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More "Mystery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spiritual medium, while holding a pen, yields it to an unseen guidance other than that of her own will. Now and then he fancied that this plan was destined to be the successful one. A skill and insight beyond his consciousness seemed occasionally to take up the task. The mystery, the miracle, of imbuing an inanimate substance with thought, feeling, and all the intangible attributes of the soul, appeared on the verge of being wrought. And now, as he flattered himself, the true image of his friend was about to emerge from the facile material, bringing with it more ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... slowly and lightly as a feather, among the heap of corpses. The keeper opens the two center partitions to examine the brood cells. In place of the former close dark circles formed by thousands of bees sitting back to back and guarding the high mystery of generation, he sees hundreds of dull, listless, and sleepy shells of bees. They have almost all died unawares, sitting in the sanctuary they had guarded and which is now no more. They reek of decay and death. Only a few of ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... face is afloat, we guess that it may all be afloat. At any rate the open sea now washes against its face at least forty miles south of where it ran in the days of Ross. Though this Barrier may be the largest in the world, it is one of many. The most modern review of this mystery, Scott's article on The Great Ice Barrier, must serve until the next first-hand examination ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... it that the farmer believes, why should any one believe, in these modern days, when the advancement of science has so simplified the industrial processes of the world, and thrown its light into so many corners, that the word "mystery" is hardly to be applied to any operation of nature, save to that which depends on the always mysterious Principle of Life,—when the effect of any combination of physical circumstances may be foretold, with almost unerring certainty,—why ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... planets, the moderate west wind, the elastic temperature, the miracle of that great star, and the young and swelling moon swimming in the west, suffused the soul. Then I heard, slow and clear, the deliberate notes of a bugle come up out of the silence, sounding so good through the night's mystery, no hurry, but firm and faithful, floating along, rising, falling leisurely, with here and there a long-drawn note; the bugle, well play'd, sounding tattoo, in one of the army hospitals near here, where the wounded (some of them personally so dear to me,) are lying in their cots, and many a ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... "I will question you no more, though how you ever came in here and she got out is a mystery to me. But I have other matters to see to, so farewell for ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... my father's custom to permit me to speak in his presence, unless I was first questioned. I cared for this the less because I knew that as soon as we were upstairs together my cousin would unburden himself to me freely. And already I scented some mystery under his guarded speech, which made me impatient for the time when we should be alone. I listened with an ill grace to the chapter which my father read to the household after supper, and it seemed to me ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... SIR PETER. Heyday—what's the mystery now? while he appeared an incorrigible Rake, you would give your hand to no one else and now that He's likely to reform I'll warrant You ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... masonry, enormous piles, Which no rude censure of familiar time Nor record of our puny race defiles, In dateless mystery ye stand sublime, Memorials of an age of which we see Only the types in ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... abundance, and without spoiling his style, have afforded an additional word—at least a hint—that slavery was meant, though nothing was said about it? The subject must have been too "delicate," even for the most distant allusion! The mystery of silence is solved!! ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... intention to detail his interview with Mr. Hickman. For the present it is sufficient to say, that he produced to that gentleman a letter of introduction from Lord Cumber himself, who removed all mystery from about him, by stating that he was an English artist, who came over on a foolish professional tour, to see and take sketches of the country, as it appeared in its scenery, as well as in the features, character, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... teaching the ignorant aye! perhaps for the very best of us going out with Christ into the outer darkness to seek that which is lost until He find it. For even that is not shut out beyond the bounds of possibility in the impenetrable mystery of the Hereafter. Do you know Whittier's beautiful poem of the old monk who had spent his whole life in hard and menial work for the rescue and help of others? And when he is dying his confessor tells him work is over, "Thou shalt sit down and have endless prayers, and wear a golden crown for ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... couldn't have been Peter," said De Soto positively. "He's old, right enough, but he is as big as the side of a house, with a face like a full moon, and he is Yankee to his toes. By gad, Barnes, the plot thickens! A woman has been added to the mystery. Now, who the devil is she and what has become ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... between them and us. At times I wonder if he has it from the literature of Bengal or from religion, and at other times, remembering the birds alighting on his brother's hands, I find pleasure in thinking it hereditary, a mystery that was growing through the centuries like the courtesy of a Tristan or a Pelanore. Indeed, when he is speaking of children, so much a part of himself this quality seems, one is not certain that he is not also speaking of the saints, 'They build their houses with sand and they play with empty ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... that bourne which we all know of, and his widow now supported herself and the two round, dirty-faced young gentlemen who had choked themselves in their astonishment at Ralph, by taking in washing and ironing, to which she added, occasionally, the occupation and mystery of undergarment construction. ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... cannot deny him truth, his truth is honesty and not understanding. The experiences in which he discovers so much worth, are random and capricious, and do not constitute a universe. To the solution of ultimate questions he contributes a sense of mystery, and ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... strange occurrences, as well as funny ones—how Alice fell into the water—but there! I must save my space in this book for the happenings of it. I might add that, incidentally, the girls helped to solve a strange mystery concerning Oak Farm, and solved it in a way that made glad the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. Felix Apgar, the parents of Sandy, and of the ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope
... on, and on one side were bush pastures filled with poor cattle while on the opposite side of the road were pastures dry and bare where the cattle were very fat. The child inquired the meaning of the mystery. The Lord answered him, "Hush, child! These lean cattle in the rich pastures are the souls of sinners, while those fat cattle on dry and sunburnt ground are the ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... "it has come! I have known it for some little time, and my thought has mingled with yours. I tell you frankly that I did not quite expect it; but one never knows here. You must come with me at once. You are to see the last mystery; and though I am glad for your sake that it is come, yet I tremble for you, because it is unlike any other experience; and one can never be the ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... awful condition of things, I won't tell you just yet. But you do this. Here's something you can do toward solving the mystery,—and I can't. Find out for sure,—don't ask her, but see for yourself,—if Azalea gets a letter from Horner's Corners addressed in a big, bold Spencerian hand. I remember Uncle Thorpe's handwriting perfectly, and it's unmistakable. I've not ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... my head for instance to the mystery of my not having mentioned that the coolest and freshest flower of the day was ever that of one's constant renewal of a charmed homage to Pinturicchio, coolest and freshest and signally youngest and most matutinal (as distinguished from merely ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the brim with rose and tawny-gold, with white, and wine-dark shadows; the colossal carvings as of huge rock-gods and sacrificial altars, and great beasts, along its sides, were made living by the very mystery of light and darkness, on that violent day of spring—I remember sitting there, and an old gentleman passing close behind, leaning towards me and saying in a sly, gentle voice: "How are you going to tell it to the folks at home?" America has ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... splendour by treading on a blood-stained road paved with broken human hearts? It did not exist. Her nature was different although her body came of a long line of these power-loving kings. Why this profound difference of the spirit? Like everything else it was a mystery. The two were as far apart as the Poles. Everyone must have hated Oro, from the beginning, however much he feared him, but everyone who came in touch with her must ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... mystery to me. Four years out of convent, and not a lover; I mean one upon whom you might bestow love. And that ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... was, to a great extent, shrouded from the public in a veil of mystery, which had both its voluntary and involuntary elements. If Mr. Tilden had desired to be otherwise than mysterious it would have required much more self-control and ingenuity than would have been necessary to ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... his mind. This had always been a stumbling-block to Roswell's faith. He could not see it; and that which he could not see he was indisposed to believe. Here was the besetting weakness of his character; a weakness which did not suffer him to perceive that could he comprehend so profound a mystery, he would be raised far above that very nature in which he took so much pride. As he reflected on this branch of the subject, a thousand mysteries, physical and moral, floated before his mind; and he became aware of the little probability that he should have been ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... naturally of a quiet temperament, was nevertheless a bold and brave youth, and there was something in the mystery of this message—for such he rightly deemed it—that made him fain to see the end thereof. So he called in the vintner's wife and paid her the lawin', telling her to say to the friend who had been with him, when he came back, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... thought a more lovely creature could not exist. The music excited her, and her cheek was delicately flushed, which heightened the brilliancy of her eyes; her lovely lips were just half apart and trembling with feeling. Then she understands so well the art and mystery of dressing. While other young ladies around her were in the full pride of brilliant costume, the eye felt freshened and relieved when looking at her—there was such a repose in her demi-toilette. The simple white dress was so pure and chaste in its effect, displaying only her lovely throat, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... you, sir. Upon my first coming to the city, after my long travel for knowledge, in that mystery only, there came three or four of them to me, at a gentleman's house, where it was my chance to be resident at that time, to intreat my presence at their schools: and withal so much importuned me, that I protest ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... great things and in small things they act from ideas. The magic power of thought cannot be exaggerated. Great conceptions have great consequences, and they rule the world. A new spiritual idea shoots forth its rays and enlightens to larger issues generations of men. There is a mystery in every forth-putting of will-power, and every expression of personality. Character cannot be computed. The art of goodness, of living nobly, if so unconscious a thing may be called an art, is one certainly which defies complete scientific treatment. It is with facts like these that ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... reproaching the supposed Sebastian for disowning his friend, as long as he was within hearing. When Viola heard herself called Sebastian, though the stranger was taken away too hastily for her to ask an explanation, she conjectured that this seeming mystery might arise from her being mistaken for her brother; and she began to cherish hopes that it was her brother whose life this man said he had preserved. And so indeed it was. The stranger, whose name was Antonio, was a sea-captain. He ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... established the principles of the theory of descent in his admirable "Philosophie Zoologique" in 1809. Nay, even then most—and among them the most distinguished—biologists thought the problem of creation a quite insoluble mystery, and Darwin was the first to solve it, fifty years later, by his theory of selection in 1859. Hence we venture to assert that there is no scientific problem of which we may dare to say that the mind of man will never solve it even in the remotest future. Well does Darwin ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... autumn comes, when the wind creeps in, when the rain trickles down the windowpanes, when the fields, the country, seem hidden under a huge veil of sadness, when the spoils of our woodlands strew the earth, when the groves have lost their mystery and the nightingale her voice—oh! then the room with the northern aspect has a very ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... dark and slender column with here and there a child walking beside one of the elder mourners. The bearers went first with the bier; the track was uneven, and the procession was lost to sight now and then behind the slopes. It was forever a mystery; these people might have been a company of Druid worshipers, or of strange northern priests and their people, and the doctor checked his impatient horse as he watched the retreating figures at their simple ceremony. He could not help thinking what ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... tone being taken by my kind friend, whose memory I have always held, and ever shall hold, in the highest veneration, Mr. Evans slightly apologized for having asserted that he had proof of my guilt; saying in excuse that it was his duty to do every thing in his power to unravel the mystery. "You may go Master Hunt," said Mrs. Evans; and in the kindest possible manner she endeavoured to console me for the injustice I had suffered, by telling me that the thief would certainly be found out, and then those that had accused me would be ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... their eyes. While their lips were being moistened by the stream of gold, they were, as a matter of fact, drinking the transformed flesh and blood of the heroes who had sacrificed themselves on the French battlefields, and in this infamous travesty of the Christian mystery of the Lord's Supper the devil himself took part and possession of them. They followed new customs, new views of life, other ideals. The motto of their noisy and obtrusive life seemed to be, "Get rich as quickly and with as little trouble as possible, and make as much as possible ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... at Acre and there befel between us what befel. Thou tookest money of me and saidest, Thou shalt never again see me but for five hundred dinars.' And now thou art become my property for ten ducats.' Quoth she, This is a mystery. Thy faith is the True Faith and I testify that there is no god but the God and that Mohammed is the Messenger of God!' And she made perfect profession of Al-Islam. Then said I to myself, By Allah, I will not go in unto her till I have set her free and acquainted ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... the primeval forest. A dim twilight prevailed, for no random shaft of sunlight broke through the thick roof of leaves and creepers overhead. The Tahitians were plainly awed by the silence and gloom and mystery of the place and happening, but they showed themselves doggedly unafraid, and were for pushing on. The Poonga-Poonga men, on the contrary, were not awed. They were bushmen themselves, and they were used to this silent warfare, though the devices were different from ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... was rather handsome, and this explains the whole mystery. She had, above all, a most beautiful arm, and paid no small attention to her toilet. She delivers her parts with tolerable correctness, but her tone is heavy and common. The little warmth with which she animates her ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... invigorating air always blowing, Albany ought to be the most perfect sanatorium in the world. Later in the afternoon I went for a drive with Mrs. Loftie all round the place, seeing the church, schools, and new town hall, as well as the best and worst parts of the town. It was no longer a mystery why the place should be unhealthy, for the water-supply seems very bad, although the hills above abound with pure springs. The drainage from stables, farm-buildings, poultry yards, and various detached houses apparently has been so arranged as to fall into the wells which ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... re-entered it as if to snuff the candles, and, seeing the prince was lying on the sofa, looked at him, noticed his perturbed face, shook his head, and going up to him silently kissed him on the shoulder and left the room without snuffing the candles or saying why he had entered. The most solemn mystery in the world continued its course. Evening passed, night came, and the feeling of suspense and softening of heart in the presence of the unfathomable did not lessen ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... that stage, and we are perhaps millions of years older than you. And yet," he continued musingly, "I envy you. Knowledge is, of course, relative, and I can know so little! Time and space have yielded not an iota of their mystery to our most penetrant minds. And whether we delve baffled into the unknown smallness of the small, or whether we peer, blind and helpless, into the unknown largeness of the large, it is the same—infinity is comprehensible only to the Infinite One: the all-shaping ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... which he contrived to shake off these various Ariadnes, whenever it was advisable, was not the least striking proof of his diplomatic abilities. He never left them enemies. According to his own solution of the mystery, he took care never to play the gallant with Dulcineas under a certain age. "Middle-aged women," he was wont to say, "are very little different from middle-aged men; they see things sensibly, and take things coolly." ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "the fruit shall translate to us the mystery and wisdom of the feminine heart. Take the apple, Miss Garland. Hear our modest tales of romance, and then award the prize as you ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... crimson. How could she know of the episode in the orangery? Know? There was no mystery in that; Molly Hesketh had told her. But Rickerl von Elster, loyal in little things, saw but one explanation—Dorothy ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... spent a night on the ocean nor been at sea on a sailing vessel; in his boyhood he had rather feared the great gray ocean, and only later in life did he become so strongly attracted by its power and mystery and by the impression of its eternal struggle against those who must wrest a precarious living from its depths that it provided the background for his most striking and characteristic stories. Three summers in Newfoundland ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... stars move, flowers blossom and decay, spring and autumn come, and people are born and die is too full of mystery, but I can feel some intelligence working through ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... Devil, tho' he knew him to be the Son of GOD, did not fully know the Mystery of the Incarnation; nor did he know how far the Inanition of Christ extended, and whether, as Man, he was not subject to fall as Adam was, tho' his reserv'd Godhead might be still immaculate ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... much of his mother; and next to nothing of his father. And because of the apparent mystery with which the Prince was surrounded before his son: his mother's reluctance in speaking of him, the serfs' sign for avoidance of the evil-eye when the master was mentioned, even Monsieur Ludmillo's careful reticence on the subject, Michael came, by degrees, to play a foremost part ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... these bodies is one of the most debated questions in surgical pathology; they obviously consist of a portion of the articular surface of one of the bones, but how this is detached still remains a mystery; some maintain that it is purely traumatic; Konig regards them as portions of the articular surface which have been detached by a morbid process ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... The first loves because it must; the second, because it ought; and the result of the first is not in any objective, imaginable, comprehensible, action, but in that action by which it abandoned its power of true agency, and willed its own fall. This is, indeed, a mystery. How can it be otherwise?