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More "Mystic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... towards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent. And so, besides myths, we find the same mathematic figures, cosmic graphs which remain among the aboriginal peoples in all continents, mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or scientific significance is lost, yet which continue in use for purposes of ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... and faced him again, the hungry fires in her eyes burning with mystic radiance. A tiny stream of blood ran down from her lip and stood in the dimple of her chin. She drew a delicate lace handkerchief from her bosom and wiped the blood away until it ceased to flow. And then in ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... well. Sixty converts were baptized on October 3, and the priests rejoiced at the success of their efforts. But the Indians back in the mountains were alarmed and hostile. Who were these white-faced strangers causing their brother aborigines to kneel before a strange God? What was the meaning of that mystic ceremony of sprinkling with water? The demon of priestly jealousy was awakened in the breasts of the tingaivashes—the medicine-men—of the tribes about San Diego, who arranged a fierce midnight attack which should rid them forever of these foreign conjurers, the ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... was more and less than this. He was at once a giant and a dwarf. When he has been sweeping the sky in circles infinitely great, he suddenly shrivels into something indescribably small. There is a moment when Carlyle turns suddenly from a high creative mystic to a common Calvinist. There are moments when George Eliot turns from a prophetess into a governess. There are also moments when Ruskin turns into a governess, without even the excuse of sex. But in all these cases the alteration comes as a thing ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... throne Built on the steadfast centre of the world, And waited for the middle hour of night, Now swiftly coming, to convene her court. Set in an ocean of perpetual calm Was the fair island honoured by her reign; Slowly around her rolled the Frigid Zone, Dim in the mystic moonlight far away,— A silvery ring, circling her nearer realm With the pale lustre of its snowy walls, Defending from all storm and sudden change The sea which bathed the island's level shores. She sat upon her throne, and none might tell Whether her limbs the lambent lustre ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... these people whom he loved; to inspire them to better deeds and to nobler lives. They, in turn, recognized and paid willing homage to a noble soul, a great genius, whose power to sway and control them was not in the least deflected or dimmed by a thought of his deformed body. Under the mystic spell of divine music, which appeals to the highest aspirations of the human heart; which calls forth the hidden forces of the soul: they came in such perfect rapport with him in his inner life, that they sensed with soulful eyes the strong, radiant, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... of this family were taken away; but taken with such features of opportunity in time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that grief was tempered with a kind of admiration. The effect on Fleeming was profound. His pious optimism increased and became touched with something mystic and filial. 'The grave is not good, the approaches to it are terrible,' he had written in the beginning of his mother's illness: he thought so no more, when he had laid father and mother side by side at Stowting. He had always loved life; ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Christians only in name, the truth was so disfigured and transformed among them, that it exercised no influence over their hearts; and though they believed the Bible to be of value, they regarded it rather in the light of a mystic charm than the word of God. Thus all the great truths of our most holy faith were so travestied and changed as to produce alone a degrading superstition. They believed that the Bible had the power of exorcising spirits of ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... she behaved with a sort of mystic hostility, a holy detachment and displeasure, as if she suspected them of getting over it, or of wanting to get over it if they could. But to her one married daughter and to her grand-children she was soft and gentle. ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... regret to find in these particular productions of the great Germanic school a development of that practical tendency which distinguished the Batavian and Flemish branches,—although it might recognize a departure from that mystic principle which, in its efforts to symbolize the strivings of humanity towards the infinite object of worship above, had somewhat disregarded the wants of the worshippers below,—although the spaces might ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... watch the day and night, In vain the world through space may roll: I never see the mystic light Which fills ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... with a simple joy in it, and his pleasure strengthened the mystic bond which had formed itself between us through the confidences he had made me, so flatteringly corroborative of all my guesses concerning him and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... painted for the perfumer Ciano, an eccentric man, but respected after his kind, a sign for his shop, containing a gipsy woman telling the fortune of a lady in a very graceful manner, which was the idea of Ciano, and not without mystic meaning. Another who learnt to paint from the same master was Antonio di Donnino Mazzieri, who was a bold draughtsman, and showed much invention in making horses and landscapes. He painted in chiaroscuro ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... fancy all wild heads bowed in adoration. Certainly the wood thrush's call touches that chord in the human breast. To listen to it with open heart is to know all things are for good and that a peace from mystic spaces far above the woodland is descending upon it. Heard through this song the tone of the brook's voice changes and instead of swift-syllabled gossip I seem to hear it softly ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... take one's lover by the hand and go wandering over those mystic moonlit slopes into some new unreal world where it would not matter whether a man were rich or poor, high-born or low-born, where there should be no such things as rank and state to be won or lost! Lesbia felt to-night as if she would like to live out her life in dreamland. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... came last—the Priest whose functions had so curiously dwindled since the times of the Temples. To be called first to the reading of the Law, to bless his brethren with symbolic spreadings of palms and fingers in a mystic incantation delivered, standing shoeless before the Ark of the Covenant at festival seasons, to redeem the mother's first-born son when neither parent was of priestly lineage—these privileges combined with ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... that dazzled and hypnotized her. The theater again took so powerful a hold on Janina that there was no room in her consciousness for anything else. In her hours of ecstasy it appeared to her like a mystic altar suspended high above the gray vale of everyday life and glowing with flames like a second burning bush of Moses; it seemed to her like ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... Prescot, and Thomas, officers who had served in the provincial regiments during the last war, put themselves in cantonment, and formed a line nearly twenty miles in extent, with their left leaning on the river Mystic, and their right on the town of Roxburghe, thus enclosing Boston in the centre. Their headquarters were fixed at Cambridge, and they were soon joined by a strong detachment of troops from Connecticut, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... asked if I would go with him to bring in the body. I shook my head. Life out here breeds a higher understanding of the mystic division between soul and body; one learns to contemplate the disfigured dead with a calmness that is not callousness. But this was different. How real a part he had played in my life these last two years! I wanted always ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... who at the same time had head and strength enough to steer the boat among the perplexing currents. Our excursions were sometimes long. Once we went down the Back Bay, thence around Charlestown up the Mystic to Medford, during which trip I steered the Orion without a single rub, going and coming under I think some forty draw-bridges. I have scarcely ever received a compliment in which I took more pride than when ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... the queen and garden of the world. Amidst her domestic factions, she was doubtless superior to France both in art and science, in wealth and politeness; but the difference could scarcely support the epithet of barbarous, which he promiscuously bestows on the countries beyond the Alps. Avignon, the mystic Babylon, the sink of vice and corruption, was the object of his hatred and contempt; but he forgets that her scandalous vices were not the growth of the soil, and that in every residence they would adhere to the power and luxury ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... nuance'? And is not the essential part of the poetical theory of Mallarme and of the French Symbolists enunciated in this definition and commendation of 'that class of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one'? To this 'mystic or secondary impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always a distinct, but an august soul-exalting echo.' Has anything that has been ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... beneath another man's property, and carried away, to coinage, his gold. Between Bully Presby and the man who tunneled under a bank to loot the safe, there was no moral difference save in the romance of that mystic underground world where men bored like ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... of America form a distinct group. Marked racial differences and their background of the mystic, age-old East leave them separated and apart in a conglomerate civilization whose assimilative power is the wonder of the age. They form thus far the largest body of "irreconcilables," to use Prof. Lowell's term, ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... took up the work without any enthusiasm. She made the first correct mystic passage with needle and thread; when she came to the loop she failed to go right, and the effect was bungled ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... and insect pay grateful homage. In Egypt, India, China, Japan, Persia, and Asiatic Russia, how many millions have bent their heads in adoration of her relative the sacred lotus! From its centre Brahma came forth; Buddha, too, whose symbol is the lotus, first appeared floating on the mystic flower (Nelumbo nelumbo). Happily the lovely pink or white "sacred bean" or "rose-lily" of the Nile, often cultivated here, has been successfully naturalized in ponds about Bordentown, New Jersey, and may be elsewhere. If ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... instantly restored. My vis-a-vis, who was addressed as "Mr. Vice," was, indeed, somewhat grumpy; but I had won the goodwill of the others, and was allowed to look on, a silent spectator, whilst the many mystic rites and usages which distinguished the "commercial table" of that epoch were duly celebrated. Strange to say, that was not only my first but my last experience of the kind, and now I imagine that the old customs of the road—the wine-drinking, the speech-making, ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... background. To Helen's mind returned the simile of a huge flaming pit in which multitudes of little imps struggled and fought. She was yet unable to invest them with human attributes like her own, and the mystic and unreal quality in this battle which oppressed her from the first ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... like Pope,—between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant and Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke, Paley, Mackintosh and Stewart,—between men of the world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying half insane under the infinitude of his thought,—is that one class speak from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class from without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... looked all about him and pondered upon the mystic gloom, he began to believe that at any moment the ominous distance might be aflare, and the rolling crashes of an engagement come to his ears. Staring once at the red eyes across the river, he conceived them to be growing larger, as the orbs of a row of dragons ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... can only thrive or grow in the solitude, And droops and dies in the marts of men, where sights and sounds are rude; That is not a faith at all, but a dream of a mystic's heart; Our faith should point as the compass points, ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... there is the testimony of human witnesses; next, there are the non-human boundaries wherein the action took place, boundaries which, by all our experience, impose fixed limits to action; thirdly, there is that indefinable thing, that mystic power, which all nations deriving from the theology of the Western Church have agreed to call, with the schoolman, common sense; a general appreciation which transcends particular appreciations and which can integrate the differentials of evidence. Of this last it is quite impossible to afford ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... O mystic Nile! Thy secret yields Before us; thy most ancient dreams Are mixed with far Canadian fields And murmur of ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Despite his mystic praise of slumber, Father Brown was up earlier than anyone else except the silent gardener; and was found smoking a big pipe and watching that expert at his speechless labours in the kitchen garden. ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... independent mind will find in these essays, much to admire in their elucidation of truth and detection of error, but more in their dauntless defiance of those who represent the Bible as a "sealed book" to all who are not visited with a special faculty for discerning its mystic characters and hidden sense. In that case, the Scriptures are a revelation only to the elect, who, to satisfy themselves and the world, that their interpretation is the only sound one, ought to produce miracles as proof of their own inspiration, not less unequivocal than those which ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... chastisement by the law. Reserved for aristocrats only, the guillotine would have appeared to him in the light of an iniquitous privilege. In his thoughts he was beginning to erect chastisement into a religious and mystic dogma, to assign it a virtue, a merit of its own; he conceived that society owes punishment to criminals and that it is doing them an injustice to cheat them of this right. He declared the woman Meyrion guilty and deserving of ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... only one of our party acquainted with both Thibetan and Hindoostanee, I ascertained that the words carved upon the stones were "Um mani panee," and meant, as far as I could make out, "the Supreme Being." As the old gentleman repeated the mystic syllables, he bobbed and scraped towards a strange-looking monument close by, in an abject, deprecatory way, as if in extreme awe of ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... little more than the height of a man. A clear area of a few yards surrounded the pi-pi, and was enclosed by four trunks of cocoanut trees resting at the angles on massive blocks of stone. The place was sacred. The sign of the inscrutable Taboo was seen in the shape of a mystic roll of white tappa, suspended by a twisted cord of the same material from the top of a slight pole planted within the enclosure*. The sanctity of the spot appeared never to have been violated. The stillness of the grave was there, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... sockets, and his head felt very light and empty, although so heavy that he could not lift it from the pillow. But he managed to shift his gaze from the window until it rested upon a man's face—a gaunt, impassive brown face illuminated by steady and thoughtful eyes, filled with that mystic, unshakable spirit of fatalism that is the real Genius of the eastern peoples. The head itself stood out with almost startling distinctness against the background of pure white. It was swathed with an immaculate white turban. The thin, stringy ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... misty a vapourer as I ever saw; a poetic, self-contradicting and inconsistent orator, a blower of bubbles, a seer of visions, a mystic, and a dreamer—about as scientific as Alice's White Knight! Harman's aunt, who lived in London, the only relative he had left, I believe—and she has died since—put him in Keredec's charge, and he was taken up into the Tyrol and virtually hidden for two years, the idea ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... Paul Collaer, who played beautifully; Gilson, the mystic; Henri of Liege; the son of Ysaye, they were all clear to us. There was a splendid fat doctor who felt physical fear, but never shirked his job. He used to go and hide behind the barn, with his pipe, till there was work for him. His wasn't ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... him, a sound that might have been the cry of a child or the scream of a trapped animal. Assuming it to be the latter, Will again hesitated. Often enough he had laughed at the folk-tales of witch hares as among the most fantastic fables of the old; yet at this present moment mystic legends won point from the circumstances in which he found himself. He hurried forward to the edge of a circle from which the sound proceeded. Then, looking before him, he started violently, sank to his knees behind a rock, and so remained, ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... very walls are woven of dreams, All undefined by blasphemies of art! Here, pure from finite hues the very night Conceives the mystic harmonies of light, Delicious glooms and gleams; And sorrow falls in rose-leaves on the heart, And pain that yearns upon the passing hour Is but a perfume ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... it was a practice of preachers to rouse their congregation by relating a fable of AEsop. In the British Museum there is a collection of two hundred and fifteen stories, romantic, allegorical, and legendary, evidently compiled for the use of monastic preachers. Mystic similitudes were at this time greatly affected in all branches of learning. In the "Romaunt of the Rose," the difficulties of a lover are represented under the form of a man seeking a rose in an inaccessible garden. This flower, alchemists considered to be emblematic of the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... or cylinders inscribed with their prayers, which they twirl round on an axis, continually pronouncing these mystic words, and they believe that all the prayers on these rolls are virtually pronounced at each turn of the roll; The religion of the Dalai-Lama, is a branch of the Shamanian and Braminical superstitions, and has for its foundation the Manichaean doctrine of the two ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... leaving the world to darkness and to us in the woods. The woods, where Adam and Eve lived and loved, where Pan piped, and Satyrs danced, the opera house of birds; the woods, green, imparadisaical, mystic, tranquillizing—to the poet perhaps when all is well—but to us, they seemed haunted by spirits of evil, the yells of the demons seemed to echo and reecho; but an indefinable something seemed to sympathize with ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... detachment from Saybrooke, determined to march against the enemy. The Piquods had taken two positions which they had surrounded with palisadoes, and had resolved to defend. The nearest was on a small eminence surrounded by a swamp near the head of Mystic river. Against this fort the first attack was made. The Indians, deceived by a movement of the vessels from Saybrooke to Narraghansett, believed the expedition to have been abandoned; and celebrated, in perfect security, the supposed evacuation of their country. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... for. A short time afterwards young T. received a most kind reply from the baron, inviting him to come to Berlin; but, before this letter arrived, the young student had heard that Baron von K. was a pietist or mystic (as true believers are contemptuously called in Germany;) and as young was of a highly philosophical turn of mind, reasoning about every thing, questioning the truth of revelation, yea questioning most sceptically the existence of God, he much disliked ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Third Part • George Mueller
