a spot, until the moon suddenly rose. Enraptured with the shimmering beauty of a moonbeam, he stood entranced and trembling and could not go. In ecstasy they met, embraced and kissed. The sun sank and left him in her arms. The opal is the child of their love. In its fair face is forever mingled the silver of the rising moon and the golden ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... special character of the mysticism of the East? It is the calmness of faith, love feeding on itself, ecstasy without ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... distended dugs or golden fleeces. The wings of thy night involve thee not in the horror of darkness, but have still some white feather; and thy day is (that for which we esteem life) the longest." But this ecstasy of Pliny, as is observed by Bertius, seems to allude as well to Marpesia and Panopea, now provinces of this ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... in dazzling ecstasy, From far away, with joy, to the beloved shore; And I with breast aflame, beneath thy charm once more, Shall haste to bring my liberty ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... Peter, is a giant, a huge, delightful baby in a mob-cap, turns out his elbows, strives eagerly after something. My wife falls into an ecstasy of agitation and emotion when she holds him in her arms; but I am completely at a loss to understand. I know that he has a great store of physical energy, but whether there is any purpose for which the store is wanted I do not know. That is why I do not care for children under two ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... in this pleasing ecstasy, I join my trembling lips to thine, And back receive that life from thee Which ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... Thus, an injudicious poet, who aims at loftiness, runs easily into the swelling puffy style, because it looks like greatness. I remember, when I was a boy, I thought inimitable Spencer a mean poet, in comparison of Sylvester's "Dubartas," and was wrapt into an ecstasy when ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... thought of the joy of bathing them in the tank, and that made the wounds sweet to me.... My Father, I have heard of the temptations which in times past assailed the holy Solitaries of the desert, flattering the reluctant flesh beyond resistance; but none, I think, could have surpassed in ecstasy that first touch of the water on my limbs. To prolong the joy I let myself slip in slowly, resting my hands on the edge of the tank, and smiling to see my body, as I lowered it, break up the shining black surface and shatter the starbeams into splinters. And the water, my Father, seemed ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... it. She was crazy with delight over her little friend's good fortune, so she took several steps forward and cried in an ecstasy, 'O ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... interruption, without relief, without repose. It sometimes happened that a young man, incapable of sustaining these consuming vigils, reeled and fainted; they removed the apparently lifeless body without suspending the discussion. M. Caseaux was in an ecstasy for an hour, and began to prophesy. Another day, M. Olinde Rodrigues was struck as if by apoplexy; because, asking each of the members in turn whether it was not true that the Holy Spirit was in him, (M. Olinde Rodrigues,) one of the persons interrogated had the temerity to answer by certain ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... its value in my eyes on the cause that produced it. There was but one source whence it could flow. A nameless ecstasy thrilled through my frame when any new proof occurred that the ambiguousness of my ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... language I could understand; I felt my frame pervaded by a glow That seemed to thaw my marble into flesh; Its cold, hard substance throbbed with active life, My limbs grew supple, and I moved—I lived! Lived in the ecstasy of a new-born life! Lived in the love of him that fashioned me! Lived in a thousand ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... professor, in ecstasy, "it's just as I told you. Dissimulation is second nature to the tribe. No he is too big for them. The old lady says she and the other rogue are your children. Doctor, there's a notion for you!—an old bachelor like you, ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... feel uneasy. She was seized with a vague dread. Her own like experiences seemed far away, unreal, and only half remembered. She recalled faintly an ecstasy of pain, the heavy odor of chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awakening to find a little new life to which she had given being, added to the great unnumbered multitude of souls that come ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... served to him in solitude in a little panelled parlour off the Hall; and in the fresh April morning, with the sunlight lying on the lawn and lighting up the old worn detail of the carved cornices, he recovered for a time the boyish sense of ecstasy of the first morning at home after the return from school. While he was breakfasting, a scribbled note from Jack was ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... herself into Mrs. Patterson's arms in an ecstasy of delight. "I'm so glad that it hurts," she exclaimed. "I'd forgot what good times there are in ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... would act without ceremony; but Caper and Roejean were on a high horse, and they fairly pumped the spring of Italian compliments so dry, that Bagswell could only make a squeaking noise when he tried the handle. This verbifuge of our three artists put their host into an ecstasy of delight, and he circulated all round, rubbing his hands and telling his six friends that his three friends were milordi, in very audible whispers, milordi of the most genial, courtly, polite, complimentary, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... and son laughed, and said "Good night" to each other. But as Henrik conveyed the hand of his mother towards his lips, he fell into a sort of ecstasy over it. ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... employing them, stirred the North to unbounded enthusiasm, and made the rebel army feel that the Negro was the equal of the Confederate soldier under all circumstances. Secretary Stanton was in a state of ecstasy over the behavior of the Colored troops at Petersburg, an unusual thing for him. In his despatch ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... road quite hid Frances Kane from the little girl's view she clasped her hands with a mixture of ecstasy and alarm. ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... supper. They talked about the people who had been there that day. Edward, full of love and ecstasy, spoke well of every one—always sparing, often approving. Charlotte, who was not altogether of his opinion, remarked this temper in him, and jested with him about it—he who had always the sharpest thing to say on departed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... she felt that strange suffering which is always the other side of intense love—the reverse of the medal of the ecstasy of passion—and she thought she would tell him nothing about it. Why should he be hurt, annoyed, and humiliated? It would spoil all the pleasure of her coming back so early—the unexpected delightful time they might have. ... In this Bertha committed ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... effected; but there are a set of emotions about which a man had best be shy of talking lightly,—and the feelings excited by contemplating this vast, magnificent, harmonious Nature are among these. The view of it inspires a delight and ecstasy which is not only hard to describe, but which has something secret in it that a man should not utter loudly. Hope, memory, humility, tender yearnings towards dear friends, and inexpressible love ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lifelong blindness and lifelong disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy—there ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... instant the man also sprang. He caught her in arms that almost expected to clasp emptiness, arms that crushed in a savage ecstasy of possession at the actual contact with a creature of flesh and blood. In the same moment the lamp in the room behind him ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... jumping up and down and clapping their hands. "Mother," shouted Shenton, "they're coming!" Little Natalie clambered in stumbling haste up the steps and clutched Mrs. Leighton's skirts. "Muvver," she cried, in an agony of ecstasy, "they're coming!" ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... Mithradates had once come forward as the liberator of the Hellenes, if he had introduced his rule with the recognition of civic independence and with remission of taxes, they had after this brief ecstasy been but too rapidly and too bitterly undeceived. He had very soon emerged in his true character, and had begun to exercise a despotism far surpassing the tyranny of the Roman governors—a despotism which drove ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... I ask. But no one will tell me. Across the balcony a girl is hugging her fellow in a maudlin and hysterical manner. Another girl is hanging with her arms around the neck of one of the creatures I described some time ago. She is pressing her lips to his as if in ecstasy. He takes it all as a matter of course, like an indifferent young husband after the honeymoon is over. His companion joins him—the moon-faced fellow—and they come around to our box and ogle us. ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... probable, very probable. For habits like those must set themselves deep in the very core of the system, don't you think, Colonel? If this woman, now, was descended from a whole line of ancestresses, who had all been trained for their work into a sort of ecstatic fervour, the ecstasy and all that went with it must have got ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... vigour? What god, envious of my mighty joy, rendered me a shameful object of his raillery? Snatched my (till then) never failing power, and left me dying on thy charming bosom. Heavens, how I lay! Silent with wonder, rage and ecstasy of love, unable to complain, or rail, or storm, or seek for ease, but with my sighs alone, which made up all my breath; my mad desires remained, but all inactive, as age or death itself, as cold ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... supper table was being cleared away preparatory to the dance, Captain Jack rushed upstairs to the party in the gallery. Patricia flung herself at him in an ecstasy of rapture. ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... in the nameless shades of this man's soul and then hear with an endless excitement about the nameless shades of the souls of all his aunts and uncles. A moment before he had been dying alone. Now he was living in the same world with a man; an inexhaustible ecstasy. In the gallery below the ball Father Michael had found that man who is the noblest and most divine and most lovable of all men, better than all the saints, greater than all the ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... of the temple, who were identified with the Sauades and nymphs of the heavenly host. Men heard them passing in the night, heralded by the piercing notes of the flute provoking to frenzy, and by the clash of brazen cymbals, accompanied by the din of uproarious ecstasy: these sounds were broken at intervals by the bellowing of bulls and the roll of drums, like the rambling of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... it was that Kate discovered the motor attachment of the new machine and was divided between ecstasy and economic qualms. ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... an echo in a living breast. Man is nothing but the desire to feel himself in another." "When I dare look up to thee from my childish pursuits, I think I see a bride whose priestly robes do not betray, nor her face express, whether she is sad or joyous in her ecstasy." "Thou lookest deeper into my breast, knowest more of my spiritual fate, than I, because I need only read in thy soul to find myself." "I would possess every thing, wealth and power of beautiful ideas, art and ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... incongruous years of middle age. There is never a man, gifted to any degree with imagination, but eternally searches for an ultimate loveliness not disappearing in the circle of his embrace—the instinctively Platonic gesture toward the only immortality conceivable in terms of ecstasy. ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... simply as though lifted by the hands that held her own. Their vitality thrilled through her like a strong current of electricity. She felt that whichever way they turned, wherever they led her, she must be safe. And there was a quivering ecstasy in that dazzling, rapid rush that filled ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... thickened, straightening Laura's auburn ringlets, and hanging in dew-drops on Philip's rough coat, but little recked they; it was such an hour as they had never enjoyed before. Philip had never so laid himself open, or assured her so earnestly of the force of his affection; and her thrills of ecstasy overcame the desolate expectation of his departure, and made her sensible of strength to bear seven, ten, twenty years of loneliness and apparent neglect. She knew him, and he ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... feature of all those distressing examples seemed to indicate that, while theoretically the man was in an ideal state of blissful ecstasy, he was, practically, in a condition bordering on madness. At the very moment he was supposed to be happy, he was about half the time most miserable. Even at its best, it did not make for comfort. Poor Chic ran the gamut every week from hell to heaven. It was with a sigh of ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... time that still seems brighter than this—when he could exult in the fairy splendour and comic humour of Aladdin and weep over the sorrows of The Drunkard, when he was thrilled and frightened by J.B. Booth in The Apostate, and could find an ecstasy of pleasure in the loves of Alonzo and Cora and the sublime self-sacrifice of Rolla. Thoughts of such actors as Henry Wallack, George Jordan, John Brougham, John E. Owens, Mary Carr, Mrs. Barrow, and Charlotte Thompson, together in the same theatre, are ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Mrs. Green?" But there was no need for her to answer that question. There was a sudden scurry of feet, and a wire-haired fox-terrier was jumping all over him in ecstasy. