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More "Magician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... got back to Miss Matty's I really did begin to think that Mr Peter might be thinking of Mrs Jamieson for a wife, and I was as unhappy as Miss Pole about it. He had the proof sheet of a great placard in his hand. "Signor Brunoni, Magician to the King of Delhi, the Rajah of Oude, and the great Lama of Thibet," &c. &c., was going to "perform in Cranford for one night only," the very next night; and Miss Matty, exultant, showed me a letter from the Gordons, promising to ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the window. "Who is the magician? Name him! I will have him thrown into the carceres. We'll see whether the charms he sells so cheap are any good! Or is he a Christian?" ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... the Queensland border country a dillee bag full of unclaimed Doowees. The wirreenun who has charge of this is one of the most feared of wirreenuns; he is a great magician, who, with his wonder-working glassy stones, can conjure up visions of the old fleshly habitations of the ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... madman who ran about the desolate wilds uttering strange and terrible things, who was wrapped within and without in torments of flame, who refrained from crime and death only because vengeance would thus be cheaply satisfied, could hardly be the boy of yesterday. Was sin such a magician that in a day it could evolve out of merry Horace and innocent Sonia two such wretches? The wretch Sonia had proved her capacity for evil; the wretch Horace felt his capabilities for crime and rejoiced in them. He must live to punish. A sudden fear came upon him that his ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... ability to draw living men—was but incidental and an instrument; who but took the tragedy of life by the way, as he went to set forth the whole story of the soul; never losing sight of Karma, and that man is his own adverse destiny; finishing all with the triumph of the soul, the Magician, in The Tempest. And I count him less than that Blind Titan in Bardism, who, setting out to justify the ways of God to men, did verily justify the ways of fate to the Soul; and showed the old, old truth, so dear to the Celtic ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the poor child's funeral from a distance. Ah, that Distance! What a magician for conjuring up scenes of joy or sorrow, smoothing all asperities, reconciling all incongruities, veiling all absurdness, softening every coarseness, doubling every effect by the influence of the imagination. ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... harmless wand, While Moses held it in his hand; But, soon as e'er he laid it down, Twas a devouring serpent grown. Our great magician, Hamet Sid, Reverses what the prophet did: His rod was honest English wood, That senseless in a corner stood, Till metamorphos'd by his grasp, It grew an all-devouring asp; Would hiss, and sting, and roll, and twist. By the mere virtue of his fist: But, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... others believed that in bright fairy land The mighty magician was living— That newness of life to worn heart and weak hand, Soft winds and pure waters were giving; That back to the region of heather and pine Would he come unimpaired by old ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... hours the Spanish commandant sank under his wounds and the garrison surrendered. Daunted by a feat which every one regarded as little short of a miracle, the castle and monastery of St. Vincent, together with another fort near it, capitulated at the magician's first summons, and left him in complete possession of the anchorage to water ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... Magician Thought, informed of Love, Hath fixed her on the air— Oh, Love and I laughed down the fates And ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... not understand his words, but their tone was sufficient command; besides there was Yussufs pistol, which acted like a magician's ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... was nothing to read, nothing to do, nothing to hear, and nothing to see. I was steeped in nothing. And as the senses were unexercised, thought worked on memory till the brain seemed gnawing itself, as a shipwrecked man might assuage his thirst at his own veins. Then imagination, the magician, lovely in weal but terrible in woe, began to weave his spell, and visions arose of dear loved ones agonising beyond the prison walls, to whom my heart yearned through the dividing space with an intense passion that seemed as though its potency might almost annihilate our barriers. ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... that of Mr. Baring-Gould in his "Curious Myths of the Middle Ages." The literature, too, of the past is rich in allusions to this piece of superstition, and Swift in his "Virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician's Rod" ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... think your praying helped to make it happen!" Mr. Leimberg drew Carmencita's hand farther through his arm, and his lips twisted in contemptuous pity. "You think there is a magician up—oh, somewhere, who makes things ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... of late to every passing thought With finest change (might I but half as well So write) the pale magician of the bow, Who brought from Italy the tales, made true, Of Grecian lyres; and on his sphery hand, Loading the air with dumb expectancy, Suspended, ere it fell, a ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... look over the old man's withered face. "I do know where I did leave it," he said; "but I put it not on again. The friend I have to my counsel did bid me put it on, and I did obey him, for he is a magician. But I like it not, and I will wear it no more. Why, look thou," he continued earnestly. "When I wear it I must remain with the young lord, and be not free to consort with other men, and see and hear all that goeth on. Wherefore I ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... packing-room was always littered with straw and excelsior dug from hogsheads and great crates. Aloysius lorded it over a small red-headed satellite who disappeared inside barrels and dived head first into huge boxes, coming up again with a lamp, or a doll, or a piece of glassware, like a magician. Fanny, perched on an overturned box, used to watch him, fascinated, while he laboriously completed a water set, or a tea set. A preliminary dive would bring up the first of a half dozen related pieces, ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... last his old love of travelling awoke in him. He did not feel satisfied to have seen wonderful nations and animals merely passing through a show box, but wanted to see them in living reality; but how was he to get by the little magician? On foot he knew it was impossible, but thought he might succeed on a fleet horse. So he went to his friend Conrad, and offered him the apple which could never be eaten, for his good cantering horse. Most boys are fond of red apples, but Conrad cared ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... finally triumph. This advice, unaccompanied as it was by any explanation, redoubled the curiosity of the people, and the belief gained ground that it was not merely one or two nuns who were possessed of devils, but the whole sisterhood. It was not very long before the name of the magician who had worked this wonder began to be mentioned quite openly: Satan, it was said, had drawn Urbain Grandier into his power, through his pride. Urbain had entered into a pact with the Evil Spirit by which he had sold him his soul in return for being made ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... sentences from the Koran, which the Mahommedan priests write on scraps of paper and sell to the natives, who believe that they possess extraordinary virtues. They indeed consider the art of writing as bordering on magic; and it is not in the doctrines of the Prophet, but in the arts of the magician that their confidence ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... the jestress to go. "Vrai Dieu!" that person had exclaimed. "If what the dwarf said be true? To cross the king!—and yet," he had added cynically, "it sounds most unlike. Did Aladdin flee from the genii of the lamp? Such a magician is Francis. Chateaux, gardens—'tis clearly an invention of Triboulet's!" And the fallacy of this conclusion the duke's plaisant had not ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Herrick's fairy world is an immeasurable distance from that of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Puck and Titania are of finer breath than Herrick's little folk, who may be said to have Devonshire manners and to live in a miniature England of their own. Like the magician who summons them from nowhere, they are fond of color and perfume and substantial feasts, and indulge in heavy draughts—from the cups of morning-glories. In the tiny sphere they inhabit everything is marvelously adapted to their requirement; nothing ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... propitiate Satan and receive his power, he strikes the drum with a hammer made of the reindeer's horn, not so much to procure a sound as to set the index in motion with all its little chains, that it may move over the figures, and point to whatever gives the required answer. At the same time the magician murmurs conjurations, springs sometimes up from the ground, screams, laughs, dances, reels, becomes black in the face, foams, twists his eyes, and falls to the ground at last in an ecstasy, dragging the ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... colours, makes life flow; and her thoughts recurred in wonderment to the behaviour of Constantia Durham. That was Laetitia's manner of taking up her weakness once more. She could almost have reviled the woman who had given this beneficent magician, this pathetic exile, of the aristocratic sunburned visage and deeply scrutinizing eyes, cause for grief. How deeply his eyes could read! The starveling of patience awoke to the idea of a feast. The ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in his wanderings he was taken and sold as a slave, and his master, who was a wicked magician, demanded that he go out in search of a ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... own big battle-ax, if any knight will agree to abide a blow in return. After some natural consternation and a fine speech by Arthur, Gawain accepts the challenge, takes the battle-ax, and with one blow sends the giant's head rolling through the hall. The Green Knight, who is evidently a terrible magician, picks up his head and mounts his horse. He holds out his head and the ghastly lips speak, warning Gawain to be faithful to his promise and to seek through the world till he finds the Green Chapel. There, on next New Year's day, the Green Knight will meet him and return ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... was indeed very young for a war magician, and he felt not a little pride on account of it. Assuming a self-satisfied and important air, he turned to his nephew ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... their return, the spirit directing his course towards Innsprueck, to seize upon the magician who had banished him from that city. Now Paracelsus trembled for the consequences which his releasing the Evil One would entail upon him who had conjured him into the tree, and bethought how he might rescue him. When they arrived once more at the fir-tree, he asked the ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... for they were all ruined, poor folk, with nothing to look forward to but starvation until long months hence the harvest came again for those who would live to gather it. Also they were convinced that we, the white magician and the prophet of their enemy the Child, had brought this disaster on them. Had it not been for the escort I believe they would have fallen on us and torn us to pieces. Considering them I understood ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... are now innumerable, each more tempting than the other; but affection turns back to the old red and white, in forty-eight volumes, wherein one first fell under the magician's spell. Thackeray, for some reason I cannot recall, unless it were a prejudice in our home, I did not read in youth, but since then I have never escaped from the fascination of Vanity Fair and The Newcomes, and another ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... reputation of being a bold and wicked wizard. He had been born in Worcester, and trained in the apothecary's business, but, tempted by the prospect of securing great wealth at a minimum of trouble, he had turned alchemist and magician. It was rumored that on at least one occasion he had disinterred a freshly buried corpse, and by his incantations had compelled the spirit of the dead man to speak to him. There was more truth in the report that the reason he always wore a close-fitting ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... played a shadow-dance that fixed us all in sound for ever. Each could tell the very notes meant for him; and as long as he played, we could not stop, but went on dancing and dancing after the music, just as the magician—I mean the musician—pleased. And he punished us well; for he nearly danced us all off our legs and out of shape into tired heaps of collapsed and palpitating darkness. We won't go near him for some time again, if we can only remember it. He had been very miserable all day, he was so poor; and we ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... emphasize his power to heal and protect. He is the great physician who knows all secret sources whence healing can be obtained for the maladies and ills caused by the demons and sorcerers. He is therefore in a peculiar sense 'the lord of the fates' of mankind, the chief exorciser, the all-wise magician of the gods, at whose command and under whose protection, the priest performs his symbolical acts. Not only does humanity turn to Ea: the gods, too, appeal to him in their distress. The eclipse of ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... between the believers in the natural and the supernatural—between gentlemen who are going to reward us in another world and those who propose to make life worth living here and now. In all ages the priest, the medicine man, the magician, the astrologer, in other words, gentlemen who have traded upon the fear and ignorance of their fellow-man in all countries—they have sought to, make their living out of others. There was a time when a God presided over every department ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... is too partial a Friend; so is Cowell: Spedding, I think, wouldn't care. So, as you were very kind about the other Plays, and love Calderon (which I doubt argues against me), I send you my Magician. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... began, opening fire without further parley, "the major has come to ask your aid in a case of singular and mystifying interest. You may or may not have heard of a music-hall artiste—a sort of conjuror and impersonator—called 'Zyco the Magician,' who was assisted in his illusions by a veiled but reputedly beautiful Turkish lady who was billed on the programmes and posters as 'Zuilika, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... first act would not seem to be made of pasteboard, and in which all the magic would not seem to be mere conjuring. In that world one might have beautiful landscapes and beautiful figures to suit them. There Sarostro would not be a stage magician, but a priest; from Papageno and the lovers to him would be only the change from Ming to Sung, which would seem no change at all. Chinese art, in fact, is the world of the magic flute, the world where silver bells hang on every flowering tree and the thickets are full of enchanted nightingales. ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... no use to us; we have a harper ourselves, Abhean, son of Bicelmos, that the Men of the Three Gods brought from the hills." "I am-a poet," he said then, "and a teller of tales." "That is no use to us; we have a teller of tales ourselves, Ere, son of Ethaman." "And I am a magician." "That is no use to us; we have plenty of magicians and people of power." "I am a physician," he said. "That is no use; we have Diancecht-for our physician." "Let me be a cup-bearer," he said. "We do not want you; we have nine cup-bearers ourselves." "I am a good worker in brass." "We have a ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... the magician; "so thou feelest sure thou art a greater wizard than I. Well, I challenge thee to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... period, which Austin had hung in in the centre of his room, flashed and glittered in the uncertain, light; and those two figures—one leaning against the mantelpiece, the other prowling restlessly to and fro as he talked, carrying a mahl-stick, which he waved ever and anon like the rod of a magician—completed the picture. It was a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes in the great world of art, a peep into Bohemia; and O, how much brighter a region it seemed to Clarissa than that well-regulated world in which she dined every ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... surrounded with difficulties, but fraught with clanger. Men looked with favour on the long-established supremacy of these great families, and their influence and power were therefore not easily broken. Bute sought to dissolve the spell; but the hand of Bute was not that of a magician, and he signally failed in the attempt. Broken, but not subdued, the aristocracy formed new parties, and acted upon new principles, all calculated, when dictated by the spirit of opposition, to annoy the sovereign, and disarrange ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... iniquity at our heels is sometimes an old sin in a new form. You remember the difficulty that Hiawatha had in hunting down Pau-puk Keewis. That mischievous magician assumed the form of a beaver, then that of a bird, then that of a serpent; and though each in turn was slain, the magician escaped and mocked his pursuer. Surely a parable of our strife with sin. We smite it in one form and it comes to life in another. One day a man is angry—clenched ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... fairy tale, "The Magician turned Mischief-maker," came out in 1877; and a short domestic tale called "A Bad Habit"; but Julie was unable to supply any long contributions this year, as in April her seven-years home at Aldershot was broken up in consequence of Major Ewing being ordered to Manchester, and her time was ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... reigned in the circle. Fagots were thrown on the fire; and the two captives, or spectators, stood as near it, the observed of all observers, as the heat rendered comfortable. It was just then that Crowsfeather and his companions first recognized the magician ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... was a new softness in her sweet eyes, a tone in her voice,—oh, it was always kind,—but now a tenderness that I must not hear. She would see my hands; could not believe that I was not seriously wounded; vowed that her aunt was a magician; "though I prayed long, long, last night, monsieur, that the wounds might heal quickly. They are really—no! look, Yvon! look! these terrible blisters! but, they are frightful, M. D'Arthenay. You—surely you should not have left your room, ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... this confusion, most congenial to his bold and scornful spirit, Catiline stalked, like the arch magician, to and fro, amid the wild and fantastic shapes of terror which he has himself evoked, marking the hopes of this one, as indications of an unknown, yet sure friend; and revelling in the terrors of that, as certain evidences of an enemy too weak ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... into English verse, and have just reached the beginning of the Fourth Georgic. He is, I may tell you, a poet, and the most marvellous that ever lived; so marvellous, that the middle ages mistook him for a magician. That any age is likely to mistake me—his translator—for a conjuror I think improbable. Nevertheless I do my best. And while translating I hold this book in my hand, not that I can see to read a line of ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... [1] When the magician (the Piper) had led the one hundred and thirty children out of the city, two hundred and seventy-two years before the gate ...
— The Rat Racket • David Henry Keller
... assumed the turban of the Prophet, and followed the laws of Islam, with their own consciences be the blame. Themselves sought out the bait; it was not flung to them by the Soldan. And when they shall hereafter be sentenced, as hypocrites, to the lowest gulf of hell, below Christian and Jew, magician and idolater, and condemned to eat the fruit of the tree Yacoun, which is the heads of demons, to themselves, not to the Soldan, shall their guilt and their punishment be attributed. Wherefore wear, without doubt or scruple, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Enid's fealty, had ruled his kingdom well and gone forth to "crown a happy life with a fair death" against the heathen of the Northern Sea, "fighting for the blameless King." The next Idyll relates how the venerable magician Merlin succumbs to the thrall of the wily harlot Vivien, decked in her rare robe of samite, and yields to her the charm which was his secret. 'Lancelot and Elaine' follows with its conflict between the virgin innocence of Elaine, the lily maid of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... consistently with the respect to one's auditors, to use upon this subject terms either of mystification or of obscure or indirect allusion. The clouds have been dispelled; the DARKNESS VISIBLE has been cleared away; and the Great Unknown—the minstrel of our native land—the mighty magician who has rolled back the current of time, and conjured up before our living senses the men and the manners of days which have long passed away—stands revealed to the hearts and the eyes of his affectionate and admiring countrymen. If he himself ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... bless you, no less. That is, he said he was a sea-captain; but he talked French like a Parisian, and quoted Shakespeare like Mr. Burke or Dr. Johnson. He may have been M. Caron de Beaumarchais, for I never saw him, or a soothsayer, or Cagliostro the magician, for he guessed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... age record as facts, a material living agency is always required. On the Continent you will find still magicians who assert that they can raise spirits. Assume for the moment that they assert truly, still the living material form of the magician is present; and he is the material agency by which, from some constitutional peculiarities, certain strange phenomena are represented to your ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... them protective charms, and satisfy that desire which is so prevalent among them, of searching into futurity. ***** When any of the people are ill, the person who is invested with this triple character of doctor, priest, and magician, sits by the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... under-currents. Whether they are all even seen now-a-days it is difficult to determine, but they must at one time have either shown themselves willingly, or been dragged from their hiding-places by some powerful magician, for they are one and all described. They are dwarfs, and correspond to the Scottish conception of kelpies or fairies. They are wicked and malevolent beings, and are never credited with a good or generous action. Whatever they possess they keep, and greedily seize upon any one who comes within ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... it," said my canal-digger, "that the Grand Monarch was a bit of a magician. The depth of what I may call his High-Church sentiment, which at last proved so edifying to the Maintenon, has never convinced them that he wasn't a trifle in league with the devil. At the foot of his praying-chair was always chained a little ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... doctor has much to tell us concerning two sisters in Lucifer who have long been at daggers drawn, and considering their supernatural attributes, it is incomprehensible in a high degree that they have not destroyed one another like the Magician and the Princess of a more credible narrative of wonders in the "Arabian Nights." Diana Vaughan, much heard and little seen, has since become famous by her conversion to the Catholic faith. Honoured with her acquaintance for a considerable period, the doctor invariably testifies ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... days of the week, birds and beasts, colours, herbs, and precious stones—all, according to old-time occult philosophy, are connected by the sympathetic relation believed to run through all creation, the knowledge of which was essential to the magician; as well, also, the chief portions of the human body, for man, as we have seen, was believed to be a microcosm—a universe in miniature. I have dealt with this matter and exhibited some of the supposed correspondences in "The Belief in ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... with him at Mr. Allan Ramsay's, with Lord Graham[1161] and some other company. We talked of Shakspeare's witches. JOHNSON. 'They are beings of his own creation; they are a compound of malignity and meanness, without any abilities; and are quite different from the Italian magician. King James says in his Daemonology, 'Magicians command the devils: witches are their servants. The Italian magicians are elegant beings.' RAMSAY. 'Opera witches, not Drury-lane witches.' Johnson observed, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... commented the fair-haired boy of seventeen, sauntering into his sister's room and taking a somewhat insecure seat upon a fancy table, where, with hands in pockets, he regarded her quizzically. "Great Scott, what a turn out! You look like a magician in the midst of a magic circle. Are you going to witch the lot into newts and toads? Whence this thusness? You won't persuade me that it's a fit of neatness and you're actually tidying. Doesn't exactly ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... you are a magician you ought to change her into a nasty black spidah, to pay her back fo' shuttin' me up with them!" Lloyd was delighted with this new play. For the time it seemed as if she really were escaping from a castle prison. Faster and faster they went. Jonesy, ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... prophesied, by a pretended enchanter, that the Lady Dulcinea del Toboso could be freed from the enchantment under which a wicked magician had placed her, if Sancho would of his own free will give himself ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... magician Upon the morrow morn. "Mighty," was his petition, "Look not on me in scorn; But one last gaze elision, Lest I ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... freedom from the bad consequences which usually result from an act; as, the magician could eat fire ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... upon mount Sriparvata. She has now arrived at supernatural power by religious austerities. I have learnt the news about her from Kapala Kundala, the female pupil of a tremendous magician Aghorghanta, a seer and a wandering mendicant, but now residing amidst the neighbouring forest, who frequents the temple of the dreadful goddess Chamunda near the city cemetry." Avalokita remarks, "Madhava would be highly pleased if his early ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... which, as Ganymede was the lady Rosalind, he could so easily perform, he pretended he would bring to pass by the aid of magic, which he said he had learnt of an uncle who was a famous magician. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the monks, and merely consisted in the compilation of a series of bald annals locked up in bad Latin. It is true, Thomas of Ercildoune was a contemporary of Snorro's; but he is known to us more as a magician than as a man of letters; whereas histories, memoirs, romances, biographies, poetry, statistics, novels, calendars, specimens of almost every kind of composition, are to be found even among the meagre relics which have survived the literary decadence that supervened on the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... the abode of a great magician was kept in such constant distress by its fear of a cat that the magician, taking pity on it, turned it into a cat itself. Immediately it began to suffer from its fear of a dog, so the magician turned it into a dog. Then it began to suffer from fear of a tiger, and the magician turned it into ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent; but he had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone in England, the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew the sublime secret of believing by "the reason" what "the understanding" had been obliged to fling ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... called the Thundering legion, so far as this, that the rain which relieved the Emperor's army in the field, and which the Church ascribed to the prayers of the Christian soldiers, is by Dio Cassius attributed to an Egyptian magician, who obtained it by invoking Mercury and other spirits. This war had been the occasion of one of the first recognitions which the State had conceded to the oriental rites, though statesmen and emperors, as private men, had long taken part in them. The emperor Marcus had been urged by his fears ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... every man there are sudden transitions of feeling, which seem almost miraculous. At once, as if some magician had touched the heavens and the earth, the dark clouds melt into the air, the wind falls, and serenity succeeds the storm. The causes which produce these changes may have been long at work within us, but the changes themselves are instantaneous, and ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... I have spoken was on her finger. She had borrowed it of her brother; and a superior power rendered all other magic of no avail. A touch from Malagigi to prove the force of his spell awoke her, to the magician's consternation, with a great cry. She fled into the arms of her brother, whom it aroused; and, by the help of his sister's knowledge of enchantment, Argalia mastered and bound the magician. The book was then turned against him, and the place was suddenly filled ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... together. Well, while he was away, I found his absence a void. There was something wanting; Briarfield was duller. Of course, I had my usual occupations; still I missed him. As I sat by myself in the evenings, I used to feel a strange certainty of conviction I cannot describe, that if a magician or a genius had, at that moment, offered me Prince Ali's tube (you remember it in the 'Arabian Nights'?), and if, with its aid, I had been enabled to take a view of Robert—to see where he was, how occupied—I should have learned, in a startling manner, the width of ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... all others whom he would have selected for her own sake. A year ago he had looked upon her as a star entirely out of his own sphere, for he had the poorest of prospects for the future, but now, as by the stroke of a magician's wand, a fine position was almost assured, and he could approach Margot if not as an equal, still as a match whom nobody need disdain. Almost, but not ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... I don't rank him as a magician, or sorcerer; nothing like that. I'd rather think that he's merely in possession of a scientific secret, no more wonderful in itself than, say, wireless. He's merely got hold of it in advance ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... half marble half man, continued his history to the sultan thus: After this cruel magician, unworthy of the name of a queen, had metamorphosed me thus, and brought me into this hall by another enchantment, she destroyed my capital, which was very flourishing and full of people; she abolished the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... this a regular Chanson de Geste (in all but "Family" connection), the Fuerres de Gadres, a poem of several thousand lines. But the most generally popular (though sometimes squabbled over) parts of the story, were the supposed perversion of Olympias, not by the God Ammon but by the magician-king Nectanabus personating the God and becoming thereby father of the Hero; the Indian and some other real campaigns (the actual conquest of Persia was very slightly treated), and, far above all, the pure Oriental wonder-tales ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... father, a very great magician. He has known how to render labor pleasant and attractive. As for the pleasure, over and above good wages, he accords to us a portion of his profits according to our deserts; whence you may judge of the eagerness ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... friend and pupil, was in search of the best judicial definition of treason within the meaning of the Constitution, he selected this sentence from the case of Bollmann and Swartwout and passed by the elaborate opinion in Burr's case in significant silence. But reputation is a great magician in transmuting heresy into accepted teaching. Posthumously Marshall's opinion has attained a rank and authority with the legal profession that it never enjoyed in his own time. Regarding it, therefore, as today established doctrine, we may say that it ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... at the approaching men with fascinated eyes, although she saw but one, the towering magician who had reared this fairy palace. She saw Ames lead his companion to the door of the little waiting room at their right, and heard the congressman ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... her grand ideal of her mysterious benefactor. If she tried to make in her mind a picture of him or her, it ended by being something glittering and strange—not at all like a real person, but bearing resemblance to a sort of Eastern magician, with long robes and a wand. And when she fell asleep, beneath the soft white blanket, she dreamed all night of this magnificent personage, and talked to him in Hindustani, and ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... albinoes are not uncommon; nor are the children put to death, as by the Ashantis. Both races cut the boss from hunchbacks after decease, and 'make fetish' over it to free the future family from similar distortion. Our villagers told us strange tales of a magician near Assini who can decapitate a man and restore him to life, and who lately had placed a dog's head on a boy's body. Who can 'doubt the ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... in a new home, the house became transformed as if a magician of the Arabian Nights had touched it with his wand. There was not a dark or gloomy corner to be seen. Lights blazed everywhere. The rarest pictures and choicest furniture were to be seen. Everything was ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... as if a magician had waved his wand over it. The streets swarmed with people. Farmers' vehicles of every description added to the confusion, and Roland frowned as he noticed how badly organized had been the preparations for coping with this sudden influx of food, but ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... the Magi in connection with their occult "wonder working," we must turn to the dictionaries, where we will see that the word "Magic" is derived from the title "Magi;" the word "Magician" having been originally "Magian", which means "one of the Magi." Webster defines the word "Magic" as follows: "The hidden wisdom supposed to be possessed by the Magi; relating to the occult powers of ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... one of the earliest of these fables, and remained a great favorite with the Germans, being finally immortalized by Goethe. The same author has made us familiar with a personage who figures in an interesting legend of the fifteenth century. Doctor Faust, or Faustus, is a magician who by unlawful arts gains a mastery over nature. This legend became the foundation of a number of stories and dramas, and was put into verse by ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... course, the priest and the magician ruled the field. But today, as I examine this "Book of Common Prayer", I discover that there is at least one spot out of which he has been cleared entirely; there appears no prayer to planets to stand still, or to comets to go away. The "Church of Good Society" has discovered astronomy! But if any ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... writers," and thinks it fortunate that Shakspere was unacquainted with classical rules. The critic had evidently made no attempt to define the influence of particular writers upon Shakspere. His criticism is at some points purely conventional, as for instance when he calls the poet "that powerful magician, whose art could fascinate us even by means of deformity itself "; but on the whole Scott seems to write about Shakspere in a very reasonable and ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... of a new thing in response to a sense of need. The very need itself creates, working through man as its agent. This truth is illustrated vividly by the miracles of modern invention. The hand of man unaided was not able to cope with his expanding opportunities; the giant steam and the magician electricity came at his call to work their wonders. The plow and scythe of the New England colonist on his little farm were metamorphosed into the colossal steam-driven shapes, in which machinery seems transmuted into intelligence, as he moved to the conquest ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... and sex. The Rhymer of Ercildoune was probably only a man more learned and far-seeing than others of his time. His reputation for Second Sight may rest upon a basis similar to that which led the mediaeval mind to dub Virgil a magician, and to recognise the wizard in Sir Michael Scott, the grave ambassador and counsellor of kings, and, at a later date, enabled the profane vulgar to discover a baronet of Gordonstoun to be a warlock, for ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... unthinkingly. In that silent hour Nature had drawn him into her wide embrace, lulling him with a mother's gentleness; and now, in the moment of waking, it seemed that again the same beneficent agency was dispensing love and favor, for he opened his eyes upon a changed world. A magician's wand had been waved over the city during his hours of sleep; the mist and oppression of the night had disappeared with the darkness. Paris was under ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... of "getting ugly"; and no disease is more difficult to cure. I said authors; but indeed I had a side eye to one author in particular, with whose works I am very well acquainted, though I cannot read them, and who has spent many vigils in this cause, sitting beside his ailing puppets and (like a magician) wearying his art to restore them to youth and beauty. There are others who ride too high for these misfortunes. Who doubts the loveliness of Rosalind? Arden itself was not more lovely. Who ever questioned the perennial charm of Rose Jocelyn, Lucy Desborough, or Clara Middleton? fair women ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Very frequently they were the physicians to royal personages. Zedkias, for instance, was the physician to Louis the Pious and later to his son Charles the Bald. His reputation as a physician was great enough to give him the popular estimation of a magician, but it did not save him from the accusation of having poisoned Charles when that monarch died suddenly. There seem to be no good grounds, however, for the accusation. There were a number of schools of medicine, in Sicily and the southern part of Italy, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... would be dealt with, and the responsibility for all things was on other and broader shoulders. With the revival of trade, and the removal of responsibilities and burdens, came time to think and to talk. The wave of the magician's wand looked so very simple that the price began to seem heavy. The eaten bread was forgotten. The dangers and difficulties that were past were of small account now that they were past; and so the men who had remained passive, and recorded formal ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... happiest with the literary character. Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is the true parent of genius. In all ages solitude has been called for—has been flown to. No considerable work was ever composed till its author, like an ancient magician, first retired to the grove, or to the closet, to invocate. When genius languishes in an irksome solitude among crowds, that is the moment to fly into seclusion and meditation. There is a society in the deepest solitude; in all the men ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... now I'm making one for the King. He saw this and had a lot of bamboo sticks put up all over the town, without any underground connections, and couldn't make out why the water wouldn't spurt out of them. And because mine spurts, he thinks I'm a magician." ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... that princely present made to them by the fairy Orlanda. And inside were narratives of bloody fights, of the building and besieging of fortresses, of the terrible swordthrusts exchanged by Roland and Renaud, who was at last about to free the Holy Land, without mentioning the tales of Maugis the Magician and his marvellous enchantments, and the Princess Clarisse, the King of Aquitaine's sister, who was more lovely than sunlight. Her imagination fired by such stories as these, Bernadette often found it difficult to get to sleep; and this was ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... move too slowly. Even thus Prospero is not quite satisfied. During his subsequent dialogue with Ariel, we are to suppose that Ferdinand, in conversing apart with Miranda, betrays more impassioned ardor than the wise magician altogether approves. The prince's caresses have not been unobserved; and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... fates could be further consulted, however, the big bell clanged for preparation, and the magician was obliged to pocket her cards, hurry downstairs, get out her lesson books, and write a piece of French translation, while the inquirers into her mysteries also separated, some to practise piano or ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... to notice something. An expression in our faces as we drift by the fastidious ballyhoos of the shop windows. We are waiting for something—actors walking up and down in the wings waiting for their cues to go on. This is intelligible. This magician of a street has created the illusion in our heads that there are adventure ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... and Arden started to return to Alba. Word came to the king that the company he was in pursuit of were gone. The king then sent for Duanan Gacha Druid, the best magician he had, and he spoke to him as follows:—"Much wealth have I expended on you, Duanan Gacha Druid, to give schooling and learning and magic mystery to you, if these people get away from me today without care, without consideration or regard for me, without ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... drawn from the adventures of Philautus in London, who, deeply smitten with the charms of a young English lady, consults a sorcerer in order to obtain a philtre that will inspire love. Here was an excellent opportunity, which the magician does not fail to seize, of talking about serpents and toads. But, after a long enumeration of the bones, stones, and livers of animals that cause love, the alchemist, urged by Philautus, ends by confessing that the best ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... seat of an ancient civilization which was in its power many centuries before Christ. The changes that have passed over the earth are far more wonderful than any ascribed to the wand of the magician. Nations have come and gone, and the land of the Pharaohs has become an inheritance for strangers; new sciences have enriched human life, and the fair structure has arisen on the ruins of the past. Many centuries, with their burden of human hopes and fears, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Enkidu saw in his dream creatures who had been kings when they lived upon the earth, and shadowy beings offering roasted meat to Anu and Enlil, and cool drinks poured out from waterskins. In this House of Dust dwelt high priests, ministrants, the magician and the prophet, and the deities Etana, Sumukan, Eresh-kigal, Queen of the Earth, and Blitsri, who registered the deeds ...