... (Essay on Pope, ii. 141), 'was a Mystic and a Quietist, and a warm disciple of Fenelon. It was he who brought a Catholic priest to take Pope's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... strange austerity, whose trance appals, Before thee, and a suppliant on thee calls. Continue still thy silence high and sure, That something beyond fleeting may endure— Something that shall forevermore allure Imagination on to mystic flights Wherein alone no wing of ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... fearless, but there was something so weird about this mystic sentence, which hinted at capital punishment, that she shrank back nervously. Mother Cockleshell, delighted to see that she had made an impression, climbed on to the gray donkey and made a progress through the camp. Passing by Chaldea's caravan ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... perhaps, interest MR. SANSOM to be informed that the appearance described to him is mentioned as a known fact in one of the works of the celebrated mystic, Jacob Behmen, The Three Principles, chap. 19. "Of the going forth of the Soul." I extract from J. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various
... be provided," returned the Wise One, smiling. He stepped to an ancient chest, deeply carved with mystic signs, that stood quite by itself in a corner of the hut. From out that chest many magic gifts had come, when need was great. Filled to the brim with treasures as it always was, none saw aught within but those gifts which were for his ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... Her chaplet, wound about her right arm, had beads of a milky whiteness, whilst the links and the cross were of gold. And on her bare feet, on her adorable feet of virgin snow, flowered two golden roses, the mystic roses of this divine ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... mystic pool herdsman and monarchs alike receive summons and admission. The most Christian King must, for his own sake, accomplish his own sanctification; his sanctification provides for that of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... delight of a life of slothful renunciation, self-abnegation, and devotion to "duty." The music of the last scene sings that song in tones of infinite sweetness; but it cannot satisfy you; you turn from the enchanted hall, with its holy cup and spear and dove, its mystic voices in the heights, its heavy, depressing, incense-laden atmosphere; and you hasten into the night, where the winds blow fresh through the black trees, and the stars shine calmly in the deep sky, just as though no ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... delicate hand. From the tip of each of her long taper fingers issued a lambent flame of such surpassing brilliancy as would have plunged a whole gas company into despair—it was a 'Hand of Glory,' [Footnote: One of the uses to which this mystic chandelier was put, was the protection of secreted treasure. Blow out all the fingers at one puff, and you had the money.] such a one as tradition tells us yet burns in Rochester Castle every St. Mark's Eve. Many are the daring individuals who have watched in Gundulph's Tower, ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... that day. And it so happened that, of all Fridays in the year, it fell on the Friday before Easter: that awful anniversary when the altars of the Church are veiled throughout Christendom, and the dark stone is rolled to the door of the mystic sepulchre. ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... roadside tree —A murderer's corse it needs must be—, Sever the right hand carefully:— Sever the hand that the deed hath done, Ere the flesh that clings to the bones be gone; In its dry veins must blood be none. Those ghastly fingers white and cold, Within a winding-sheet enfold; Count the mystic count of seven: Name the Governors of Heaven.[2] Then in earthen vessel place them, And with dragon-wort encase them, Bleach them in the noonday sun, Till the marrow melt and run, Till the flesh is pale and wan, As a moon-ensilvered cloud, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the bells at midnight Ring in the dawning year; And above the clanging chorus Of the song, I seemed to hear A choir of mystic voices Flinging echoes, ringing clear, From a band of angels winging Through the haunted atmosphere: "Ring out the shame and sorrow, And the misery and sin, That the dawning of the morrow May in peace be ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... The sweet, subtle aroma of his hair reached her. The subtle warmth of his body met hers. As the mystic eyes opened below her eyes, a crooning lullaby hidden somewhere within her found its way to her throat and there stuck. She grew dizzy and her throat ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... my days divine But flashes back some mystic sign; And every shape that erst was bright Sweeps by me garmented ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the mystic land of spring knows hallowed places in sunny valleys where the tender goddess first reveals herself at Nature's living altars. Yet he can scarcely tell at which shrine she will first appear. She delights ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... by year the Viking's raven Made that mystic spot his rest; Year by year within the eyot Brooded he as on a nest; And no man would ever venture To invade the lone domain Where in solitary scheming The grim bird ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... interested her so much as a low cottage, something like her own, which lay away in the distance. She could not guess how far it might be, because distances are deceiving out there, where the altitude is high and the air is as clear as one of those mystic balls of glass in which the sallow mystics of India see the moving ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... a mystic charm most winsome In th' glance of a speaking eye Whose light shines in dark recesses And ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... in the morning, in a room which she shared with a school teacher, Fanny Elmer read Tom Jones—that mystic book. For this dull stuff (Fanny thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes. Good people like it. Dowdy women who don't mind how they cross their legs read Tom Jones—a mystic book; for there is something, Fanny thought, about books ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... and many gainful pursuits are closed against him. He cannot play lawn tennis, or, at least according to my observation, he cannot play lawn tennis oftener than once in two weeks. In between games he limps round, stiff as a hat tree and sore as a mashed thumb. Time was when he might mingle in the mystic mazes of the waltz, tripping the light fantastic toe or stubbing it, as the case may be. But that was in the days of the old-fashioned square dance, which was the fat man's friend among dances, and also of the old-fashioned two-step, and not in these times when dancing is a cross ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... of the coffin-shaped board was roughly drawn, in black paint, a skull and cross-bones and, underneath them, the words "Eliab Hill and Nimbus Desmit," and below these still, the mystic cabala, "K.K.K," a formulary at which, just at that time, a great part of the nation was laughing as a capital illustration of American humor. It was accounted simply a piece of grotesquerie intended to frighten the ignorant ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... Dodona, or the God Ammon, or any ancient tradition has sanctioned in whatever manner, whether by apparitions or reputed inspiration of Heaven, in obedience to which mankind have established sacrifices in connexion with mystic rites, either originating on the spot, or derived from Tyrrhenia or Cyprus or some other place, and on the strength of which traditions they have consecrated oracles and images, and altars and temples, and portioned out a sacred domain ...
— Laws • Plato
... particulars, "gathered from the lips of prominent actors in the battle." This account says, "The first men, so far as remembered, that took stations in the battery, were four, William Lord, Asa Lee, George Fellows, and Amos Denison. Just before six o'clock, six volunteers from Mystic, Jeremiah Holmes, Jeremiah Haley, Ebenezer Denison, Isaac Denison, and Nathaniel Clift, reached the place, on foot, and ran immediately to help to operate the gun in ...
— The Defence of Stonington (Connecticut) Against a British Squadron, August 9th to 12th, 1814 • J. Hammond Trumbull
... idols of lust and ignorance. A kindly warning to you, fellow-prospectors and miners, who delve in the vitals of Mother Earth! Beware Thumb Butte, beware the district of the Sphinx! Have a care, for you know not what you may encounter in this mystic neighborhood! Shun strange gods and set up no idols in your hearts, as you value the salvation of your souls. But if your mine lies in this district, be fearful not to excite the anger of the gnomes of the mountain. Charge lightly, lest ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... he butts in. "My friend, the world-renowed Professor Parducci, is a medium, a mystic and a swami. He's the seventh son of a seventh son, born with a veil and spent two years in Indiana with the yogi. He can peer into the future or gaze back at the past. He is in direct communication with the spirits of the dear departed and as a crystal gazer ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... and held it up proudly to the light. "Will you look at that, now?" she crooned. "The finest ever I brewed. Ah, the mystic droplet! Some swain will be buying that, now, and putting it in a lassie's cup o' tea, and she'll be pining away for love of him ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... introduction of the fortunate phrase is due to Secretary Chase. President Lincoln placed the act upon a legal basis, justifying it in law and in history. The sentence is what we might have expected from the head and heart of the man who wrote the final sentence of the first inaugural address: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... clock-case at the Royal Rosicrucian Lodge at Bungay, Suffolk, to spy the proceedings of the Society, of which her husband was a member, and being frightened by the sudden whirring and striking eleven of the clock (just as the Deputy-Grand-Master was bringing in the mystic gridiron for the reception of a neophyte), rushed out into the midst of the lodge assembled; and was elected, by a desperate unanimity, Deputy-Grand-Mistress for life. Though that admirable and courageous female never subsequently breathed a word with regard to the secrets of the initiation, ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... she's at home; widow of a bishop most likely. Those girls have been carefully reared, you can see that, but full of the spirit of mischief. The moment I tackled that stupid innkeeper about his monstrous pie they felt the drawing of the mystic tie that binds us together with silken cords. Very likely they, like us, are in search of adventure, and if our own affairs were less urgent I should certainly cultivate ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... all his half-formed resolutions vanished into air. He sat in a corner of the curious, dimly-lit and old-fashioned chamber, and, lying back in the chair, abandoned himself to dreams as Sheila sang the mystic songs of the northern coasts. There was something strangely suggestive of the sea in the room itself, and all her songs were of the sea. It was a smaller room than the large apartment in which they had dined, and it was filled with curiosities ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... as he journeyed home beneath fading heavens. Somehow the barriers of wealth had fallen, and there had been—he could not phrase it—a general assertion of the wonder of the world. "My conviction," says the mystic, "gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it," and they had agreed that there was something beyond life's daily grey. He took off his top-hat and smoothed it thoughtfully. He had hitherto supposed the unknown to be books, literature, clever conversation, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... in the south. The black-robed scholars knelt on one side of the dead, the novices on the other, the relatives and friends behind. But art had perfected itself in the gallery above the lower end of the chapel. This also was draped with black which seemed to absorb, then shed forth again the mystic brilliance of the candles; and kneeling, well apart, were the nuns in their ivory white robes and black veils, their banded softened features as composed and peaceful as if ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... The unusual form of the house, filled with such groups {p.073} of crowded spectators, themselves forming an extraordinary spectacle to the eye which has never witnessed it before, yet all intent upon that wide and mystic curtain, whose dusky undulations permit us now and then to discern the momentary glitter of some gaudy form, or the spangles of some sandalled foot, which trips lightly within: Then the light, brilliant as that of day; then the music, which, in itself ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... The school of Hermes Trismegistus, Who uttered his oracles sublime Before the Olympiads, in the dew Of the early dawn and dusk of Time, The reign of dateless old Hephaestus! As northward, from its Nubian springs, The Nile, forever new and old, Among the living and the dead, Its mighty, mystic stream has rolled; So, starting from its fountain-head Under the lotus-leaves of Isis, From the dead demigods of eld, Through long, unbroken lines of kings Its course the sacred art has held, Unchecked, unchanged ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... muscular effort. In the light of knowledge gained in later years, I can now see in that long, slouching, shuffling figure, in that tallow-colored face with the bloodless, loose lips and the wandering, mystic eyes of periwinkle blue—I can see in that girl-face framed by a trashy picture-hat, and in that girl-form wrapped in the old golf-cape, one of the earth's unfortunates; a congenital failure; a female creature doomed from her mother's womb—physically, ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... of the old world forlorn A mystic child is set in these still hours. I keep this time, even before the flowers, Sacred to all the young and ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... never anybody a-going to tell anybody else about it. He made them boys cross they hearts and bodies not to. I didn't cross mine 'cause I knew I had to tell you, but I do it now." And Eliza stood up and solemnly made the mystic sign, thus locking the barn door of her secret chambers after having quartered the troublesome steed of confidence on the ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... through the cottage door, And blushed as she sought the plant of power; Then silver glow-worm, O lend me thy light, I must gather the mystic St. John's Wort to-night, The wonderful herb whose leaf must decide If the coming year shall make me a bride. And the glow-worm came With its silvery flame, And sparkled and shone Through the night of St. John; While it shone on the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... amber mosses, and the flowers that hung from craggy ledges, had wisdom to impart. A borderman lived under the green tree-tops, and, therefore, all the nodding branches of sassafras and laurel, the grassy slopes and rocky cliffs, the stately ash trees, kingly oaks and dark, mystic pines, together with the creatures that dwelt among them, save his deadly red-skinned foes, he loved. Other affection as close and true as this, he had not known. Hearkening thus with single heart to nature's teachings, he learned her secrets. Certain ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... their veins, and Slavonic hearts beat high with hope in their bosoms. They had all the delightful Slavonic zeal, the Slavonic dash, the Slavonic imagination. They were easy to stir, they were swift in action, they were witty in speech, they were mystic and poetic in soul, and, like the Irish of the present day, they revelled in the joy of party politics, and discussed religious questions with the keenest zest. With them religion came first and foremost. All their poetry ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... XVII Corps Light Railway Company, Royal Engineers, went to Brigade Headquarters to learn Staff work. The transport vehicles had somewhat camouflaged themselves, having been decorated on all sides by wonderful and mystic signs, so as to show to the initiated to what unit they belonged. If you enquired you would be told that the dark blue square meant "First Line Transport," the narrow light green oblong edged with white placed on the left ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... of the war there was, we were told, in England and France a revival of "religion," and indeed many of the books then written gave evidence of having been composed in exalted, mystic moods. I remember one in particular, called "En Campagne," by a young French officer. And then, somehow, the note of mystic exaltation died away, to be succeeded by a period of realism. Read "Le Feu," which is most typical, which has sold in numberless editions. Here is a picture ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... ever that she went there, and it was not in order to be alone with her sorrow, though that would have been a natural and human impulse; nor was it because she felt herself drawn to an existence of asceticism and mystic meditation. ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... Coney Island. This is the favorite resort of clams and little jokers. Here you may daily fill your bread-basket with bivalves, and then observe the mysteries of that mystic game, now you see it, now ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... devils, and gave unto them grace through the very thing that had been disclosed to his own sight as a sign of victory against the onrush of foes; and how on the third day the Glory 185 of men and Lord of all mankind rose from the tomb and from death, and ascended into heaven. Men wise in the mystic things of the Spirit thus said unto the victory-inspired monarch as they had 190 learned from Silvester. And at their hands the prince of the people received baptism, and held to the faith according to the will of the Lord from that time ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... for its possible help to build fires, it would have come no farther with me. The great levels around me lay cooled and freed of dust by the wet weather, and full of sweet airs. Far in front the foot-hills rose through the rain, indefinite and mystic. I wanted no speech with any one, nor to be near human beings at all. I was steeped in a revery as of the primal earth; even thoughts themselves had almost ceased motion. To lie down with wild animals, with elk and deer, would have made my waking dream complete; and since ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... result being that a rapid, though only temporary, recovery took place. Had he relaxed his efforts somewhat, the cure might have been a permanent one, but Dr. Pascal, with the penetrating vision of the mystic, saw how pressing were the needs of the age, and how few the pioneers of this new presentation of the Truth, so that, at whatever cost of personal sacrifice, he plunged once more into the midst of ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... yet unreveal'd to human sight, Ye gods, who rule the regions of the night, Ye gliding ghosts, permit me to relate The mystic wonders of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... affected to believe that he took second place in the name. But the three B's were there; did they not point psychically to the golden bees of the Corsican? Indeed, an astrologist in Chicago had once told him, for a paltry half-dollar, that those B's in his name were of a profoundly mystic significance. ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... to Mussulmen three mystic significations; it denotes providence; it is the expression of law; and thirdly, of power; it restores the courage of the faithful and strikes terror to the hearts of ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... left him benumbed in his baseness, cowardliness and weakness. Now he understood that love, in order to triumph, must first humble its own power, still its own movement and soften its brutal will. Now he comprehended that he must carve mystic runes of passion upon his own heart as upon a glowing rose and fling it into the mighty sea of feeling, praying it to bring the maiden Gro into ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... every mark of care, In every wrinkle's mystic line, I fancied jewels gleaming there That wore ...