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... a sigh of ecstasy she sprang into the air as a slave might do from whom the fetters have ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... against the balustrade, and gazed at the handsome windows through which the rich, warm light streamed out into the wintry air. As he sat there, strains of exquisite music, and the sounds of dancing, floated out into the night. The little fellow clasped his hands in ecstasy and listened. He had never heard such melody, and it made his heart ache to think how poor and mean was his own minstrelsy compared with that with which his ears were now ravished. The wind blew fierce and keen down the grand street, whirling the snow about ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... The Huron Indians pray to the souls of the fish they catch; well, why should they not? a fish has a soul if Modern Society has one; one could conceive a fish going softly through shining waters for ever and for ever in the ecstasy of motion; but who could conceive ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the circulator of the circulation of the blood, used to fling away Virgil in his ecstasy of admiration, and say 'the book had a devil.' Now, such a character as I am copying would probably fling it away also, but rather wish that the devil had the book; not from a dislike to the poet, but a well-founded ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... can depict mockery, every stage of anxiety or pain, astonishment, ecstasy, terror, suffering, fury and admiration, besides all ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... of the world with regard to the North Pole had at this date reached a pitch which can only be described as fevered, though that word hardly expresses the strange ecstasy and unrest which prevailed: for the abstract interest which mankind, in mere desire for knowledge, had always felt in this unknown region, was now, suddenly, a thousand and a thousand times intensified by a new, concrete interest—a tremendous ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... Linda's heart. And it was understood that every one in the house was supposed to be living under some special cloud of God's anger till Linda's consent should have been given. Madame Staubach had declared during the ecstasy of her devotion, that not only she herself, but even Tetchen also, would become the prey of Satan if Linda did not relent. Linda had almost acknowledged to herself that she was in the act of bringing eternal destruction on all those around ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... find ecstasy in vertigo when thought, turning on itself, exhausted by the stress of introspection, tired of vain effort, recoils in fright; thus it would seem that man must be a void and that by dint of delving within himself, he reaches the ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... fallen upon her knees in blessing and thankfulness, forgetful of all her tribe of sorrows, conscious only that she was a woman crowned and throned. By degrees she forgot that she was starving, forgot everything in an ecstasy of pure passion and pride, an ecstasy that brought food, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... father's position, 6; Torquato's birth, 7; the death of his mother, 9, 15; what Tasso inherited from his father, 11; Bernardo's treatment of his son, ib.; Tasso's precocity as a child, 12; his early teachers, ib.; pious ecstasy in his ninth year, 13; with his father in Rome, 14; his first extant letter, 15; his education, 16; with his father at the Court of Urbino, 17; mode of life here, 18; acquires familiarity with Virgil, 19; studies and annotates the Divina Commedia, ib.; metaphysical studies and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... to the shining of the Scottish Sea, the great water with its islands, the coast of Fife with its dotted line of little fishing towns, the two green Lomonds standing softly distinct against the misty line of more distant hills. It was the same view that moved Fitz-Eustace to ecstasy, still but little changed in the eighteenth century from what it had been in the sixteenth. And picturesque as Edinburgh still continues to be in spite of many modern disadvantages, it was no doubt infinitely more picturesque then, crowning the rocky ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... divine ecstasy in her expression as she looked down into the little face; it never seemed ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... exorcising them, kept Pete Noel occupied. But suddenly one of these monstrous shapes neglected to vanish. He was just about to throw himself upon it, in half delirious antagonism, when it lurched upward with a snort, and struggled away from him. In an instant Pete was alive in every faculty, stung with an ecstasy of hope. Leaping, floundering, squirming, he followed, open knife in hand. Again and yet again the foundered beast, a big caribou bull, buried halfway up the flank, eluded him. Then, as his savage ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of a saloon in that part of Chicago known as "back of the yards." This information is definite and suited to the matter of fact; but how pitifully inadequate it would have seemed to one who understood that it was also the supreme hour of ecstasy in the life of one of God's gentlest creatures, the scene of the wedding feast and the joy-transfiguration ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... him to what the buckskin had seen, or perhaps he was of a different metal. Near the rear of the premises the big brute came in so great a fury that he broke through the palings. The ensuing collision,—for the boy stood his ground,—was so violent that Ray went down underneath, and an ecstasy thrilled him when the flame swished and the smoke stung, and he felt something sink into his shoulder and a stifle of hot, foamy breath ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... shapely bare arms and on her ankles, and thus arrayed she brings me a guitar, and to my strumming sings a Moorish song, swaying her arms above her head and turning gracefully in their fashion, so that all were in an ecstasy with this strange performance. And the talk spreading, the number of visitors grew apace,—as bees will flock to honey,—and yielding to their urgent entreaties, she would often repeat this piece of business, and always with a most winning grace, that ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... sensibility in his verse. It is curious how often he uses the metaphor of wings: of the winged spirit, soaring, like his skylark, till lost in music, rapture, light, and then falling back to earth. Three successive moods—longing, ecstasy, and the revulsion of despair—are expressed in many of his lyrics; as in the Hymn to the Spirit of Nature, in Prometheus, in the ode To a Skylark, and in the Lines to an Indian Air—Edgar Poe's favorite. His passionate desire to lose {260} himself in Nature, to become one with that spirit ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... choleric outbursts or untempered enthusiasms, and yet, somehow, after a talk with his father he had so often found himself feeling much calmer or really happier. Anger in some way or other came to seem a foolish thing; and even if he had come in from an ecstasy of play, it was certainly pleasant to have the beating throbs in his head die away and to feel his cheeks grow cool again. In looking back, Horace knew that no philosophy had ever so deeply influenced him to self-control ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... to seek further explanation of the pain I had suffered—was suffering then, indeed, as I had reason to know when ecstasy permitted a return of sensation. My back bears the scars ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... Covent Garden on its way. 'Stop at the pastry-cook's at the corner,' said Macassar up through the little trap-door. The cab drew up suddenly. 'She's mine, she's mine!' shouted Macassar, rushing into the shop, and disregarding in the ecstasy of the moment the various customers who were quietly eating their ices. 