— The Babylonian Story of the Deluge - as Told by Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh • E. A. Wallis Budge
... skin. He had another tongue than these dwarf men of the bush, and this Alvaro and I learnt when his suspicion of us gave way and he found that we wished not to alienate the tribe from his authority. . . . For the Spanisher had said: 'Their magician, because of his black magic, he alone hath the secret of the mine of stones like unto those of Golconda.' . . . Little did we fear his magic we who feared nothing in heaven or earth or in the waters beneath Alvaro and I, old freebooters of the ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... covered with blushes. Great, indeed, was the change which had come over that once proud spirit—change surprising to all, but as natural as any other of the thousand changes which are produced in the progress of moments by the arch-magician, Love. Heretofore, her song had disdained the ordinary topics of the youthful ballad-monger. She had uttered her apostrophes to the eagle, soaring through the black, billowy masses of the coming thunder-storm; to the lonely but lofty rock, lonely in its loftiness, which no foot travelled but her ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... assert that of the three types under discussion, the European, the Chinaman, and the Indian, the average European conjuror is the most skilled particularly at sleight-of-hand. He certainly excels in card manipulation which is seldom touched by the Oriental magician. In illusions he is beyond comparison, as many of our readers may certify who have seen the wonderful productions by Messrs. Maskelyn and Cooke, Devant, and their many followers. The gradual disappearance of a lady in evening dress, visibly, and in mid stage growing smaller and smaller ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... general more surprised than Massena, when pursuing his retreating foe through Portugal, in full anticipation of "driving the leopards into the sea," he suddenly saw before him the frowning lines of Torres Vedras, the great fortress which had sprung from earth, as it were, at the touch of a magician's wand? ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... to please the magician who has worked all these wonders.—Listen, my fat elephant, after dinner we will go to the play together. I am starving to ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... any of them could catch their breath he had kissed the baby, gripped Mrs. Wentworth's hand a second, and with a "S'long" to the others disappeared as though, Sis declared, a magician had waved his wand ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... understood his genius, and could make use of it, and was offered a place in the great, gay city, Mere Giraud formed an ambitious plan. He should take Laure and find her a position also; she had the fingers of a fair magician, and could embroider marvelously. So she trusted Laure to him, and the two bade farewell to St. Croix and departed together. A month passed, and then there came a letter containing good news. Valentin was doing well, and Laure also. She had found a place in a great family where ...
— Mere Girauds Little Daughter • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... friend, "the sweet Harp-String" (I give no more than his Irish name for fear of gaugers), has the science of unpacking the stubbornest heart, but then he supplies the potheen-makers with grain from his own fields. Besides, he is descended from a noted Gaelic magician who raised the "dhoul" in Great Eliza's century, and he has a kind of prescriptive right to hear tell of all kind of other-world creatures. They are almost relations of his, if all people say concerning the parentage ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... of mortal passion, together they are as soul and body, one being; separate them, and the body without the soul is a monster, the soul without the body is no longer human, nor earthly, nor real to us at all, though still divine. Love is the world's maker, master and destroyer, the magician whose word can change water to blood, and blood to fire, the dove to a serpent, and the serpent to a dove—ay, and can make of that same dove an eagle, with an eagle's beak, and talons, and air-cleaving wing-stroke. Love is the spirit of life and the angel of death. He speaks, and ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... body should be of a character to admit of the formation of currents in its substance: it must, in other words, be a conductor of electricity. The higher the conducting power the more copious were the currents. He now passes from his little brass globe to the globe of the earth. He plays like a magician with the earth's magnetism. He sees the invisible lines along which its magnetic action is exerted and sweeping his wand across these lines evokes this new power. Placing a simple loop of wire round a ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... and Christian deception, the cunning advocates of regicide, the proud servants of the only salvation-dispensing Church!—there, with rage in their hearts, they meditated plans of vengeance against this criminal pope who had condemned them to a living death; who, like a wicked magician, had changed their sacred college into an open grave! He had killed them, and he, ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... except his sister was in the secret. Eve, like the thrifty housekeeper and divine magician that she was, conjured up a few louis d'or from her savings to buy thin shoes for Lucien of the best shoemaker in Angouleme, and an entirely new suit of clothes from the most renowned tailor. She made a frill for his best shirt, and washed ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... you verbatim. It was worth it. But I cannot; and the most I can do is to try to convey to you the sense of that scene—we three tanned, weather-beaten outlanders listening open-mouthed to the keen, competent, self-assured magician who before our eyes spun his glittering fabric. Talbot Ward had seized upon the varied possibilities of the new city. The earnings on his first scheme—the ship storehouses, and the rental of the brick building ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... country, but shut himself up in his palace, seeking by the silliest auguries to ascertain the issue of the war. The most notable of these vaticinations was "the Augury of the Hogs", which he practised by the advice of a certain Jewish magician. He shut up in separate pens three batches of hogs, each batch consisting of ten. One batch was labelled "Romans" (meaning the Latin-speaking inhabitants of Italy), another "Goths", and the third "Soldiers of the Emperor". They were all ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... herself to think that she had been so genuinely wrapped in dreams as to let so much time slip by unheeded. Together they went down the moonlit field, where the arishmows seemed like the pavilions of a long-dead Arthurian host conjured up by some magician's spells. In the last field before the moor Ishmael pulled the corn out lavishly as a throne for her and ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... be? Not Turk, I suppose, or Magician?—Quarrelling?—Parnellite?—Impertinence? Shall we give it up? No, they like us to guess, poor things; and besides, if we don't, they'll do another; and it is getting so late, and such a long drive home. Oh, they're all coming ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... ['The prophet said,] "Whoever attains to the knowledge of astrology for any other explanation than the three aforementioned, then verily he has attained to a branch of magic. An astrologer is a magician, and a magician is a necromancer, and a ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... scarab, scarabaeus[obs3]; sudarium[obs3], triskelion, veronica, wishbone; swastika, fylfot[obs3], gammadion[obs3]. wand, caduceus, rod, divining rod, lamp of Aladdin[obs3]; wishing-cap, Fortunatus's cap. 994. Sorcerer.— N. sorcerer, magician; thaumaturgist[obs3], theurgist; conjuror, necromancer, seer, wizard, witch; hoodoo, voodoo; fairy &c. 980; lamia[obs3], hag. warlock, charmer, exorcist, mage[obs3]; cunning man, medicine man; Shaman, figure flinger, ecstatica[obs3]; medium, clairvoyant, fortune teller; mesmerist; deus ex machina[Lat]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... he had taught Marco quite simply from his childhood. It was this: he himself—Marco, with the strong boy-body, the thick mat of black hair, and the patched clothes—was the magician. He held and waved his wand himself—and his wand was his own Thought. When special privation or anxiety beset them, it was their rule to say, "What will it be best to think about first?" which was Marco's reason for saying it to himself ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sultan said again to his daughter, "How do you know that this prince has been transformed by enchantments into an ape?" "Sir," replied the Lady of Beauty, "your majesty may remember that when I was past my infancy I had an old lady who waited on me; she was a most expert magician, and taught me seventy rules of magic, by virtue of which I can, in the twinkling of an eye, transport your capital into the midst of the sea, or beyond mount Caucasus. By this science I know all enchanted persons at first ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... Jerome peacefully at work in his panelled study, translating the Bible, while the blessed sun shines in and the lion and the little bear doze contentedly, is not Luther foretold? But the German study, {685} that magician's laboratory that has produced so much of good, has also often been the alembic of brooding and despair. More than ever before at the opening of the century men felt the vast promises and the vast oppression of thought. New science had burst the old bonds ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... know that she was still a living-breathing girl; all seemed as unreal as though she had slipped away into a magician's world. ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... 1846. This spot is not far from Whooping Boy's Hollow, so named because of a boy who was killed by Indians, and because the rubbing of two trees there in a storm gave forth a noise like crying. An older legend has it that this noise is the angry voice of the magician who tried to slay Wyandank, the "Washington of the Montauks," who is buried on the east end of the island. Often he led his men into battle, sounding the warwhoop, copied from the scream of the eagle, so ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... launched into the immensity of time and space as you read the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you hung as if suspended by a magician's wand over the illimitable abyss of the past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to civilizations before the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and layer upon layer of the quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of the Ural range, the soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... tongues paralyzed. They were gazing straight into his shining eyes. Suddenly he turned his head for a quick, startled glance over his shoulder. The next instant he was gone, vanishing in the blackness that hung behind him like the magician's curtain in a theatre. They heard rapid footsteps on the veranda, the crash of a chair overturned, then a loud shout, and again the sound of flying footsteps across the brick-paved terrace. Another shout, and still another, ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... stature and in power. In one of his villages was a pit, six feet deep and as wide as a hogshead, filled with treasure gathered from Spanish wrecks on adjacent reefs and keys. The monarch was a priest, too, and a magician, with power over the elements. Each year he withdrew from the public gaze to hold converse in secret with supernal or infernal powers; and each year he sacrificed to his gods one of the Spaniards whom the fortune of the sea ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... is just splendid! I have nothing to do but sit around and watch you set the hen and hatch out those big broods and make my living for me. Don't you wish you had somebody to do the same for you?—a magician who can turn steel add copper and Brooklyn gas into gold. I mean to raise your wages again—I begin to feel that I can ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... that the hull thing wuz to show forth the powers of electricity. I thought that that wuz Electricity on top of that throne, and the woman in front wuz a-gazin' out fur ahead, a-tryin' to catch sight of that most wondrous New World that that strange Magician is a-goin' to sail us into. And I didn't wonder that she wuz a-gazin' ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... trouble was this. In an old red stone castle, the turrets of which were just visible above the trees on the other side of the stream, there lived a magician who had long had his eye upon the beautiful maiden who was the young man's promised bride. To win her he appeared as a wealthy middle-aged suitor, ready to lay all his riches at her feet, his real character being carefully concealed; but all his arts had been plied in vain; ...