—For if the will be unconditional, it must be inexplicable, the understanding of a thing being an insight into its conditions and causes. But whatever is in the will is the will, and must therefore be ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... after twenty years of constancy, Monsieur Hulot is tired of his wife, that is nobody's concern but mine. As you see, he has kept his infidelity a mystery, for I did not know that he had succeeded you in the ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... ever having once attempted to deceive my little woman on my own account since she named the day. I wouldn't have done it, sir. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I couldn't have done it, I dursn't have done it. Whereas, and nevertheless, I find myself wrapped round with secrecy and mystery, till my life is a ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... it—the latter part I mean.) I have heard absolutely nothing of her since she has been abroad. I don't know when she will return—or if she will ever return, to live at Dimchurch again. Oh, what would I not give to have this dreadful mystery cleared up! to know whether I ought to fall down on my knees before her and beg her pardon? or whether I ought to count among the saddest days of my life the day which brought that woman to live with me as ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... WHYFORE of these things that stirred within him an emotion which he had never experienced before. The Englishman had grimly and determinedly taken his secret to the grave with him. To him, John Keith—who was now Derwent Conniston—he had left an heritage of deep mystery and the mission, if he so chose, of discovering who he was, whence he had come—and why. Often he looked at the young girl's picture in the watch, and always he saw in her eyes something which made him think of Conniston as he ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... moment all is wrapped in mystery and darkness, like that in which the terrible deed was done that we ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... as greatly puzzled at the exact meaning of the mele just given. Some scholars, no doubt, would dub these nonsense-lines. The author can not consent to any such view. The old Hawaiians were too much in earnest to permit themselves to juggle with words in such fashion. They were fond of mystery and concealment, appreciated a joke, given to slang, but to string a lot of words together without meaning, after the fashion of a college student who delights to relieve his mind by shouting "Upidee, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... something terrible as a detective—what you might call a hyper-super-ultra detective. Detective sticks out big all over him—like a sort of universal mumps. He never looks except when he looks cautiously out of the corner of his eye; he walks on his tiptoes; he talks in whispers; he simply oozes mystery. Fat head?—why, Lige Stone wears his hat ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... housekeeper came down to the village sometimes after fish or gulls' eggs, but went her way without satisfying the eager questions with which the women plied her. So one year passed away, then a second, and the master of the stone house was still as much a mystery to the poor fishers as ever. He rarely walked upon the sand, gave them not a look if ever they chanced to meet, and living, apparently, for no one but himself, took not the slightest interest in their welfare, cared naught for wreck or disaster on the ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... not add to Cameron's peace of mind, and the moments seemed hours as the poor old horse stumbled on through the darkness of the night. At last they entered the timber, and how the negro ever guided his crippled steed past the trees and fallen logs and rocks was a mystery; but he did; and at last they saw the ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... Gardens, Sir George would make friendships among the small people whose nursery coaches are there the swell of a thoroughfare. On the second occasion of meeting he might be expected, with a fine show of mystery, to produce a toy from his pocket. 'It's so easy,' he remarked, 'to convert these gardens into a fairy-land for some child whose name you only know because the nurse told it you.' Then, a favourite would not be met one day, or the ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... the shadows that had darkened the past and the future to the lame boy fled away. Gradually all the untoward circumstances of his life seemed to adjust themselves anew. His lameness, his suffering, his helplessness were no longer parts of a mystery, darkening all the future to him, but parts of a plan through which something better than a name and a place in the world might be obtained. Little by little he came to know himself to be one of God's favoured ones; and then he would ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... was a fair success financially. "We hired a sort of garret," writes Monsignor Knox "with the proceeds, as Club Rooms; and on the night after we all received our keys the premises were burglariously entered; why or by whom is still a mystery, but it was a good joke that it should ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... perplexities of the squadron. Bonaparte's enterprise has been freely condemned in later days as chimerical; but it did not so appear at the time to the gallant seamen who frustrated it. The preparations had been so shrouded in mystery that neither Nelson nor his government had any certainty as to its destination,—an ignorance shared by most of the prominent French officials. When, after many surmises, the truth gradually transpired, the British officers realized that much time must yet elapse before ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... little gray, dim room now, and waited with brooding eyes. Within, all was quiet with that air of awesome mystery peculiar to the cloister, which so soon gives place with increasing familiarity, to a sense of deadly monotony. It is only from outside that the mystery of the cloister continues to interest. Juanita knew every stone in this silent house. Its daily round of artificial duties ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... themselves on the destruction of the girls. Disease and debauch quickly blast the beauty of these lovely victims. Many of them are dead in two or three years. Cannibals seem almost merciful in comparison with the white slavers, who murder the girls by inches. It is a dark mystery that twentieth century civilization allows these atrocities, even under the ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... all-powerful, and the measure, after being debated for a few days and nights in the House, and a few hours in the Senate with closed doors, was adopted. This gratuitous surrender to England of the commerce of the world, this measure whose objects were veiled in mystery, conjectured, but not understood, became a law ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... from first to last in a sort of whole and with a kind of measurement. But when I began to dwell upon my childhood, one little thing gave birth to another swiftly, as you may see one flicker in the heaven multiply and break upon the mystery of the dark, filling the night with clusters of stars. As I thought, I kept drawing spears of the dungeon corn between my fingers softly (they had come to be like comrades to me), and presently there flashed upon me the very first ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... marked him out as fit to be employed on services from which prudent men and scrupulous men shrink. During two years he had been watched by the agents of the government; but where he exercised his craft was an impenetrable mystery. At length he was tracked to a house near Saint James's Street, where he was known by a feigned name, and where he passed for a working jeweller. A messenger of the press went thither with several assistants, and found Anderton's wife and mother posted as sentinels at the door. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... philosophies, and scientific works; also a Bible and a dictionary. He had studied these and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. He never talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a mystery. He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the same hour in the evening. His hands were hardened from some sort of toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. He would have liked to know, and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... with which Oaklands acknowledged this sally, attracted Coleman's attention, and mimicking the sound, he continued, "A—ha—hem! and what may that mean? I say, there's some mystery going on here from which I'm excluded—that's not fair, though, you know. Come, be a little more transparent; give me a peep into the hidden recesses of your magnanimous mind; unclasp the richly bound volume of your secret soul; elevate me to the altitude ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... we are exploring the meaning of Hanoi's recent statement. There is no mystery about the questions which must be answered before the bombing ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... them; but they finally concluded that her appearance at that moment must be accidental, and she could not have made out the privateers. They had just told Ralph to run down with the news to the harbor when a light was thrown upon the mystery; for from the other end of the island from which the frigate had emerged a large schooner appeared. Every sail was set, and her course was directed toward this other end of the island upon which the watchers were standing. The two French sailors burst out into a torrent of oaths, expressive ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... served out his time faithfully and diligently, ought to claim it as a debt to his indentures, that his master should let him into an open acquaintance with his customers; he does not else perform his promise to teach him the art and mystery of his trade; he does not make him master of his business, or enable him as he ought to set up in the world; for, as buying is indeed the first, so selling is the last end of trade, and the faithful apprentice ought to be fully ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... force of a brand-new pair of lungs. But I 've enjoyed it very well ever since. Ah, the strange tale of Man. Conceived in sin, brought forth in pain, to live and amuse himself in an impenetrable environment of mystery—in an impenetrable fog. And never to see, of all things, his own face! To see the faces of others, to see the telescopic stars and the microscopic microbes, yet never to see his own face. And even the reflection, the shadow of it, which he can see in a ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... my tired and yet excited imagination it seemed as though Death had already touched them. My mind's eye singled out those who were sealed to slaughter, and there rushed in upon my heart a great sense of the mystery of human life, and an overwhelming sorrow at its futility and sadness. To-night these thousand slept their healthy sleep, to-morrow they, and many others with them, ourselves perhaps among them, would be stiffening in the ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... to talk about something I was reading, to let him down easy and to open him up wider, for I was anxious to burrow into the mystery and dig exploration shafts in all directions. As he seemed to close again, I allowed my comment to drool off into a hum, and then looked up short in a way to send his ideas from mark-time to a continuance ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... tall girl in gray, whose deep, controlled voice vibrated in their ears, like the far-off sounds we hear at night from woods or the sea, whose face was ineffaceably marked, whose air impressed with a sense of mystery. I think both would have annihilated my personality if possible, for the sake of comprehending me, for both loved me ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... to the penetration of this great ethical, aesthetical and sociological mystery. But in leaving it, let me point to another and antagonistic one: to wit, that which concerns those viscera of the lower animals that we use for food. The kidneys in man are far down the scale—far down in Class V, along with false teeth, ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... spring. And if one found and pressed that spring, something unexpected and something unbelievably wonderful would happen. They hunted for that spring untiringly—hunted—and hunted—and hunted. At last they found it. And after they found it, we no longer interested them. The mystery and fascination had gone. After all, a ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... at all events, sufficiently remarkable to be remembered, supposing he had been seen drinking, or loitering about; but Giles returned without any intelligence, calculated to dispel or lessen the mystery. ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... she is simply beside herself until that man takes himself and his yell out of hearing distance. To be sure, he yells through his nose, but why in the world that woman should make herself miserable about something she can't possibly help is a double-turreted mystery to me. The thing for her to do is to sit down placidly on the back porch and make up her mind that the ragman is not going to upset the tranquillity of her existence; that he hasn't any right to interfere with her happiness, ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... natives, and I accompanied the party, but, contrary to expectation, no one was allowed to land, the person in authority having seen something on shore to alarm him, the nature of which continued to us a mystery. The second cutter laid off, and the first remained in water about knee-deep, surrounded by a crowd of unarmed natives. The scene was at that time very animated—groups of men, women, and children, were to be seen ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... the scene of Captain Ross's four years' sojourn in the ice. It was founded two hundred years ago by a wandering Cossack; though what could have induced people to settle in a place which the sun lights, but never warms, is a mystery; where there is a day that lasts fifty-two English days, and a night that lasts thirty-eight; where there is no spring and no autumn, but a faint semblance of summer for three months, and then winter; where a few dwarf willows and stunted grass form all the vegetation; and where, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... they caused was due to the extreme difficulty of following them, and the absolute impossibility of forecasting their attacks. Without warning, and unseen until the moment they dealt the death stroke, they emerged from their forest fastnesses, the horror they caused being heightened no less by the mystery that shrouded them than by the dreadful nature of their ravages. Wrapped in the mantle of the unknown, appalling by their craft, their ferocity, their fiendish cruelty, they seemed to the white settlers devils and not men; no one could say with certainty whence ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... himself finds the origin of romantic feeling in wonder and the sense of mystery. "The essence of romance," he writes, "is mystery"; and he enforces the point by noting the application of the word to scenery. "The woody dell, the leafy glen, the forest path which leads, one knows not whither, are romantic: the public highway is not." "The winding secret brook . . . is ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... time Mrs. Somerville was visiting Abbotsford the Waverley Novels were appearing, and were creating a great sensation; yet even Scott's intimate friends did not know that he was the author; he enjoyed keeping the affair a mystery. But little Woronzow discovered what he was about. One day when Mrs. Somerville was talking about a novel that had just been published, Woronzow said, 'I knew all these stories long ago, for Mr. Scott writes on the dinner-table; ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... past delight. Its romance had gone; the weird mystery of the Oriental city had lost its fascination; and no incense-laden, music-haunted, brightly-coloured corner remained unexplored. Cairo was wonderful; but Cairo was filthy. The troopers had tasted of its delights, and ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... Surgeon on board the Revenge Sloop, built by order of a Come of Congress authorizd thereto & at the Continental Expense, and till lately supposd to have ever since remaind Continental Property, but now so invelopd in political Commercial Mystery as that it cannot be ascertaind whether she is ownd by the United States or private Persons, or whether she is the property partly publick & private. I will tell you more of this Matter when the Mystery shall be unraveld if it ever is; in the mean time remember my dear Sir ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... rest in weariness, then much of man's noblest nature is a mistake, and many of his purest and profoundest hopes are an illusion, a mockery, and a snare. The obstinate hope that, within the limits of humanity, we shall find what we need is a mystery, except on one hypothesis, that it, too, belongs to 'the unconscious prophecies' that God has ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... for you?" he laughed, and glanced at my unfinished MS. "A story, eh? From which I gather that the district is beastly healthy—what, Petrie? Well, I can put some material in your way that, if sheer uncanny mystery is a marketable commodity, ought to make you independent of influenza and broken legs and shattered ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... changed into another dimension, so much clearer the air was, so much brighter the stars.... He had discovered a higher, more rarefied stratum of life, in the dim, keen atmosphere of which things took on incomparable beauty and mystery, so that the water on his left hand, unseen, yet so blue, was not the Gulf of Lyons, but the whole Mediterranean, which washed Genoa and Naples and Sicily, and the little islands of the Greeks, and the barbaric shores of Africa, Morocco, and Algiers; and Gibraltar, where the English were, like an ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... well-a-day! I look back at those two hills now, and the land of dreams lies still beyond them, it is true; but it is now upon the side whence I first gazed. It is back there, where one can not go again; back there, along that crystal, murmuring mystery of the little stream one knew when ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... to inform the captain what had transpired in the road and at the mansion of Mr. Halliburn; for he believed the officers would be anxious to solve what was now a mystery ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic
... possibility of a through animal in perfect health giving a disease to wintered Southerners or domestic cattle, also robust and healthy. Time has demonstrated the truth, yet the manner in which the germ is transmitted between healthy animals remains a mystery to this day, although there has been no lack of theories advanced. Even the theorists differed as to the manner of germ transmission, the sporule, tick, and ship fever being the leading theories, and each having its advocates. The latter was entitled to some ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... realized that for all Guy's love of dead elegances his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark. She realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for escape. He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... others looked upon it as a wise provision, in view of the many events which were crowding thick and fast in Paris just then, but to all, the real motive of that climax remained a puzzle and a mystery. Anyway, Marguerite St. Just married Sir Percy Blakeney one fine day, just like that, without any warning to her friends, without a SOIREE DE CONTRAT or DINER DE FIANCAILLES or other appurtenances of ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... doubt my clever little readers have guessed quite readily the true solution of this mighty mystery; but to the simple Bartlemy the reality of the Gold Stone's magic power was placed beyond a doubt when, on reaching his chamber and striking a light, he found, instead of the farthing and penny which had always been his weekly payment, a crown ...