'She's ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... the railroad, and never be disturbed: Nature knows very well what sounds are worth attending to, and has made up her mind not to hear the railroad-whistle. But things respect the devout mind, and a mental ecstasy was never interrupted." He noted, what repeatedly befell him, that, after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would presently find the same in his own haunts. And those pieces of luck which happen only to good players happened to him. One day, walking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks, and secret ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs! all ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... and I were drawn on a sledge—(i.e. an old hamper, a basket wine-hamper—without a wheel) by two white bullocks, up the precipitous mountains. Think of my travelling in those wild places at four o'clock in the morning! a little frightened, dreadfully tired, but in an ecstasy of admiration. It was a sight to see before one died and went away into another world. But being expelled ignominiously at the end of five days, we had to come back to Florence to find a new apartment cooler than the old, and wait for dear Mr. Kenyon, and dear Mr. Kenyon does not come after ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... you beholds,' when Netta, impatient, looked through a second glass, and exclaimed in ecstasy, 'Where did you get ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... extremely difficult and abrupt. We however remarked on our road seven native huts, which increased our hopes that these mountains would lead by a comparatively easy descent to the coast line of country. Bilboa's ecstasy at the first sight of the South Sea could not have been greater than ours, when on gaining the summit of this mountain, we beheld Old Ocean at our feet: it inspired as with new life: every difficulty vanished, and in imagination we were already at home. ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... was beyond the dream of poet. I trembled in an ecstasy of pain. From the next cell there came to us softly the voice of a poor condemned Appin Stewart. He was crooning that most tender and heart-breaking of all strains. Like the pibroch's mournful sough he wailed it out, the ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... sheds, and groves, throughout the county. These enthusiasts were called all sorts of opprobrious names such as, 'Nigger friends, and disturbers of Israel,' and some were excommunicated from the churches. These were indeed stirring days; Connecticut had received a change of heart, and in her ecstasy ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... talks. Vain hope that mere dry sense should here Explain the holy signs to thee. I feel you, spirits, hovering near; Oh, if you hear me, answer me! [He opens the book and beholds the sign of the Macrocosm.[6]] Ha! as I gaze, what ecstasy is this, In one full tide through all my senses flowing! I feel a new-born life, a holy bliss Through nerves and veins mysteriously glowing. Was it a God who wrote each sign? Which, all my inner tumult stilling, And this poor heart with rapture filling, Reveals to me, by force divine, Great Nature's ...
— Faust • Goethe
... the forest-depths alone, The chase neglected, and his hound 225 Couch'd beside him on the ground. deg. deg.226 —Ah! what trouble's on his brow? Hither let him wander now; Hither, to the quiet hours Pass'd among these heaths of ours. 230 By the grey Atlantic sea; Hours, if not of ecstasy, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... just as they stood in Rome as Shakspere represents them? Why, we travel hundreds of miles to see the places noted for the doings of these old Romans; and if we could be made to believe that we met one of the smaller men, even, of that day, our ecstasy would be unbounded. 'A tin pan so painted as to deceive is atrocious,' says this writer. Of course, for we are not interested in a tin pan; but give us a portrait of Shakspere or Milton so that we ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... nearest town up a steep hill? Latin, French, English, German, failed to make me understand the situation. At last I took in the Pfarrer's meaning. I was to send it by the milkman after leaving it at a certain hotel. "Ja," I cried in an ecstasy of joy, at last grasping his meaning, "Ja, ich mittam der Gepaeck von der milkman." I arrived the next day. I found the Pfarrer knew Latin, Greek (but he pronounces both quite differently from me), German, French, Russian, Syriac, Hebrew, and a little English. ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... "Bangor," which the worthy old New England clergyman so admired that he actually had the down-east city called after it, and "Windsor," and "Funeral Hymn." But Myrtle was in no mood for these. She let off her ecstasy in "Balerma," and "Arlington," and "Silver Street," and at last in that most riotous of devotional hymns, which sounds as if it had been composed by a saint who had a cellar under his chapel,—"Jordan." So she let her wild spirits run loose; and then a tenderer feeling stole over her, and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Faguet, "the Greece of fair river-banks, of gracious hill-slopes, of comely groups around a well-head or a stream, of harmonious theories beside the voiceful sea, of dancing choirs upon the luminous heights, under the blue heavens, which lift to ecstasy his spirit, light as the light ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the air. It was not exactly to my taste, however, nor did the thought of my poor mother at home make me more sympathetic with Tom's ecstasy; so whilst he chattered I strode ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lenience to the combined effects of Huggeny and of Clement's severe countenance in producing one of those paroxysms of giggle that seem invincible in proportion to their unbecomingness. The door was reached and instantly opened, Stella springing into her arms in ecstasy. 'Sister's come!—O Sister, Sister, Sister, don't ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to the house. But the ecstasy of finding each other, again was too new. They passed the dark old gateway to the sunken garden, and walked on, talking thirstily, drinking deep of the joy ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... he lacks humor. In their search for happiness his characters suffer a great deal and know only temporary ecstasy. They are often witty, but ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the elements and forces of His arming, for a night and a day to two days and nights, but rarely longer. Sometimes he would chant a hymn without words, or offer the ceremonial "filled pipe." In this holy trance or ecstasy the Indian mystic found his highest happiness and the motive power ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... they stepped side by side, their hands brushed together, and he caught hers in his grasp, turning to look full upon her. Her ecstasy was poignant; she trembled in her walk. But she looked straight ahead,—waiting. To both of them it seemed that the earth rocked under their feet. He looked long at her profile, softened in the magic ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... which, with its lofty pillars reaching to the sky, was emblazoned in so wondrous a light, that, notwithstanding the extreme refulgence, it did not dazzle. Within this, upon a ceaselessly revolving sun-orb, stood the most beautiful and tallest of the fairies. In her golden hair gleamed stars. Joy and ecstasy radiated like a glory from her lovely pale face, and vapoury raiment concealed, but as with a breath, her incomparable figure. Towards her pressed the innumerable host; for the sublime creature might be the priestess of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... beauty my whole recreant heart yielded at once—at whose footstool I bowed down without a struggle, in the most ardent, in the most abject worship of love. What, indeed, was my passion for the young girl of the valley in comparison with the fervor, and the delirium, and the spirit-lifting ecstasy of adoration with which I poured out my whole soul in tears at the feet of the ethereal Ermengarde?