— The Spectacle Man - A Story of the Missing Bridge • Mary F. Leonard
... hands of the potter. They could only conceive of failure as another expression for inadequate will. Is not this one of the notes of Byron's Ode on the Fall of Bonaparte? 'L'audace, l'audace, et toujours l'audace.' If Danton could have read Byron, he would have felt as one in front of a magician's glass. Every passion and fit, from the bloody days of September down to the gloomy walks by the banks of the Aube, and the prison-cry that 'it were better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men,' would have found itself there. It is true that in ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... attentively, I was able to distinguish these words: "We are powerless to resist that vile Siddha whenever he chooses to command us; could not some person be found powerful enough to counteract the designs of that vile magician?" ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... February day of the year 1760, and a young Tony, newly of age, and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack merchantman of old Bracknell's fleet, felt his heart leap up as the distant city trembled into shape. Venice! The name, since childhood, had been a magician's wand to him. In the hall of the old Bracknell house at Salem there hung a series of yellowing prints which Uncle Richard Saulsbee had brought home from one of his long voyages: views of heathen mosques and palaces, of the Grand Turk's Seraglio, ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... body for the space of two years, so that none suspected but that she was still alive; for she did both speak and eat, though very sparingly; only she had a deep paleness on her countenance, which was the only sign of death. At length a Magician coming by where she was then in the company of many other virgins, as soon as he beheld her he said, "fair Maids, why keep you company with the dead Virgin whom you suppose to be alive?" when taking away the magic charm which was ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... Acts viii. 9. Verse 11 leads us to suppose that Simon the magician was already famous ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... is a great magician; he rules the very minds of his subjects; he makes them think as he pleases. If he has only one million dollars in his treasury and needs two, he has but to assure them that one dollar is worth two, and they believe him. If he has ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... employment of a "Fire Artist." Although seldom presenting it in his recent performances, Ching Ling Foo is a fire-eater of the highest type, refining the effect with the same subtle artistry that marks all the work of this super-magician. ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... the history of the gods. The words which the god had spoken in connection with some lucky incident would, it was thought, prove effective now in bringing good luck to the human supplicant—that is to say, the magician hoped through repeating the words of the god to exercise the magic power of the god. It was even possible, with the aid of the magical observances, partly to balk fate itself. Thus the person predestined through birth on an unlucky day to die of a serpent bite ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... regretful good-by to the summit, for it held me as by a magician's spell, I hastened down the steep incline of the cog-wheel road, past Windy Point, and turning to the right, descended across the green slope below the boulder region to the open, sunlit valley which I had visited on the previous afternoon. It ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... circumstances one day to her new friend, the devil immediately tempted her to go in person, and see what sort of a creature this new magician was. This enterprise was certainly very rash; but nothing was too rash for Miss Jennings, who was of opinion that a woman might despise appearances, provided she was in reality virtuous. Miss Price was all compliance, and thus having fixed upon this glorious resolution, they only thought of the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... it was quite sour, whereupon he objected:—"Such miracles as these are worthless since it leaves the fruit uneatable." Mochuda blessed the apples and they all became sweet as honey, and in punishment of his opposition the magician was deprived for a year of his eyesight. At the end of a year he came to Mochuda and did penance, whereupon he received his sight back again and he returned ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda
... the yarn the old woman was struck dumb; but when at length she found her voice she asked the girl what magician had helped her to do what no one had done before. But she got no answer, for the maiden was afraid of bringing trouble on ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... the end of that road in the sunset and the cathedral seen against the west, and the gilded Virgin half cast down, but incapable of losing dignity, and evening coming down over the marshes. They brought it back like a spell. Like two spells rather, that some magician had mixed. Picture some magician of old in his sombre wonderful, chamber wishing dreams to transport him far off to delectable valleys. He sits him down and writes out a spell on parchment, slowly and with effort of aged memory, though ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany
... anecdote was told of the great chief of the Cossacks, the celebrated Platoff. Pursued by the King of Naples, he was beating a retreat, when a ball reached one of the officers beside him, on which event the headman was so much irritated against his magician that he had him flogged in presence of all his hordes, reproaching him most bitterly because he had not turned away the balls by his witchcraft. This was plain evidence of the fact that he had more faith in his art ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Memoirs of Napoleon • David Widger
... standing forth in radiant relief against the darkness of the heavy, majestic forms surrounding it in a wide circle. This tomb in this light would be a palace meet for the gloomy rule of the king of the troop of demons conjured up by the power of a magician—if they have a ruler. But where am I wandering? 'The artist!' I hear you exclaim again, 'the artist! Instead of rushing forward and interposing, he stands studying the light and its effects in the royal tomb.' Yes, yes; I had come too late, too late—far too late! ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Pleasant magician that waves this wand! what curious people are walking in the chambers of your brain! What dreams are yours, and what cruel cuts this real world sometimes gives you! You have no right to be here, poor devil! You are somewhat misplanted; you belong to some sphere between earth and heaven, and not ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... it can, my medicines avail nothing: if your illness were really that of the body, you would have been restored to health long since; but if your indisposition has its source in the mind, my prescriptions cannot aid you. Seek a magician—that is my advice: he by his occult science may be enabled to discover the cause of your bad health, and ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... think the most striking and outstanding are to be seen in Clive Street and its environs. Looking back and contrasting the past with the present, it all seems so startling and wonderful as to suggest the idea that some genii or magician had descended upon the city and with a touch of his magic wand converted a very ordinary looking street, containing many mean, dilapidated looking dwellings, into a veritable avenue of palaces, and for ever sweeping away blots and ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... Magic is a theological argument, disguised in the form of a play, that relies for its effects on clever conversation, the moving of pictures, and a mysterious person who may have been a conjurer and may have also been a magician. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... silken raiment, In the waters of Pohyola, There beheld the chips and splinters, Carried by the winds and waters. In a bag the chips she gathered, Took them to the ancient court-yard, There to make enchanted arrows, Arrows for the great magician, There to shape them into weapons, Weapons for the skilful archer, Since the mighty oak has fallen, Now has lost its hundred branches, That the North may see the sunshine, See the gentle gleam of moonlight, That the clouds may keep ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... theology. As Macaulay said, this time it was a theological treatise, not an essay upon important questions of government; and the intrepid reviewer rightly sought a more fitting subject for his magician's gifts in the dramatists of the Restoration. Newman said of it, 'Gladstone's book is not open to the objections I feared; it is doctrinaire, and (I think) somewhat self-confident; ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... storks on the palace roof looked at each other, and Caliph Chasid said, 'Can you guess now, Grand Vizier, why I have been enchanted? This Mirza is the son of my deadly enemy, the mighty magician Kaschnur, who in an evil moment vowed vengeance on me. Still I will not despair! Come with me, my faithful friend; we will go to the grave of the Prophet, and perhaps at that sacred spot the spell ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... bears with it hopes that have been outlived, whether fulfilled or disappointed. One by one the lights that we kindle in our hall flicker out, and death quenches the last of them. But there is one light that burns on clear through the article of death, like the lamp in the magician's tomb. 'The righteous hath hope in his death.' We can each settle for ourselves whether we shall carry that radiant angel with her white wings into the great darkness, or shall sadly part with her before we part with life. To the earthly soul that last earthly hour is a black wall beyond ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Greif had believed that the scientist was raving mad. Up to the moment when the telegram had arrived, he had been convinced that Rex was a cheat, who had accidentally learned certain facts connected with the Greifensteins and was attempting to play the magician by making an adroit use of what he knew. When brought suddenly face to face with a phenomenon he could not explain, Greif's reason ceased altogether to perform its functions. The news he had just received was startling, but the bewilderment caused ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... must tell you. A long time ago, on the bank of the river where there is water, at Gao, where my father was a prince, there was.... Well, one day, one feast day, there came from the interior of the country an old magician, dressed in skins and feathers, with a mask and a pointed head-dress, with castanets, and two serpents in a bag. On the village square, where all our people formed in a circle, he danced the boussadilla. I was in the first row, and because I had a necklace of pink tourmaline, ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... moments the trio remained kneeling and staring up at the King in absolute wonderment; for in a few brief words he had swept away, as by the touch of a magician's wand, the gathering feeling of jealous annoyance which was forming in each breast. Leoni was the first to find the use of his tongue; but it was in a hesitating way quite foreign to his usual ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... promised to hold. Through love they had sought each other, and now the fulfillment of that love had brought more than tenfold its promise to both. It was a royal love; a generous love and a rich one in its revelation. It was a magician that had touched life for them and changed it into a glory. In giving them to each other, it was moving them to the fullness of their own capabilities. Much to do in two little months; but ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... fire-bath in She, could not more completely have transmogrified him. His face brightened with youthfulness, his solitary forelock bushed out into a wavy and hyacinthine hirsute crop, his ancient and magician-like garments fell from him, his plumes expanded, until he looked more like "the herald Mercury" ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... restaurant was in itself a sufficient reminder that the overstrain had not been incurred for nothing. Electricity is the true "white magic" of the future; and here, with his pallid face and silver hair, sat the master magician—one of the great light-givers of the world. A light-giver, I think, in more than a merely material sense. The moral influence of the electric lamp, its effect upon the hygiene of the soul, has not yet been duly estimated. But even in a merely material sense, what has not the Edison ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... A modern magician to make the semblance of a human being, with two laths for legs, a pumpkin for a head, etc., of the rudest and most meagre materials. Then a tailor helps him to finish his work, and transforms this scarecrow into quite a fashionable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... able to tell just how hot or how cold it may be. And more wonderful still, he has fashioned other little tubes by which we are to tell when it is going to storm and when it will be fair weather. And I cannot begin to tell you all the wonderful appliances this magician has fashioned for our comfort and safety this winter, aided and abetted by his willing ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... touch, a consummate bloom, to which duty can never attain, and which is only attainable by love. All love's ministries are creative of loveliness. Wherever her finger rests, something exquisite is born. Love is a great magician: she transforms the desert into a garden, and she makes the ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... The innocent conjecture was soon, however, disabused; for on their drawing nearer they observed that faithless population gathered about "ANOTHER DISTINGUISHED FOREIGNER," with a remarkably long beard and a fierce pair of horns, who proclaimed himself a magician from beyond the land where the sun rose, and rejoiced in the name of Doctor Capricornus, A.V.G.T., and M.U.H.S., which the great learning of Herr Schwein interpreted by A Very Great Traveller, or Thief, and Member of the ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... believed to be a magician. An able naturalist, who happened to know something of the arcana of nature, was immediately suspected of magic. Even the learned themselves, who had not applied to natural philosophy, seem to have acted with the same feelings as the most ignorant; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... to Pilate, stands Herod, lazy and voluptuous. He, too, finds nothing of evil in Jesus, whom he supposes to be a clever magician. "Cause that this hall may become dark," he says, "or that this roll of paper, which is thy sentence of death, shall become a serpent." He receives Christ in good-natured expectancy, which changes to disgust when he answers him not a word. Herod pronounces him "dumb as a fish," and, ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... out of Judaism or the Jewish sects; in the later writers, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Hippolytus, that these schools owe most to the doctrines of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, etc.[330] But they all agree in this, that a definite personality, viz., Simon the Magician, must be regarded as the original source of the heresy. If we try it by these statements of the Church Fathers, we must see at once that the problem in this case is limited—certainly in a proper way. For after Gnosticism is seen to be the acute secularising of ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... of application is found in all the molecules of the body, and they produce pressures and slidings of a peculiar kind. But these forces are of a very limited magnitude; but it might nevertheless be of great interest to amplify them in a strong measure. Let us, for example, suppose that a magician has found a means of increasing the intensity of gravity tenfold in his laboratory. All the conditions of life would be modified to the extent of being unrecognizable. A living being borne in this space would remain ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... sun arise after the storm, like a prisoner released from dungeon and chains, again to look upon the faces of those he loved; and all nature put on a holiday garb to greet him. Every tree and bush was sparkling, as if with rapture. If a magician of superhuman power had waved his wand over the earth, it could not have been more changed. Long icicles were suspended from the fences and the overhanging roofs, and even the sheds looked brilliant and beautiful ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... for, unless he can break the charm which binds Ada, he must share her fate and be doomed to remain a stone for ever. Arindal, who until then has been using the dagger and the shield given him by the friendly magician, now makes use of an instrument—a lyre—which he has brought with him, and the meaning of which he had not yet understood. To the sounds of this instrument he now expresses his plaintive moans, his remorse, and his overpowering longing ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... diffidently by Washington. The pilot turned presently to "get his stern-marks," saw the lads and invited them in. Now their happiness was complete. This cosy little house, built entirely of glass and commanding a marvelous prospect in every direction was a magician's throne to them and their enjoyment of the place ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... gold a few small, scattered flakes of fleecy cloud that floated high over our mastheads. Then, all in a moment, the small, faintly- gleaming bit of land ahead became transformed, as it might be with a magician's wand, into a block of deepest, richest purple, bristling with rays of burning gold, a throbbing rim of molten gold swept into view from behind it, and in an instant it vanished amid a blinding blaze of sunlight that ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... at this picture of myself, which is much more like to the studious magician in the enchanted opera of Rinaldo; not but Twickenham has a romantic genteelness that would figure in a more luxurious climate. It was but yesterday that we had a new kind of auction-it was of the orange-trees and plants of your old acquaintance, Admiral Martin. It was one of the warm days of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... cried the magician, with a glance at his watch and an ear towards the open window. "The postman's knock from door to door down every street in town—house to house from one end of your British Islands to the other! A certain letter is without doubt being delivered at this very ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... saw the face of Hogarth, he started, muttering: "He has the diamonds back! God! is he a magician?" ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... The magician of M. Maillardet is also worthy of notice. We copy the following account of it from the Letters before mentioned of Dr. B., who derived his information principally ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... name a word meaning "magician" was formed, showing that these priests had gained the reputation of being dealers ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... the first speaker, "I'm all of a tremble! And to think that many times I have got this magician Urbain ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... himself among them, but to take him alive and bring him a prisoner to Pyrrhus's camp; and that then, after the battle was over, he should be subjected, they declared, to the most cruel and ignominious punishments, as a magician and an impostor. Decius sent back word, in reply, that Pyrrhus had no occasion to give himself any uneasiness in respect to the course which the Roman general would pursue in the approaching battle. The measure that he had referred to was one to which the Romans were not accustomed to resort ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... age? And is not this sufficient to prove, clearly and incontestibly prove, that she is dead? And yet here she is again, in all her primitive beauty and splendour! No, this surely can never be. However the author may succeed in his description, in painting reanimated nature, he is no magician, or if he is, he cannot ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... foibles of genius, for, notwithstanding all his fast life and many vices, Fox was hardly surpassed as a scholar, an orator, and a linguist; and, as a politician, Pitt himself—a life-long rival—frankly admitted that 'Fox was a magician, who laid a spell upon his hearers as long as the words ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... ago a beautiful little brown sparrow made her home in the garden of a certain great and renowned magician. She built her nest in the grass, and was content to hop and chirp about in the rose thicket, and to keep very ...