— Funny Big Socks - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... a force new to science, or one of the known forces masquerading under strange conditions, weighty authorities are already arguing. More than one eminent scientist has already affected to see in it a key to the great mystery of the law of gravity. All who have expressed themselves in print have admitted, with more or less frankness, that, in view of Roentgen's discovery, science must forthwith revise, possibly to a revolutionary degree, the ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... man, enveloped in his ambient-atmosphere of revolutionary fanatic Madness, rushes on, impelled and impelling; and has become a blind brute Force; no rest for him but in the grave! Darkness and the mystery of horrid cruelty cover it for us, in History; as they did in Nature. The chaotic Thunder-cloud, with its pitchy black, and its tumult of dazzling jagged fire, in a world all electric: thou wilt not undertake to shew how ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... between the fleets of the great nations, developed during the second six months of the war into a strange series of adventures. The fleets of the British and the Germans stood like huge phantoms—the first enshrouded in mystery somewhere in the Irish and North Seas; the second held in leash behind the Kiel Canal, awaiting the opportune moment to ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... being the eve or vigil of All-Hallow's or All Saint's Day, and no holiday in all the year is so informal or so marked by fun both for grown-ups as well as children as this one. On this night there should be nothing but laughter, fun and mystery. It is the night when Fairies dance, Ghosts, Witches, Devils and mischief-making Elves wander around. It is the night when all sorts of charms and spells are invoked for prying into the future by all young folks and sometimes by ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... middle of September, I observed a north canoe paddling in for the landing-place, having a gentleman passenger on board, who immediately on landing ordered his servant to carry his baggage up to the Fort. On his entering the house, the apparent mystery was soon unfolded. Mr. Siviright handed me a letter from Mr. Thane, conveying the agreeable Intelligence of my being superseded by the bearer,—commanding me to obey him as my bourgeois, and to conduct myself in such a manner as to give Mr. S. every satisfaction. The latter injunction ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... the line, where the days and nights are of equal length, certain seasons of the year are so excessively hot that the blood of the inhabitants would putrify, if it were not for the salt, and they would all die. They have no art or mystery in its use; but every one dissolves a small piece every day in a porringer of water, and drinks it off, which in their opinion ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... timidly unbuttoned the shirt of the dead robber and pulled out the charm. The mystery was explained. Fixed firmly in the center of the Anting-Anting was a silver bullet. There was but one explanation. The Macabebes had melted a statue of the Virgin and used it to make bullets to fire at Manuelito. Against such bullets the charm was useless, but against ordinary lead it never ...
— Philippine Folklore Stories • John Maurice Miller
... from the very first I declined having anything to do with this matter. It is now all over, and we can never, by our conjectures, unravel the mystery; let ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... should seem to be attributing too miraculous powers of intuition to Lord Emsworth's secretary, it should be explained that the mystery which hung about that curio had exercised his mind not a little since his employer had given it to him to place in the museum. He knew Lord Emsworth's power of forgetting and he did not believe his account of the transaction. Scarab maniacs like Mr. Peters did not give away ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... would not be coming up. Perhaps I had better go back to try and find my way to the street door, as I had intended, lest that somebody should consider that I am intruding; however, having got thus far, I will try and solve the mystery." He, therefore, again descended step by step. He found himself in a small vaulted chamber, in the centre of which was a table covered with retorts, jars, glasses of all shapes and sizes, and other chemical apparatus, while at a chair was seated a tall, grey-headed old gentleman, stirring ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... desire for a little information relative to your noble husband's cigars, Your Ladyship. It would greatly assist me in clearing up the mystery of the robbery. Never mind the disguise. I've ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... of aristocratic refinement, the grace and natural delicacy of virginal souls, in general eluded Balzac's observation. He found it hard to imagine a lady; still harder—though he tried and half succeeded—to conceive the mystery of a young girl's mind, in which the airs of morning are nimble and sweet. The gross bourgeois world, which he detested, and a world yet humbler were his special sphere. He studied its various elements in their environment; ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... face had grown fuller, that he was in good spirits, and did all his work cheerily. Instead of seeing him grow thinner day by day, as she had expected, he constantly gained flesh. She soon discovered that Tellerchen must be at the bottom of the mystery, for she perceived that the boy took much better care of him than of the other cattle. How should she manage to find out what he did and ate in the woods? She secretly sent her daughter after him, and ordered her ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... you can absolutely count on meeting set-backs. Be sure that you are not deceiving yourself at any time about actual conditions. The man who starts out simply with the idea of getting rich won't succeed; you must have a larger ambition. There is no mystery in business success. The great industrial leaders have told again and again the plain and obvious fact that there can be no permanent success without fair dealing that leads to wide-spread confidence in the man himself, and that is the real capital we all ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... me that we were all to leave India forever, and at once." And so, gently soothing the unhappy girl, orphaned in her heart, Justine Delande escaped to the first essay of her life in high decorative art. "There is some strange mystery of the past in all this! He has a heart of flint, this old tyrant!" murmured Justine, as with fingers trembling in haste she completed a toilet, which later caused even old Hugh Johnstone to growl "By Gad! This Swiss woman's not half bad looking!" ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... d' The Commission in Lunacy A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Letters of Two Brides The Gondreville Mystery The Secrets of a Princess A Daughter ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... as persevering as any others when there is a mystery to be discovered, and so Lili-Tsee set herself to discover this mystery. She hunted day after day to see if she could find some trace of anything in that little room which was at all unusual, but she found nothing. One day, however, she happened to come in suddenly ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... wasn't fair. Ram Juna is really very celestial in a ponderous kind of way, isn't he? When he talked the simple old truths I liked him, but not in the esoteric explanations and profounder mysteries. I have chased Mystery for more years than I shall own, and, so far as I can see, whenever you open the door on her secret chamber, she shuts a door on the other side and is gone into a further holy of holies. I've come to disbelieve in those who tell me that they ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... asked you here, as I wished—with a great many other whys and wherefores, which will keep cold. In short, you must excuse all my seeming omissions and commissions, and grant me more remission than St. Athanasius will to yourself, if you lop off a single shred of mystery from his pious puzzle. It is my creed (and it may be St. Athanasius's too) that your article on T * * will get somebody killed, and that, on the Saints, get him d——d afterwards, which will be quite enow for one number. Oons, Tom! you must not meddle just now with the incomprehensible; ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... dined with Horne Tooke. He is a clear-headed old man, as every man must needs be who attends to the real import of words, but there is a sort of charlatanry in his manner that did not please me. He makes such a mystery out of plain and palpable things, and never tells you any thing without first exciting, and detaining your curiosity. But it were a bad heart that could not pardon worse faults than these in the author of 'The Diversions ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in the life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... elephants, previously ordered, would all be in readiness for us on the following day. The journey from Fyzabad to Pegnugger was not a long one, and we set out in the cool of the evening, sending our servants along in that "happy-go-lucky" fashion which characterises Indian life. It has always been a mystery to me how native servants manage always to turn up at the right moment. You say to your man, "Go there and wait for me," and you arrive and find him waiting; though how he transferred himself thither, with ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... in religious sentiment is no more to be expected, than a sameness of face. If the human judgment varies in almost every subject of plain knowledge, how can it be fixed in this, composed of mystery? ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... I do see. My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image. Sentiment is nothing, till you have arrived at a mystery and a veil, something that is seen obscurely, that is just hinted at in the distance, that has neither certain outline nor colour, but that is left for the mind to fill up according to its pleasure and in the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... asseveration our host would have plunged at this declaration, remains, like the tale of Cambuscan bold, veiled in deep mystery; for as he started from the log on which he had been reposing while in the act of unsplicing his bamboo fishing pole, the elder of the Teachmans thrust his head out of the cabin nearest to us—"Come, boys, to breakfast! "—and at the first word of his welcome voice, Tom made, as he would have ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... itself first, how this spontaneous generation of language came to pass, is a mystery; even as every act of creation is of necessity such; and as a mystery all the deepest inquirers into the subject are content to leave it. Yet we may perhaps a little help ourselves to the realizing of what the process was, and what it was not, if we liken it to the growth of a tree springing ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... the pioneer was free, to explore new regions and to report what they find; for like the pioneers they have the ideal of investigation, they seek new horizons. They are not tied to past knowledge; they recognize the fact that the universe still abounds in mystery, that science and society have not crystallized, but are still growing and need their pioneer trail-makers. New and beneficent discoveries in nature, new and beneficial discoveries in the processes and directions of the growth of society, ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... and throwing himself into the arms of mother church. Vanity is the failing of Porthos, who shines more by his imposing appearance, brilliant attire, and bull-dog courage, than by any qualities of the head. To Athos, who is the most interesting of the three, a certain mystery is attached, which, however, is seen through early in the book. He is a man of high birth, princely manners, and chivalrous feeling, but whose stormy life has cast a strong tinge of melancholy over his character, and who now finds his sole consolation in the wine-cup. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... been trained in this manner, subtraction will be quite easy; care, however, should be taken to give them a clear notion of the mystery of borrowing and paying, which is ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... contained the name of the Pharaoh, and a prayer on his behalf: "Osiris, King of the two Egypts, Menkauri, living eternally, given birth to by heaven, conceived by Nuit, flesh of Sibii, thy mother Nuit has spread herself out over thee in her name of 'Mystery of the Heavens,' and she has granted that thou shouldest be a god, and that thou shouldest repulse thine enemies, O King of the two Egypts, Menkauri, living eternally." The Arabs opened the mummy to see if it contained any precious jewels, but found within it only some leaves of gold, probably ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the newspapers had declared to be more interesting than any novel. She had roused herself to be interested in the visit, to talk, to ask questions, to look about her, as they drove into the east, instead of gazing inwards with that introspective glance which had given her eyes of late the beauty of mystery, making them larger and darker than they had been ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... there were reported to yield it in abundance, but somehow it seemed to be hatched in them. The laboratory in London was its unfailing source. The ocean never yielded it until it had been bottled. At last, one day on board the 'Challenger,' an accident revealed the mystery. One of Mr. Murray's assistants poured a large quantity of spirits of wine into a bottle containing some pure sea-water, when lo! the wonderful protoplasm Bathybius appeared! It was the chemical precipitate of sulphate of lime produced by the mixture of alcohol and sea-water! ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... understand, that the ask in which he was engaged was to be kept most strictly secret, while the hardened slave was astonished to find that the attentions paid to the sick were to be rendered with yet more mystery than the bloody offices of ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... they love one another. And whatever quarrels there may be between them they ought not to call in their own mother to judge between them and tell tales of one another. They are their own judges. Love is a holy mystery and ought to be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens. That makes it holier and better. They respect one another more, and much is built on respect. And if once there has been love, if they have been married for love, why should love pass away? Surely one can keep it! ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... moved slowly and spread out like a platform. They sat on a flat boulder to watch the changing beauty of the colors. Their daily forays for shellfish had deepened their love of the sea—its ways of mystery that were ever bringing to their attention some new loveliness of form and tint. Now, before their incredulous eyes there appeared rising from the cloud bank the illusion of graciously rounded domes, spires, minarets, and the next instant they were gazing on a city of enchantment softly reflected ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... exchanged glances in surprise. Here was a little scrub of a bookseller putting the essence of the art and mystery of bill-discounting ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... PRAYER BOOK of CHARLEMAGNE?"—was my first solicitation to Mons. Barbier. "Gently,"—said my guide. "You are almost asking to partake of forbidden fruit. But I suppose you must not be disappointed." This was only sharpening the edge of my curiosity—for "wherefore this mystery, good M. Barbier?" "That you may know another time. The book is here: and you shall immediately inspect it."