—Oh, bright was the seraph Ermengarde! and in that knowledge I had room for none other.—Oh, divine was the angel Ermengarde! and as I looked down into the depths of her memorial eyes, I thought ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with adventure and doubloons and crime, Rum and the Ebony Trade: when, time on time, Real Pirates, right Sea-Highwaymen, could mock The carrion strung at EXECUTION DOCK; And the trim Slaver, with her raking rig, Her cloud of sails, her spars superb and trig, Held, in a villainous ecstasy of gain, Her musky course from BENIN to the MAIN, And back again for niggers: When, in fine, Some thought that EDEN bloomed across the Line, And some, like COWPER'S NEWTON, lived to tell That through those parallels ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... my whole, while filling My shadowy first with ecstasy divine! Listen! oh, listen! would ye not be willing Ever in gloom to dwell, and not repine,— Ever to joy in such melodious gladness,— Ever to sorrow ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... an ecstasy of fury) See ye belong to a night-club before the week's out. (He does his glare again.) I'll establish frivolity and a spirit of modernism in this household, if I have to take the stick ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... opiates and cannabis from Central and Southwest Asia to Western Europe and Scandinavia and Latin American cocaine and some synthetics from Western Europe to CIS; limited production of illicit amphetamines, ephedrine, and ecstasy for export ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and received with hisses when she appeared, and discharged with hisses and laughter when she had finished—then instantly encored and insulted again! And how the high-born knaves enjoyed it! White-kidded gentlemen and ladies laughed till the tears came, and clapped their hands in very ecstasy when that unhappy old woman would come meekly out for the sixth time, with uncomplaining patience, to meet a storm of hisses! It was the cruellest exhibition—the most wanton, the most unfeeling. The singer would have conquered an audience of American ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... to behave herself with dignity; but now she burst into a violent fit of laughter, threw herself backwards over the chair, and went rolling about the floor in an ecstasy of enjoyment. The king picked her up easier than one does a down quilt, and replaced her in her former relation to the chair. The exact preposition expressing this relation I do not happen ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... sustained the ecstasy and anguish of that likeness, but of his sayings and of the wonders he wrought in that time ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... convinced that he had inspired the tender breast of Aurelia with mutual affection; and, though she was invidiously snatched from his embrace in the midst of such endearments as had wound up his soul to ecstasy and transport, he did not doubt of being able to rescue her from the power of an inhuman kinsman, whose guardianship would soon of course expire; and in the meantime he rested with the most perfect dependence ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... his measureless faith in his brother and his passion for dreams, the mad arrogance of the declaration was lost. The ecstasy with which Ham spoke tinged the promise with a fire of conviction—so ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... time in this state of religious ecstasy as he improvised prayers and repeated again and yet again, "Lord, have mercy upon me!" Each time that he said, "Pardon me, Lord, and teach me to do what Thou wouldst have done," he pronounced the words with added earnestness and emphasis, as though he expected ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... delightful views of a picturesque Swiss village,—exactly such a cluster of low roofed houses as she had admired many a time in photographs of Alpine scenery. An exclamation from a little boy who clapped his hands in ecstasy caused her to look through a cleft in the nearer hills. With a thrill of wonder she discovered there, remote and solitary, all garbed in shining white, a majestic snow capped mountain. Ah! this was the real Switzerland! Her heart throbbed, and ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... the tall, straggling hedges of dog-roses, brambles and hawthorn that top the banks are luxuriantly overrun with honeysuckle, filling the whole air with its spicy fragrance. On either side are blossoming fields of clover and beans, the larks are mounting and singing in ecstasy overhead, the road climbs a steep ascent, and we have miles and miles of finished landscape in view. There are timber-tied farm-houses here and there, or tiny hamlets whose straw thatches are simply glorious with their patches of velvet moss and the brilliant golden ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... being attached to the bow of the boat, they held their breath with expectation, many of them standing on one leg; and when at last the boat, with four persons in it, shot away to sea at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour, they roared with ecstasy; accompanying the yells with contortions of frame and visage which were so indescribable that we gladly leave it all to ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... held a laboured conversation with her. To him there was a sense of triumph as he sat smoking his blackened pipe, listening to the halting phrases of the woman, and gazing deeply into her wonderful blue eyes. And in the ecstasy of recollection he forgot Ralph and all but his love. There was no generosity in his heart; he had given himself up to the delights of his passion. He claimed the fair Aim-sa to himself, and was ready to uphold his claim so long as ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... joyful ecstasy, the poor, sleepy, half-dead devil should raise his head, we laugh at him. It ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... brilliancy, and a polite cynicism which, at first, surprised one. Had Bertha been unimpassioned, she might have judged him at his value; but she had lost her power of insight. She heard him, plunged in a foolish ecstasy, as one hears a traveller who has returned from far and dangerous countries, who has visited peoples of whose language the hearer is ignorant, and lived in the midst of manners and ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... eyes, yet I knew when their lashes Fringed their cheeks from downcast eyes, And when they turned their heads; And when their garments clung to them, Or fell from them, in exquisite draperies. Their spirits watched my ecstasy With wide looks of starry unconcern. Their spirits looked upon my torture; They drank it as it were the water of life; With reddened cheeks, brightened eyes, The rising flame of my soul made their spirits gilt, Like the wings of a butterfly drifting suddenly into sunlight. And they ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... pieces for the canoes. I should have given four fathoms for each man and the same for each boat. The final scene was most gratifying to the African mind: I solemnly invested old Nessala with the grand cloak which covered his other finery; grinning in the ecstasy of vanity, he allowed his subjects to turn him round and round, as one would a lay