— Harper's Young People, October 12, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... by damnable Magician, Being cast illegally in prison, Love brings his Action on the Case. And lays it upon Hudibras. How he receives the Lady's Visit, And cunningly solicits his Suite, Which she defers; yet on Parole Redeems him ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... is not yet noon, hunger rages in us. The pancakes, the syrup, the toast and the other incidents of breakfast have disappeared the way the rabbit vanishes when the magician waves his hand. The horrid Polyphemus did not so crave his food. And as yet there is no comforting sniff from the kitchen. Scrubbing and other secular matters engage the farmer's wife. There is as yet not a faintest gurgle ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... of gold into the temperate regions, locking land and sea under tons of ice. Never the frost comes, and the snow deepens on the land, and the rivers and lakes are struck silent as if by a cruel magician's magic, but that this old fear returns, creeping like poison into the nerves, bowing down the heart and chilling the warm wheel of the blood. For the rodents and the digging people—even for the mighty grizzly himself—the season means nothing but the cold and the darkness of their underground lairs. ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... the boy, he became a great magician, or, as we in our age would call him, a man of science and wisdom, named Merlin. He lived long on the mountain, but when he went away with a friend, he placed all his treasures in a golden cauldron and hid them in a cave. He rolled a great stone over its mouth. Then with sod and earth ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... and lighter and loftier portion, where the light comes in, is but a space filched away from the roofs and leads, and jammed in in such a fashion that it would defy a magician to find it from without. We tried days and days and could not do it, and never did, albeit we can climb like cats and had an inkling where it was—until we put Julian within to shout aloud and guide us by his voice. It is so placed that none can get really nigh to those places where the ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... and man. To them alone was the will of God declared. They only could penetrate the future. And they alone predicted the future to those who sought of them therefor. In later days the name Magi became synonymous with sorcerer, magician, alchemist, &c.[24] ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... the doctor has much to tell us concerning two sisters in Lucifer who have long been at daggers drawn, and considering their supernatural attributes, it is incomprehensible in a high degree that they have not destroyed one another like the Magician and the Princess of a more credible narrative of wonders in the "Arabian Nights." Diana Vaughan, much heard and little seen, has since become famous by her conversion to the Catholic faith. Honoured with her acquaintance ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... through Portugal, in full anticipation of "driving the leopards into the sea," he suddenly saw before him the frowning lines of Torres Vedras, the great fortress which had sprung from earth, as it were, at the touch of a magician's wand? ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... coming thence, one who was fabled to have gathered together more knowledge, both of this world and of that other hidden one which was to them just as real, than any mortal man alive. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that Cardan should have been regarded rather as a magician than as a doctor, and in the Scotichronicon[146] it is recorded that the Primate was cured of a lingering asthma by the incantations of an astrologer named Cardan, from Milan. Cardan in his narrative speaks of Edinburgh ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... said the blacksmith blowing his nose. 'A nasty, wicked magician—he had a spite against the King, and he got at the Princess when she was playing ball in the garden, and now she's blind and deaf and dumb. ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... shootee wolf, turnee into man light away. Ha, ha, me allee same plenty smart man, likee magician." ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... at work in his panelled study, translating the Bible, while the blessed sun shines in and the lion and the little bear doze contentedly, is not Luther foretold? But the German study, {685} that magician's laboratory that has produced so much of good, has also often been the alembic of brooding and despair. More than ever before at the opening of the century men felt the vast promises and the vast oppression of thought. New science ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... sea of sleep walks white-robed Night; The breeze but the faint rustle of her drapery That calls the mist-made bark of dream From the cavern of the Unknown to sail to us, Laden with endless star-like fancies. And She! the magician, walks on and on Over the sapphire embankment of the sky Like a moving magnet drawing behind ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... and bold Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville is entirely in the vein of Rousseau's discourse on the superiority of primitive over civilised life. "Prodigious sibyl of the eighteenth century," cries Michelet, "the mighty magician Diderot! He breathed out one day a breath; lo, there sprang up a man—Rousseau."[87] It is hard to believe that such an astonishing genius for literature as Rousseau's could have lain concealed, after he had once inhaled the vivifying air of Paris. Yet the fire and inspiring energy ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... an ambitious lad who was quite a wonder at turning rapid cartwheels. Another did some creditable pole balancing. One old man wanted to serve as a magician. All had a chance, but their merit was not distinguished enough ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... course raise him, and invite him to cooperate in the business of photographing his own shining face. But we are not so sanguine as to expect that miracle, though almost as great wonders have been done by the power of this magician. But where is the "triple curse" with which, according to this authority, "that gravestone is weighted"? Quite another view of the inscription is given by Lord ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... deserve your confidence, Jeanne; but I am not a magician. But I will talk it over with"—and he hesitated—"with a young fellow who is, like myself, a Royalist, and in disguise. Luckily, we ran against each other the other day, and after a little conversation discovered each other. He, too, has relatives in prison, and will, I ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... a magician at whose touch the plainest features take on new aspects. Helen's face had never been plain. Even in its anguish it had produced in beholders the profound commiseration which is more readily given when beauty is sorrowful. Now that a new life at ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... lovers, to those who have found their way into the secret places of his art, his lines are impregnated with a peculiar beauty, and the last perfection of style. Over them, the most insignificant of his verses can throw a deep enchantment, like the faintest wavings of a magician's wand. 'A-t-on vu de ma part le roi de Comagene?'—How is it that words of such slight import should hold such thrilling music? Oh! they are Racine's words. And, as to his rhymes, they seem perhaps, to the true worshipper, the final crown of his art. Mr. Bailey tells us that the couplet ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... vernaculars were things unsafe, "like to play the bankrupt with books," but as protesting by anticipation against the continuance of this error which affected Bacon and Hobbes, and was not entirely without hold even on such a magician in English as Browne. But perhaps everybody has not seen how by implication it acknowledges the peculiar character of the genuine letter—that, though it may be a work of art, it should not be one of artifice—that it is a matter of "business or bosoms," ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... kissed the dragon, which instantly became a most beautiful princess; for she had lain enchanted as a dragon, by a wicked magician, till somebody should be bold enough to ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent; but he had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone in England, the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew the sublime secret of believing by "the reason" what "the understanding" had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could still, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... dimension in space, Greif had believed that the scientist was raving mad. Up to the moment when the telegram had arrived, he had been convinced that Rex was a cheat, who had accidentally learned certain facts connected with the Greifensteins and was attempting to play the magician by making an adroit use of what he knew. When brought suddenly face to face with a phenomenon he could not explain, Greif's reason ceased altogether to perform its functions. The news he had just received was startling, but the bewilderment caused by its arrival at that precise juncture ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... to do this with scientific accuracy when we employ that remarkable key to Nature's secrets known as the spectroscope. The beams of white sunlight consist of innumerable beams of every hue in intimate association. Every shade of red, of yellow, of blue, and of green, can be found in a sunbeam. The magician's wand, with which we strike the sunbeam and sort the tangled skein into perfect order, is the simple instrument known as the glass prism. We have represented this instrument in its simplest form in the adjoining figure (Fig. 17). It is a piece of pure and homogeneous glass in the shape ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... true magic; this was the key to the symbolic transmutations of the Eastern tales. The adept could, in truth, change those who were obnoxious to him into harmless and unimportant shapes, not as in the letter of the old stories, by transforming the enemy, but by transforming himself. The magician puts men below him by going up higher, as one looks down on a mountain city from a loftier crag. The stones on the road and such petty obstacles do not trouble the wise man on the great journey, and so Lucian, when obliged to stop and converse with ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... to interchange talk with this magician. But Power, in all its shapes, is venerable to man. Awe, curiosity, a clinging fascination, drew me ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... tales is that they are all told to King Khufu by his sons; and as the beginning is lost, eight lines are here added to explain this and introduce the subject. The actual papyrus begins with the last few words of a previous tale concerning some other magician under an earlier king. Then comes the tale of Khafra, next that of Bau-f-ra, and lastly ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... full of queer people. It is the chosen home of every kind of eccentricity. It sounds incredible in this year of grace, but my friend Oliver Haddo claims to be a magician. I think he is ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... of nature; and when we think or speak of him, it should be with humility where we do not understand, and a conviction that it is rather to the narrowness of our own mind than to any failing in the art of the great magician, that we ought to attribute any sense of weakness, which may assail us during the contemplation ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... origin, which in the latter part of the sixteenth century came to be associated with an actual individual of the name of Faustus whose notorious career during the first four decades of the century, as a pseudo-scientific mountebank, juggler and magician can be traced through various parts of Germany. The Faust Book of 1587, the earliest collection of these tales, is of prevailingly theological character. It represents Faust as a sinner and reprobate, and it holds up his compact with Mephistopheles ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... beloved violin gave him confidence. Lovingly, tenderly, he drew the bow across the strings. The coldly critical eyes no longer gazed at him. The unsympathetic audience melted away. He and his violin were one and alone. In the hands of the great magician the instrument was more than human. It talked; it laughed; it wept; it controlled the moods of men as ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... Nobody thinks 'the cognitions of which I was conscious in my dream are unreal'; what men actually think is 'the cognitions are real, but the things are not real.' In the same way the illusive state of consciousness which the magician produces in the minds of other men by means of mantras, drugs, &c., is true, and hence the cause of love and fear; for such states of consciousness also are not sublated. The cognition which, owing ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... his, it would have gone near converting me. Charles Greville, who was deaf, and spoke rather loud in consequence of that infirmity, said, as he entered, to my sister, "I shall ask him about my mother." Adelaide, quite determined to test the magician's powers to the utmost, replied, with an air of concern, as if shocked at the idea, "Oh, no, don't do that; it is too dreadful." However, this suggestion of course not being thrown away upon Mr. Foster, Charles Greville desired to be put in communication ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Esther, "I mean to please the magician who has worked all these wonders.