— Tiger and Tom and Other Stories for Boys • Various
... for tribal instincts and passions. The passionate loves and hatreds of the clans, their pride of race, their deathless lealty; and more than all, and better than all, their religious instincts, faiths and prejudices; these, with the mystic, wild loveliness of heather-clad hill and rock-rimmed loch, of roaring torrent and jagged crags, of lonely muir and sunny pasture nuiks; all these, and ten thousand nameless and unnamable things united in the weaving of the spell of the Glen upon the hearts of its people. ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... A kind of mystic ceremony substituted for religious worship, with what spiritual efficacy has ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... like a jewel Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour; The heavy white limbs, and the cruel Red mouth like a venomous flower; When these are gone by with their glories, What shall rest of thee then, what remain, O mystic and sombre ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... their credit, not for being just, but because they are laws; 'tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by fools, still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but always by men, vain and irresolute authors. There ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... represent clearly, that we may fairly suppose that the authority which absolute monism undoubtedly possesses, and probably always will possess over some persons, draws its strength far less from intellectual than from mystical grounds. To interpret absolute monism worthily, be a mystic. Mystical states of mind in every degree are shown by history, usually tho not always, to make for the monistic view. This is no proper occasion to enter upon the general subject of mysticism, but I will quote one mystical pronouncement to show just what I mean. The paragon ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... silently the fruitful seed, As softly o'er the tilth ye tread, For hands that delicately knead The consecrated bread— The mystic loaf that crowns the board. When, round the table of their Lord, Within a thousand temples set, In memory of the bitter death Of Him who taught at Nazareth, His followers are met, And thoughtful eyes with tears are wet, As of the Holy One they think, The glory of whose rising yet ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... night was coming on, but He, in the plenitude of His divine compassion, turned you not away, but gives you a princely reward—even Himself. Like the Prodigal, destitute and naked, you return, and receiving you, He spreads a mystic feast, in which He gives you heavenly food; and while the shadow of death falls around you, lo! He comes to go with you towards those dismal portals, and admit you to a region of probation and everlasting hope. Humbly confiding, and strong in faith, receive Him, not as ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... grip. Their voices had fallen, they suffocated in the silence. Ulick had mentioned Blake's name, and she had accepted an artistic discussion as an escapement, but their hearts were overloaded, and it was in answer to his own thoughts that Ulick had spoken of the eighteenth-century mystic. For the question had arisen in him whether the passions of the flesh are not destructive of spiritual exaltation, and he told her that exaltation was the gospel according to Blake. We must seek to exalt ourselves, ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... break and falter in the darkness,— Break, falter, and are still; And veiled and mystic, like the Host descending, The sun sinks from ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... more. When in the tomb I stood,— And faltered on the path that separates This life from death, at any moment ready To greet the underworld,—lo, seized me then An eerie shuddering; I know not what—; I felt in me a mystic transformation;— Away flowed hate, revenge, my very soul; Each memory vanished and each earthly longing;— Only the name of "Catiline" remains Written in ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... predicate concerning him. If the physical adequately could have revealed that Power, there never would have been anything but the physical to reveal him. The fact that spiritual life is here is evidence that it takes spiritual life fully to display the truth about creation's reality. As an old mystic put it: "God sleeps in the stone, he dreams in the ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... the Life—the blessed well, With living waters gushing o'er, Which those that drink shall ever dwell Where sin and thirst are known no more. Thou art the mystic pillar given, Our lamp by night, our light by day; Thou art the sacred bread from heaven; Thou ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... seem'd swelling The panting heart to burst its bound, And wandering Fancy found a dwelling In every shape—thought—deed, and sound. Germ'd in the mystic buds, reposing, A whole creation slumber'd mute, Alas, when from the buds unclosing, How scant and blighted sprung ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... trying to do the same thing ourselves. I was concentrating upon a V, with a film on my forehead, and the others were trying it either with film or plate. Only one other secured anything at all, and that was but a blur. Our subject who did get the Cross result is a very highly developed mystic with remarkable powers of concentration, but modest about his powers and for that reason, and because he is extremely busy, we have not been able to repeat the experiment ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... hitherto lacking. Its appearance too suggests the famous allegory, the unsolved riddle of human existence which so puzzled the divine Plato and the ancient philosophers of Athens and Syracuse. Here are we, the living men of to-day, watching the corpse of a departed world upon which the mystic symbol of Psyche has just alighted. Tempus breve est is the simple little truism that rises to our reflecting minds. Eighteen centuries between the Vettii and ourselves! They are gone like a flash, and we are amazed to note ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... him. She only lowered her eyes to the deft hands that were disposing the cards in mystic array upon the table. ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... picture is deepened by the effects of the twilight on the plains. A wide outlook across a level country, like a view of the sea, is always impressive, but it has peculiar power in the vague light which follows the sunset. Many poetic natures have felt this mystic spell of the gloaming as it descends upon the plain. Robert Louis Stevenson was one of these, and upon visiting Barbizon he described vividly his feelings at such an hour. We are told also that Millet loved to walk abroad at nightfall and note the ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... the night when you Had kissed me first. (Ah, your eyes were blue, And very tender, and Heaven-true, There in the candlelight!) I thought of a misty summer night, When a shower fell on the vivid grass (There, through the rain, I watched you pass!) I thought of a mystic summer night That never ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... This way, that way, forward, back, Swings the pendulum to and fro, Always regular, always slow. Grave and solemn on the wall,— Hear it whisper! hear it call! Little Ginx knows naught of Time, But has heard the mystic rhyme,— "Hickory, dickory, dock! The mouse ran ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... exclusively with the writings of Pouchkine, Gogol, Dostoievsky, Tourguenef, who was the inventor of the word Nihilism, and the mystic Tolstoy, who was the principal apostle of the doctrine. All these, with the possible exception of Tourguenef, had one characteristic in common. Their intellects were in a state of unstable equilibrium. As poets, they could ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... will look on me," (for hitherto the king had been so busy, first with the dogs, and then with the mystic operation of breaking, in vulgar phrase, cutting up the deer, that he had scarce given his assistant above a transient glance,) "you will see whom necessity makes bold to avail himself of an opportunity which ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... "The mystic cord of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... step is accompanied with danger; we look round and above in despair; suddenly we feel within us a new impulse and a new power! we feel a vague sympathy with that unknown region which spreads beyond this great net,—that limitless beyond hath a mystic affinity with a part of our own frame; we unconsciously extend our wings (for the soul to us is as the wings to the fly!); we attempt to rise,—to soar above this perilous snare, from which we are unable to crawl. The old spider watcheth us in self-hugging quiet, and, looking ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "I am an American citizen, Mr. Knox, which is tantamount to stating that I belong to the greatest community of traders which has appeared since the Phoenicians overran the then known world. America has not produced the mystic, yet Judaea produced the founder of Christianity, and Gautama Buddha, born of a royal line, established the creed of human equity. In what way did these magicians, for a miracle-worker is nothing but a magician, differ from ordinary men? In one respect only: They had learned to control that ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... flood and every form of quackery is welcome, we need not wonder that a theosophy having so respectable a core—something, indeed, like a true logic misunderstood—should gain many adherents. Out of the names of things and of virtues a mystic ladder could be constructed by which to leave the things and the virtues themselves behind; but the sagacity and exigencies of the school would not fail to arrange the steps in this progress—the end of which was unattainable except, perhaps, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... it was a hen bird, for he saw the male fly to the net, and tear the meshes one by one with its beak, until it had made an opening by which its mate could escape. The holy man watched this incident, and as, by virtue of his holiness, he easily comprehended the mystic sense of all occurrences, he knew that the captive bird was no other than Thais, caught in the snares of sin, and that—like the plover that had cut the hempen threads with its beak—he could, by pronouncing the word of power, break ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... in the Leonine Elegiacs, in Claribel, and several other poems. Qualities which were not for long to find public expression, speculative powers brooding, in various moods, on ultimate and insoluble questions, were attested by The Mystic, and Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind not in Unity with Itself, an unlucky title of a remarkable performance. "In this, the most agitated of all his poems, we find ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... great heritage of song which Yorkshire bequeathed to the nation between the seventh century and the fifteenth. After the Caedmonic poems, its chief glories are the religious lyrics of Richard Rolle, the mystic, and the great cycles of scriptural plays which are associated with the trade-guilds of York and Wakefield. But in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the all-conquering Standard English spread like a mighty ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... upon the worn and weary soul as it drifted lazily on, far from the noise and the toil and the reek of the world! All times were calm; all waters kind. The days rolled on in ever-changing scenes of beauty; the nights, star-gemmed and mystic, were filled with music and the witchery ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... scribe of Osiris. Chapters XCVI and XCVII also placed him under the protection of Thoth. The recital of Chapter XCVIII provided the deceased with a boat in which to sail over the northern heavens, and a ladder by which to ascend to heaven. Chapters XCIX-CIII gave him the use of the magical boat, the mystic name of each part of which he was obliged to know, and helped him to enter the Boat of Ra and to be with Hathor. The Bebait, or mantis, led him to the great gods (Chapter CIV), and the Uatch amulet from the neck of Ra provided his double (ka) and his heart-soul (ba) with offerings (Chapters ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... and then punish him for not standing upright." Why, that statement of the "Autocrat" appears to me at least as certain as that two and two make four. It may, indeed, contain some recondite and malignant reference which the stupid American divines know, and which I do not; it may be a mystic Shibboleth, indicating far more than it asserts; as at one time in Scotland it was esteemed as proof that a clergyman preached unsound doctrine, if he made use of the Lord's Prayer. But, understanding it simply as meaning that the Judge of all the Earth will do right, it appears ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... as love) I say I appear indeed, and give my voice in public business; but oh my heart more kindly is employed; that and my thoughts are Sylvia's! Ten thousand times a day I breathe that name, my busy fingers are eternally tracing out those six mystic letters; a thousand ways on every thing I touch, form words, and make them speak a thousand things, and all are Sylvia still; my melancholy change is evident to all that see me, which they interpret ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... rage, hate, and violence. Innocent, guileless fear has been the cause of many wars. Not, of course, the fear of war itself, which, in the evolution of sentiments and ideas, has come to be regarded at last as a half-mystic and glorious ceremony with certain fashionable rites and preliminary incantations, wherein the conception of its true nature has been lost. To apprehend the true aspect, force, and morality of war as a natural function ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the quiet grey that hung over the Atlantic. Not a breath of wind passed over land or sea. To the northward Chun Castle stood darkly on the summit of the neighbouring hill, and the cromlech loomed huge and mysterious; southward were traces of mystic circles and upright stones, and other of those inexplicable pieces of antiquity which are usually saddled on the overladen shoulders of the Druids. Everything, in fact—in the scene, the season, and the weather—contributed to fill the mind of the ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... history will reveal a fact that is not observant to the casual reader—that man, as an individual, has ever been groping in darkness, seeking hither and thither to find a ray of light that would safely guide him and lead him through the mystic vale of doubt and uncertainty—be a "light to his pathway, a ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... total destruction of life." He then quotes apparently the language of the text, "He consumed his body by Agni (the fire of) Samadhi," and says it is "a common expression for the effects of such ecstatic, ultra-mystic self-annihilation." All this is simply "a darkening of counsel by words without knowledge." Some facts concerning the death of Ananda are hidden beneath the darkness of the phraseology, which it is impossible for us to ascertain. By or in Samadhi he burns his body in the very ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... Mystic, with introspection, asks the question in the form "Can the Absolute find me out and possess me and thus make me feel that that which is within me is akin to, is, in fact, a part of Him and that I am possessed thereby?" ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... that this people had rather a tendency to the useful, than to the beautiful. Unable to assimilate the elements of beauty and grace furnished by more genial races, this mystic and vanished nation was rather prone to the stupendously and minutely practical, than devoted to the beautiful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... world began now and ended for Skavinski on his island. He had grown accustomed to the thought that he would not leave the tower till his death, and he simply forgot that there was anything else besides it. Moreover, he had become a mystic; his mild blue eyes began to stare like the eyes of a child, and were as if fixed on something at a distance. In presence of a surrounding uncommonly simple and great, the old man was losing the feeling of personality; ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... cultivated and generous contemporary ways it reveals a pre- established harmony. As you live in it day after day its beauty and its interest sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions. If in the absence of its masters you have happened to have it to yourself for twenty-four hours you will never forget the charm of its haunted stillness, late on the summer afternoon for instance, when the call of playing ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... did call upon his Snake with due and portentous ceremony and, according to Stephen, who was present, which I declined to be, that mystic reptile declared that Dogeetah, alias Brother John, would arrive in Beza Town precisely at sunset on the third day from that night. Now as he had divined on Friday, according to our almanac, this meant that we might hope to see him—hope exactly described my state of mind on the matter—on ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... of Florence, for which he received 1200, contributed by the inhabitants of every part of Italy in 1872. The statues are in white marble, the tablets and friezes in bronze, and the pedestal in granite. The monument is tame and mystic. Cavour, in an upright position, holds in his hand a scroll bearing the words, "libera chiesa in libero stato." (See p.294.) The climate of Turin is more suitable for bronze than for marble statues. To the west is the Piazza S.Carlo, with a bronze ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... Iacchus! power excelling, here in stately temple dwelling, O Iacchus! O Iacchus! Come to tread this verdant level, Come to dance in mystic revel, Come whilst round thy forehead hurtles Many a wreath of fruitful myrtles, Come with wild and saucy paces Mingling in our joyous dance, Pure and holy, which embraces all the charms of all the Graces When the mystic ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... have rolls or cylinders inscribed with their prayers, which they twirl round on an axis, continually pronouncing these mystic words, and they believe that all the prayers on these rolls are virtually pronounced at each turn of the roll; The religion of the Dalai-Lama, is a branch of the Shamanian and Braminical superstitions, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... ring-side of Indian sporting grounds, and only tacitly accepted in the extra-official circles of Hindustan. For it figured not in the official Army List, either as active or retired. The whole panorama of the mystic land of the Hindus was unrolled once more by the memories of fifteen clouded years, He saw again his far-away theater of varied action, with its huge grim mountains towering far over the snow line, its arid wastes, its fertile plains bathed ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... River. In this they were successfully aided by Tecumseh, the Shawanee chief, and his brother, the Prophet. These were sons of a Creek mother and a Shawanee brave. By relationship, and by the rude eloquence of the former and the mystic arts and incantations of the latter, they brought into confederacy with Northern tribes—which they had organized as allies of the English in a last hope of destroying American power in the West—almost the entire Creek nation. These savages, though at peace under treaty and largely ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... its mystic sense of entranced Love for the Soul of Souls. Umar was hated and feared because he spoke boldly when his brethren the Soofis dealt in innuendoes. A third quotation has been trained into a likeness of the Hymn of Life, despite the commonplace and the navrante vulgarit which characterize ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... senseless wood, And chatter in a mystic strain, Is a mere force on flesh and blood, And shows some ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... was sipping a whisky toddy, with the feeling that he had been privileged to assist at some mystic rite. Mr. Beach, posting himself before the fire and placing his hands behind his back, permitted ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the eye is a good working lens. But they don't notice them except by accident, when the light slants sideways, and when there's a specially good background for them to be projected and magnified upon." And, taking him into his mystic chamber, and reconstituting the conditions, "Look!" says he, "there are your old friends again!" And there they were, sure enough, in all their amorphous horror. It is, in fact, not so much the actual external object that determines ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... darkens as the night descends; And through the mystic atmosphere I feel the creeping coldness that portends A change of spirit in my dream The multitude that moved with song and cheer Have vanished, yet a living stream Flows on and follows still the flag, But silent now, with leaden ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... blackness of night. And then out of the belly of the cloud there sprang a woman arrayed as a bride, and behind her there followed men with faces strange to me, whose stamping footsteps shook the island to its roots in the deep sea. Then came a mystic voice to me, ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... gradually its glories became more perceptible. Begun by Hubert in 1420 and finished by Jan in 1432, its pristine splendour has vanished; and the loss of the wings—the Adam and Eve are in Brussels, the remaining volets in the Berlin Museum—is irreparable despite the copies. But this Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, with its jewelled figures of the Christ, of St. John the Baptist, St. Cecilia, and the central panel with its