figure, yet with profound respect, and, lastly, he retired to charm ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... dizzily up the deck was in an ecstasy. He was oblivious to all the world—even to Pauline, who stood questioning an officer at the rail. The fact that his servant, Catin, slipped silently down the hatchway to the main compartment, and thence on to the pump room at the vessel's bottom, would hardly have interested ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... young foliage of the maples not moving, having the air of observing the Sabbath with propriety. There were benches here and there along the walks, and to one of these Joe crossed, and sat down. The mongrel, at his master's feet, rolled on his back in morning ecstasy, ceased abruptly to roll and began to scratch his ear with a hind foot intently. A tiny hand stretched to pat his head, and the dog licked it appreciatively. It belonged to a hard-washed young lady of ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... and arrows upon the logs; not a Blackfoot was hurt, but several Crows, in spite of their leaping and dodging, were shot down. In this childish manner the fight went on for an hour or two. Now and then a Crow warrior in an ecstasy of valor and vainglory would scream forth his war song, boasting himself the bravest and greatest of mankind, and grasping his hatchet, would rush up and strike it upon the breastwork, and then as he retreated to his companions, fall dead under a shower of arrows; yet no combined attack seemed to ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... craft bumps the shore, Priscilla rises joyously. She stretches her hands in ecstasy toward the new world. She leans forward against the breeze, her whole figure alive with the joy of ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... his hands in his pockets before an unfinished picture on the easel; then, as his habit was, he began to stroll touristlike from canvas to canvas, standing before each in a musing ecstasy of contemplation that no readjustment of view ever seemed to disturb. Her eye instinctively joined his in its inspection; it was the one point where their natures merged. Thank God, there, was no doubt about the ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... animal with eyes half-shut and mouth half-open, drinking in the scented warmth of the air. Then suddenly he flung himself face downwards on the grass at the edge of the stream, burying his face in the daisies and cowslips, and lay stretched there in wide-armed ecstasy, with his long fingers pressing and stroking the dewy herbs of the field. Never before had Darcy seen him thus fully possessed by his idea; his caressing fingers, his half-buried face pressed close to the grass, even the clothed lines of his figure were ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to make a salad dressing like that—and the whole town knows that was the price—the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get their Indian ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... misery, with a sense of its supreme folly, yet with a refusal in their souls to acknowledge defeat or to stop this side of victory. In each battle there were officers and men who risked death deliberately, and in a kind of ecstasy did acts of superhuman courage; and because of the number of these feats the record of them is monotonous, dull, familiar. The mass followed their lead, and even poor coward-hearts, of whom there were ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... right into his mouth,' said Val, while Fergus went into an ecstasy of laughter. 'Wasn't it a ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hovered over him like a dream while waking and like a reality in dreams. But if it might be in God's good providence that this desolate life should come under the influence of human affections once more, what an ecstasy of renewed existence was in store for him! His life had not all been buried under that narrow ridge of turf with the white stone at its head. It seemed so for a while; but it was not and could not and ought not to be so. His first ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... lark!" I cried, when he had finished; and we both then burst into an ecstasy of laughter at the very idea ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... a Happy Life!" cried Babbalanja, in an ecstasy. "My lord, I am lost in the dream of it, as here recorded. Marvelous book! its goodness transports me. Let me read:—'I would bear the same mind, whether I be rich or poor, whether I get or lose in the world. I will reckon benefits well placed as the fairest ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... vast number of phenomena which lie along the border line between the physical and spiritual, and which are conspicuous in the phenomena of somnambulism, sleep, dreaming, hypnotism, spiritualism, clairvoyance, trance, ecstasy, and religious marvels. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... things to civilization is how a white man can degenerate to savagery. Young Radisson's life is an illustration. In the first transports of his freedom, with the Mohawk women dancing and singing around him, the men shouting, he leaped up, oblivious of pain; but when the flush of ecstasy had passed, he sank to the mat of the Iroquois lodge, and he was unable to use his burned feet for more than a month. During this time the Iroquois dressed his wounds, brought him the choice portions of the hunt, gave him clean clothing purchased ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... the countryside bowed in silver quietude, the rivers ran through undistinguishable fields chanting their lonely songs. The seas leaped and withdrew, and called again to the stars, and gathered in ecstasy and roared skywards, and the trees did not rob each other more than was absolutely necessary. The men and women were all hidden away, sleeping in their cells, where the moon could not see them, nor the clean wind, ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... him. (In this way), they all arrived together at the river, and Ananda considered that, if he went forward, king Ajatasatru would be very angry, while, if he went back, the Lichchhavis would resent his conduct. He thereupon in the very middle of the river burnt his body in a fiery ecstasy of Samadhi,(4) and his pari-nirvana was attained. He divided his body (also) into two, (leaving) the half of it on each bank; so that each of the two kings got one half as a (sacred) relic, and took it back (to his own capital), and there ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... under their very eyes, and then, attired in white satin, the neophyte was slowly driven through the streets of Rome that all might witness how a soul had been saved for the true faith. And in the ecstasy of this union with the human brotherhood and the divine fatherhood, and with Christ, its symbol, Giuseppe de' Franchi saw not the dark, haggard faces of his brethren in the crowd, the hate that smouldered in their dusky eyes as the festal ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... chance. For, in fact, the orations which were spoken by him had much more of boldness and confidence in them than those that he wrote. Eratosthenes says that often in his speaking he would be transported into a kind of ecstasy, and Demetrius, that he uttered the famous ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... wringing from him one cry for mercy. He would die a thousand times sooner than sue to him. He thought of Joan — realizing that for her sake he should be called upon, in some sort, to bear this suffering; and even the bare thought sent a thrill of ecstasy through him. Any death that was died