—Listen, my fat elephant, after dinner we will go to the play together. I am ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... "A magician more mighty and more evil than Mirza ever was or could be," he continued, "a master of the Black Art, expelled a woman's spirit from its throne and temporarily installed in its place the ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... only compare himself to Aladdin in his palace. Could it be believed that so many ideas had been left for one man to discover? It seemed to him, that the kingdoms of literature lay at his mercy; he was like a magician who has discovered a new spell, which places his rivals in his power. He knew that this book, if he could ever finish it, would alter the aspect of literary criticism, as a blow changes the pattern in ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... his German empire crumbled into nothing, as at the spell of a magician. Hanover returned to the dominion of its rightful sovereign immediately. Brunswick, Hesse, and the other states which had formed Jerome's kingdom of Westphalia, followed the same example. The Confederation of the Rhine was dissolved for ever; ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... a single spark, rises in smoke and flame a mighty Afrit with a voice like thunder and an arm that shatters like an earthquake. The dreams of Oriental fancy have become the sober facts of our every-day life, and the chemist is the magician to ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... bow was perceived a darker mass of mist, which after some time resolved itself into the well-known form of the Rock of Lisbon. The wind being light and variable, we drew very gradually inshore, till the mist suddenly lifting, as if at the command of a magician, disclosed to us the splendid and fantastic scenery of those rocky heights, as they rose proudly from the glittering ocean, which was dotted with numerous sails of fishing-boats and coasters, and here and there the canvas of some loftier merchantmen, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... mathematical papers and destroyed. But this duty seems, fortunately for us, to have been neglected by his executors, and hence among this 'waste' one has even now no great difficulty in recognizing in the well-known Latin handwriting of the' magician,' many jottings in chronology, geography and science, and many abstracts and citations of the classics, that in their time must have played parts in the History of the World. The Will now first produced lets in a flood of light ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... irremediable, change impossible—which demanded the drudgery of a student, while it involved the deliberation of a master—in which the patience of a mechanic was to be united with the foresight of a magician—in which no license could be indulged either to fitfulness of temper or felicity of invention—in which haste was forbidden, yet languor fatal, and consistency of conception no less incumbent than continuity of toil. Let them reflect what kind of men must have been ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... steal upon the variety show with the increasing predominance of short plays. Since they were short, I should not have minded them so much, but they were always so bad! Still, I could go out, when they came on, and return for the tramp magician, or the comic musician, who played upon joints of stovepipe and the legs of reception-chairs and the like, and scratched matches on his two days' beard, and smoked a plaintive air on a cigarette. But when the 'playlets' ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... he couldn't sing, but he could show them a trick or two. And with his grimy euchre-deck he kept his word, showing that he was not the mere handy-man, but the magician of the party. The natives, who know the cards as we know our A B C's, were enthralled, and began to look upon Potts as a creature of more than ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... the winged hours would seem to move too slowly. Even thus Prospero is not quite satisfied. During his subsequent dialogue with Ariel, we are to suppose that Ferdinand, in conversing apart with Miranda, betrays more impassioned ardor than the wise magician altogether approves. The prince's caresses have not been unobserved; and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... night he glided about the deck, like the ghost of a hospital attendant; flitting from mast to mast; now hovering round the skylight, now vibrating in the vicinity of the binnacle. Blunt, the Dream Book tar, swore he was a magician; and took an extra dose of salts, by way of precaution ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... Arcturus through this, Maskull. It may serve as a provisional sign. It's the best I can do, unfortunately. I am not a travelling magician.... Be very careful not to drop it. It's ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... him, while you let me play upon those ardent strings of feelings, that you might save him! You used me, Tinoir Doltaire, son of a king, to further your amour with a bourgeois Englishman! And he laughed in his sleeve, and soothed away those dangerous influences of the magician. By the God of heaven, Robert Moray and I have work to do! And you—you, with all the gifts of the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... part of the sixteenth century. He is frequently mentioned as a well-known character who gained his celebrity by the profession of magic. In the "History of Dr. Faustus," first published 1587, he is represented as a magician, who gained by unlawful arts a mastery over nature. The legend rapidly spread; It was versified by the English dramatist Marlowe, it became the foundation of innumerable tales and dramas, until, transformed by the genius of Goethe, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... as the "Devil's Tree," and the "Magician's Cypress," because much affected by witches and sorcerers when ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Achmet was correct; even where milk was abundant, the Arabs invariably declared that they had not a drop, that the goats were dry, or had strayed away; and some paltry excuses were offered until the temper of the Turk became exhausted, and the coorbatch assisted in the argument. A magician's rod could not have produced a greater miracle than the hippopotamus whip. The goats were no longer dry, and in a few minutes large gourds of milk were brought, and liberally paid for, while I was ridiculed by the Turk, Hadji Achmet, for so foolishly throwing ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... beaten. Now suppose Mr. Yeats had told Mr. Moore, then moving in this glamorous atmosphere, another story of the same sort. Suppose he had said that the farmer's pigs had fallen under the displeasure of some magician of the sort he celebrates, who had conjured bad fairies into the quadrupeds, so that they went in a wild dance down to the village pond. Would Mr. Moore have thought that story any more incredible than the other? ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... concealed magician's wand, which you propose to draw forth at some decisive moment, and present to me, as the cross is presented to ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... horses and hydra-headed dragons guarded enchanted castles—where Princes and Princesses flew through the air on carpets that obeyed a mystic talisman—where cities whose houses were made of precious stones sprang up in a night under the hand of the magician, and where busy marts were suddenly stricken with a spell and each citizen lay or sat, or stood with weapon raised or foot advanced, just as he was, speechless and motionless, till time had told ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wisdom, fine observation, and profound thought; sterling philosophy written in the purest, simplest, and raciest English; noble translations, or rather free adaptations of Calderon's two finest dramas, The Wonderful Magician and Life's a Dream, and a splendid paraphrase of the Agamemnon of AEschylus, which fills its reader with regret that he should not have Englished the whole of the great trilogy with the same severe sublimity. In America this ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... will loosen these cautious tongues. My friend, "the sweet Harp-String" (I give no more than his Irish name for fear of gaugers), has the science of unpacking the stubbornest heart, but then he supplies the potheen-makers with grain from his own fields. Besides, he is descended from a noted Gaelic magician who raised the "dhoul" in Great Eliza's century, and he has a kind of prescriptive right to hear tell of all kind of other-world creatures. They are almost relations of his, if all people say concerning the ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... more like an indifferent but restless corpse. Those two could not be said to have ever conversed together. Conversation with Jorgenson was an impossible thing. Even Lingard never attempted the feat. He propounded questions to Jorgenson much as a magician would interrogate an evoked shade, or gave him curt directions as one would make use of some marvellous automaton. And that was apparently the way in which Jorgenson preferred to be treated. Lingard's real company on board the Emma was d'Alcacer. D'Alcacer had met Lingard on the easy terms of ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... which spread over the entire heavens and illuminated the distant mountains of Lower California. I have never seen anything like that wonderful color, which spread itself over sky, river and desert. For an hour, one could have believed oneself in a magician's realm. ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... not much over a hundred years after his death he was declared by scholars to be a mere myth. A certain J.C. Duerr attempted to prove, in a learned "Dissertatio Epistolica de Johanne Fausto," (printed at Altorf, in 1676,) that the magician of that name had never existed, and that all the strange things which had been related of him referred to the printer John Faust, or Fust,—who had, indeed, been confounded with him before, although he lived nearly a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... women who go into these rages, but they do not do so much harm. They walk on all fours like beasts. Seeing this, the magician, called oqui, begins to sing; then, with some contortions of the face, he blows upon her, directing her to drink certain waters, and make at once a banquet of fish or flesh, which must be procured although very scarce at the time. When the shouting is over and the banquet ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... the space of two years, so that none suspected but that she was still alive; for she did both speak and eat, though very sparingly; only she had a deep paleness on her countenance, which was the only sign of death. At length a Magician coming by where she was then in the company of many other virgins, as soon as he beheld her he said, "fair Maids, why keep you company with the dead Virgin whom you suppose to be alive?" when taking away the magic charm which was ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... fell into another error; they were in a hurry, and would fain have effected their great transformation as by the waving of a magician's wand. Impatient of gradation, they scorned to traverse the distance between the point of departure and that of the goal, and by way of setting up the new social structure without delay, they rolled away all hindrances regardless of consequences. In this spirit of absolutism ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... manhood and succeeded his father the Emperor Yuhi. His early reign was greatly troubled by the rebel Shiyu. This rebel wanted to make himself King, and many were the battles which he fought to this end. Shiyu was a wicked magician, his head was made of iron, and there was no man that could ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... absence, and put to death his father and mother and his infant brother. On learning of this murderous act Jason determined on revenge. But Pelias was too strong to be attacked openly, so the hero employed a strange stratagem, suggested by the cunning magician Medea. He and his companions halted at some distance from Iolcus, while Medea entered the town alone, pretending that she was a fugitive from ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... was of wonderful quality, rich and unctuous, the labials dropping, honeyed, from the lips. It wooed the crowd, lured it, enmeshed it. But the magician had, a little, lost confidence in the power of his spell. His mind dwelt uneasily upon his well-garbed auditor. What was he doing there, with his keen face and worldly, confident carriage, amidst those clodhoppers? Was there peril in his presence? ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... woman had left, Marya Proderenska sat alone and her face was troubled. The strength of the curse—she had felt it herself—was enormous. She did not know of any magician who had such power. ...