—was his reply. M. Barbier unlocked the recess in which it is religiously preserved; took off the crimson velvet in which it ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the right key. It is the same with nature and with all the great arts; for Truth is one; and if you are quite ignorant of her in her highest and grandest revelations, you cannot by possibility understand the more subordinate and initiative. Some dim sense of the hidden mystery, some vague appreciation of the outward beauty of the language without getting at its expressed meaning, or but very partially, just so far as you have the key; that is all ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... half-drooped lashes,—how different they were from Imogen's, as different as dusk from daylight. And they were not really sad, not really sleepy, eyes; that was the surprise of them when, after the downcast mystery, they raised to one suddenly their penetrating intelligence. The poetry of their aspect was constantly contradicted by the prose of their glance. But she did more than turn her own poetry into prose, so he told himself; she turned other people's into prose, ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... take enough exercise. I go for an immense walk directly after dinner every day, a real quick hot one through the Thiergarten. The weather is fine, and Berlin I suppose is at its best, but I don't think it looks very nice after London. There's no mystery about it, no atmosphere; it just blares away at you. It has everything in it that a city ought to have,—public buildings, statues, fountains, parks, broad streets; and it is about as comforting and lovable as the latest thing in workhouses. It looks disinfected; ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... of life, nay, with all life's real powers, that she seems the real, vital, living one, and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of the present, little better than a spectre. Yet Helena has been ages before Faust ever was; nay, by an awful mystery like those which involve the birth of Pagan gods, she whom he has evoked to be the mother of his only son has given, centuries before, somewhat of her life to make this self-same Faust. A strange mystery of Fate's necromancy this, and with strange anomalies. For opposite this living, decrepit ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... this mystery, or rather, perhaps, by very reason of this mystery, the fame of Nyssia had not been slow to spread throughout all Lydia, and become popular there to such a degree that it had reached even Candaules, ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... prudence and ability, were quite unable to restrain the prodigal wastefulness of the prince. The entry of the queen, Isabeau de Baviere, whom he had married three years before, was made the occasion of extravagant processions, pomps, diversions, and mystery-plays in Paris, as was the marriage of his brother, the Duc d'Orleans, with the beautiful Valentine Visconti, and the conferring of the order of knighthood on the children of the Duc d'Anjou. When, finally, worn out with dissipation, with the license of unlimited power from the age of twelve, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... thing, the real mystery about the exodus, is that in all the Southland there has not been a single meeting or promoter to start the migration. Just simultaneously all over the South about a year ago, the negro began to ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... deny the truth of this, and she tried to find in it a motive sufficient for their silence. But there was one method so direct, so simple, and in her opinion so eligible of knowing the real state of the affair, and of instantly removing all mystery, that she could not help suggesting ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... so much the girth of the tree as its whole bearing that impresses a beholder; and I do not think either of us will forget its effect in the gloom and silence and mystery of the gathering night. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... been educed from 'Childe Roland,' to cite but one instance, to start a School of Philosophy with: though it so happens that the poem is an imaginative fantasy, written in one day. Worse still, it was not inspired by the mystery of existence, but by 'a red horse with a glaring eye standing behind a dun one on a piece of tapestry that used to hang in the poet's drawing-room.'[28] Of all his faults, however, the worst is that jugglery, that ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... beside the enchanted Nile and wondered at the mystery of the Sphinx; I felt the lure, the wanderlust of the mysterious arid plains and laid my body down on the desert sand to sleep, a weapon by my side; I arose to greet the rising sun and, with "Allah" on my tongue, bowed my head in solemn worship ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... a glorious night later on; evening, full of dewy scents, of lengthening shadows, of soft, unaccountable noises, of mystery and magic; and, over all, a rising moon, big and yellow. Thus, as he went, Barnabas kept his eyes bent thitherward, and his step was light and his heart sang within him for gladness, it was in the very air, and in the whole fair world was no space for care or sorrow, for ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... know so strong, his appetite for definiteness so profound, that I feel that Carlyle's terror was like that of a mite in an enormous cheese, longing to explore it all, lost in the high-flavoured dusk, and conscious of a scale of mystery so vast that it humiliated a brain that wanted to know the truth about everything. In these sad hours—and they were numerous and protracted—he felt like a knight worn out by conflict, under a listless enchantment which ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... bestrode a certain iron lion, the same strange to him and guarding the portals of a public building. Being thus happily placed, he drew two huge American six-shooters, whereof his possession was wrapped in mystery even to himself, and blazed vacuously, yet ferociously, at the moon. Spoken to by the constabulary who came flying to the spot, Richard ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... them. Aunt Corinne would have flown with screams, but her nephew hushed her up and put her valiantly on a very high stump behind himself. The dog took no trouble to trace them. He was too comfortable before the brands, too mud-splashed and stiff from a long day's journey, to care about chasing any mystery of the wood to its hole. But this warned them not to venture too near other fires where other possible ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... of Rossetti' throws light upon many events in Rossetti's life over which there hung a veil of mystery.... A book that ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... returned to No. 7, full of grief, and weighed down with the sense of desolation and mystery, the other boys were silent from sympathy in his sorrow. Duncan and Llewellyn both knew and loved Russell themselves, and they were awestruck to hear of his death; they asked some of the particulars, but ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... to Cecilia a mystery which had long perplext her; for the speeches of young Delvile when he had surprised her in that situation were now fully explained. In seeing her come out of the surgeon's house, he had naturally concluded she had only entered it to ask news of his patient, Mr. Belfield; her protestations of merely ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... impressive, whether we regard the record with complacency as a noble testimony to the aspiring genius of man, who claims to outlive the sun and the stars, or whether we view it with pity as a melancholy monument of fruitless labour and barren ingenuity expended in prying into that great mystery of which fools profess their knowledge and ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... after "the unattained and dim,"—these anxious endeavors, especially of late years, by naturalists and philosophers of various schools and different tendencies, to penetrate what one of them calls "the mystery of mysteries," the origin of species? To this, in general, sufficient answer may be found in the activity of the human intellect, "the delirious yet divine desire to know," stimulated as it has been by its own success in unveiling the laws and processes of inorganic Nature,—in the fact ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... controlled by any public official independent of the Government. Vast sums are squandered, while the Secret Service Fund is a dark mystery to everybody. But, essential as the power to control taxation and expenditure is to a free people, there are other matters of the gravest importance which are equally precious. The Legislature in this country is the supreme power, apparently uncontrolled by any fixed Constitution. The chance ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... which attracts the mind and gives rise to manifold contemplation; so the ancient tragedy leads us forward to the highest reflections involved in the very sphere of things it sets before us—reflections on the nature and the inexplicable mystery of man's being. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... and still no light was thrown upon the mystery. About a fortnight after the catastrophe, however, information was brought to the neighborhood that the corpse of a woman, answering to the description of Marian, had been washed ashore some miles ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... laughed, 'a baby could unriddle it.' She looked at him for a moment to enjoy her triumph of mystery. 'Husband mine, a pig thus stuffed is good eating for Cleves men. I have not kept a hostel for twelve years for envoys and secretaries without learning what each eats with pleasure. And long have I thought that if I wed a man it should be such a man as could thrive ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... exploded before him. He started back as though he had received an electric shock. A perfect battery of howls was leveled against him, and for a moment his ears were stunned with the deafening uproar. He determined, however, to solve the mystery. Giving the structure a push that brought it tumbling to the ground, he sprung back and held his rifle prepared for any foe, were he a four-footed or a two-footed one. Instead of either, what was his amazement to see a negro, as black as midnight, emerge ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... with maidenhood what few children have, more or less of the varied forms of imagination, which once had rather amused or puzzled her in John Penhallow. Her uncle, who thought slowly unless in danger, rode on with his mind upon a small order for rails and was far from feeling the mystery of the autumn days. The girl beside him was reading into the slow rocking to and fro of the falling leaves some reluctance to become forever a ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in the apostle's words, 'Having no hope and without God in this world'; all this is a vision to dizzy and appall, and inflicts upon the mind a sense of profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution." To have one's doubts, one's misgivings, one's own blank confusion portrayed with such appreciation and in such vivid detail by another—how could it fail to powerfully affect ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... France, whatever it lost in method or in majesty, it gained in fantasy: literally Flamboyant, it breathed away its strength into the air; but there is not more difference between the commonest doggrel that ever broke prose into unintelligibility, and the burning mystery of Coleridge, or spirituality of Elizabeth Barrett, than there is between the dissolute dulness of English Flamboyant, and the flaming undulations of the wreathed lines of delicate stone, that confuse themselves with the clouds of every morning ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... He had studied these and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. He never talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a mystery. He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the same hour in the evening. His hands were hardened from some sort of toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. He would have liked to know, and he watched for some ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... son aboard the prince; told him I heard them talk of a fardel and I know not what; but he at that time over-fond of the shepherd's daughter,— so he then took her to be,—who began to be much sea-sick, and himself little better, extremity of weather continuing, this mystery remained undiscover'd. But 'tis all one to me; for had I been the finder-out of this secret, it would not have relish'd among my other discredits. Here come those I have done good to against my will, and already appearing in the ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is much. For what are we? Whence do we come? and whither do we go? Is birth the commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... or mechanic—this story has special charm, perhaps, but to every reader its mystery and ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... hope in me, That, when no star from out the darkness bore Gives promise of the coming of the morn, When all life seems a pathless mystery Through which tear-blinded eyes no way can see; When illness comes, and life grows most forlorn, Still dares to laugh the last dread threat to scorn, And proudly cries, Death is not, shall not be? I wonder at myself! Tell me, O Death, If that thou rul'st the earth, if ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... In like manner, the true theory of action is the key to the intellectual world, by which its difficulties are to be laid open and its enigmas solved. Not possessing this key, it was as impossible for Plato, or for any other philosopher, to penetrate the mystery of sin's existence, as it would have been, without a knowledge of the laws of motion, to comprehend the stupendous problem of the ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... objects was the result of sex in the animate subject: that primitive men saw the moon as a most conspicuous object, whose spots at periods had the semblance of a man's face, whose waxing and waning increased their wonder: whose coming and going amid the still and solemn night added to the mystery: until from being viewed as a man, it was feared, especially when apparently angry in a mist or an eclipse, and so reverenced and worshipped as the ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... perhaps in the waters of the western Atlantic. A very considerable amount of exceedingly valuable property has thus mysteriously disappeared, and strong representations have been made to Whitehall that vigorous measures should be taken to solve the mystery, with the result that I have been ordered to investigate. These orders arrived about a week ago, but up to the present I have been quite unable to obey them, for the very good and sufficient reason that every ship at my disposal is needed for work even more important than ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... year 1836 was about the pivotal date. And it only marks the invention of the silk hat! But that year the plow began to take the place of the steel trap in the way of making a living in the West. That was the year, I might say, when the mystery and romance of the unknown West found their end, and the day began of what we call business ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... has regulated that movement, and that the immediate effect of cheap bread would be a reduction of the workman's wages. We cannot, therefore, admit that any pressure from without has wrought this change of opinion, about which there seems to be a mystery which may never be properly explained. Perhaps it is best that it should remain so. Enough are already implicated in this question, on one side or the other. The facts and the arguments are before us, and we have ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... safety was not a question of grave concern. The mystery of Watson's death yet remained, and until that was solved Helen was still in danger of arrest. His mind at last settled to the task of discovering and punishing the raiders. Who was Watson's assassin? What fierce desire for revenge had prompted that ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... dear Ellis, must for their own sakes, as well as for yours, insist on your taking notice of what that fellow says, both of you and to you. We must bring him to an explanation, and clear up the mystery. We are certain, as I have often assured you, that his treatment of you is undeserved; and why should he go on insinuating all sorts of things against you, and ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... "No, no; not a Ganymede—an oracle, my Judah. A few lessons from my teacher of rhetoric hard by the Forum—I will give you a letter to him when you become wise enough to accept a suggestion which I am reminded to make you—a little practise of the art of mystery, and Delphi will receive you as Apollo himself. At the sound of your solemn voice, the Pythia will come down to you with her crown. Seriously, O my friend, in what am I not the Messala I went away? I once heard the greatest logician in the world. His subject was Disputation. One saying I ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... these heroic souls and the soul of Captain Nemo? From this collection of portraits could I finally unravel the mystery of his existence? Was he a fighter for oppressed peoples, a liberator of enslaved races? Had he figured in the recent political or social upheavals of this century? Was he a hero of that dreadful civil war in America, a war lamentable ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... way of his own, nothing more, and the nation to which he had always denied artistic perceptions, the nation which he had always fiercely accused of sentimentality, was thus solemnizing his committal to the earth! Divine mystery of art! The large magnificence of England smote him! He had not suspected his ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... the real character of his relations with Liubka was a mystery to none of his comrades; but he still continued in their presence to act out the comedy of friendly and brotherly relations with the girl. For some reason he could not, or did not want to, realize that it would have ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... and more, as I waited for the Perfect Fool at the door of my carriage in the harbour station at Calais. He was truly an impossible man, that small-eyed, short-haired, stooping mystery I had met at Cowes a month before, and formed so strange a friendship with. To-day he would do this, to-morrow he would not; to-day he had a theory that the world was egg-shaped, to-morrow he believed it to be round; in one moment he was hot upon a journey to St. Petersburg, in ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... aren't empty. Dreams are as near the truth as we can come. What greater truth can you ever have than this? For as men and women dream, they drop one by one the veils between them and the mystery. But when they meet they are shrouded in the veils again, and though they long to strip them off, they cannot. And each sees of each but dimly the truth which in their dreams was as clear as light. Oh, child, it's not our ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... the old woman, with an air of mystery which drew the circle closer round the fire, informed them that she had provided her grave-clothes some years before—a nice linen shroud, a cap with a muslin ruff, and everything of a finer sort than ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... The mystery lay on a plate in the middle of the table. In colour it resembled scrambled eggs, except that it was tinted a more brownish, or coppery, gold—rather like a first-class Yorkshire pudding. He suspected for an instant that it might be a Yorkshire pudding according to the new-fangled ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... of his guests especially, while the older refused him not their ears, to tales of the castle and the convent, about which, as in most Catholic families of distinction, and among religious institutions, there hung a cloud of mystery, which the young votaries of worldly enjoyments ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... pondered. He had seen that frown on his father's face many times before, and it had always puzzled him. Sometimes it would come while you watched, and you couldn't think what made it come. Or it would go away in the strangest manner, without anything having happened at all. It was a great mystery. ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... speak like that,' I entreated him, pained. 'You are the greatest artist in the world, and I am nobody—nobody at all. I do not know why I am here. I cannot imagine what you have seen in me. Everything is a mystery. All I feel is that I am in your presence, and that I am not worthy to be. No matter how long I live, I shall never experience again the joy that I have now. But if you talk about thanking me, I must run away, because I cannot stand it—and—and—you haven't played for ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... affirmed to be the skeletons of St. Mark and St. James, and other ancient worthies. The apotheosis of the old Roman times was replaced by canonization; tutelary saints succeed to local mythological divinities. Then came the mystery of transubstantiation, or the conversion of bread and wine by the priest into the flesh and blood of Christ. As centuries passed, the paganization became more and more complete. Festivals sacred to ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... see all of this so clearly as I now do, but I very soon found that, as in after years it was said that Comteism was Catholicism without Christianity, so the Carlyle-Emersonian Transcendentalism was Mysticism without mystery. Nor did I reflect that it was a calling people from the nightmared slumber of frozen orthodoxy or bigotry to come and see a marvellous new thing. And when they came, they found out that this marvellous thing was that they had ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... in yonder urn. A few unwholesome dews on a summer night were mightier than all his science. For a time I struggled not with despair; but youth is buoyant, and habit is strong. Again I pored over the mystic scroll—again I called on the spirits with spell and with sign. Many a mystery was revealed, many a wonder grew familiar; but still death remained at the end of all things, as before. One night I was on the terrace of my tower. Above me was the deep, blue sky, with its stars—worlds filled, perchance, with the intelligence which I sought. On the desert below was the phantasm ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... of natural evolution given by Darwinism and the principles of Weismann, Mendel, and De Vries, still fails to solve the mystery completely, and appeal has been made to other agencies, even to teleology and to "unknown" and "unknowable" causes as well as to circumstantial factors. A combination of Lamarckian and Darwinian factors has been proposed by Osborn, ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... the window). I don't think Prince Paul's nature is such a mystery. He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone, or experiencing a ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... country), and when I have further added that the two cuts, in the form of a T, on the left arm of the dead man, signified the Italian word "Traditore," and showed that justice had been done by the Brotherhood on a traitor, I have contributed all that I know towards elucidating the mystery of ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... destruction. Meanwhile, the question of Rome entered on a new phase. The Cabinets of Turin and Paris concluded an agreement in regard to the Roman State on 15th September, 1864. The text of this notorious agreement was known to Europe, whilst its meaning remained a mystery. The ministry of Napoleon III. made it appear in France as a guarantee for the safety of the Pope. The Piedmontese government flattered the revolutionary element of Italy, by representing that it did not in the least change their programme, the keynote of which was ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... generally to go by myself to King's College, and I sometimes hired the chorister boys to sing in my rooms. Nevertheless I am so utterly destitute of an ear, that I cannot perceive a discord, or keep time and hum a tune correctly; and it is a mystery how I could possibly have derived pleasure ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Bayonne (during the "veiled period"), and later in Russia, beside the Bosphorus, and finally in the South of Ireland. Than Baron Taylor there was no one for whom Borrow entertained "a greater esteem and regard . . . There is a mystery about him which, wherever he goes, serves not a little to increase the sensation naturally created by his appearance and manner." {189a} Borrow was much attracted to this mysterious personage, about whom nothing could ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... other hand, is supposed to have feared that he would burn it himself, and the ducal praises with it. The papers, at all events, apparently including the only fair copy of the poem, were constantly withheld; and Tasso, in a new fit of despair, again quitted Ferrara. This mystery of the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... of Epistles—Philippians, Colossians, and Ephesians—are steeped in ideas which belong to Greek philosophy and the Greek mystery-religions. It would be impossible to translate them into any Eastern language. The Rabbinical disputes with the Jews about justification and election have disappeared; the danger ahead is now from theosophy and the barbarised Platonism which was afterwards ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the poor girls never sleep for long periods without the aid of strong narcotics, and then only but fitfully; and it is from this constant suffering that the peculiar sullen or stolid look so often seen on the woman's face is derived. The origin of this custom is involved in mystery to the Westerns. Some say that the strong-minded among the ladies wanted to interfere in politics, and that there is a general liking for visiting, chattering, and gossip (and China women can chatter and gossip), both and all of which inclinations their lords ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... Illustrious what we name space—sphere of unnumbered spirits; Illustrious the mystery of motion, in all beings, even the tiniest insect; Illustrious the attribute of speech—the senses—the body; Illustrious the passing light! Illustrious the pale reflection on the new moon in the western sky! Illustrious whatever I see, or hear, or ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... had lowered. There was mystery in his manner. He sat back in his chair, picked up his pipe, replaced it in his mouth unlighted, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Lord Hollingford, the wise and learned Lord Hollingford, strangely stupid in understanding the mystery of 'Cross hands and back again, down the middle and up again.' He was constantly getting hold of the wrong hands, and as constantly stopping when he had returned to his place, quite unaware that the duties of society ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... himself it seemed a matter of indifference what became of him, and a hopeless mystery why he had been brought into the world. He had no friend. The consumption in the family was the boy's only hope. His mother had died of it, and his brother Robert, who had been kind to him, and taught him to ride. It was already showing itself in Hurrell. His ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... down some little conceits and notions of mine, in musique, which do mightily encourage me to spend some more thoughts about it; for I fancy, upon good reason, that I am in the right way of unfolding the mystery of this ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... "It seems a mystery to me that General Bezan, honored by the queen, with a purse well filled with gold, and promoted beyond all precedent in his profession, should not rather smile than frown; but perhaps there is ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government. She cared little where her pursuit might lead her, for she put no extravagant value upon life, having already, as she said, exhausted at least two lives, and being fairly hardened to insensibility in the process. "To lose a husband ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... style. C——— is a city of a hundred-thousand inhabitants, the streets closely built up, lighted, paved, and guarded by a well-regulated police force. It is a new town also, with no old associations, old legends, or old people to cast a veil of mystery over its new houses and young history; thus, it, would seem to be the last place for anything mysterious, and yet it was there that a singular incident occurred which I have never been able to explain. One night I had been asleep perhaps two hours, when suddenly I awoke,—it was about half-past ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... lamp, and went to investigate the mystery. Dotty insisted upon going too, though she hardly knew why, except that the prospect of some unknown horror fascinated her. She clung to the skirt of her uncle's coat, though he would have preferred not to be hindered. No one else, not ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... all that I had hitherto witnessed, and indeed in all the wonders which the amateurs of mystery in our 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 ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... that he might enter Bedford incognito. Somewhere between Barnet and St. Albans they met, and returned to town together in the Chancellor's job coach. They went to Lord Grey's, and the next day Denman returned to the circuit, which he had left without notice to his brother judge or to anybody—a mystery. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... all, my views or the principles of the Progressive party are of much less importance now than the purposes of Mr. Wilson. These are wrapped in impenetrable mystery. His speeches and writings serve but to make them more obscure. If these attempts to refute his misrepresentation of my attitude towards the trusts should result in making his own clear, then this discussion will have borne fruits of substantial value ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... conceive the meaning of this singular phenomenon, and saw by the looks of Thompson, who at the same time shook his head, that he suspected poor Cadwallader's brains were unsettled. He, perceiving our amazement, told us he would explain the mystery; but at the same time bade us take notice, that he had lived poy, patchelor, married man, and widower, almost forty years, and in all that time there was no man, nor mother's son in the whole world who durst use him so ill as Captain ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... official enemy, had proved more than once the best of friends, ready even to risk his life in the service of the American lad. What was the reason? What could be the tie between them? There must be some connection. What was the mystery of his origin? The events of the last year indicated to him very clearly that there was such a mystery. Adrian Van Zoon and Master Benjamin Hardy surely knew something about it, and Willet too. Was it possible that a thread lay in the hand of St. ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... me unknown; Knowing this, that one who'll send Such a treasure is my friend. Who hath sent thee?-Flora knows, For with care she reared the rose. Lo! here's a name!-it is the key That will unlock the mystery; This will tell from whom and why Thou didst to my presence hie. Wait-the hand's disguised!-it will Remain to me a mystery still. But I'm a "Yankee," and can "guess" Who wove this flowery, fairy tress. Yea, more than this, I almost know Who tied ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... a mere child. She sat, till called by the hour to prayer, pondering the question how it is that relations designed for duty and peace become the occasions of the bitterest sin and suffering. The mystery was in no degree cleared up when she was called to prayer—which, however, has the blessed power of solving all ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... the old gentlemen set a high value on the good looks of the other, doubtless also on his own; and a fine picture they made as they walked the green terrace at Hailes, conversing by the hour. What they talked of is still a mystery to those who knew them; but Mr. Austin always declared that on these occasions he learned much. To both of these families of elders due service was paid of attention; to both, Fleeming's easy circumstances had brought joy; and the eyes of all were on the grandchildren. In ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inside out, and wrung them, and shaken them,—when they prate of your transparency and openness, the abandonment with which you draw aside the curtain and reveal the inmost thoughts of your heart,—you, who are to yourself a miracle and a mystery, you smile inwardly, and are content. They are on the wrong scent, and you may pursue your plans in peace. They are indiscriminate and satisfied. They do not know the relation of what appears to what is. If they chance to skirt along the coasts of your Purple Island, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty years had been the town mystery, lost something of his timidity, and his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the world. With the young reporter at his side, he ventured in the light of day into Main Street or strode up and down on the rickety front ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... this harangue must for ever remain a mystery; for Hans, at this moment, took up the family volume which had served him for a pillow, and dashed it at the heads of the trio. A scream, so loud that it broke the tympanum of his left ear, seemed to issue from them simultaneously—a thick vapour filled the room, which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 16, 1841 • Various
