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More "Supernatural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attention, are of two kinds. The one, the "special creation" hypothesis, presumes every species to have originated from one or more stocks, these not being the result of the modification of any other form of living matter—or arising by natural agencies—but being produced, as such, by a supernatural creative act. ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... stepped out: lo! in the east a dark speck on the face of the desert. He stood as if rooted to the ground; his eyes dilated; his flesh crept chilly, as if touched by something supernatural. The speck grew; became large as a hand; at length assumed defined proportions. A little later, full into view swung a duplication of his own dromedary, tall and white, and bearing a houdah, the travelling litter of Hindostan. Then ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... fisher calls the fishes; the enchanted bullet finds its own game and needs only to be shot off; the tanner even lays a spell upon the water in his vat and makes it run up hill through a tube bent in a charm. But back of all this enchantment intelligence is working and assumes her mythical, supernatural garb when the poet images her ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... pastor, relieved. For he had been on the point of believing he had come upon something supernatural. It was well, he thought, that this was only the ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... it in the polite world, gave it for cultured circles an attraction which it is never likely to lose. . . . It is with human more than with mythological interest that the story is replete, and therefore it appeals to human hearts with a force which no lapse of time can diminish. Such supernatural machinery as is introduced, moreover, has a charm for children which older versions of the tale do not possess. The pumpkin carriage, the rat coachman, the lizard lacqueys, and all the other properties of the transformation scene, appeal at ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... varieties of the Egyptians' belief in gods, it is best to try to avoid a misunderstanding of their whole conception of the supernatural. The term god has come to tacitly imply to our minds such a highly specialised group of attributes, that we can hardly throw our ideas back into the more remote conceptions to which we also attach the same name. It is unfortunate that every other word for supernatural intelligences has become ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... of a "Supernature" antithetic to "Nature"—the primitive dualism of a natural world "fixed in fate" and a supernatural, left to the free play of volition—which has pervaded all later speculation and, for thousands of years, has exercised a profound influence on practice. For it is obvious that, on this theory of the Universe, the successful ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... deep penetrating accents of his words, carried a sting to Hugo's conscience. He felt as if Dino had a supernatural knowledge of his past life and his future, when he ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Fearful sights of a supernatural character will soon be revealed in the heavens, in token of the power of miracle-working demons. The spirits of devils will go forth to the kings of the earth and to the whole world, to fasten them in deception, and urge them on to unite with Satan in his last struggle ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... mysterious spiritual being that is behind it, like a spider in his web—feeling and interpreting every quiver of it, sending messages out into the world by means of it. But he always eludes you. You have no instrument that can touch him. You only know that he is there, enshrouded in mystery, a supernatural being not only using the brain but educating it for use. The brain itself has no knowledge or thought, and no power of itself to originate knowledge or thought. The brain of a baboon differs very little from the brain of a man. ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... nerves it was like a scene at the pantomime. He had divined it; he had foreseen and yet there was the shock and eerie thrill of magic, the appealing unreality of the supernatural in the revelation. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... to him to desist; the sound of the bell jarred on his nerves. It sounded like a summons, and a summons on that deserted craft was quite out of place. Who knew what mightn't answer it in the way of the supernatural? ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... I have made should prove interesting, not merely because it will introduce the reader to a class of Japanese poetry about which little or nothing has yet been written in English, but much more because it will afford some glimpses of a supernatural world which still remains for the most part unexplored. Without knowledge of Far Eastern superstitions and folk-tales, no real understanding of Japanese fiction or drama or poetry will ever ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... accustomed to be treated thus with contumely, and then later to see her suggestions acted upon—a feminine consolation which men would do well to take unto themselves. As soon as they entered the ball-room, Mrs. Ingham- Baker, with that supernatural perspicacity which is sometimes found in stupid mothers, saw that Agatha was refusing her usual partners. She noted her daughter's tactics with mingled awe and admiration, both of which tributes were certainly deserved. She saw Agatha look straight through one man at the decorations on the wall ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... great interest to Marguerite's entertaining stories of adventures at home and abroad, or Gabrielle's droll mimicry of the strongly marked characteristics of some one she has met or dreamed of. Sometimes the candles are extinguished, and a ghost story is told, for Gabrielle is fond of the supernatural, and her dramatic style of narration adds much to our enjoyment; indeed, chancing the other day to read in a magazine one of her pet stories, I was astonished to ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... singularly light one, since he never came to close quarters with his antagonist at all and had the Lord of Hosts on his side. A David of mythology, Perseus, another Florentine hero, a stripling with what looked like a formidable enemy, also enjoyed supernatural assistance. ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... the Irish better governed than the Scotch? Surely not. This circumstance has of late been used as an argument against reform. It proves nothing against reform. It proves only this, that laws have no magical, no supernatural, virtue; that laws do not act like Aladdin's lamp or Prince Ahmed's apple; that priestcraft, that ignorance, that the rage of contending factions, may make good institutions useless; that intelligence, sobriety, industry, moral freedom, firm ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fervor. Then, before their startled eyes, a thin film of smoke began to rise from the empty pot. It grew in volume until the room was quite dense with it. Even more quickly than it began, it disappeared, drawn apparently by some supernatural agency into the draft of the stove and out through the rickety chimney pipe. Even Dangloss blinked his eyes, and not because they were filled ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... In the strange state in which she found herself that day, the supernatural itself had seemed credible. And ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... within seemed to press upon his eyes with palpable force after the pale scattered lights and broad shadows of the piazza, and for the first minute or two he could see nothing distinctly. That yellow splendour was in itself something supernatural and heavenly to many of the peasant-women, for whom half the sky was hidden by mountains, and who went to bed in the twilight; and the uninterrupted chant from the choir was repose to the ear after the hellish hubbub of ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... of the word "beloved" by the Creeks was quite peculiar. It is evidently correctly translated, for Milfort likewise gives it as "bien aime." It was the title used for any thing held in especial regard, whether for economic or supernatural reasons; and sometimes it was used as western tribes use the word "medicine" at the present day. The old chiefs and conjurers were called the "beloved old men"; what in the west we would now call the "medicine squaws," were named "the beloved old women." ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... for any theory of life, or of medicine, which denies the existence of God, whom I regard as the source of all the forces in the universe. Nature is only the manifestation of his power and wisdom. There is nothing supernatural in the universe unless it be God himself. All the wonderful phenomena of the human body are the result of a living force with which he has endowed it, and are to be explained, if explained at all, by a better knowledge of the intentions ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... the annoying vermin lice—Exodus viii. 16-19—the plague of darkness, Exodus x. 22-24—the dividing of the Red Sea, Exodus xiv. 21-31. These bear all the characters of true miracles. And how far above the pretended supernatural doings of Mohammed, and the alleged Pagan and Romish miracles, were the wonderful deeds of Christ and His apostles! For example, our Saviour stilled the tempest, calmed the ruffled ocean, walked upon the sea, fed the famished multitude, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... dramatic form helps partly to make this more prominent, though the poet's spirit shines forth thus, independently of the mould which it imposes on itself. Of Milton we may say, too, that, in spite of the supernatural machinery of his greatest poem, it bears strongly impressed on it the political mark, and that in those minor pieces, where he is avowedly in the political sphere, he still rises to the full height of his ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... toward the scholastic method, now so much out of favor; but certainly he would put his own personality into this, as into everything that he undertook to investigate; for he was held back on the steeps of mysticism by the science which he had created, and which could only afford a shelter to the supernatural as an extension of those psychical faculties which have been ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... life as are the miracle of the growing rice, and the mysteries of the reproduction of species. This must be not only known but realised, not only accepted as a theory, but acknowledged as a fact, if the native view of life is to be understood and appreciated. Tales of the marvellous and the supernatural excite interest and fear in a Malay audience, but they occasion no surprise. Malays know that strange things have happened in the past, and are daily occurring to them and to their fellows. Some are ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... Indeed they looked supernatural. The last trace of gray was gone. They were of the purest, deepest violet, luminous, mysterious, with that awe-inspiring expression of utter aloneness. But as Etta spoke the expression changed. The gray came back and with it a glance of ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... undeniable; and yet how utterly unlike are the two plays! and how immeasurably superior the later one! It may seem, on a superficial view, that in John Gabriel Borkman Ibsen has returned to prose and the common earth after his excursion into poetry and the possibly supernatural, if I may so call it, in The Master Builder and Little Eyolf. But this is a very superficial view indeed. We have only to compare the whole invention of John Gabriel Borkman with the invention of Pillars of Society, to realise the difference between ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... with supernatural activity, and making a leap, he lit, so to speak, behind Ralph, much after the fashion of a monkey falling on the bough ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... invincible, that I despise danger, and defy and seek it. He who loves danger shall perish therein. And if the prophet-king, though so agreeable in the sight of God and so favored of