— Hex • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... one to us in our secret hearts, which throbbed with passionate excitement over our own small affairs of to-day, and to-morrow. Little cared we, as our white boat bore us southward, on the bosom of the sacred river—little cared we for the love-story of the Great Enchantress—pupil of Magician Thoth, —fair Isis, in whose honour that boat was named. Her tragic journey along this river, whose stream she could augment by one sacred tear, should have been followed by our fancy. We should have seen with our ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... from bad to worse, when Queen Moini thought of inviting a celebrated magician, then in the north of Angola. He was a magician of the first order, whose power was the more marvelous because they had never tested it in this country where he had never come. But there was no question of ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... process is a chemical experiment, but upon reading it I felt that it was as good as a conjuring trick, and a very grand one too. In fact it is good enough for a magician, for it is a wonderful example of the way in which our chemists have mastered some of the ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... boom. Mulvaney looked at me hopelessly, but I remembered how the madness of despair had once fallen upon Ortheris, that weary, weary afternoon in the banks of the Khemi River, and how it had been exorcised by the skilful magician Mulvaney. ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... munificently offers them for the construction of their railways. If they say, "Yes, thank you," to this simple question, the Chief Conjurer of the nation, the great Medicine Man of our tribe, the Head Magician of our Egypt, will only have to say, "Presto pass," and they will find themselves a Slave State in the glorious Union, under a solemn contract, struck by this same act, to endure Slavery for six years to come. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... fashion remain true to our allegiance to the magician of our youth, who can never worship or love another as we loved and worshipped him, are quite contented in the slight inevitable dimming of his fame. He is still in the hearts of the people, and there he ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... the early Babylonian tablets with catalogues of eclipses on all days of the month, and in all quarters of the sky. The great majority of the eclipses could never happen, but they could be, none-the-less, made use of by a court magician. If an eclipse of the sun took place on the 29th day and in the south, he could always point out how exceedingly unpleasant things might have been for the king and the country if he, the magician, had ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... seize the crown for himself. The country was like to fare ill when laws were broken on every side, and the corn which was to give the poor bread was trodden underfoot, and there was none to bring the evildoer to justice. Then, when things were at their worst, came forth Merlin the magician, and fast he rode to the place where the Archbishop of Canterbury had his dwelling. And they took counsel together, and agreed that all the lords and gentlemen of Britain should ride to London and meet on Christmas Day, now at hand, in the Great Church. So this was done. ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... has got. I would implore her to spend an hour or two at serious play with any decent young cat and study the grace and variety of its beautiful, imitable gestures. Then she will assuredly pounce on her magician turned mouse, and fawn on her master and friends, with a greater air of conviction. And she will mightily please all the other nice ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... she said, "Priestess of Set, great seeress and magician of the old world in whom once my spirit dwelt, send forth your Ka, your everlasting Emanation, to help me. Crush this black hound. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... from further appeals to the public, as I mean to do, I cannot pose as a Prospero who breaks his staff. I am only a somewhat sturdy, highly nervous varlet in the sphere of art, who has sought to wear the robe of the magician—and being now disrobed, takes his place quietly where God appointed him, and means to hold his tongue in future, since his proper function has ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... for their own happiness and for the benefit of others. And she sought in her bosom if the letters were safe. Yes; there they were; she felt them. Her happiness had seemed a dream without that proof of its reality. For once she gave way to imagination, and allowed that magician to build castles in the air at will. Thurston and herself must go to England immediately to take possession of the estate; that was certain. Then they must return. But ere that she would confide to him her darling project; ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... time of Theodosius. No doubt there were still here and there a few genuine classical books, and we hear of Aristotle being prized—the obscurity and subtlety of his works having led to his being now regarded as a magician. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... eyes shining over rose-flushed cheeks, of deeper-rose-red lips in curves of haunting sweetness, of the tender contour of her young face, fixed unforgettingly in the radiant moonlight—only an instant's vision, for while the blood stopped in his veins the darkness engulfed her, like a magician's curtain. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... without number, teachers, companions, and everything that money could buy or ingenuity devise; but for all this, the young prince was unhappy. He wore a frown wherever he went, and was always wishing for something he did not have. At length a magician came to the court. He saw the scowl on the boy's face, and said to the king: "I can make your son happy, and turn his frowns into smiles, but you must pay me a great price for telling him this secret." "All right," said the king; "whatever you ask I will give." The magician took the boy into ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... centuries old French fry. Monsieur was permitted to assist her in this, and wielded the keen bladed knife with precision. Then there was the salad and the seasoning of it to just that degree of the "delicieux" the palate revels in. With the art, as it were, of a magician, she drew from a huge cupboard the most inviting piece of beef and proudly flourished it before our devouring eyes. Here was the makings of a "filet de boeuf" fit for Epicurius himself. In the center of the table was next placed the great round loaf of bread, ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... his canoe and crosses arms of the sea, as a pastime, makes a tent of his boat if it rains, fighting the desperadoes of all climes with the superstition, for which he is indebted to their imagination for his safety in running phenomenal hazards, that he is a magician. Marco Polo was not so great a traveler or so rare an adventurer as Bigelow, and, having left Florida under a thunder cloud of the scowl of an angry army for untimely criticisms, he has invaded the celestial empire in his quaint canoe, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... Miss Dandridge. "When you've swum the Hellespont like Leander, or picked a glove out of the lion's den like the French knight, or battered down a haunted castle like Rinaldo, or taken the ring from a murderer's hand like Onofrio, or set free the Magician's daughter ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... came for one moment into her face. How soon he had startled her from her poor little hiding-place! How easy the assumption of extraordinary, powers based on the clever use of ordinary faculties! Your true magician is, after all, only your quiet and accurate observer. "You are not vexed that I speak of him when I want a name?" he asked, after a pause to give Leam time to regain her self-possession, to readjust the screen, to fasten ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... from a pearly haze, the innumerable towers of Manhattan floated and gleamed before my eyes. Irresistibly there came to me a memory of Turner's Venetian masterpieces, and I knew that even that great magician would have seized upon the scene before me with avidity, would have delighted in the fairy-like threads of the bridges, the poetic groupings of the vast buildings, and the innumerable fenestrations of the campanili. One by one half-forgotten fragments of ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... of these two great powers mentioned was not the same. The good old sun began by doing a great many pretty actions. As the sleet had, during the night, covered the bare branches of the trees in the boulevard Malesherbes, where the hotel Godefroy is situated, with a powdered coating, the great magician sun amused himself by transforming the branches into great bouquets of red coral. At the same time he scattered his rays impartially on those poor passers-by whom necessity sent out, so early in the morning, to gain their daily bread, He even had a smile for the poor clerk, who, in a thin overcoat, ...
— The Lost Child - 1894 • Francois Edouard Joachim Coppee
... brightness are all merged in one blinding glitter. His recurring conferences with Mrs. Westmore formed, as it were, the small surprising kernel of fact about which sensations gathered and grew with the swift ripening of a magician's fruit. That she should remain on at Hanaford to look into the condition of the mills did not, in itself, seem surprising to Amherst; for his short phase of doubt had been succeeded by an abundant inflow of faith in her intentions. It satisfied ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... his rounds, complaint and pain were hushed, and the flourish of the bamboo, which he bore in his hand, seemed powerful as the wand of a magician to silence ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... not worth working for. It was very well when it was a Pleasure. So it is with Calderon. It is well enough to sketch such things out in warm Blood; but to finish them in cold! I wish I could finish the 'Mighty Magician' in my new way: which I know you would like, in spite of your caveat for the Gracioso. I have not wholly dropt the two Students, but kept them quite under: and brought out the religious character of the Piece into stronger Relief. But as ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... big battle-ax, if any knight will agree to abide a blow in return. After some natural consternation and a fine speech by Arthur, Gawain accepts the challenge, takes the battle-ax, and with one blow sends the giant's head rolling through the hall. The Green Knight, who is evidently a terrible magician, picks up his head and mounts his horse. He holds out his head and the ghastly lips speak, warning Gawain to be faithful to his promise and to seek through the world till he finds the Green Chapel. There, on next New ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... a new home, the house became transformed as if a magician of the Arabian Nights had touched it with his wand. There was not a dark or gloomy corner to be seen. Lights blazed everywhere. The rarest pictures and choicest furniture were to be seen. Everything was magnificent and harmonious. The tall stature ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... Nang-Poo, Was a magician who lived at Foo-choo. Now if you possess a magician of cunning Nothing you want should ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... a handsome young man came to the spot at the moment the girl was being thus attended to by her mother. He was struck with her beauty, and immediately went home and told his love to his uncle, who was a great chief and a powerful magician. ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... his heart opens to the soft influences of love, and her figure, trim and debonair, that allures the older fancy of the man who sits "alone and merry at forty year," having seen his earlier Gillian and Marian and a score more happily married. She is, in fact, the domestic magician, the good fairy, the genius of home, the thoughtful, tactful, careful, intelligent house-keeper, the very she whom Milton sings, ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... (as long as we were at the table) it seemed as if his authority were quite vanished and his teeth all drawn. We had known him a magician that controlled the elements; and here he was, transformed into an ordinary gentleman, chatting like his neighbours at the breakfast-board. For now the father was dead, and my lord and lady reconciled, in what ear was he to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... far out on the lonely moor sat down to think. Like a weird magician, Memory led me back into the past, calling up the hopes and passions buried there. My childhood,—fatherless and motherless, but not unhappy; for no wish was ungratified, no idle whim denied. My boyhood,—with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and that wonder of wonders, a bashful newspaper reporter. Their chief concern centered in the query, how Pilgrim could hold that goodly heap of luggage and still have room to spare for four passengers? It became evident that her capacity is akin to that of the magician's bag. ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... to the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus. He will there see that the Magician of Cappadocia on his arrival in Babylon was told that Bardanes had been reigning two years and as many months; Apollonius stopped in the palace of the king twenty months; then he started on a tour to India; he travelled about the Asiatic Peninsula for a considerable time; next he went on a ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... rests the dust of Sir Walter Scott and his kinsfolk, and of it Alexander Smith wrote that "when the swollen Tweed raves as it sweeps, red and broad, round the ruins of Dryburgh, you think of him who rests there—the magician asleep in the lap of legends old, the sorcerer buried in the heart of the land he has ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... appeared, suggesting series of convents, barracks, or hospitals. Extraordinary and painful was the impression produced by this town so suddenly immobilised whilst in course of erection. It was as if on some accursed morning a wicked magician had with one touch of his wand stopped the works and emptied the noisy stone-yards, leaving the buildings in mournful abandonment. Here on one side the soil had been banked up; there deep pits dug for foundations had remained gaping, overrun with weeds. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... with seasonable greeting. (For no excess of consideration is too great to be lavished upon these, who unite within themselves the courage of a high warrior, the expertness of a three-handed magician, and the courtesy of a genial mandarin.) "I seek two, apparelled thus and thus. Did you, by any chance, mark the direction of ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... by Rimrock when Gunsight would be transformed by his hand, but the prophet was not there to see. After all his labors, and his patient endurance of ridicule and unbelief, when the miracle happened Rimrock Jones the magician was ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... prophet and magician, child of a wizard and a princess, who lived in the 5th century, and was subsequently a prominent personage at King Arthur's' court; prophecies attributed to him existed as far back as the 14th century; Tennyson represents him as bewitched by Vivian; legend ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... faster and stronger and more sensitive than any other living human being, but that doesn't mean I have superhuman powers, or that I'm a magician. And I'm quite certain that you, Colonel, don't credit me with such abilities. You don't believe that I can do in a short time what the combined forces of the Government couldn't do in ten. Certainly you wouldn't rely too ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... temperament, and in an age when the conjuror and the alchemist were the companions and even the idols of princes, it is easy to trace the steps by which a gifted sage retains his ascendancy among the ignorant. The hecatomb which is sacrificed to the magician, he receives as an oblation to his science, and conscious of possessing real endowments, the idol devours the meats that are offered to him without analysing the motives and expectations under which he is fed. But even when the idolater and his god are not placed ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... there was such a man as Julius Caesar? Indeed, there are millions of truths that a man is not, or may not think himself concerned to know; as whether our king Richard the Third was crooked or no; or whether Roger Bacon was a mathematician or a magician. In these and such like cases, where the assent one way or other is of no importance to the interest of any one; no action, no concernment of his following or depending thereon, there it is not strange that the mind should give itself up to the common opinion, or render ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... be covered with stripes and bruises. The uncle of my informant once read such strong language (magically) in a certain book that it began to tremble violently, and finally made a dash for it out of the window. This same personage was once sitting beneath a palm-tree with a certain magician (who, I fear, was also a conjurer), when, happening to remark on the clusters of dates twenty feet or so above his head, his friend stretched his arms upwards and his hands were immediately filled with the ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
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