mystical symbolism, painted in sumptuous tones, the lamb on the altar, the prophets and ecclesiastics in worship, the singing angels, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Average Jones. "I shouldn't have vaunted my poor French. But must I really take my little friends all the way back? You suggested to the mystic voice within that ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Thirteenth. This absurd priest determined to try what the weight of his authority could effect in favour of the orthodox Maria Theresa against a heretic king. At the high mass on Christmas-day, a sword with a rich belt and scabbard, a hat of crimson velvet lined with ermine, and a dove of pearls, the mystic symbol of the Divine Comforter, were solemnly blessed by the supreme pontiff, and were sent with great ceremony to Marshal Daun, the conqueror of Kolin and Hochkirchen. This mark of favour had more than once been bestowed ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he had done well, but with the next question he betrayed his ignorance. A good man arose, also hot on Church affairs, to discourse on some disabilities, and casually described himself as a U.P. George's wits busied themselves in guessing at the mystic sign. At last to his delight he seemed to achieve it, and, in replying, electrified his audience by assuming that the two ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... wearisome at times. In his "Pageant of Summer" he babbles prettily of green fields, but it is a long, long summer and one is hardly sorry to see its close. In some of his writings he affects one unpleasantly, gives an uncanny feeling; one divines the invalid as well as the mystic back of them; there is a hectic flush, perhaps a neurotic taint. Beautiful, yes, but not the beauty of health and sanity. It is the same indescribable feeling I get in reading that pathetically beautiful book, "The Road-Mender," by "Michael Fairless"—the gleam of the White ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... had risen to devote The mystic wafer, from the band that stood About the altar came a sudden note Of sweetness over my disdainful mood; A voice that, speaking from the brazen throat Of warlike trumpets, came like the subdued Moan of a people bound in sore distress, And ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... The disturbance will pass away; and we shall find that Abraham and Moses knew more about the universe than Hegel or Comte. The prophets of the sacred race were divinely endowed with an esoteric knowledge concealed from the vulgar behind mystic symbols and ceremonies. If the old oracles are dumb, some gleams of the same power still remain, and in the language of mere mortals are called genius. We find it in perfection only amongst the Semites, whose finer organisation, indicated by their musical supremacy, enables them to catch the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... wound the procession of sleighs and horsemen, without sound of voice or jingle of bell till, one by one, they passed out of our sight and dipped down into the canyon. But we knew every step of the winding trail and followed them in fancy through that fairy scene of mystic wonderland. We knew how the great elms and the poplars and the birches clinging to the snowy sides interlaced their bare boughs into a network of bewildering complexity, and how the cedars and balsams and spruces stood in the bottom, their dark boughs ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... power and miraculous gifts of the early Church. But when the pure doctrine became corrupted, and the Christian Church (like the Jewish of former times) gave itself up to idolatry, masses, image-worship, and the like, the knowledge of the mystic name was withdrawn, and all miracles have ceased in the Church from that up ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... that will bestow Earth's joys and blessings on a man. Each one must choose the path he'll go, Then win from it what joy he can. And he that battles with the odds Shall know success, but he who waits The favors of the mystic gods, Shall never ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... be, but only discover the beauty of her feminine stillness. Not far from that consummate caryatid, among the black columns of the tall trees laid against the lave of the blue, and beneath their cloudy branches, there are mystic enlacements which move to and fro; and hardly can one distinguish the two halves of which they are made, for the temple ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... native land. The number, indeed, was so considerable, that the priest who officiated was obliged to make use of the mop, or hyssop, with which the Roman Catholic missionaries were wont to scatter the holy drops, whose mystic virtue could cleanse the soul in a moment from the foulest stains of infidelity. "Thus," says a Castilian historian, "the calamities of these poor blind creatures proved in the end an excellent remedy, that God made use ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... work both ways, and all who are interested in it must see to it that their religion does not escape control and wreck fraternity. Even mystic prayer and contemplation, which is commonly regarded as the flower of religious life, may make men indifferent ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... outline cast On yonder wall, to arrest with poet's finger Thy beauty's mystic image fading fast, As round thy form fond ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... show that he, a man wise beyond his fellows, had not yet learned the unwisdom of striving to lift the veil of tomorrow, behind whose mystic curtain what is to be ever jostles out of place what ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... fashion since their return and new ones engaged by letter; to these the editor and his immediate associates remained an unseen presence, issuing its instructions solely through the medium of curt typewritten notes. Something mystic and Tibetan and forbidden had replaced the human bustle and democratic simplicity of pre-migration days, and the same experience was encountered by those who made social overtures to the returned wanderers. The most brilliant ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... babies, but she clung to Maren as she had ever done,—and now, in her twenty-sixth year, Maren had risen to the call as her father had done before her, and lifted her face, rapt as some pagan Priestess', toward that mystic West,—bound for the Land of the Whispering Hills, whence had come that old, vague rumour, lured alike by love of the unknown and shy, unspoken longing for the father whose heart must be ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... were, to warn the beholder of an unrevealed danger. The young man had long ago, it must be added, demanded of his grandfather the documents included in the legacy of Professor Swinnerton, and had spent days and nights upon them, growing pale over their mystic lore, which seemed the fruit not merely of the Professor's own labors, but of those of more ancient sages than he; and often a whole volume seemed to be compressed within the limits of a few lines of crabbed manuscript, judging from the time which it cost even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... genius to his fellow-citizens; and who, having once felt the strange charm of that genius, but recalls with joyful interest the happy hour when he was first brought under its influence? I well remember, even at this distance in time, the mystic, charmed presence that hung about the "Jeremiah dictating his Prophecy to Baruch the Scribe," "Beatrice," "The Flight of Florimel," "The Triumphal Song of Miriam on the Destruction of Pharaoh and his Host in the Red Sea," and "The Valentine." I was then young, and had yet to learn that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... nymph, her bonnet pushed over her face, her hayrake in her hand, a river-god in coat of velveteen, elbow on knee and pipe in mouth, who, rising when he sees us, lifts his wide-awake, and halloas back a roar of comfort to our mystic adjuration, - ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... coffin-shaped board was roughly drawn, in black paint, a skull and cross-bones and, underneath them, the words "Eliab Hill and Nimbus Desmit," and below these still, the mystic cabala, "K.K.K," a formulary at which, just at that time, a great part of the nation was laughing as a capital illustration of American humor. It was accounted simply a piece of grotesquerie intended to frighten the ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... of devils, and gave unto them grace through the very thing that had been disclosed to his own sight as a sign of victory against the onrush of foes; and how on the third day the Glory 185 of men and Lord of all mankind rose from the tomb and from death, and ascended into heaven. Men wise in the mystic things of the Spirit thus said unto the victory-inspired monarch as they had 190 learned from Silvester. And at their hands the prince of the people received baptism, and held to the faith according to the will of the Lord from that ...
— The Elene of Cynewulf • Cynewulf
... pile chanting his incantations for hours, till sheer exhaustion obliges him to desist, when his place is taken by his assistant. Water is sprinkled on the stone and huge fires are kindled. No layman may approach the sacred spot while the mystic ceremony is being performed. When the Sulka of New Britain wish to procure rain they blacken stones with the ashes of certain fruits and set them out, along with certain other plants and buds, in the sun. Then a handful of twigs is dipped in water ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Strachan. I began to wax wroth, muttered anathemas against my faithless friend, rang for the waiter, and—having ascertained the fact that a Masonic Lodge was that evening engaged in celebrating the festival of its peculiar patron—I set out for the purpose of assisting in the pious and mystic labours of the Brethren of the Jedburgh St Jeremy. At twelve, when I returned to my quarters, escorted by the junior deacon, I was informed that Strachan had not made his appearance, and accordingly I went ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... of several Kansa gentes. The ancestors of these gentes were spoken of as birds which descended from an upper world. The phratries in that tribe, the "Wa-yun min-'dun," or "(Those who) sing together," refer to mystic songs and strengthen the view that the secret society exists among these Indians. Several members of the tribe ...
— Osage Traditions • J. Owen Dorsey
... 400 carved stones of a more or less religious character. A few are Buddhist; some are memorials to priests or teachers; several bear that representation of a man and a woman facing one another (p. 265) which is one of the oldest mystic emblems; the majority are devoted apparently to the horse god. Every man who loses a horse erects a stone. There are two persons in the village who can carve these stones at a cost of about 2 yen. Some stones which are painted red are dedicated ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger, Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker, Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... in Hwochow, Chaocheng, and Fensi had a marvellous escape. The Boxers, practising their mystic rites, overran the district. Whole families fled to the mountains, and no one was safe from robbery and violence. The mandarin of Chaocheng, fearful lest massacres should take place in the county under his jurisdiction and desiring at any cost to ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... overnight, by the help of a cigar and a moonlight contemplation on deck, for sensations on landing in Egypt. I was ready to yield myself up with solemnity to the mystic grandeur of the scene of initiation. Pompey's Pillar must stand like a mountain, in a yellow plain, surrounded by a grove of obelisks as tall as palm-trees. Placid sphinxes brooding o'er the Nile—mighty Memnonian countenances calm—had revealed Egypt to me in a sonnet of ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... four men sat silent, two in slouching postures at the head of the coffin; the third, with the driver, was at its foot. It seemed drearily suggestive, the last journey of this humble mortality, in all the splendid environment of the mountains, under the vast expansions of the aloof skies, in the mystic ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... resuming the manuscript, "of dividing all art into two great classes, the landscape subjects, and the figure subjects; and I venture to describe these classes, in their highest development, under the respective titles of Art Pastoral and Art Mystic. The 'Golden Age' is an attempt to exemplify Art Pastoral. 'Columbus in Sight of the New World' is an effort to express myself in Art Mystic. In 'The Golden Age' "—(everybody looked at Columbus immediately)—"In the 'Golden Age,'" continued Mr. Blyth, waving his wand persuasively towards the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... field and alight near a rock-strewn hill. Candles are given us and we grope our way through narrow passages till we come to the centre of the hill. Here is a chamber some twenty feet in height. On the great stones which support the roof are mystic emblems. On the floor is a large stone hollowed out in the shape of a bowl. It suggests human sacrifices. My guide did not encourage this suggestion. There was, he thought, no historical evidence for it. But it seemed to ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... wondered at that men, endowed with such powers of blessing or banning, possessed of such mystic communion with the then utterly unknown powers of nature, should have exercised an all but unlimited influence over the minds of their countrymen, especially at a time when the powers of evil were still supposed to stalk the earth in all their native malignity, and no light of any revelation ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... physiognomy, being all 'right here'; intensely so, taking in everything around her. I was very much attracted towards her in this way, not as a youth would be towards a maiden—there was none of that feeling whatever. I felt she was a mystic, a powerful one, and she interested me greatly. When sitting in the room with all the members of the family, I noticed at times she would eye me very closely; and if I returned the gaze I saw such an expression in her face as if she did not belong here at all, but was living on some other planet. ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... the rounds after the Boer fashion, and beginning with the old lady in the chair, received a lymphatic shake of the hand from every single soul in the room. They did not rise—it is not customary to do so—they merely extended their paws, all of them more or less damp, and muttered the mystic monosyllable "Daag," short for good-day. It is a very trying ceremony till one gets used to it, and John pulled up panting, to be presented with a cup of hot coffee that he did not want, but which it would be ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... Existence goes on unceasingly, at our doors; thousands struggling for gold and fame and mere bread, and resorting to infamous devices to obtain them; the great commercial currents flow and flow, according to their mystic laws; the price of stocks goes up, goes down, and with them, the life and fate of thousands; the inconsequent bells ring out from Craddock Church, and the people congregate; the grave of the schoolmistress sleeps in the sunshine, and the ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Trynyte, by Henry Pepwell. In the yere of our lorde God, M.CCCCC.XXI., the xvi. daye of Nouembre." They may, somewhat loosely speaking, be regarded as belonging to the fourteenth century, though the first and longest of them professes to be but a translation of the work of the great Augustinian mystic of an earlier age. ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... New York prepared to resume her artist-life. The musical world remembered with respect and admiration the Camilla Urso of her brilliant girlhood. The wonderful child-life had ended. The new artist-life now begins. Once more the swift fingers might fly over the mystic strings. Again the bow arm wield its ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... of Time; and the days and hours were reckoned by a new standard; everything in the world had suffered some wondrous change, which Valentine Hawkehurst tried in vain to understand. The very earth upon which he walked had undergone some mystic process of transformation; the very streets of London were new to him. He had known Kensington-gardens from his boyhood; but not those enchanted avenues of beech and elm in which he walked with Charlotte. In the plainest and most commonplace ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... sense of awe inspired by a tropic forest is certainly greater than the mystic fear which any wooded wilderness of the North could ever have created. The brilliancy of colors that seem almost preternatural; the vastness of the ocean of frondage, and the violet blackness of rare gaps, revealing its in conceived profundity; and the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... or Fruit Basket, only instead of taking parts of a coach or names of fruits you take articles that belong to the Camp Fire, like bead band, ring, moccasin, bracelet, fire, honor beads, symbol, fringe, Wohelo, hand sign, bow and drill, Mystic Fire, etc. Then somebody tells a story about Camp Fire Girls, and every time one of those articles is mentioned every one must get up and turn around. But if the words 'Ceremonial Meeting' or 'Council Fire' are mentioned, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... two will lie i' the shadow of That living mystic tree Within whose secret growth the Dove Is sometimes felt to be, While every leaf that His plumes ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... is the thought of the wonders underground, Of the mystic changes wrought in the silent, dark profound! How each thing upward tends by necessity decreed, And the world's support depends on ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... sunlight falls more brightly on the gold, the incense curls in mystic spiral wreaths, its strong perfume penetrates and dims his senses; little by little, his thoughts wander till they are strangely fixed on something far away, and he no longer sees Pope nor altar nor altar-piece beyond, and is wrapped in a sort of waking sleep that is blindness. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... lives of ours, as germs find the culture soil they love; so it follows that to the commonplace comes a life of dull routine, foolish happenings seek out the sentimentalist, sordid events seek the sordid and on the mystic dawns the mysterious. Calamities wait there, too, until Fate points out a weak spot in character on which they may pounce relentless with the temptation that pierces it. As there are certain things that would scarcely dare to happen to certain people, so other greater events would hardly condescend ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... term for the harmony that binds the different parts of a story into one whole. In the present case there are three 'motives' underlying the plot. (1) What has been called the 'oracular action': the interest of mystic dream oracles gradually becoming clear as the oracles are fulfilled. (2) The development of an ironic situation—Joseph recognising his brethren but not recognised by them: once developed this situation is prolonged to the utmost by the hero's conflict ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... he left her and came and sat down by the new-comer, who let him play with the fringe of her scarf. Was she in a manner playing him with it? A thoroughly equipped society fiction, such as the English now lack, would have instructed me, and taught me the mystic meaning of the young girls who fluttered up and down the paths by twos and threes, exquisite complexions, exquisite shapes, exquisite profiles, exquisite costumes, in a glad momentary freedom from chaperonage. It would fix even the exact social value of that companion of a lady ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair; it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none but the life Kate had left—the sense of which, for that matter, by mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor—the very impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but again: ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... at work; your belief in him is his only power." Whereupon Nathanael, quite angry because Clara would only grant the existence of the demon in his own mind, began to dilate at large upon the whole mystic doctrine of devils and awful powers, but Clara abruptly broke off the theme by making, to Nathanael's very great disgust, some quite commonplace remark. Such deep mysteries are sealed books to cold, unsusceptible characters, he thought, without being clearly ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... feet and a candle. Here Lord Kew separated from the prince's party. His name does not occur in the last part of the Footprints; which, in truth, are filled full of strange rhapsodies, adventures which nobody was but the princess, and mystic disquisitions. She hesitates at nothing, like other poets of her nation: not profoundly learned, she invents where she has not acquired: mingles together religion and the opera; and performs Parisian pas-de-ballet before the gates of monasteries and the cells of anchorites. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... consonance with his feelings. Innumerable twinklings of stars faintly illuminated a cloudless, serene heaven, and a foaming, plunging ocean. The slender, dark outlines of the sailless upper masts were leaning sharply over to leeward, and describing what seemed like mystic circles and figures against the lighter sky. The crests of seas showed with ghostly whiteness as they howled themselves to death near by, or dashed with a jar and a hoarse whistle over the bulwarks, slapping against the sails ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... detained, if not by friends, by the beauty of the gardens or the river. Never did the old dining-hall and the staircases, balustraded—on whose gray stone a leaf, the first of many, rustles—seem more intense and pregnant with that mystic mournfulness which is the Thames, and which is London. The dull sphinx-like water rolling through multitude of bricks, seemed to mark on this wistful autumn day a more melancholy enchantment, and looking ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... answered, they both forgot; for their faces were turned toward the wonder of the swamp. The golden sun was pouring floods of glory through the slim black trees, and the mystic sombre pools caught and tossed back the glow in darker, duller crimson. Long echoing cries leapt to and fro; silent footsteps crept hither and yonder; and the girl's eyes gleamed ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... tells us, "the high Dutch language, on purpose to know the original words of the blessed Jacob."' Overton's Life of Law, p. 181. Behmen, or Bhme, the mystic shoemaker of Gorlitz, was born in 1575, and died in 1624. 'His books may not hold at all honourable places in libraries; his name may be ridiculous. But he was a generative thinker. What he knew he knew for himself. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... the snow increasing in thickness as we increased our elevation, the march commenced with undulations, but soon passed off into an excessively steep ascent, in some parts indeed precipitous. We crossed at twelve and a half P.M. the Pass of Rodoola, on which are some slabs, with mystic characters, but even here the ascent did not terminate, but continued, although very gradually for perhaps two miles more. Before coming to the summit, a small hut is passed. The descent was at first very rapid, then we proceeded along the side of the mountain for a long way, at nearly the ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... East and South, with never a lake nor a forest to catch the light, with not a cloud in the sky to cast a shadow. Yet over the broad, undulating expanse were lines and patches of varying color, changing and wavering from moment to moment, like mystic currents and eddies upon a heaving, tide-swept sea. Amy watched her companion furtively, ready to take umbrage at any lack of proper appreciation on his part; for this was what she liked best in all Colorado, this vast, mysterious ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... of fairy land, that hidden pocket in the hills, always covered by a mystic haze, for which the Mexicans give it the name Humada. Its steep canyon comes down from the breast of the most easterly of the Four Peaks, impassable except by the one trail; it passes through the box and there widens ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... the mind grows faster and the heart more slowly; then wakes the storm in the forest of human relation, tempest and lightning abroad, the soul enlarging by great bursts of vision and leaps of understanding and resolve; then floats up the mystic twilight eagerness, not unmingled with the dismay of compelled progress, when, bidding farewell to that which is behind, the soul is driven toward that which is before, grasping at it with all the hunger of the new birth. The story ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... calm brow, where not a wrinkle marred the serene expression of intellect, although I had been told that more than a hundred years had touched with increasing wisdom its broad surface. The smile that dwelt in her eyes, like the mystic sprite in the fountain, had not a suspicion of sadness in them. A nature so lofty as hers, where every feeling had a generous and noble existence and aim, could not have known without anguish the race of people ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... eating the cold food which was served to him, sank into a state which was neither sleep nor stupor. It was a mystic region between the conscious and the unconscious, in which all things were out of proportion, ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... new tided of life and strength to the surface, thus materially tending to insure good health to persons who indulge therein. The blood moves more rapidly, and conveys a different impression to all the organs of the body, as it visits them on that particular mystic journey when the man is laughing, from what it does at other times. For this reason every good, hearty laugh in which a person indulges lengthens his life, conveying as it does a new and distinct stimulus to ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... which, outside the Church, only serves to perpetuate the curse and bring fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made holy by his presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to represent his own mystic union with his Church. Even saints cannot live without at times some spot adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe and move is soiled, and Christ has anticipated our wants. Christ did penance forty days in the wilderness, not to subdue his ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... be remembered, a sort of Delphic oracle of the marine genus, who invariably keeps his mystic intentions locked within the secret recesses of his own breast and only gives them utterance, when the occasion arrives for him to speak, through the lips of ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... released. These excursions led us often to the Devil's Den, an excavation in an abandoned ledge of limestone, in a solitary situation at some distance from the town, and guarded, now as then, by three rather spectral-looking Lombardy poplars, which to us boys had a sort of mystic and undefined significance. Here we procured bits of serpentine, interspersed with veins of rag-stone, as we denominated asbestos, which, strangely enough, we used to chew. I suppose that no boy ever went to that place alone, and a sort of solemn ceremony attended his first visit ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... from his fingers, and in another moment he clasped a warm and clinging figure in his arms. Without a word their lips met in one long kiss. To Paul it was as if he had been transported to some distant sphere, and in some mystic fashion transcending time and space, he held his ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... flourished torches, and were shouting a song with unbridled vehemence; the women, wearing garlands, kept up with them. What they carried in the baskets on their heads could not be seen, nor did Alexander know; for so many religious brotherhoods and mystic societies existed here that it was impossible to guess to which this noisy ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and a considerable sum advanced for a philter, compounded of strange Eastern plants and mystic jewels; and then Diane, with a shudder of relief, passed into the full light of the hall, bade her father good night, and was handed by him into the litter that had long been awaiting her at ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... third-dimensional things were one. Perhaps that particular portion of the third dimension called the Earth had sprung from, or degenerated from, one single unit of a dissolving, worn-out fourth dimension. The third dimension, warped back to a higher plane, was automatically obeying the mystic laws of evolution by reforming in the shape of that old ancestor, unimaginably removed in time from the race he had begot. He was no longer Henry Woods, newspaperman; he was an entity that had ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... daughter King Dushyanta's glory, As in the sacred tree the mystic fire [62]; Let worlds rejoice to hear the welcome story, And may the son immortalize ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... mason, from yon tavern led, In mystic words doth to the moon complain That unsound port distracts his aching head, And o'er the waiter ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... great religious ages: nor is the name ill-chosen. For, more often than not, religion is the whetstone on which men sharpen the spiritual sense. Religion, like art, is concerned with the world of emotional reality, and with material things only in so far as they are emotionally significant. For the mystic, as for the artist, the physical universe is a means to ecstasy. The mystic feels things as "ends" instead of seeing them as "means." He seeks within all things that ultimate reality which provokes emotional exaltation; and, if he does not ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... girl of a mystic temperament, credulous, it is true, and somewhat superstitious like all the other people of her time, and yet filled with a deep yearning for a greater knowledge of the secrets of the universe. Her ideal of authority was formed by intercourse with the various members of her own ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... friend Don Diego was saying, "we live from the belly and loins, or else from the head and heart: between Don Quixote the mystic and Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground. The lowest ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... words, which it is not possible for a man to utter," and the throne of God, with all the seraphim and cherubim, archangels and angels, became visible and their conversation intelligible to the enraptured and transported mystic, in a fit of hallucination, when the bewildered imagination sees objectively its own subjective phantasma, and hears from without, in supposed articulate sounds, its own silent thoughts. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to form a correct idea ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... nervous sensibility and a vivid imagination; and besides, he has, as I suspect, been superstitiously brought up as a child. It would be probably useless to argue rationally with him on certain spiritual subjects, even if his mind was in perfect health. He has a good deal of the mystic and the dreamer in his composition; and science and logic are but broken reeds to depend upon with ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... wilderness. Unconsciously confirming prophecy, and still attesting the truth of a revelation which they contemn and deny,—thus strangely dwelling so different from all other nations,—preserving the initiatory rites and the mystic symbols of the faith of Abraham, the customs and traditions of the age of the patriarch,—these nations dwell distinct, separate from each other and from all other nations, awaiting the day when blindness shall be ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... to or correct my first impressions, desirable as it might be to have had such a revision for the sake of this book. I duly drank of the water of Trevi the night before I left; but the spell has been in abeyance all these years. I live, however, in the hope that it has not altogether lost its mystic power; and that some day, not too far off, I may be privileged to go over the old scenes with other and larger eyes than those with which I first reverently gazed upon them. It needs two visits at least to form any true conception of Rome: a first visit to acquire ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... from her some old words of her own were respoken in his ears: "Faith and doubt are mere empty forms until we pour out the heart's blood that vivifies them." It was her heart's blood that she had put into her dreams, and it was this, he told himself, that gave her mystic visions their illusive appearance of reality. Beauty enveloped her as an atmosphere; it softened her sternest sacrifice, it coloured her barest outlook, it transformed daily the common road in which she walked, and hourly ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... wood. Towards the close of the XVIIIth dynasty it was the fashion for wealthy persons to have two coffins, one fitting inside the other, painted black or white. From the XXth dynasty onwards they were coated with a yellowish varnish, and so covered with inscriptions and mystic signs that each coffin was a tomb in miniature, and could well have done duty as such, and thus meet all the needs ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... motionless, exposed to the elements and forces of His arming, for a night and a day to two days and nights, but rarely longer. Sometimes he would chant a hymn without words, or offer the ceremonial "filled pipe." In this holy trance or ecstasy the Indian mystic found his highest happiness and the motive power ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... Moreale, impressed him with a vague belief of some ancient wrong to himself or his race, perpetrated by the Provencal, which he was not ill-pleased to have the occasion to avenge. In truth, the words of Ursula, mystic and dark as they were in their denunciation, had left upon Villani's boyish impressions an unaccountable feeling of antipathy and hatred to the man it was now his object to betray. For the rest, every device seemed to him decorous and justifiable, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... hall, having at one end a doorway before which hung a curtain. Following their Captain, the robbers approached this curtain, and pushing it aside, entered the room beyond. There, behind a large table, sat the great magician, Alfrarmedj, busy over his mystic studies, which he generally pursued in the dead hours of the night. Drawing their swords, the robbers rushed ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton
... about to put himself into the hands of justice, that he might atone in a striking way for the crimes with which he was polluted. This man, endowed as he was with conspicuous abilities, had acquired a mystic eloquence in the cloister. He spoke with so much grace and persuasiveness that I was fascinated no less than the abbe. It was in vain that the latter attempted to combat a resolution which appeared to him insane; John Mauprat showed the most unflinching devotion to his religious ideas. ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... was coming to consult her, and she had no lead. There was a border of lead, however, over the attic window outside. All she had to do was to steal upstairs, climb out of the window on to the roof, and cut a piece of the lead off. It was now the mystic moment to obtain lead, but she must be wary. She strolled through the kitchen in a casual way. Harriet was busy about the grate, and paid no attention to her; so she secured the carving-knife without difficulty, went up to ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... me to treat life in the spirit of a mystic or a dreamer, with unshared and secret experiences, withdrawing into his own ecstasy, half afraid of life, rapt away into interior visions. Though he had a deep curiosity about mystical experiences, he was never a mystic in the sense that he had, ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... within the mystic circumference of the glen-ader; and that she derived a growing measure of mental satisfaction from its ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... sprang, While weak and ineffective fell The archer's shafts though pointed well. The Rakshas saw that naught might kill The wondrous foe who mocked his skill, And launched a magic shaft to throw A binding spell about his foe. Forth flew the shaft: the mystic charm Stayed his swift feet and numbed his arm, Through all his frame he felt the spell, And motionless to earth he fell. Nor would the reverent Vanar loose The bonds that bound him as a noose. He knew that Brahma's self had charmed The weapon that ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... tedious walk, we arrived at an open plain, on which the grass was trodden down in every direction, in some places worn quite away by the feet of the natives—for this was the great "bora ground" of the coast tribes, where the mystic ceremonies mentioned in a former chapter took place. Traversing the sacred plain, our thoughts busy in conjecturing the weird scenes that the posts had witnessed, we came to a little creek whose clear stream babbled ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... sense, the Pygmies of Societas "captured" me, and showed me about to their fellow denizens of this Land of Lilliput. They "discharged their arrows" (which they called "In-Vites", and each of which was branded with the mystic letters, R.S.V.P.) at me in swarms, and though they rather tickled than hurt, yet after a time their minute but multiplied prickings became no end ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... led Madame in the dancing. The grandmother herself sometimes took her stick and stepped through a measure to please the young people. Laughter and the joy of life filled the house every waking hour of the twenty-four. Funerals were never horrible there. Instead, they seemed the mystic ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... watchmaker and a petit bourgeois, should experience what many a saint has died without realizing! I salute you, mystic, descendent ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... inspiration, fall the expiration. Both seasons have their equinoxes, both their filmy, hazy air, their ruddy forest tints, their cold rains, their drenching fogs, their mystic moons; both have the same solar light and warmth, the same rays of the sun; yet, after all, how different the feelings which they inspire! One is the morning, the other the evening; one is youth, ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... afternoon, more even than the ponies. Before they brought him in, the Ring Master came in and said: "Now ladies and gentlemen, I am about to introduce to you the oldest and most wonderful astrologer now living. He will read to you, from a mystic book, the fate of the world and whether it is to be destroyed ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... I borrow, sometimes for private study, sometimes (you understand?) for professional purposes. It contains a Book of Common Prayer as well as the Apocrypha. P. (a Cornishman, something of a mystic, two years my senior and full of mining experiences in Nevada and S. America) always finds a difficulty in parting with this, his one book. He is deep in it, this moment, at the far ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... filled with an emotion hitherto unknown, an emotion which pointed direct to heaven. The soul, the core of profound Christian consciousness, had received a new, glad content, rousing a feeling of such intensity that it could only be compared to the religious ecstasy of the mystic; man divined that it was the mother of new and great things—was it not fitting to regard it as divine and proclaim it the supreme value? The troubadours had known it. Bernart ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... most rational of our modern Platonists, abounds, however, with the most extravagant reveries, and was inflated with egotism and enthusiasm, as much as any of his mystic predecessors. He conceived that he communed with the Divinity itself! that he had been shot as a fiery dart into the world, and he hoped he had hit the mark. He carried his self-conceit to such extravagance, that he thought his urine smelt like violets, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the tumult, rising like a strange incense from the smear of bodies, tables and waiters, will come the curious thing that is never contained in the vice reports. The gleam of the devil himself—the echo of some mystic ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... wonderful to see with, what softness the scepticism of Jarno, the commercial spirit of Werner, the reposing polished manhood of Lothario and the Uncle, the unearthly enthusiasm of the Harper, the gay animal vivacity of Philina, the mystic, ethereal, almost spiritual nature of Mignon, are blended together in this work; how justice is done to each, how each lives freely in his proper element, in his proper form; and how, as Wilhelm himself, the mild-hearted, all-hoping, all-believing Wilhelm, struggles forward towards ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... to fragments and then held fast to their ruins, indeed even went so far as to find these caricatures and ruins more beautiful than the original. The Rococo is violent in chains, insolent in constraint, drunken in sobriety. It is the art of a rich, voluptuous, mystic, restless age. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... barber, no doubt, bled his patients and customers on the public streets of Persian towns, for the benefit of their healths, when we pinned our pagan faith on Druidical incantations and mystic rites and ceremonies; his Mussulman descendants were doing the same thing when we at length arrived at the same stage of enlightenment, and the Persian wielder of razor and tweezers to-day performs the same ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... denies himself more than two shirts and never travels with ice machines. But the thirteen pairs impressed me considerably. Why thirteen, more than fifteen, or any other number? I came to the conclusion that my colleague must certainly be a member of that mystic body the "Thirteen Club," and as he had to bring in the odd number somewhere to keep the club fresh in his memory, he ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... scepticism of those who found fault with his aims, and the sincere dislike of humble and reverent men, who doubted whether the cause of religion could be advanced by such riotous methods. Not only was The General of The Salvation Army a saint and a mystic, who lived in this world and yet was not of this world, but he also was possessed of much practical ability and common sense, without which the great work of his life could never have been accomplished. We need only refer to that remarkable book which he published ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... counted Hassib. Harry peeped, and saw that mystic number of grey crocodiles lying on the island where he ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... sense, he will make no change in anything which the oracle of Delphi, or Dodona, or the God Ammon, or any ancient tradition has sanctioned in whatever manner, whether by apparitions or reputed inspiration of Heaven, in obedience to which mankind have established sacrifices in connexion with mystic rites, either originating on the spot, or derived from Tyrrhenia or Cyprus or some other place, and on the strength of which traditions they have consecrated oracles and images, and altars and temples, and portioned out a sacred domain for each of them. ...