for her would be sweet. And might not his be instrumental in ridding her for ever of her hateful foe? Would not Gaston raise heaven and earth to discover his brother? Surely he would, ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the soft ecstasy and boundless relief of the moment, "how I have learned to love you during the fears and agonies ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... as of the sun glinting on the river on a bright blue day, had a sudden way of possessing her, and the longing they induced was pain. Longing for what? For some unimagined existence where beauty dwelt, and light, where the ecstasy induced by these was neither moiled nor degraded; where shame, as now, might not assail her. Why should she feel her body hot with shame, her cheeks afire? At such moments she would turn to the typewriter, her fingers striking ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... himself subject to secret influences of the utmost power over him, able to cast him off or to hold him, to sicken his body and distress his soul, extending his views of the truth by flashes of light into vistas that seem infinite, making his love of right an ecstasy, his sympathy for human misery a passion, controlling his diet and his clothing, ordering him here and there at will and knowing how to be obeyed—when, in a word, a man finds himself treated by God in a manner totally different from any one else he knows or ever heard of, it is plain that he ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... with the Sauades and nymphs of the heavenly host. Men heard them passing in the night, heralded by the piercing notes of the flute provoking to frenzy, and by the clash of brazen cymbals, accompanied by the din of uproarious ecstasy: these sounds were broken at intervals by the bellowing of bulls and the roll of drums, like ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... himself. He bade him come out upon the Adventure of Life, the great Adventure of the earth that will make the atoms our bond-slaves and subdue the stars, that will build up the white fires of ecstasy to submerge pain for ever, that will overcome death. In Him the spirit of creation had become incarnate, had joined itself to men, summoning men to Him, having need of them, having need of them, having need of their service, even as great kings and generals and leaders ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... of abstinence we may account, in part, for that holy ecstasy, that amazing clearness of spiritual vision, sometimes enjoyed on the deathbed. "Administer nothing," said the eloquent dying Summerfield, "that will create a stupor, not even so much as a little porter and water—that I may have an unclouded view." For the same reason, Dr. Rush, who so well ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... horses and carriages and trains and pedestrians in forms grotesque, zigzagging, flitting, amusing, like a shadow-play upon a wrinkled, wind-blown curtain. The sixteenth of June. To Fitzgerald there was something electric in the date, a tingle of that ecstasy which frequently comes into the blood of a man to whom the romance of a great battle is more than its history or its effect upon the destinies of human beings. Many years before, this date had marked the end to a certain hundred ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... leaped into her face, but she stood with upraised head, regarding him with clear and candid eyes that glowed with the ecstasy ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... What fond, delicious ecstasy does early love impart! Resistless, as a spring-tide sea, it flows into the heart, Pervading with its living wave the bosom's inmost core, That thrills with many a gentle hope ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... they had always felt themselves on the same level of nonsense, and had unreservedly shared each other's confidences and projects; and ten thousand bits of intelligence were discussed with mutual ardour, while Clara's ecstasy became uncontrollable as she felt herself coming nearer to her grandmother. She finally descended with a bound almost as distressing to her brother as her ascent had been, and leapt at once to the embrace of Mrs. Frost, who stood there, petting, kissing her, and playfully ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... One alternative remained. He had heard of women aviators. If Doris could be induced to accompany him into the air, instead of clinging sodden-like to the weight of Oswald's woe, then would the world behold a triumph which would dwarf the ecstasy of the bird's flight and rob the eagle of his kingly pride. But Doris barely endured him as yet, and the thought was not one to be considered for a moment. Yet what other course remained? He was brooding deeply on the subject, in his hangar ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... kick me hard!" shouted Cunningham in an ecstasy of delight, as he smote me a blow between the shoulders that made me stagger. "The catamaran!" he continued. "Of course. Oh, what a lot of fools we were not to have thought of that before! But," suddenly bethinking himself, "if we had, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... of the reckless confidence of youth. I was on the verge of one of the most appalling adventures which could befall a man, and yet no premonition disturbed the ecstasy with which I knelt before the glimmering marble and unrolled my bundle of ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... a stridulous barking; and James Polder carried her, in an ecstasy of snarling ill-temper, out. "Cherette doesn't appreciate callers," he stated, with an expression that contradicted the mildness of his words. His gaze, Howat thought, rested on Mariana with the intensity of a fanatic Arab at the apparition of Mohammed. And Mariana ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... direction. The younger boy asked if he might have a ride in the aeroplane; the girl begged Smith to write his name in her album. The governess sat with clasped hands, gazing at him with the adoring ecstasy that she might have bestowed on a godlike visitant from another ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... he would have thirty chambers of gold, all full to the ceiling. Leander, being conducted into the chambers, took his rose and shook it, till every room was filled with all sorts of coin. Furibon was in an ecstasy, and the more gold he saw the greater was his desire to get hold of the Amazon; so that when all the rooms were full, he commanded his guards to seize her, alleging she had brought him counterfeit money. Immediately Leander put on his little red cap and disappeared. The guards, ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... hand on his arm. He shot a swift glance at her face. It was turned away. She staring at the mystic panorama that was being unveiled off there on the rim of the world. Her eyes were bright, her lips were parted in the ecstasy of hope revived, she was breathing deeply. The pulse in her smooth white neck was beating rapidly, rythmically. He could see it. He laid his bandaged hand firmly upon hers and pressed it tightly to his arm. She did not ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... at Ashridge for about a fortnight, and then, to the ecstasy of Sir Reginald, issued orders for return to Berkhamsted. Only a few words passed between the Prior and his patron as they took leave of ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... ever saw in my life. By George, it's ripping!" cried Wilson, who had been left in a kind of ecstasy by the events of the day. "There's a chap over Barnsley way who fancies himself a bit. Let us spring you on him, and let him