him, and Solomon, notwithstanding his supernatural and God-given wisdom, were troubled and fell into sin because God turned his face away from them, what have not I to fear, miserable sinner that I am, so young, so inexperienced in the wiles of the devil, and so wavering and unpracticed in the ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... The God himself is absent, but his sons come forth and do battle with the invader. The giant is victorious and departs triumphant. The twenty-eighth section gives the details of a terrific battle between Ravan and Mandhata King of Ayodhya, a distinguished ancestor of Rama. Supernatural weapons are employed on both sides and the issue of the conflict is long doubtful. But at last Mandhata prepares to use the mighty weapon "acquired by severe austerities through the grace and favour of Rudra." The giant would inevitably have been ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries believed in the supernatural, and might almost be said to have contracted a miracle-habit, as morbid as any other form of artificial stimulant; they stood, like children, in an attitude of gaping wonder before the miracle of miracles which they felt in their own consciousness; ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... it be a fiction. The supernatural is confined to the dream. All the rest is probable; and I am willing to think ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... bowed shoulders and grizzled beards showed them to be men of many years and much wisdom. When asked to give their advice, they declared that Valerio could not be killed by any ordinary weapons, but that special means must be used to be of any avail against his supernatural powers. Accordingly, one of the hechiceros broke off the head of his arrow, cast a charm over it, and predicted that this would deal the fatal blow. The party started out with Chito as a guide, and, after many miles of wearisome travel up ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... had already seized upon Adam, who, stupefied by astonishment rather than fear, uttered no sound, and attempted no struggle. But it was in vain they sought to tear from him Sibyll's clinging and protecting arms. A supernatural strength, inspired by a kind of superstition that no harm could chance to him while she was by, animated her slight form; and fierce though the soldiers were, they shrunk from actual and brutal violence to one thus young and fair. Those small hands clung so firmly, that it seemed that ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for a moment or two. The farmstead was intensely quiet, with the ominous stillness of death. All the windows were shrouded with their check curtains. There was no clatter of Suzanne's wooden clogs about the fold or the kitchen. If it had been Sunday, this supernatural silence would have been easily accounted for; but it was Thursday. I scarcely dared go on and ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... delight in showing that the unheard of, the inexplicable, are met with all through life. They are right and I agree with them, on condition that they do not at the close of their explanation replace this new notion of the supernatural by ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... intelligence. Sir Oliver Lodge well sums up the attitude of science in the following sentences:—"Orthodox science shows us a self-contained and self-sufficient universe, not in touch with anything above or beyond itself—the general trend and outline of it known—nothing supernatural or miraculous, no intervention of beings other than ourselves, being conceived possible." (Man and the Universe, p. 14, Popular ed.) Personally, we question whether there are any scientists of repute who really believe in the existence of a personal ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... regalia. The sword which the Emperor has sent for shall be inferior to none of these; the smith may set his heart at rest. The smith, awe-struck, expresses his wonder, and asks again who is addressing him. He is bidden to go and deck out his anvil, and a supernatural power will help him. The visitor disappears in a cloud. The smith prepares his anvil, at the four corners of which he places images of the gods, while above it he stretches the straw rope and paper pendants hung up in temples to shut out foul or ill-omened ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... lie; for since fate is nothing more than a connected chain of causes, he is the first cause of all upon which all the rest depend. You will also be right in applying to him any names that you please which express supernatural strength and power: he may have as many titles as he ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... acquainted with it in this reprint will meet with many things less familiar than Lady Fanshawe's moving account of her leave-taking from Charles I. at Hampton Court, which has been quoted hundreds of times. They will be thrilled by at least three stories of the supernatural told with the elan and consummate simplicity that exceeds art, and they will be charmed with the ingenuousness of the writer when she writes about herself, and her masterly little sketches by the way ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... bank of foul air, that ever rests on that coast, there was seen an object, that looked like ribs of bright light, as if a thousand stars had quitted their usual berths in the heaven, to warn us off the land, by a supernatural beacon. The sight was in itself altogether out of nature and surprising. As the night thickened, it grew brighter and more glowing, as if 'twere meant in earnest to warn us from the coast. But when the word was passed to send the glasses aloft, there was seen a glittering ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... Bible, which had before seemed to me supernatural, grew divinely natural and apprehensible; though uninspired interpreters ignorantly pronounce Christ's healing miraculous, instead of seeing therein the ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... cherished hopes, were bound up with the belief in the miraculous. Life was a constant battle between saints and demons for the possession of the souls of men. The most superstitious among