— Laws • Plato
... church," said Helen, her little soul exquisitely sensitive to the mystic, fragrant silences and glooms that ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... saw nothing. My throat was suddenly parched, I could not utter a word. A fragrance of myrrh and aromatic perfumes which emanated from her seemed to intoxicate me with languor and longing, as if at once all the odours of the mystic East had penetrated my quivering nostrils. No, this was certainly not a natural woman, for nothing human seemed to emanate from her. Her face expressed no emotion, either good or bad, beyond a voluptuousness at once sensual and divine. She doubtless noticed my suffering, for she ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... far-away, mystic look in her eyes: "It was your mother, dear—she told me we must go to Lourdes, she said it quite distinctly, she said we must sail that very week, or it would be too ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... indulged in a little autobiography. "Not me. I 'filiates wid de Pullman company a long time back, conveyin' a westbound carload of Potent Nobles ob de Mystic Mecca wid blue Fezants. Us got divo'ced somewhere. Dey an' mah mascot goat gits drug to San F'mcisco. I gits penned up wid a rag-head Hindoo boy an' some crazy folks in anotheh train. I jines me in a ruckus ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... in thought and dialectical power, the Philebus falls very far short of the Republic in fancy and feeling. The development of the reason undisturbed by the emotions seems to be the ideal at which Plato aims in his later dialogues. There is no mystic enthusiasm or rapturous contemplation of ideas. Whether we attribute this change to the greater feebleness of age, or to the development of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry in Plato's own mind, or perhaps, in some degree, to a carelessness ...
— Philebus • Plato
... of the Sawtooth Mountains, like frosted spires against an amber sky. Soon the amber would change to amethyst and deepen to purple—fading at last to a shadowy gray; and all the world seemed steeped in the mystic calm of those twilight hours before the early ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... these conquering leaves: live all the same; And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame; Live here, great heart; and love, and die, and kill; And bleed, and wound, and yield, and conquer still. Let this immortal life where'er it comes Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms. Let mystic deaths wait on't; and wise souls be The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee. O sweet incendiary! show here thy art, Upon this carcase of a hard cold heart; Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light, that play Among the leaves of thy large ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... genius. I saw only the change; he left me a youth, naive, ignorant, but filled with a divine enthusiasm, inspired as it were by the very spirit of God. In those four years he became instructed, absorbing all that was best from ancient and modern art, but still a mystic, a young archangel in ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... the lintel of the door represented on Plate V., enlarged. I intended, in the Lecture on Marble Couchant, to have insisted, at some length, on the decoration of the lintel and side- posts, as one of the most important phases of mystic ecclesiastical sculpture. But I find the materials furnished by Lucca, Pisa, and Florence, for such an essay are far too rich to be examined cursorily; the treatment even of this single lintel could scarcely be enough explained in the close of the ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... of Osteolepis; and here the occipital plates of Cheirolepis Cummingiae; and here the spine of the anterior dorsal of Diplacanthus striatus." My reading of the fossils was at once recognized, like the mystic sign of the freemason, as establishing for me a place among the geologic brotherhood; and the stout gentleman producing a spirit-flask and a glass, I pledged him and his companion in a bumper. "Was I not sure?" he said, addressing his friend: "I ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the study of these characters, especially in the very human figure of Pepet, homely, rough, and unscrupulous, who resembles in many ways Jean Giraud of Dumas' La Question d'argent. The theme, the conquest of a rude man by a Christian and mystic girl, is also the theme of Galds' novel ngel Guerra. The first two acts are the best; the third borders on melodrama, and the last, though containing some excellent comedy, is flat. The real flaw lies in the extensive use of financial transactions to express a psychological contest; ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... and the trap,— As we follow the lines By the rays of the mystic light That flames in the north with banners so bright, As we list to its swish, swish, swish, through the air all night, Hurrah for the gun and ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... of land made by the company, after it had got fairly under way, was of six hundred acres to Governor Winthrop, on the 6th of September, 1631, "near his house at Mystic." The next was to the deputy-governor, Thomas Dudley, on the 5th of June, 1632, of two hundred acres "on the west side of Charles River, over against the new town," now Cambridge. The next, on the 3d of July, 1632, was three hundred acres to John Endicott. It is described, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... reference to the population of the kingdom. These returns were annually forwarded to the capital, where they were submitted to the inspection of officers acquainted with the art of deciphering these mystic records. The government was thus provided with a valuable mass of statistical information, and the skeins of many-colored threads, collected and carefully preserved, constituted what might be called ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... joy. The One awakens out of quiescence as we come forth, and knows itself in us; as we return we enter it in gladness, knowing ourselves. After long cycles the world you live in will become like ours; it will be poured forth and withdrawn; a mystic breath, a mirror to glass ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... his sister, Moa, were the ringleaders. With them were, as passengers, Sir Arthur Coniston and Ob Hahn, a Venus mystic. The whole ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... Where it is explained that Adam meaning Man; Seth, placed; and Enosh, Misery: the mystic inference is that ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... religion of early Japan. The inner or secret shrine: its esoteric and its exoteric office. The Mystic Brotherhoods. Why the esoteric meanings have always been veiled. The great teachers and the uniformity of their instructions. Philosophy as taught by Vivekananda. The fundamental doctrine of Buddhism. Have the present-day Buddhists lost the key? Is religion ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... of religion, argues that our inner experience makes us cognizant of a spiritual world. The advance of psychological research does not deal kindly with this contention, and such works as Leuba's "Psychology of Religious Mysticism" give a rational explanation of the mystic state. Moreover, James did not give his support to monotheism. "That vast literature of proofs of God's existence," he stated, "drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, today does little more than gather dust in the libraries, for the simple reason ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... craftsmen, metal workers, and youthful painters, among whom was Botticelli, at that moment of his development a jovial habitue of the Poetical Supper Club, who had not yet given any premonitions of becoming the poet, mystic, and visionary of later times. There also Leonardo came into contact with that unoriginal painter Lorenzo di Credi, his junior by seven years. He also, no doubt, met Perugino, whom Michelangelo called "that blockhead in art." The genius and versatility of the Vincian painter was, however, ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... sits in long array a reverend troop Teaching the mystic truths of law divine: 'Mid these by right takes Agapetus place Who built to guard his books this fair abode. All toil alike, all equal grace enjoy— Their words are different, but their ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... nature with fruitless toil to find the spring of living water: he only raises his wand, and, obedient to the hidden power, it bends at once to your secret. Your friendship, though independent of language, gives to it life and light. The mystic spirit stirs even in commonplaces, and the merest question is an endearment. You are quiet because your heart is over-full. You talk because it is pleasant, not because you have anything to say. You weary of terms that are already love-laden, and you go out into the highways and hedges, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... know that radical cures were difficult of performance, and he ended by lamenting his ignorance of English or some European language, and that he had not learned our Ilm (science) also. Then we plunged into sympathies, mystic numbers, and the occult virtues of stones, etc., and I swallowed my mixture (consisting of liquorice, cummin and soda) just as the sun entered a particular house, and the moon was in some favourable aspect. He praised to me his ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... it not fine? It is a subject, however, for a mystic. I have an idea myself for a picture, if I can get the tent-cloth to paint it on, and if some brushes and tubes I sent for ever ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... piglet and pushed it into the first, where it disappeared. And so, one by one, the nine tiny piglets were pushed together until but a single one of the creatures remained. This the Wizard placed underneath his hat and made a mystic sign above it. When he removed his hat the last ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... I have no riches to bequeath to you; my only wealth was those secrets of magic which you know. Some stones you already have, engraved with mystic signs, and long ago I taught you how to make others. But you still lack the most precious of all talismans—the three rings belonging to the daughters of Siroco. Try to get possession of them, but take heed on beholding these young girls that you ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... saint's day, had come out to indulge in swinging, but who had forgotten to supply themselves with a swinging-rope. Bappa agreed to get them one if they would play his game first. This the young ladies readily agreed to do; whereupon, all joining hands, he danced with them a certain mystic number of times round ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... A silence from the moon's deepest valley. Fire rays fall athwart the robes Of hooded men, squat and dumb. Before them, a woman Moves to the blowing of shrill whistles And distant thunder of drums, While mystic things, sinuous, dull with terrible color, Sleepily fondle her body Or move at her will, swishing stealthily over the sand. The snakes whisper softly; The whispering, whispering snakes, Dreaming and swaying and ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane
... the old desk. It coiled and hesitated, and then began to swim a languorous way down the mahogany slant. At the angle it waved its sizzling molten head to and fro over the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment, with a mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed directly down ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... produced many singular, mysterious beings," said Monsieur Bernard. "To-day, for instance, besides this extraordinary doctor, we have Hoene Wronski, the enlightened mathematician, the poet Mickievicz, Towianksi the mystic, and Chopin, whose talent is supernatural. Great national convulsions always produce ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... did he mean? He told her to read philosophy. He said she had the eyes of a mystic. She had spent several minutes looking in the mirror trying to see the strange mysticism he saw in her eyes, and remembering ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... river, Josey lay broad awake, resignedly conscious of his extreme age, and thinking soberly of the beginning and end of life,—the dawn and fruition of love,—the wonderful, beautiful, complex labyrinth of experience through which every human soul is guided from one mystic turn to another of mingled joy and sorrow by that supreme Wisdom, Whom, though we cannot see, we trust,—and feeling the near close of his own long life-journey, he folded his withered hands and ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... of the girls a man has loved, whom she has never seen, than of any number of attractive rivals. In the blind adoration which he yields her, she takes no thought of immediate defection, for her smile always makes him happy—her voice never loses its mystic ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... way, that way, forward, back, Swings the pendulum to and fro, Always regular, always slow. Grave and solemn on the wall,— Hear it whisper! hear it call! Little Ginx knows naught of Time, But has heard the mystic rhyme,— "Hickory, dickory, dock! The mouse ran up ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... wroth, muttered anathemas against my faithless friend, rang for the waiter, and—having ascertained the fact that a Masonic Lodge was that evening engaged in celebrating the festival of its peculiar patron—I set out for the purpose of assisting in the pious and mystic labours of the Brethren of the Jedburgh St Jeremy. At twelve, when I returned to my quarters, escorted by the junior deacon, I was informed that Strachan had not made his appearance, and accordingly I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Ciano, an eccentric man, but respected after his kind, a sign for his shop, containing a gipsy woman telling the fortune of a lady in a very graceful manner, which was the idea of Ciano, and not without mystic meaning. Another who learnt to paint from the same master was Antonio di Donnino Mazzieri, who was a bold draughtsman, and showed much invention in making horses and landscapes. He painted in chiaroscuro the cloister of S. Agostino at Monte Sansovino, executing therein ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... going on at our table. A peep under the lid of the sugar-bowl has shown me that there is another poem ready for the company. That receptacle is looked upon with an almost tremulous excitement by more than one of The Teacups. The two Annexes turn towards the mystic urn as if the lots which were to determine their destiny were shut up in it. Number Five, quieter, and not betraying more curiosity than belongs to the sex at all ages, glances at the sugarbowl now and then; looking so like a clairvoyant, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... vulture cap on which traces of colour remained. Her arms were held forward as though to support a child, which perhaps she was suckling as one of the breasts was bare. But if so, the child had gone. The execution of the statue was exquisite and its tender and mystic face extraordinarily beautiful, so life-like also that I think it must have been copied from a living model. Oh! my friend, when I looked upon it, which we did by the light of the candles, for the sun was sinking and shadows gathered in that excavated ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... over, gambling and speculation are joined in many ways to superstition; and the Eastern diver is superstitious to the hour of his death. At Marichchikkaddi he devotedly resorts to the mystic ceremony of the shark-charmer, whose exorcism for generations has been an indispensable preliminary to the opening of a fishery. The shark-charmer's power is believed to be hereditary. If one of them can ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... lands they talk in flowers, And they tell in a garland their loves and cares: Each blossom that blooms in their garden bowers On its leaves a mystic language bears. —PERCIVAL. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... evermore was heaving. All her limbs were gracefully reclining, Set at rest by sweet and godlike balsam. Gladly sat I, and the contemplation Held the strong desire I felt to wake her Firmer and firmer down, with mystic fetters. ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... assumed a stately air, wore white and flowing robes, and were adept in the arts of sorcery and magic. They were even consulted by kings and chieftains, as if they possessed prophetic power. They were a picturesque body of men, with their mystic wands, their impressive robes, their tall caps, appealing by their long incantations and frequent ceremonies and prayers to the eye and to the ear. "Pure Zoroastrianism was too spiritual to coalesce readily with Oriental luxury ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... at Cronin, startled. Another mention of the mystic number. He called for information about ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... identified with art, and the artistic fact is always clearly distinguished from beauty, mimetic from its content. Plotinus first identified the two, and with him the beautiful and art are dissolved together in a passion and mystic elevation of the spirit. The beauty of natural objects is the archetype existing in the soul, which is the fountain of all natural beauty. Thus was Plato (he said) in error, when he despised the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... a gentler bard Gaze on the mystic vase with fond regard— But see, Thalia checks the doubtful thought, 'Canst thou, (she cries,) with sense, with genius fraught, Canst thou to Fashion's tyranny submit, Secure in native, independent wit? Or yield to Sentiment's insipid rule, By Taste, by Fancy, chac'd through ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... word 'God' which follows than with the word 'King' which precedes. The Apostle's meaning is this: 'The King of the ages, even the God who is,' etc. And the epithets thus selected all tend in the same direction. 'Incorruptible.' That at once parts that mystic and majestic Being from all of which the law is decay. There may be in it some hint of moral purity, but more probably it is simply what I may call a physical attribute, that that immortal nature not only does not, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Schopenhauer, a Taine, a Tolstoy; below them, thousands of humbler voices repeat it in chorus. According to each one's turn of mind, the new philosophy assumed shades different in appearance—Buddhist nirvana, atheistic nihilism, mystic asceticism; but all these theories proceeded from the same sentiment, and all these doctrines may be reduced to the same formula:—'Let us depreciate life, let us escape from ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... mountains; but Crabbe remained faithful to the dismal and yet, in his hands, the impressive scenery of his native salt-marshes. His method of description suits the country. His verses never become melodramatic, nor does he ever seem to invest nature with the mystic life of Wordsworth's poetry. He gives the plain prosaic facts which impress us because they are in such perfect harmony with the sentiment. Here, for example, is a fragment from the 'Village,' which is simply a description of the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... may well mean a life of luxury and affluence. Most peasants in Europe will tell you that a dream about the flower foretells not only a happy marriage, but long life and prosperity. For ages the clover has been counted a mystic plant, and all sorts of good and bad luck were said to attend the finding of variations of its leaves which had more than the common number of leaflets. At evening these leaflets fold downward, the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... and food, and with little air to breathe, our Claus was, indeed, in a pitiful plight. But he spoke the mystic words of the Fairies, which always command their friendly aid, and they came to his rescue and transported him to the Laughing Valley in the twinkling ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... list of dreams with their significations and lucky numbers, and the getting of fortunes by the Mystic Circle, Cards Dice, Coffee and Tea Grounds, etc. Also a list of curious superstitions and omens, birthdays, lucky day, their significance and their numbers. It is unquestionably the best and most reliable book of its kind published and is worth many times the price asked ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... to the basements of Italian mountains. Higher, the roseate whiteness of ridged snow on Alps or Apennines. Highest, the blue of the sky, ascending from pale turquoise to transparent sapphire filled with light. A mediaeval mystic might have likened this chord to the spiritual world. For the lowest region is that of natural life, of plant and bird and beast, and unregenerate man; it is the place of faun and nymph and satyr, the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... precaution to which the Ceylon diver devotedly resorts, is the mystic ceremony of the shark-charmer, whose exorcism is an indispensable preliminary to every fishery. His power is believed to be hereditary; nor is it supposed that the value of his incantations is at all dependent upon the religious faith ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... times; or, in all, the Ave Maria's one hundred and sixty-five times, without variation. From the indistinct utterance, elevated voice, and rapid manner in which it is pronounced, it certainly has a wild effect, and is more strongly impressed with the character of a mystic rite, or incantation, than with any other religious ceremony with which we ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... affrightedly at the mystic beings who had come for her, but settled into peace as I closed her ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... that the great medicine man of the Utes came here to receive the mystic cure, bringing with him Eagle-Foot's staff and belt. Long strips of cedar bark were bound together into a rope. This was soaked in deer's grease, one end lighted, and dropped into the Pit, the other fastened to the staff, ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... Seti, "filled with the moon, lovely as the moon, mystic as the moon and worshipping the moon, ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... designated a lady's-maid, but who had risen from that humble position to be no less than Chancellor of State to her sovereign majesty, Miss Ocky. The two women had shared the ups-and-downs, the sunshine and shadow, of that mystic, colorful Orient through whose extent the restless curiosity of the younger had led them to and fro. Out there the line between mistress and servant had inevitably been supplanted by the bond of companionship; but ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... luxury of imagination, which sought nothing beyond itself (as a child burdens itself with spring flowers, thinking of no use beyond the enjoyment of gathering them), often showed itself in his verses: they will be only appreciated by minds which have resemblance to his own; and the mystic subtlety of many of his thoughts will share the same fate. The metaphysical strain that characterizes much of what he has written was, indeed, the portion of his works to which, apart from those whose scope was to awaken mankind to aspirations for what he considered the true and good, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... The mystic monogram of the club, the initials P and D contained in a circle, which was placed on their designs submitted in the two Beaux-Arts competitions, has probably set more than one interested person guessing ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 03, March 1895 - The Cloister at Monreale, Near Palermo, Sicily • Various
... sharp to the right. We are now following the coast-line towards Ostend. How beautiful the sand dunes looked from above. The heavy billows of sea-mist gave it a somewhat mystic appearance. How cold it was. I huddled down close into my seat, my head only above the fuselage. Keeping my eye upon the wonderful panorama unfolding itself out beneath me, I glanced at my camera and tested the socket. Yes, it ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... of the mystic League, I hope, by sly intrigue, To rule the seventh also, And let it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... discussed over the teacups in Riverboro. The months had come and gone, and at length the great day had dawned for Rebecca,—the day to which she had been looking forward for five years, as the first goal to be reached on her little journey through the world. School-days were ended, and the mystic function known to the initiated as "graduation" was about to be celebrated; it was even now heralded by the sun dawning in the eastern sky. Rebecca stole softly out of bed, crept to the window, threw open the blinds, and welcomed the rosy light that meant a cloudless ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... he said to me: "By the Arctic Sea there's a treasure to be won. Follow and follow a lone moose trail, till you come to a valley grim, On the slope of the lonely watershed that borders the Polar brim." Then I woke my pals, and soft we swore by the mystic Silver Flail, 'Twas the hand of Fate, and to-morrow straight we would seek the ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... the hour gone by? The mystic strain, Degenerate once, may never spring again. What long-forsaken gods shall we invoke To grant such increase to ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... gems of dear England's soil, Welcomed alike in palace as in the cot of toil; Tender and soft their tintings, as gentle maiden's blush, Soothing their perfumed breathings, as twilight's mystic hush. ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... watered the stocks, and finally took up the crystal and looked into it with awe, wondering why the Cobbler could see so much, and she only the distorted reflection of her own face. So interested, however, for once, did she become in the inspection of this mystic globe, that she did not notice the dawn pass into broad daylight, nor hear a voice at the door below,—nor, in short, take into cognition the external world, till a heavy tread shook the floor, and then, starting, she beheld the Remorseless Baron, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... formulation. The earlier Middle Ages did, in fact, extinguish antique civility. The later Middle Ages did create, to use a phrase of Michelet, an army of dunces for the maintenance of orthodoxy. The intellect and the conscience became used to moving paralytically among visions, dreams, and mystic terrors, weighed down with torpor, abusing virile faculties for the suppression of truth and ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... a-going to tell anybody else about it. He made them boys cross they hearts and bodies not to. I didn't cross mine 'cause I knew I had to tell you, but I do it now." And Eliza stood up and solemnly made the mystic sign, thus locking the barn door of her secret chambers after having quartered the troublesome steed of confidence on the ranges of Mother ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... straitly, With a courtly mien; Crossing hands and changing places, Bowing low between, While the minuet inlaces Waving arms and woven paces,— Glittering damaskeen. Where is she whose form is folden In its royal sheen? From our longing eyes withholden By her mystic girdle golden, Beauty sought but never seen, Music walks ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... eyes of Llewellyn Leigh, however, the place had no such mystic significance. On the afternoon following the visit of Miss Wycliffe to the tower, he had walked hither from the college, down the long, winding street on whose well-worn pavements the yellowing leaves of the elms threw a sheen like gold. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... "Al-Kutb al-Ghauth" lit. the pole-star of invocation for help; or simply "Al-Ghauth" is the highest degree of sanctity in the mystic fraternity of Tasawwuf. See v. 384; and Lane (A. N.) i. 232. Students who would understand these titles will consult vol. iii. chapt. 12 of The Dabistn by Shaw and Troyer, Paris and London, 1843. By the learned studies of Dr. Pertsch the authorship of this work ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... personal memories of him here. I knew him well enough to love him, and to catch a glimpse of the beauty and sincerity of his soul; but I did not know him well enough to discover the secrets of his mind. Those who had the happiness of being his intimate friends seem always to represent him as a mystic who shut himself away from the spirit of his time. I hope at some future date one of his friends will publish some of the conversations that he had with him, of which I have heard. But this man who had so strong a faith was also very independent. In his religion he ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... like that, Ruth?" he begged. "Don't! My new friends are part of the new life. You wouldn't have me cling to the old any longer than I can help? Why, you and I together have sat here hour after hour and prayed for a change, prayed for the mystic treasure that might come to us from those ships of chance. Dear, if mine comes first, it brings good for you, too. You can't believe that I ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... compared with the obscure Gnosticism, with the distorted metaphysics, which fill the discourses of John, would speak loudly enough. This by no means implies that there are not in the discourses of John some admirable gleams, some traits which truly come from Jesus.[2] But the mystic tone of these discourses does not correspond at all to the character of the eloquence of Jesus, such as we picture it according to the synoptics. A new spirit has breathed; Gnosticism has already commenced; the Galilean era of the ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... A mystic German writer calls a house, properly ordered, the "home of the soul," carrying out the idea that the house in which an orderly soul lives, is only an expansion of the body built and adorned out of her passing experiences. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... ago. True, he did not know it, it was so slyly done; but nothing could tempt her to a like act again. Not that she is sorry for the deed—ah! no. This little talisman will ever be most precious unto her. But the brow seemed so hallowed now; there was a mystic light upon it, as though a beam from Heaven were shining directly there, and a superstitious awe crept over the heart of the young maiden as she remembered the cold dews that her hand had felt as she stroked back ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... at the upper end of the great hall, directly before the accused, sat the Grand Master of the Temple, in full and ample robes of flowing white, holding in his hand the mystic staff, which bore the symbol of the Order. At his feet was placed a table, occupied by two scribes, whose duty it was to record the proceedings of the day. Their chairs were black and formed a marked contrast to the warlike appearance of the knights who attended the solemn gathering. ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... they returned, headed by a Medicine-man, whom the English called the 'mace-bearer.' With the slow and stately measure of a mystic dance this great high priest of heathen rites advanced chanting a sort of litany. Both litany and dance were gradually taken up by tens, by hundreds, and finally by all the thousands of the devotees, who addressed Drake with shouts of Hyoh! and invested him ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... or two get hold of some ill-conditioned meat, and suffer for it, the groans of their colics are echoed all over the land. If a milkman misrepresents his honest cows by falsifying their product, the chemist detects him, and the press puts him in the pillory. If the Cochituate or Mystic water is too much like an obsolete chowder, up go all noses, and out come all manner of newspaper paragraphs from "Senex," "Tax-payer," and the rest. But air-poisoning kills a hundred where food-poisoning kills one. Let me ...