... We were thoroughly terrified this time, and fled once more, not only to the cavern but thence into the open air, and home. I do not know how we may regard the matter in the morning; but at present I really do not feel as though I could ever venture into the place again until the mystery has been solved and the cause of those ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... stretch: and God only knows what judicial blunders might have been committed before the culprit was finally brought to punishment if the latter had not, once for all, himself delivered over the key of the mystery. ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... misrepresented the truth, whether from ignorance or design, he seldom failed to persuade that part of his audience for whose hearing his harangue was chiefly intended. He was well acquainted with the nature of the public funds, and understood the whole mystery of stock-jobbing. This knowledge produced a connexion between him and the money-corporations, which served to enhance his importance. He perceived the bulk of mankind were actuated by a sordid thirst of lucre; he had sagacity enough to convert the degeneracy ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... stairs" is thus enacting, and these people are courting fortune in the fresh air, the gentlemanly gamblers are seated before the green cloth-covered tables, with the gravity befitting so many cabinet councils; but without their mystery, for doors and windows are thrown open, and both ladies and gentlemen may pass in and out, and look on at the game, if they please. The heaps of ounces look temptingly, and make it appear a true El Dorado. Nor ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... me, and tickled my palate with the lightest of sea diet. The men strowed seats for me on deck, and touched their caps with respectful sympathy. One and all were indefatigably kind, but taciturn to a degree beyond belief. A fog of mystery hung and deepened about them and the Lady Nepean, and I crept about the deck in a continuous evil dream, entangling myself in impossible theories. To begin with, there were eight women on board: a number not to be reconciled ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rhyme of "A Woman, a Spaniel, and Walnut Tree"; our modern "Pippin, pippin, fly away," indicates the same sentiment—The fairy tale of Ashputtel and the Golden Slipper, the legend from which came our story of Cinderella—Tylor on Children's Sports—The mystery of Northern Europe at Christ's coming—The Baby's Rattle—Ancestral worship follows sun and moon worship, and gives us the tales of fairies, goblins, and elves—Boyd Dawkins' story of the Isle of Man ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... their means, and how they spend it. But there are others of whom no man knows anything, and George Vavasor was such a one. For myself I like the open babbler the best. Babbling may be a weakness, but to my thinking mystery is a vice. ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... romantic few. To these qualities were added a carriage and bearing of that high and commanding order which men mistake for arrogance and pretension, and women overrate in proportion to its contrast to their own. Something of mystery there was in the commencement of the deep and eventful love which took place between this person and Isabel, which I have never been able to learn whatever it was, it seemed to expedite and heighten the ordinary progress of love; and when in the ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Fortescue, and wondering who he could be. The study of physiognomy is one of my fads, and his face had deeply impressed me; in great wealth, moreover, there is always something that strikes the imagination, and this man was evidently very rich, and the mystery that surrounded ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... government of the world thus preserved, it was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back, and once more unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily discredited paraphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far all this was good or bad for the mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a better ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Varicella, of which the contagium also remains a mystery, is another infectious eruptive form of disease, peculiar to children. It begins with the appearance of a number of little pigmented elevations on the skin which develop into vesicles and pustules. After a certain period they become encrusted ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... exclaimed mockingly. "What do you know about them, you of all men, a bundle of nerves and brains, with a motor for a heart, and an automatic brake upon your passions? Upon my word, I believe that I have solved the mystery of your perennial youth. You have found a way of substituting machinery for the human organ, and you are wound ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... de Lloseta de Mallorca would be looked upon as a mystery, because he lived in a large house by himself; because it was not known what his tastes might be; because the interviewer interviewed him not, and because the Society rags had no opportunity ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... between nocturnal enuresis and sexual activities, sometimes masturbation. Children not infrequently believe that the sexual acts of their elders have some connection with urination and defecation, and the mystery with which the excretory acts are surrounded, helps to support this theory. Up to puberty scatologic interests may be regarded as normal; at this age the child has still much in common with the primitive mind, which, as mythology ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... have occurred in all ages, in all countries, and in all conditions of life, for we know that they are the very truth, as we have seen them translated into action. There is no use attempting to explain by any human reason facts of such majesty and mystery, for how can natural reason explain ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... were all together, the chiefs said, "This is a mystery. Whenever we meet with trouble, we shall bring all our prayers to Pole. We shall make offerings to him. We shall ask him for what we need. When we ask anything, we must make gifts. If anyone desires to become a chief, he shall make presents to the Keepers ...
— Myths and Legends of the Great Plains • Unknown
... abased himself in vain; those courtiers who had formerly witnessed her majesty's tenderness and indulgence towards him, now wondered at the violence of her resentment; and somewhat of mystery still involves the motives of her conduct. At one time she deferred his liberation "because she heard that some of his friends and followers should say he was wrongfully imprisoned:" and the French ambassador who spoke for him, found her very short and bitter on that point. Soon ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Arthur is Alfred Tennyson's dream of a gentleman. Arthur is manhood at its prime. He was strong, a warrior, a self-made man, since the foolish questioned, "Is he Uther's son?" Mystery and miracle mix with his history, as is accurate, seeing no life grows tall without the advent of miracle. He is rescuer of a realm from anarchy, founder of the Round Table—an order of knighthood, purposed to include only pure knights—was ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... here. How the New-Englander, whose Puritan forefathers were almost Jews, and hardly got beyond the Old Testament in their Scriptural studies, has come to make pork so capital an article in his diet, is a mystery. Small-boned swine of the Chinese breed, which are kept in the temple sties of the Josses, and which are capable of an obeseness in which all form and feature are swallowed up and lost in fat, seem to be plenty in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... was probably not intended to apply to a man with a sore foot, and it was difficult to understand why the ankle failure had come so suddenly. We could only attribute it to some defect in the mending of the boot at York, but then came the mystery why the other ankle had not been similarly affected. The day was beautifully fine, but the surroundings became more smoky as we were passing through a mining and manufacturing district, and it was very provoking that ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... perfectly was it adapted to local conditions that it may be profitably read to-day as a not untrue reflection of the manners and spirit of the time and city. Its amusing audacity and complacent superiority, the mystery hanging about its writers, its affectation of indifference to praise or profit, its fearless criticism, lively wit, and irresponsible humor, piqued, puzzled, and delighted the town. From the first it was an immense success; it had a circulation in other cities, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... each seemed satisfied with what he saw. Then Culver went, saying to himself: "What makes him think the Fanning-Smiths were mixed up in the raid? And what on earth has G. L. and G. got to do with it? Gad, he's a WONDER!" The longer Culver lived in intimacy with Dumont the greater became to him the mystery of his combination of bigness and littleness, audacity and caution, devil and man. "It gets me," he often reflected, "how a man can plot to rob millions of people in one hour and in the next plan endowments for hospitals and colleges; despise public opinion one minute and the ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... possible that there may not be a third solution to the mystery?" asked Roger, who was clear-sighted and somewhat matter-of-fact. "There being a good many people who desire to have it supposed that the Duke is the rightful heir to the throne of England, it is possible that the paper was a bold forgery, drawn up for ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... primers and elementary works of all kinds, were Mary's detestation; but she loved books that touched her heart and filled her mind with thoughts wide and deep enough to reach into the infinite of time and space, the mystery of mind and ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... love affairs is no measure of time: where the attrait, or magnetic rapport (for perhaps magnetism has something to do with the mystery), is very strong, one couple will make as much way in a fortnight as another will do in a year. In the present instance, Major Elliott's proclivity to fall in love with Frances may have been aided by his persuasion that she was the niece of his friend. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... architecture forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St. Anthony's emulate those of St. Mark's, and the porticos of other Paduan churches rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards that fascinate with their mystery and beauty. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... is, that it is owing to the cloudy darkness of my own mind. I should be glad that I am more advanced in my progress of being, so that I can view Dr. Johnson with a steadier and clearer eye. My dissatisfaction to-night was foolish. Would it not be foolish to regret that we shall have less mystery in a future state? That we "now see in[631] a glass darkly," but shall "then see face to face?"' This reflection, which I thus freely communicate, will be valued by the thinking part of my readers, who may have themselves experienced a similar state ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... devotees. A foaming little stream crept and plunged over bare and splintered rocks. Twisted junipers and the dwarf pines of high elevations crouched like malignant gnomes amongst the boulders, or tossed their arms like witches on the crags. This bold and splintered range rose from the softness and mystery of the great pine woods on the lower ridge as a ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... said to his wife; and it would not have occurred to him to suspect Stafford, or to read one of his letters to Lady Tynemouth. He had no literary gifts; in truth, he had no "culture," and he looked upon his wife's and Stafford's interest in literature and art as a game of mystery he had never learned. Inconsequent he thought it in his secret mind, but played by nice, clever, possible, "livable" people; and, therefore, not to be pooh-poohed openly or kicked out of the way. Besides, it "gave Alice something to do, and prevented her from ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... less of a mystery to most of the girls, but the greatest of all to Mrs. Vincent to whom she had come the year the school was opened. Mrs. Vincent had more than once said to herself: "Well, I certainly have four oddities to deal with: Who is Marjorie? ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... cruise, in the following year, bettered his health, and brought him the anecdote of a mystery of the sea which was the germ of "The Wrecker." He saw Samoa, and bought land there—Vailima—the last and best of his resting-places; and here he was joined, in 1891, by his intrepid mother. He was now a lord of land, a householder in his unpretentious Abbotsford, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Nevermore—nevermore." The solemn, musical word, with the picture in the dim light, of the sleeping figure—asleep to wake nevermore—and so white, so white, all save the dusky curls, sank deep into his young mind and memory. His great grey eyes were wistful with the beauty, and the sadness, and the mystery of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... abroad again, the valley was like a great opal, where the moon shot its rays into the transparent fog far below him. The road was white and the shadows black and one was no more devoid of mystery than the other. ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... to perform the task that has been assigned to me—that of preparing the present edition—by reason of the fact that it was in my presence and at my instigation that the first efforts were made to penetrate the mystery previously enshrouding ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... inference, and rest there) that I have not a word to say. Only I see that if this class of facts, however grotesque, be recognised among thinkers, our reigning philosophy will modify itself; scientific men will conceive differently from Humboldt (for instance) of the mystery of life; the materialism which stifles the higher instincts of men will be dislodged, and the rationalism which divides Oxford with Romanism (nothing between, we hear!) will receive ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... to go that far," Grove protested; "I am not answering the questions of the universe. Savina has an idea there's a mystery in it, a quality hidden from reason; and I want to knock that on the head. It's a law of nature, that's all; keep away from it if you want security. I can't imagine people of breeding—you will have to overlook this, Mr. Randon, on the account of Morris—getting so far down the slide. It belongs ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... she know of the episode in the orangery? Know? There was no mystery in that; Molly Hesketh had told her. But Rickerl von Elster, loyal in little things, saw but one explanation—Dorothy ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... Malleposte, my busy thoughts reviewed all the details of our acquaintance, and the farther I was carried from his presence, the more obtrusive became the suspicions which connected him with the murder of Lieschen Lehfeldt. How, or upon what motive, was indeed an utter mystery. He had not mentioned the name of Lehfeldt. He had not mentioned having before been at Nuremberg. At Heidelberg the tragedy occurred—or was Heidelberg only a mask? It occurred to me that he had first ascertained that I had never been at Heidelberg ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... and very intimate, was dispelled. John watched her as she moved about the stage, and wondered why it was that the audience had suddenly become a little fidgetty. His eyes were full of astonishment. He gazed at Mrs. Cream as if he were trying to understand some ineluctable mystery.... He remembered how enthralled he had been by the acting of the girl who had played Juliet. He had been caught up and transported from the theatre to the very streets of Verona. He had felt that he was one of the crowd that followed the Montagues or the Capulets, and ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... for years to the prattle of men who call themselves egoists. It is a title by which they have sought to identify me. To label a mystery suffices for its dismissal and thus they seek to dismiss me. There is in egoism, however, a depth to which all but myself are blind. I have found this depth in myself and out of it rises a definition which I must consider cautiously. There is but one egoist and that is He who, intolerant ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... Birch Canoe was builded In the valley, by the river, In the bosom of the forest; And the forest's life was in it, All its mystery and its magic, All the lightness of the birch-tree, All the toughness of the cedar, All the larch's supple sinews; And it floated on the river Like a yellow leaf in Autumn, ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... reminiscence, connected with the place, came back to her startled mind; for, falling on her knees, and clinging wildly to her companion, she cried in a piercing tone, "Oh! lady, wherefore have you brought me hither?—where is my son?—what does all this horrible mystery mean? But, chiefly now of all—why, why ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... that efficiency which might enforce, or regulate, or, if the case required it, might supply the want of every other court. Public prosecutions are become little better than schools for treason,—of no use but to improve the dexterity of criminals in the mystery of evasion, or to show with what complete impunity men may conspire against the commonwealth, with what safety assassins may attempt its awful head. Everything is secure, except what the laws have made sacred; everything is tameness and languor that is not fury and faction. Whilst ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... chief pro-ally trouble-maker, and he now made a little speech. He had been agreeably surprised to learn that the money had been raised so quickly; but then certain uncomfortable doubts having occurred to him, he had made inquiries and found there was some mystery about the matter. It was stated that the new paper was to demand a general strike in the Empire; and of course everybody knew there were powerful and sinister forces now interested in promoting strikes ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... destinies of others, that the palm of one's hand was cryptic with one's future fortunes, and that the remotest planets had an influence on one's life. Furtively, then, as one might enter a place dedicated to some shameful mystery, this erudite, handsome, wretched gentleman slipped into the sanctums of the diviners, where, with a feeling of degradation and imbecility, yet with a pounding heart, he listened to prophecies uttered by the aid of playing cards, horoscopes, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... last—by no direct exertion of my own, but by turn after turn of things to which I blindly gave my little help—the mystery of my life was solved. Many things yet remained to be fetched up to focus and seen round; but the ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... are the broad lines upon which the perpetuation of the species starts. What possible abstractions are there in them? Is not their character concrete and visible? Whatever fine sentiments are evolved, we know their source and comprehend their function. There is no mystery here. ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... Joe made his re-appearance, carrying another sack on his shoulders, which contained a number of empty bottles, and now for the first time we became initiated into the BRAN mystery which had often puzzled us on the road—it seemed so strange a thing to carry up to the diggings. Joe laughed at our innocence, and denied having told us anything approaching a falsehood; a slight suppression of the truth was all he would plead guilty to. I verily ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... already above mentioned.[18] The discovery however of several very ancient Glagolitic manuscripts, and especially of one which could be proved to be older than the Council of Spalatro[19] destroyed it at once; but unfortunately, without clearing up the mystery either of its invention ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... never fears to uphold his client, however unpopular his cause may seem to be for the moment. It is this courage which kindles his eloquence, inspires his conduct, and gives direction and firmness to his skill. This it is which impels him onward, at all risks, to lay bare every 'mystery of iniquity' which he believes is threatening his case. He does not ask himself whether his opponent be not a man of wealth and influence, of whom it might be for his interest to speak with care and circumspection; but he devotes himself with a ready zeal to his cause, careless ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... not exact—in the sense of absolute sameness—and not cheap, in the sense of first cost, is apt to be a reason for buying them. Hand-weaving, like handwriting, is individual, and this is a virtue instead of a defect, since it gives the variety which satisfies some mystery of human liking, a preference for inequality rather ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... Paris that he was gone. Instead of taking post for Lorraine, he went to the little house in the Bois de Boulogne, where his female ministers resided; and there he continued lurking for some days, pleasing himself with the air of mystery and business, while the only real business which he should have ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... transportation in the valley, upon the pickets guarding the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, upon the outposts in Fairfax County, and upon the rear of the army manoeuvering against Lee. This explains—what at the time seemed to many of the readers of the Northern newspapers a mystery—how Mosby's men could be in so many different places at the same time. The safety and success of the Rangers were enhanced by these subdivisions, the Federals having become so alert as to make it extremely ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... Listen. Baldpate Inn is located in a temperance county. That doesn't mean that people don't drink here—it simple means that there's a lot of mystery and romance connected with the drinking. Sometimes those who follow the god of chance in the card-room late at night grow thirsty. Now it happens that there is a trap-door in the floor of the card-room, ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... breath. He smote; and clinging to the serious chords With godlike ravishment, drew forth a breath So deep, so strong, so fervid, thick with love— Blissful, yet laden as with twenty prayers, That Juno yearned with no diviner soul, To the first burthen of the lips of Jove. Th' exceeding mystery of the loveliness Sadden'd delight; and with his mournful look Dreary and gaunt, hanging his pallid face 'Twixt his dark flowing locks, he almost seemed Too feeble, or, to melancholy eyes, One that has parted with his soul for pride, And in ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... wonderment. She was much happier, he could see, and he was convinced that Jack was in some way responsible for the change, but it was all a mystery yet. ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... said Lady Chandos; "true friendship does not hide itself, or make mystery of its actions. Madame Vanira, I loved you when I first saw you; I take my love and my liking both from you. Now that I find that you have acted treacherously I ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... Kingdom, while historically they suddenly appear, almost in full force, and apparently without intermediaries with other groups. To quote Darwin's vigorous words: "The rapid development, as far as we can judge, of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery." ("More Letters of Charles Darwin", Vol. II. page 20, letter to J.D. Hooker, 1879.) A couple of years later he made a bold suggestion (which he only called an "idle thought") to meet this difficulty. ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... commanded at Port Maria desired to see him. The young man immediately complied with this request, and presented himself to the governor as the Count de Tarnaud. M. Nadau (for such was the name of this official) had of course heard the floating rumours, and was resolved to penetrate the mystery. He therefore received his visitor with empressement, and offered him his hospitality. The offer was accepted, but again rather as a matter of right than of generosity, and the young count and Rhodez became inmates of the house of ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... and for earth," he said, solemnly, and I thought very truly. "In the resurrection we shall be one another's without it. I don't like to go through the form of such a sacrament idly; it seems like a profanation of its mystery." ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... my future prospects (which, by the way, were not very great) to remain in that room. The oddity of the situation; the mystery of the occurrence; the suspense I saw in every face; the eagerness of the cries I heard redoubled from time to time outside; the malevolence but poorly disguised in the old lawyer's countenance; and, above all, the presence of that noble-looking woman, ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... actuates this girl in her endeavour to elevate this boy in the world? What the mystery that brought to the gamin this guardian angel in the form of a variety actress who mingles bright sayings with lack of grammar, who tells Rabelaisian anecdotes in one minute and philosophizes in slang about the ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... great controversy over the Federal Constitution he remained silent. His silence, however, was the silence of concealment. He shared no confidences, he exploited no principles, he did nothing in the open. He lived in an air of mystery, writing letters in cipher, using messengers instead of the mails, and maintaining espionage upon the movements of others. Of himself he wrote to Theodosia, "he is a grave, silent, strange sort of animal, inasmuch that we know not what to make of him." In the political parlance of ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... independent sailing of a grimy steamer bound for Sunderland and more coal; the elaborate wharfing of the barque:—all these things on a hot still day can exercise an hypnotic influence more real and strange than the open sea. The romance and mystery of the sea may indeed be more intimately near one on a harbour wharf than on the deck of a ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... grandfather and Mr. May? She secured the scrap of paper, furtively putting it into her pocket. It was better to say nothing either to the doctor, or any one else, of anything so utterly incomprehensible. It oppressed Phoebe with a sense of mystery and of personal connection with the mystery, which even her self-possession could scarcely bear up against. She went into the kitchen after Betsy, avowedly in anxious concern for ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... course of a man's life. The greater part of human actions, however humiliating to our moral and intellectual dignity, is the result of sheer accident. That the accidents of life should harmonize with the immutable decrees of Providence, is the great mystery of an honest and thinking mind. The reading accidentally of a fugitive brochure, thrown upon the table of the public library of Algiers, gave me the germ of the idea, which, fructifying and expanding, ultimately led me to the design of visiting and exploring the celebrated Oasis of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Lieutenant Gordon would release the fellow under any circumstances. There was some mystery about his appearance there that could only be solved by the man himself, and so such restoratives as the Boy Scouts carried in their camping outfits were ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... know, there's no great mystery about it. If a bold sailor will go huntin' close to the house, and run down his game right in front of Mr Shank's windows, he must expect to have witnesses. However, give me your flipper, mess-mate, and let me congratulate you, for in my opinion there's ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... of General von Hausen. Their air scouts either could not distinguish it from the armies of the Duke of Wuerttemberg and the crown prince, amid the forest of the Ardennes, or they did not observe it at all. To the army of General von Hausen there clings a good deal of mystery. When last noted by us, previous to the minor battle of Dinant, it had been formed by forces drawn from the armies of the Duke of Wuerttemberg and crown prince. Ostensibly at that time, it was destined to support, as a separate ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... insulted him with this suspicion! Hm... I would not have allowed that conversation yesterday. These monomaniacs will make a mountain out of a mole-hill... and see their fancies as solid realities.... As far as I remember, it was Zametov's story that cleared up half the mystery, to my mind. Why, I know one case in which a hypochondriac, a man of forty, cut the throat of a little boy of eight, because he couldn't endure the jokes he made every day at table! And in this case his rags, the insolent police officer, the fever and this suspicion! All ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... did what would have saved a world of trouble, and much mental and bodily suffering and misunderstanding, if he had done it sooner. To wit, he sent an intelligible rescript or translation of his original note, made in a plain hand by his clerk. Then the mystery cleared, and I saw that his heart had been right, all the time. I will recite the note ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in Kittermaster's last letter published in The Alleynian—a very characteristic bit of writing. There were very few fellows or masters either who ever got at Kitter's inner nature. He was always somewhat of a mystery to most people. This was accentuated by his taciturn temperament, his rather distant manner, and short, brusque way of speaking. But he certainly was one of the very best masters I can remember at Dulwich, and of the Corps ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... guard against the cosmic forces, whose ends are not his ends, without and within himself; so long as he is haunted by inexpugnable memories and hopeless aspirations; so long as the recognition of his intellectual limitations forces him to acknowledge his incapacity to penetrate the mystery of existence; the prospect of attaining untroubled happiness, or of a state which can, even remotely, deserve the title of perfection, appears to me to be as misleading an illusion as ever was dangled before ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... sunburn is succeeded by the brown pigmentation that henceforth stands guard like the photographer's ruby window, protecting the deeper layers of the skin. The black skin of the negro was no longer a mystery. It is his protection against the fierce sunlight of the tropics and the injurious effect ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... was all covered with fine hair; a russet made her body velvety, while the Beast was apparent in the almost equine development of her flanks, in the fleshy exuberances and deep hollows of her body, which lent her sex the mystery and suggestiveness lurking in their shadows. She was, indeed, that Golden Creature, blind as brute force, whose very odor ruined the world. Muffat gazed and gazed as a man possessed, till at last, when he had shut his eyes in ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... accounts for the spiritual world. When the psychologist has finished telling us all that he knows about the rules which govern our mental life, and how to run it best, he is still left face to face with the mystery of that life, and of that human power of surrender to Spiritual Reality which is the very essence of religion. Humility remains, therefore, not only the most becoming but also the most scientific attitude for investigators in this field. We must, then, remember the inevitably symbolic nature of ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... me that the best thing is to go back to the fire and wait a few minutes," said the doctor, after standing thoughtful and silent. "He is far more likely to come to us than we are to go to him. It seems to be a mystery; but mysteries sometimes turn out very simple things. What ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... which will presently fade away. It appeared to her sometimes as though she were on the verge of the momentous discovery which she had often wondered whether she would ever make. Could it be that the mystery of her parentage was about to be solved, and that with a result which would be altogether to her mind? But, as often as she reached this point, she pulled herself sharply up. Her name was Mary Ann Owen: that settled the question at once. But was it so? There came a ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... they gave such an account of their adventure as satisfied even the excited expectations of their friends; though the Baron thought it both prudent and more becoming his dignity to leave considerable mystery attaching to the precise ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... of saints. In a time when the people could not read, such shows presented Sacred History in a most vivid form. No one could possibly forget any detail in the Passion of Our Lord who had once seen it performed in a Mystery, with the dresses complete, with appropriate words and action, and with music. In the year 1409 there was a play representing the Creation of the World performed at Clerkenwell. It lasted eight days, and was witnessed by a vast concourse of all ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... factor: the fascination of what is strange, the charm of the unlike, hliogabalisme. As Shakespeare has put it, there must be some mystery in love—and there can be no mystery between intellectual equals. I dare say that many a woman marries an inferior man, not primarily because he is a good provider (though it is impossible to imagine her overlooking this), but because his very inferiority interests her, and makes her ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... curiosity, and making a detour, so as to avoid being gnashed at again by Robert, who was coming rapidly back in his direction, he strolled round to the paper-shop and asked for a copy of "Todd's News." Instantly the bright December morning grew dark with mystery, for the proprietor told him that Mr Quantock has bought every copy he possessed of it. No further information could be obtained, except that he had bought a copy of every other ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... asked Kennedy, ignoring what to me seemed to be the most important feature of the case, the mystery of the silent bullet. "Didn't you see it after ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... that Amos Adams and his wife, considering the mystery of death, tried to peer behind the veil. For Amos tables tipped, slates wrote, philosophers, statesmen and conquerors flocked in with grotesque advice, and all those curious phenomena that come from the activities of the abnormal mind, appeared and astounded the visionaries ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... at Sunrise for him, and the little heartache, unlike any other sorrow a life can ever know, was his, as he stood there. In the four years' battle he had come off conqueror until the symbol above the doorway no longer held any mystery for him. His character and culture now matched his voice. Before him was higher learning, an under-professorship at Harvard, and later on the pulpit for his life work. But now the heartache of parting was his, and a deeper pain than breaking ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... copulation, and many other facts which indicate some sort of sexual relationship. The precise manner in which those minute bodies, so common amongst the Sphaeronemei, which we prefer to call stylospores, perform their functions is still to a great extent a mystery; yet it is no longer doubted that certain species of Aposphaeria, Phoma, Septoria, &c., are only conditions of some species of Sphaeria, often developed and matured in close proximity to ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... recent exercise, set to with a will and ate heartily of the mysterious contents of the kettle. He was only satisfied on one point, that it was