see what he can make of you. We'll put up a purse—won't we, Purvis? You shall never ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... we notice the same abandonment, the same illusions produced on the imagination, the contortions of the body, the child-like credulity, the superstition, the depression, and exaltations of the feelings, "the agony, the ecstasy, the plentitude of belief." They are the complement of barbaric faith, and not a peculiarity of the Negro. If in these primitive conditions we see the Negro tickled by a straw, or frightened by a ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... open of itself when the time came. Motherhood! There'd be a doctor and a nurse at first, of course, but presently they'd go away and she'd be left with a baby. Her own baby! She could care for him with her own hands, feed him—her joy reached an ecstasy at this—feed him from her ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Archelaus. Him she would lead to the heavenly courts and win forgiveness for the sin of his creation; he, the brand she had lit, should by her be plucked from the burning. Crossing over to her window, she had leaned her hot brow against the pane, closing her eyes in an ecstasy of prayer. It was very dim still in the house, but without the first faint pallor of the dawn was growing, and against it every solid object showed distinct and black. And, opening her eyes, Annie saw, silhouetted darkly with the precision of ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... heart was thumping pretty hard and his breathing was uncertain, as though he had raced the length of the field with a pigskin tucked in the crook of his arm, and his gaze sought the floor for fear those two would read the almost tragic ecstasy that shone in them. "Yes," he repeated, ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction with her life and her own nature. Rachel suddenly took a violent dislike to Susan, ignoring all that was kindly, modest, and even pathetic about her. She appeared insincere and cruel; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the kind blue ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... vividness which he had never experienced before, in the deepest of the many reveries in which they had been presented to his fancy. Mr Rathbone understood his feelings, and so little doubted of being able to obtain this favour, that he tried to work up still more the ecstasy of hope which he had excited. "I have no doubt Mr Gardiner will spare you, Charles: you can be off by to-morrow ...
— Principle and Practice - The Orphan Family • Harriet Martineau
... impact of his fate. But there is a first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer to endure—admirably expressed in the sudden change to a brief trochaic verse; then the grim mood is dissolved in a momentary ecstasy of remembrance or of idea—and the verse, too, unfolds and ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... how he threw some driftwood into a racing torrent and how Mark went running down-stream after it, waving and shouting in a sort of mad ecstasy. ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... drink. He fired another and another and another.... The Hun was puzzled at this departure from routine, and opened a morose machine-gun fire which skimmed the top of the parapet and covered Second-Lieut. St. John with earth from shattered sandbags. He went on firing Verey lights in a sort of bland ecstasy till his supply ran out, when he went to his Company Commander's dug-out for more. He filled his pockets with fresh ammunition, went back to his post, and began firing again. The first light was mauve. He almost clapped his hands at it, and fired the second. It was pink. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... close resemblance to one another, and their merits and their failures are alike identical. We have to form what broken impression we can of their early habits. Joseph is presented to us as wandering in the woodlands, lost in a melancholy fit, or waking out of it to note with ecstasy all the effects of light and colour around him, the flight of birds, the flutter of foliage, the panorama of cloudland. He and Thomas were alike in their "extreme thirst after ancient things." They avoided, with a certain ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... horse, shouted and prayed in their peculiar style, which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands, of such scenes; and can now see a poor girl, in the very ecstasy of the Methodist "shout," hugging the banner of one of the regiments, and jumping up to the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... for the suppression of strife. I remember spring mornings, when the birds began to sing in the shrubberies, and the beds were full of rising flower-blades, when one's whole mind and heart used to expand in an ecstasy of hope and delight; I remember long rambles or bicycle rides far into the quiet pastoral country, in the summer heat, alone or with a single companion, when life seemed almost too delicious to continue; then there would ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... at this moment with Antinea, and it is to me a bitter and splendid joy to think of his joy. But some evening, in three months, four perhaps, the embalmers will come here. Niche 54 will receive its prey. Then a Targa slave will advance toward me. I shall shiver with superb ecstasy. He will touch my arm. And it will be my turn to penetrate into eternity by the ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... loose their pent-up feelings. The place pulsated with a roar like that of a great waterfall in a deep gorge, salvo after salvo of cheers swelling and merging. The deep boom of their applause pursued Brinnaria and made her cower. The people would never forget her now. They were in ecstasy. She ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... love, there is no such thing as owing between them Waited serenely for the certain disasters to enthrone her What will be thought of me? not a small matter to any of us When testy old gentlemen could commit slaughter with ecstasy Why, he'll snap your head off ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... her love, who sways Her breast, as moon the tide, Whose breath is incense—Ah, again To see him softly glide Before the grave god-idol's gaze Of inward ecstasy, To watch the great bell boom ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... hummed around me, indistinct, Vague, meaningless—seemed to resolve themselves Into a language I could understand; I felt my frame pervaded by a glow That seemed to thaw my marble into flesh; Its cold, hard substance throbbed with active life, My limbs grew supple, and I moved—I lived! Lived in the ecstasy of a new-born life! Lived in the love of him that fashioned me! Lived in a thousand ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... the thrill of passion in the poet's mystic book And I've lingered in delight to catch the rhythm of the brook; I've felt the ecstasy that comes when prima donnas reach For upper C and hold it in a long, melodious screech. And yet the charm of all these blissful memories fades away As I think upon the fortune that befell the other day, As I bring to recollection, with a joyous, wistful sigh, That I ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... such recreations would soon be developed. The writer has seen young boys, of eight and ten years of age, gathering and cleaning shells from rivers, and collecting plants, and mineralogical specimens, with a delight, bordering on ecstasy; and there are few, if any, who, by proper influences, would not find this a source of ceaseless ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