— Parks for the People - Proceedings of a Public Meeting held at Faneuil Hall, June 7, 1876 • Various
... the god of gods, strung the invisible wires of mental telegraphy between our hearts, and over the mystic, unseen lines our thoughts, bright as hope, dark as sin, lighter than the thistle down, heavily charged with the electricity of doubt and trust, faith and fear, love and longing, flew noiselessly back and forth through the stillness ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... looked into each other's eyes. It was a momentary flash which they exchanged, but in that instant both of them were thrilled with the strange, sweet knowledge that no human soul may analyze: it is the mystic conviction which makes this man or that woman different from all the rest of humankind to the ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... enchanted region, he reached the vicar-general's office in safety and having procured a highly flattering address on parchment, from the Archbishop of Canterbury, to his 'trusty and well-beloved Alfred Jingle and Rachael Wardle, greeting,' he carefully deposited the mystic document in his pocket, and retraced his steps in ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... call upon his Snake with due and portentous ceremony and, according to Stephen, who was present, which I declined to be, that mystic reptile declared that Dogeetah, alias Brother John, would arrive in Beza Town precisely at sunset on the third day from that night. Now as he had divined on Friday, according to our almanac, this meant that we might hope to see him—hope exactly described ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... private and personal experience, is the drift of this poem, or rather cycle of poems, that ring throughout with a deeper accent and a more direct appeal than has yet made itself felt. It is the drama of the human soul,—"the mystic winged and flickering butterfly," "flitting between earth and sky," in its passage from birth ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... lifted, and the leader wove her mystic paces in and out among the children, while the ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... ceased to be held sacred they were endowed with sundry magical or mystic properties. The apple has been supposed to possess peculiar virtues, especially in the way of health. 'The relation of the apple to health,' says Mr. Conway, 'is traceable to Arabia. Sometimes it is regarded as a bane. In ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... full of riant laughter, recalls the sad students who wandered past, and then from amid the airy ripple of notes comes the sweet, mellow strain of the 'cello, which tells of love eternal amid the summer roses; how the tender melody sweeps on full of the perfume and mystic meanings of that night. Hark! is that the nightingale in the trees, or only the silvery notes of a violin, which comes stealing through the steady throb and swing of the heavier stringed instruments? ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... is ever most deeply enamoured, when it is with he knows not what—and the devotion of a mystic has a rude Gothic grandeur in it, which the respectful adoration of a philosopher will never reach. I may be thought fanciful; but it has continually occurred to me, that, though, I allow, reason in this world is the mother of wisdom—yet some flights of ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the earlier days of the church, when men were staid and sincere, it was, no doubt, an impressive sight to see rank succeeding rank, of the old and the young, all calm and all devout, seated before the tent of the preacher, in the sunny hours of June, listening to his eloquence, or partaking of the mystic bread and wine; but in these our latter days, when discipline is relaxed, along with the sedate and the pious come swarms of the idle and the profligate, whom no eloquence can edify and no solemn rite affect. On these, and such as these, the poet has poured ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the woods to themselves; there was no sound at all except the occasional soft drop of melting snow. Once they stood quite still holding their breath to watch the squirrels skim from tree to tree as if they were weaving the measures of a mystic dance. If it hadn't been for the squirrels they might have been the only creatures alive in all ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... liked the idea of Vivien. It had cachet, she thought. She was very fond of posing as a mysterious enchantress, the mystic touch pleased her vanity. ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... Phoenix, Japanese H[o]-w[o], the second of the incarnations of the spirits, is of wondrous form and mystic nature. The rare advent of this bird upon the earth is, like that of the kirin or unicorn, a presage of the advent of virtuous rulers and good government. It has the head of a pheasant, the beak of a swallow, the neck of a tortoise, and the features of the dragon and ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... small islands, stretching out to the horizon on the right, and a boundless wilderness of trees on the left. Here were collected the ladies and gentlemen of Norway House, and a number of indescribable personages, apparently engaged in mystic preparations for the approaching feast. It was with something like awe that I entered the schoolroom, and beheld two long rows of tables covered with puddings, pies, tarts, stews, hashes, and vegetables of all shapes, sizes, and descriptions, ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... complex powers, it reminds me of some stupendous mechanism which shall spin electric bands of stupendous thought and feeling, illuminating the vista of eternity with corruscations of brilliancy, and blending the mystic brow of eternal ages with a tiara of never-dying beauty, whilst for those who have trampled on the truth of Christ, it shall spin from its terrible form toils of eternal funeral bands, darker and darker, till sunk to the lowest ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... the sea. His hens "turned in," at night. He was full of sayings and formulas of a maritime nature; there was one which always seemed to me to have something of a weird and mystic character: "South moon brings high water on Coast Island Bar." In describing the transactions of domestic life, he used words more properly applicable to the movements of large ships. He would speak of a saucepan as if it weighed a hundred tons. He never tossed or threw even the ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... ears: "Faith and doubt are mere empty forms until we pour out the heart's blood that vivifies them." It was her heart's blood that she had put into her dreams, and it was this, he told himself, that gave her mystic visions their illusive appearance of reality. Beauty enveloped her as an atmosphere; it softened her sternest sacrifice, it coloured her barest outlook, it transformed daily the common road in which she ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... little children gather, Half in wonder, round his knees; And the faithful dog, mute, watchful, In the mystic glass he sees; And the voice of song, and pictures, And the simplest homestead flowers, Unforgotten, crowd before him ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... been, had the prediction which he put into the mouth of Galeotti Martivalle, the astrologer of Louis the Eleventh, in the romance of Quentin Durward, been written at the period of its date! Louis, who has justly been held as the Tiberius of France, is represented as paying a visit to the mystic workshop of the astrologer, whom his Majesty discovered to be engaged in the then newly invented art of multiplying manuscripts by the intervention of machinery—in other words, the apparatus ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... no move, either with his feet or his tongue. In the haze that lay between him and Bangs, the man of the robe seemed to tower and to take on a mystic dignity which had been lacking in the candid light of day. After the silence had continued for some time Bangs spoke again. His new manner showed that his eyes had been reprimanding his tongue. "Excuse me! I didn't mean to sound ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... . . mercy.' This stirred Keats's imagination, and he produced the wonderful, mystic ballad of ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... His old brown holland was good enough when he stayed at home. Sometimes, when she was away, and Dolly the maid was making his bed, he came into his mother's room. It was as the abode of a fairy to him—a mystic chamber of splendour and delight. There in the wardrobe hung those wonderful robes—pink and blue and many-tinted. There was the jewel case, silver clasped; and a hundred rings on the dressing table. There ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... should reveal her true mission, and on needles lest his wife should reveal her true depths. Likewise he worried Eileen to drink his choicest wines. Vintages that she felt her father would have poised on his tongue in mystic clucking ecstasy stood untasted in a regiment of little glasses ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... break our keys. But God meant music; and we may, If we will keep our lives in tune, Hear the whole year sing roundelay, December answering June. God ever at his keyboard plays, Harmonics, right; and discords, wrong: "He that hath ears," and who obeys, May hear the mystic song. ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... that statement of the "Autocrat" appears to me at least as certain as that two and two make four. It may, indeed, contain some recondite and malignant reference which the stupid American divines know, and which I do not; it may be a mystic Shibboleth, indicating far more than it asserts; as at one time in Scotland it was esteemed as proof that a clergyman preached unsound doctrine, if he made use of the Lord's Prayer. But, understanding it simply as meaning that the Judge of all the Earth will do right, it appears ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... Who composed this Mystic Krewe no one knew. Year after year, like a splendid dream, a glittering procession moved through the streets at dusk of Shrove-Tuesday, representing the fairest myths of fable and the most gorgeous pageants of history. Mrs. Long, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... in mystic circles and went to the sideboard for a drink. In the evening, when the exaltation of the day had died down, he went to the sideboard again, and after some visits became convinced that the eye-doctor was a liar, since he could still see ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... and in actual existence for about four years. During the period of development the revolutionists denounced the monarch in most extravagant terms and compared him to the devil. Their aim was to kill the mystic belief of the people in the Emperor; for only by diminishing the dignity of the monarch could the revolutionary cause make headway. And during and after the change all the official documents, school textbooks, press views and social gossip have always coupled ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... dying. He walked on—slowly and mechanically back to the scene of the overwhelming cataclysm where all his hopes lay irretrievably buried. He walked on—majestic as he had never been before, in the brilliant throne-room of the Tuileries or the mystic vastness of Notre Dame when the Imperial crown sat so ill upon his plebeian head. . . . He walked on—silent, exalted and great—great through the magnitude of ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... and to nobler lives. They, in turn, recognized and paid willing homage to a noble soul, a great genius, whose power to sway and control them was not in the least deflected or dimmed by a thought of his deformed body. Under the mystic spell of divine music, which appeals to the highest aspirations of the human heart; which calls forth the hidden forces of the soul: they came in such perfect rapport with him in his inner life, that they ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... Jefferson's writin', and Hamilton's, and Benjamin Franklin's—he who also discovered a New World, the mystic World that we draw on with such a stiddy and increasin' demand for supplies of light, and heat, and ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... Philebus falls very far short of the Republic in fancy and feeling. The development of the reason undisturbed by the emotions seems to be the ideal at which Plato aims in his later dialogues. There is no mystic enthusiasm or rapturous contemplation of ideas. Whether we attribute this change to the greater feebleness of age, or to the development of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry in Plato's own mind, or perhaps, in some degree, to a ...
— Philebus • Plato
... upon, and a considerable sum advanced for a philter, compounded of strange Eastern plants and mystic jewels; and then Diane, with a shudder of relief, passed into the full light of the hall, bade her father good night, and was handed by him into the litter that had long been awaiting ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... barren ground, She stood on inner ground that budded flowers; While circling in their never-slackening round Danced by the mystic hours. ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... expedition, which Speke made with the king to the Nyanza, they landed on an island inhabited by a magician and his wife, who were supposed to be priests of of the water-spirit of the lake. His head was decorated with numerous mystic symbols, among them a paddle, the badge of his high office. He was dressed in a little, white, goat-skin apron, adorned by various charms, and, instead of a walking-stick to support his steps, he used a paddle. Though not an old ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other. And I know that anything more which you may say will be vain. Yet speak, if ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... stimulate, yet never to satisfy or exhaust. The regularity of stated hours of prayer, and of a kind of idle industry, weaving mats or plaiting baskets, alternated with periods of morbid reflection on the moral state of the soul, and of mystic communion with the Deity. It cannot indeed be wondered that this new revelation, as it were, of the Deity, this profound and rational certainty of his existence, this infelt consciousness of his perpetual presence, these ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... adapted for their purpose. The almost universal use of the rattle among the Indians in their sacred dances is very significant. The meaning of the snake song is unknown to the Indians who sing it. The words are probably either archaic or remnants of a sacred language or mystic words of ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into the details of her relations with Kennicott, enjoyed her spirit of play as expressed in childish tea-parties, and, with the mystic bond between them forgotten, was healthily vexed by Carol's assumption that she was a sociological messiah come to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of Vida's thought was the one which, after a year, was most often turned to the light. In a testy ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... who admitted the baptism of heretics repeated the rite, or, as it was afterwards styled, the sacrament, of confirmation, to which they ascribed many mystic and marvellous prerogatives both visible and invisible. See Chardon. Hist. des Sacremens, tom. 1. p. 405-552.] His son and successor, Recared, the first Catholic king of Spain, had imbibed the faith of his unfortunate brother, which ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... But somehow the great Victorian man was more and less than this. He was at once a giant and a dwarf. When he has been sweeping the sky in circles infinitely great, he suddenly shrivels into something indescribably small. There is a moment when Carlyle turns suddenly from a high creative mystic to a common Calvinist. There are moments when George Eliot turns from a prophetess into a governess. There are also moments when Ruskin turns into a governess, without even the excuse of sex. But in all ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... sandalled, so they weave their way, And so they stand, with silence panoplied, Chanting, through mystic symbollings of flame, Their solemn invocation to ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... a white Christmas Eve, Thor's priests held their winter rites beneath the Thunder Oak. Through the deep snow of the dense forest hastened throngs of heathen folk, all intent on keeping the mystic feast of the mighty Thor. In the hush of the night the folk gathered in the glade where stood the tree. Closely they pressed around the great altar-stone under the overhanging boughs where stood the white-robed priests. Clearly ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... Slowly the mystic waters fell away, sinking with slightly rolling action into the valleys, and out of the wool-white waves sudden sharp dark forms upthrust like strange masters of the deep. Towers took shape and islands upheaved, crowned with dark fortresses. To the west a vast and inky-black ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... stump of a tree, or it may be only the symbol of a tree. The story of the tree of good and evil, and the tree of life, has been the origin of many superstitious notions regarding trees. The notion that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was an apple tree, caused the apple to have a great many mystic meanings, and gave it a prominent place in many legends, and also brought it into prominence as a divining medium. In many parts of Scotland the apple was believed to have great influence in love affairs. If an apple seed were shot between the fingers it was understood that it would, ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... "How is he to get through the stove without burning himself?" Reason falters and Faith triumphs. It would be done somehow, and then the reindeer would fly to the next house, and the next, and so on, and so on. The mystic hour draws near. Like a tidal wave it rolls around the world, foaming at its crest in a golden spray of gifts and love. ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... cheat my brain with airy vanishings And mystic glories of the world beyond. A whole enchanted town Thy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... Morn's mystic rose is reddening on the hills, Dawn's irised nautilus makes glad the sea; There is a lyre of flame that throbs and fills Far heaven and earth with hope's wild ecstasy.— With lilied field and grove, Haunts of the turtle-dove, Here is the land ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... child at play, Like a living ocean-child, Through the feathery spray she cleaves her way To the billows' music wild; The sea is her wide-spread pleasure ground, And the waves around her leap, As with joyous bound, to their mystic sound, She ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... yet. She crossed on her bosom her dimpled hands, And fearlessly entered the phantom bark; We felt it glide from the silver sands, And all our sunshine grew strangely dark; We know she is safe on the farther side, Where all the ransomed and angels be: Over the river, the mystic river, My childhood's ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... wonder-music spoke. She and he were wandering alone together along that fairy shore where every sea-shell gleamed like pearl and every wave broke iridescent at their feet. The sun shone in the sky for them alone, and the caves were mystic palaces of delight that awaited their coming. And once it seemed to her that he drew her close, and she felt his ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... the coat which he was wearing. The experience occurred on 23 November, 1654, and there is no reason to doubt its genuineness unless we choose to deny all mystical experience. Now, Pascal was not a mystic, and his works are not to be classified amongst mystical writings; but what can only be called mystical experience happens to many men who do not become mystics. The work which he undertook soon after, the Lettres ecrites ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... and other, prompt for fate— Listless the first and heavy-eyed, Astrain the second—she espied That strange white flower, unseen before, With chalice pale, which thin stalk bore And swung, as hanging by a hair, So fine it seemed afloat in air, Unlinkt and wafted for the feast Of some blest mystic, without priest Or acolyte to tender it: Whereto the maid did stoop and fit Her hand about its silken cup To close it, that her mouth might sup The honey-drop within. The bloom Saw Kore then, and knew her doom Foretold in it; and stood in trance Fixed and still. No nigromance Used she, but ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... dead body, nor shall you. You have other vials in the casket of better hue and flavor. What is this?" continued Angelique, taking out a rose-tinted and curiously-twisted bottle sealed on the top with the mystic pentagon. "This looks prettier, and may be not less sure than the milk of mercy in its ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to the inmates of the cottage of all that the trushul or cross trident suggested, still less did I vex their souls with the mystic possible meaning of the antique patteran or sign which I had drawn. For it has, I opine, a deep meaning, which as one who knew Creuzer of old, I have a right to set forth. Briefly, then, and without encumbering my book with ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... rows of vines, or what will be vines when the summer comes, but are now black, knotted and gnarled clubs, without a sign of life in the seemingly dead stick. One who sees that sight may find a new beauty and meaning in the mystic words, "I am the Vine, ye are the branches." It is not merely the connection between branch and stem common to all trees; not merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the grape, which made the ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... inferred from the words of a proselyte warrior, who declared with enthusiasm that he had learned from the Sulpitian missionary that the King of France was the eldest son of the wife of Jesus Christ.[32] This he of course took in a literal sense, the mystic idea of the Church as the spouse of Christ being beyond his savage comprehension. The effect was to stimulate his devotion to the Great Onontio beyond the sea, and to the lesser Onontio who represented him as ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... gladness, Of filmy sun, and opal tinted skies; Of warm midsummer air that lightly lies In mystic rings, Where softly swings The music of a thousand wings That almost tones ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... looked at her with a gentle mockery that passed immediately into that sudden seriousness—that unconscious air of command—of which the man of interior life holds the secret. In his jests even, he is still, by natural gift, the confessor, the director, since he sees everything as the mystic ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... air. I was right glad when the little creature came and sat on my knee, and in its affectionate way began to nibble at my finger-tips. It sat erect, its thin paws waving with a tiny, measured swing, and in its mystic voice, so infinitely small, so sweet and yet so majestically strong, began a song which no pen can transcribe. Knowing that the awakening must come, but unwilling to lose a moment of the dream, I, who with one finger could have crushed the little ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... for him, and he came repeatedly after this to see me and express his satisfaction in the opportunities for study he enjoyed at Cambridge. He was a dark, still, slender person, always with a trance-like remoteness, a mystic dreaminess of manner, such as I never saw in any other youth. Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his mind reacted slowly on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer would often be behind time, and then a vague, sweet smile, or a few words spoken under his breath, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a spot," said a friend who chanced to be near at hand, "which occupies in the world of fancy the same position which the Bourse, the Rialto, and the Exchange do in the commercial world. All who have affairs in that mystic region, which lies above, below, or beyond the actual, may here meet and talk over ...
— The Hall of Fantasy (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... people to a higher plane of living, but the fruits of the lives of these superiors were handed on to other groups to utilize, and they are not without influence {23} over the whole human group of to-day. So, too, the religious mystic philosophy and literature of India represented a high state of mental development, but the products of its existence left the races of India in darkness because the mystic philosophy was not adaptable to the practical affairs ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... admirer of Charles Strickland, and there was no danger that he would whitewash him. He had an unerring eye for the despicable motive in actions that had all the appearance of innocence. He was a psycho-pathologist, as well as a student of art, and the subconscious had few secrets from him. No mystic ever saw deeper meaning in common things. The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psycho-pathologist the unspeakable. There is a singular fascination in watching the eagerness with which the learned author ferrets out every circumstance ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... veil over the sun or a white gauze around the midnight moon; sporting in the glacier; folding its bright snow-curtain softly about the wintry world; and weaving the many-colored bow whose warp is the rain-drops of earth, whose woof is the sunbeam of heaven, all checkered over with the mystic ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... made all his troubles, now urging him he knew not where. All he knew for certain was that the shy woman-look had crept back for a moment into her eyes; and after that the fate of empires was as nothing to the import of her smile. Did she feel, as he felt, the mystic bond between them, the appeal of his young man's strength; or was that smile a mask, a provocative weapon, to veil her own thoughts while she read through his like a book? He gave it up; but there was a way of knowing—he could call out ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... insisted on staying with us, and Aunt Nan (we all call her that now) had gone to Mystic Lake with Donald's brother, so we four girls were all alone. Virginia said "Yes" on the spot, and Mary and I were wild at the prospect. Vivian's eyes got big when Dick said "bear-traps," but she wouldn't let us know she was afraid. Really, you'd ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... longer the same woman. On her face was the candid and virtuous expression of the pure young girl such as she had been in her parents' home. The dawn of eternal life was already whitening her brow and glorifying her face with its celestial tints. Doubtless she heard the mystic harmonies, and gathered strength to live from her desire to unite herself once more with God in the last communion. The rector came beside the bed and gave her absolution. The archbishop administered the sacred oils with a fatherly ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
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