delicious—a dish fit for a king. Just then Gurrier, the half-breed, entered the lodge. He could solve the mystery, having spent years among the Indians. To him the doctor appealed for information. Fishing out a huge piece, and attacking it with the voracity of a hungry wolf, he was not long in determining what the doctor had supped heartily ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... Co., ship-owners. The notes found upon him were traced as notes he had received in payment of a cheque forged in their name. But no information could be obtained as to his antecedents, nor the series of events that had brought his career to so pitiful a close. The greatest mystery hung about the fact of the miniature portrait; no clue of the faintest kind could be obtained as to how it came into his possession, but the Doctor had identified it, beyond the least shadow of a doubt, as the one stolen ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... their utterance," cried Richmond, with a somewhat jealous look at his friend, "for I have determined to know more of this mystery, and shall require the earl's assistance to unravel it. I think I remember Morgan Fenwolf, the keeper, and will send for him to the castle, and question him. But in any case, I and Surrey will visit ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... behind an old man bent with age and feebleness, painfully making his way. The foreshortening and the movement of the man's figure struck the boy forcibly, and in a flash he discovered the secret of perspective and the mystery of planes. He ran quickly home, got a pencil and drew from memory a picture of the old man, so lively in its resemblance that as soon as his parents saw it, they recognized it and fell a-laughing. Talk with his boy revealed to the father ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... among all the beautiful scenery in the Middle and Eastern States is there a spot more characteristic and interesting than Paltz Point, and the lake that lies under its shadow—that lake, whose name was a mystery, even to the inmates of the house built upon its brink. Its waters are clear, and of a deep green hue; its depth is said to be great, and its rocky shores rise in perpendicular cliffs of from ten to two hundred feet. The highest point stands three or four hundred feet above ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... went home for a fortnight's visit. The sight of the small still shape that had been Mira, the baby who had been her special charge ever since her birth, woke into being a host of new thoughts and wonderments; for it is sometimes the mystery of death that brings one to a consciousness of the still greater mystery ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... little the friends of Monseigneur were allowed to see her; and amongst these were M. le Prince de Conti, Monseigneur le Duc de Bourgogne, Madame la Duchesse de Bourgogne, and M. le Duc de Berry. There was always, however, an air of mystery about the matter. The parties that took place were kept secret, although ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... forward to Sunday, when he could go home to his mother for a satisfying meal, of which he was sharply feeling the need. It was a mystery to him how Isom kept up on that fare, so scant and unsatisfying, but he reasoned that it must be on account of there being so little of him but ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... went. In a solitary mountain spot amid immeasurable grandeur, he buried himself in his lonely cabin. Yet he was not a hermit. He mingled with the crowd; he sought its suffrage for public office; yet he was not of it. He was a mystery to all. They elected him to office and continued to do so; why, they never knew, unless it was because he could save for ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... and the dreadful suspicion that the city had been carried at night, and that all their labour was in vain, seized those on board. Suddenly a man was seen wading out from the fort, while at the same time a boy waved his cap wildly from its summit. The mystery was solved. The Spaniards had fled panic stricken in the darkness. Had they remained they could have frustrated the enterprise, and Leyden must have fallen; but the events of the two preceding days had shaken their courage. Valdez retired from ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... and instruments. The machine is not liable to derangement. Any person may use it the first time of trying, and this use is almost universal. Yet it is, from the view of any hour in all the past, an incomprehensible mystery. A moment of reflection drifts the mind backward and renders it almost incredible in the present. The human voice, recognizable, in articulate words, is apparently borne for miles, now even for some hundreds of miles, upon an attenuated wire which hangs ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... Parmalee's strange and awful death had strongly affected Ruth. That mystery was likely to erect a barrier between the girl and himself. Indeed, it had done so already. ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... celebrate the holy mystery of the mass, although it had to be done outside that rock, the dwelling-place of the Indians. They selected the shore of a small river near the sea. There with their own hands they raised an oratory and an altar, where they celebrated mass ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... has often been asked but seldom answered satisfactorily. Newspaper editors and correspondents have frequently attempted a practical elucidation of the mystery, by quoting from their own brains the rarest piece of absurdity which they could imagine, and entitling it 'Transcendentalism.' One good hit of this kind may be well enough, by way of satire upon the fogginess of certain writers who deem themselves, and are deemed by the ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... understood, and he makes no mystery of it, that he inclines towards the vague and undecided doctrine ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... cardinals and priests are impostors, who should on no account be obeyed. He clearly explains indeed that those who rule in the Seven-hilled city represent no other than the Scarlet Woman spoken of in the Apocalypse, their system being in truth the Mystery of Iniquity." ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... deceitful hope! Thou phantom of future happiness! To thee have I stretched out my arms, and thou hast vanished into air! Wretched Steinfort! The mystery is solved. She is the wife of my friend! I cannot myself be happy; but I may, perhaps, be able to reunite two lovely souls, whom cruel fate has severed. Ha! they are here. I ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... of this night, I saw a thin point of light rise out of the mystery of the sea far to the eastward, the tiny sail of the shallop of the old moon, blown landward by little winds of dawn, making port on the shore of "hither Manomet." In the velvety blackness of this ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... niece to solve the mystery, but the problem was too great for her to grasp, and as Mrs. Hodgkins rose to go, Almira begged her to question Timotheus if she chanced to meet him, and find out just what he intended to do with his spare time, and to learn if possible in what way ...
— Randy and Her Friends • Amy Brooks
... sign. It's a mystery what can have happened to them. Colonel Roth is a short distance ahead. I heard him say he believed they were ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes
... not see what the bother was, but I had not the courage to ask, for I had already conceived a wholesome dread of the mystery of an American lady's nerves. So I merely suggested, "And that is the ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... between his fingers into Nelson's face, and that this insult was returned by Nelson slapping Davis (Killed by a Brother Soldier.—Gen. J. B. Fry.) in the face. But at the time, exactly what had taken place just before the shooting was shrouded in mystery by a hundred conflicting stories, the principal and most credited of which was that Davis had demanded from Nelson an apology for language used in the original altercation, and that Nelson's refusal was accompanied by a slap ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... the mere momentary spell of her; he looked again at his watch while they moved back to the door through which she had advanced. But he had also again questions and stops—all as for the mystery and the charm. "You looked it up—without ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... Young Men from Politics: Causes and Cure.' He was evidently a master of his subject, and spoke without notes. He was absolutely without any pretence to oratory; and yet for thirty minutes he played upon his audience as it were a pipe, and plucked out the heart of its mystery. He was by turn, serious, merry, doleful, witty, pathetic, humorous, ironical and gravely philosophic. When he was gay in speech, his face was funereal, and during the utterances of his grave reflections, his face was lighted up with a winning smile. There were moments ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... consent—or tacit connivance—an attitude patent to commercial instincts in view of the cataclysm which must naturally ensue, with deadly results to the vested interests of orthodoxy, so soon as the long-trusted barriers of plausible and pretentious mystery and importance shall be swept away by the rising tide of popular indignation. When the masses become educated to discriminate between truth and falsehood and thus shall come into their rights, then and not till then, will the dawn ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... and speculations regarding the famous canals of the luminary. The mere thought of the possibility of a larger telescope than any now in existence, which might throw additional light on this evasive mystery, was exciting not only Chicago, but the whole world. Late one afternoon Cowperwood, looking over some open fields which faced his new power-house in West Madison Street, observed the planet hanging low and lucent in the evening sky, a warm, radiant bit of orange ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the blacks, you'll smile and say I had my labor for my pains—the which I had. His place was at the quarters, and of what went on within the house he knew no more than I. But this he told me; that company surely was expected, and that some air of mystery ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... having been duly noted by Monsieur Popinot, by Bibi-Lupin, who stayed there a day to examine every detail, by the public prosecutor himself, and by the sergeant of the gendarmerie at Nanterre, this murder became an agitating mystery, in which the Law ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's favourite. He is said by some to have been accidentally poisoned by his wife; by others purposely, by some of his adherents. This affair, though clouded in mystery, appears not to have been particularly inquired into. Likewise let me ask, on what authority is Stanfield Hall, Norfolk (the scene of a recent tragedy), described as the birthplace of Amy Robsart, the unfortunate first ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... to Russia is like a jig-saw puzzle, a mystery even to the man who devised it. A straight-forward recognition of the Omsk Government would have been an honest hand for honest work, but where would Allied diplomacy have come in? Diplomacy is ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... liue, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded Butterflies: and heere (poore Rogues) Talke of Court newes, and wee'l talke with them too, Who looses, and who wins; who's in, who's out; And take vpon's the mystery of things, As if we were Gods spies: And wee'l weare out In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebbe and ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Saracens is shown, Submission is the Christian's own; And where our Saviour, high and holy, Wandered a pilgrim poor and lowly Upon that ground with mystery fraught, The fathers of our Order taught The duty hardest to fulfil Is to give up your own self-will Thou art elate with glory vain. Away then from my sight! Who can his Saviour's yoke disdain Bears not his ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the danger of selling such deadly poisons. But it was never explained how Lady CALLENDER obtained the prussic acid, nor why she had selected that particular moment for its use. I ought to add, that CASANUOVA left England before the inquest, and has never returned. On the mystery of the final catastrophe the manuscript throws no light. It ends abruptly. But the whole tone of it leads me to believe, that in some unexplained manner Sir CHARLES himself had been instrumental in causing his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... woman, a girl, a young and innocent girl; he had looked upon that girl and listened to her voice, and his soul was changed as the earth by the sunrise. As lying in his bed he read these letters, and mused over their contents, and all the thoughts that they suggested, the strangeness of life, the mystery of human nature, were painfully impressed upon him. His melancholy father, his fond and confiding mother, the devoted Glastonbury, all the mortifying circumstances of his illustrious race, rose in ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... shamrock, green shamrocks," while little children have "Patrick's crosses" pinned to their sleeves, a custom which is said to have originated in the circumstance that when St. Patrick was preaching the doctrine of the Trinity he made use of the trefoil as a symbol of the great mystery. Several plants have been identified as the shamrock; and in "Contributions towards a Cybele Hibernica," [1] is the following extensive note:—"Trifolium repens, Dutch clover, shamrock.—This is the plant still worn as shamrock on St. Patrick's Day, ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... while with thee, I breathe, as from the heart, thy dear And dedicated name, I hear A promise and a mystery, A pledge of more than passing life, 5 Yea, in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the veil of the mist and burst in places which seemed hidden behind cotton-wool. An unseen enemy was killing unseen men, and other guns replied into this grim, grey mystery, not knowing what destruction was ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... this: her mother came from the east of England, where, as perhaps you know, they have the pretty custom of sending presents on St. Valentine's day, with the donor's name unknown, and, of course, the mystery constitutes half the enjoyment. The fourteenth of February was Libbie's birthday too, and many a year, in the happy days of old, had her mother delighted to surprise her with some little gift, of which she more than half-guessed ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... rounded-off completion and satisfactoriness as that suggested by an entirely sensuous and comfortable person. There were no corners in it, no vistas hinting at anything except at some perfectly normal lawn or set garden, no mystery, no implication of any other theory or glimpse of theory except that ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... arrest—which was imminent—should be delayed lest international complications ensued. Why the Serb authorities did not impart their doubts to the British Consulate in Belgrade must remain a Balkan mystery. Instead of doing so the Serb police replied, "We are having her followed everywhere. The names of all she speaks to are noted. She goes everywhere. She talks to any one who will talk to her. She draws all kinds of things for what purpose we cannot ascertain. She speaks Serbian ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... wail of a soul in pain, as in Shelley's "Adonais," or in some outburst of exultant grief such as Whitman's "Captain, My Captain," or in some revelation of the unseen potencies close about us, as in Browning's "Saul," or in some vision of the mystery of this our earthly struggle such as "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," or in some answer of the spirit to a never stilled question such as Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." When he thus finds it he has come to poetry in its highest use. In his "Alexander's ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... of creeping near to wild animals and winning their confidence whenever it is possible, of following them day and night with no motive but the pure love of the thing and no object but to see exactly what each animal is doing and to understand, so far as a man can, the mystery ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... he proceeds to say, was versified by a king (Kie-zhih) and set to music, and was performed before the public with a band and dancing—evidently a Buddhist mystery play. ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... and then looked more puzzled. At last he grinned as the solution of the mystery came ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... Prometheus' theological sentiments should remain a mystery to the public. She then began to reflect very seriously on the subject of her own morals. "This day," she said to herself, "I have renounced all the Gods, and told lies enough to last me my life, and for no other reason than that I am in love. If this is a sufficient ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
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