our modern countrymen turn to supernatural agencies only when natural causes seem insufficient; to Eginhard and his friends the supernatural was the rule; and the sufficiency of natural causes was allowed only when there was ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... it,' answered Arthur, irritably, 'but I'm not inclined to attribute to the supernatural everything that ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... turned her face toward Ruth and screeched in evident alarm. She looked wild enough to be called a "Whosis," whatever kind of supernatural apparition that might be. Her silk dress was in rags; her hair floated down her back in a tangled mane; altogether she was a ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... of the hour there was an intimation of privity to the event which had taken place, an implication of the unity of the natural and the supernatural, strangely different from that robust gayety of the plain day which later seemed to disown the affair, and leave the burden of proof altogether to the human witness. By this time Hewson had already set about to putting it in ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... maniacs. If such a man, after a dozen hours in his cell, were approached by some one whom he had every reason to regard as a friend and a rescuer, and beaten cruelly with a weapon possessed of strange and altogether horrible qualities—supernatural qualities, so far as he could tell—it is fair to suppose that he would be as much transformed by the ordeal as ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... and tedious detours into the picturesque parables and miraculous incidents of the Old Testament, there is method in his digressiveness. He knows that one of the charms of Paganism lies in its rich and variegated mythology. Yet Christianity also can point to an even nobler inheritance of the supernatural and the wonderful in the mysterious evolutions of its history. Hence the stories of the early patriarchs, of the Israelites and Moses, of Daniel and Jonah, are imported by the poet as pictorial illustrations of his theme. ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... present subject of discussion tempts to many an excursion into particulars, its treatment is restricted to general outlines, with an aim simply to clarify current ideas of miracle and the supernatural, so as to find firm holding ground for tenable positions in the present "drift period" of theology. The chief exception made to this general treatment is the discussion given to a class of miracles regarded with as much incredulity as any, yet as capable as any ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... merciful to their son rather than to many another son, the good Elder did not pause to consider. Possibly he thought it no more than just that the prayers of the righteous should be answered by a supernatural intervention between their sons and the bullets of the enemy. His ideas on this point were no doubt vague at the best, but certain it is that he returned from his long and difficult journey to the seat of strife after his boy, with ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... America, had "come down in great wrath," and was present among them, sometimes even in visible shape, to terrify and tempt. Special providences and unusual phenomena, like earth quakes, mirages, and the northern lights, are gravely recorded by Winthrop and Mather and others as portents of supernatural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, according to rumor, been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. John Cotton, in open assembly, at Boston, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... told him. "I mean, this is a thing like, outside material means. Supernatural, sort of. Did you cross ...
— Something Will Turn Up • David Mason
... unearthly merriment, mingled with shrieks and wailings, borne upon the night-breeze; whilst the few who have ventured within its walls, tell of shapes seen, and sounds heard, which would cause the stoutest heart to quail. For myself, I am no great believer in the supernatural, and have no doubt that imagination, united to the loneliness of the spot, and the strange freaks the wind plays through a large uninhabited house, have originated reports which we are sure would lose nothing in the recital; so if you are inclined to ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... old man's fancy—but the house, her surroundings, her loneliness, contradicted her. To her over-acute senses the thought of Blackburn in that room, so often consecrated to the formula of death, suggested a special and unaccountable menace. Under such a strain the supernatural assumed vague ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... well-educated, sensible, winsome, lawn-tennis-playing English girl. Her vivacious spirits rose superior to her surroundings, which were often sad enough. But she was above all things wholesome, unaffected, and sparkling—a gleam of sunshine. She laid no claim to supernatural powers; she held no dealings with familiar spirits; she was simply a girl of strong personal charm, endowed with an astounding memory and a rare measure of feminine intuition. Her memory, she told me, she shared ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... before he gave it away. I delight too in the temperature of your piety, and that you would not see the enthusiastic exorcist. How shocking to suppose that the Omnipotent Creator of worlds delegates his power to a momentary insect to eject supernatural spirits that he had permitted to infest another insect, and had permitted to vomit blasphemies against himself! Pray do not call that enthusiasm, but delirium. I pity real enthusiasts, but I would shave their heads and take away some blood. The exorcist's associates are in a worse predicament, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... an axiom that religion is revealed to men in no other manner than that which is agreeable both to the nature of things and to reason, as the witness and interpreter of divine providence; and teaches that the subject-matter of every supposed supernatural revelation, is to be examined and judged according to the ideas regarding religion and morality, which we have formed in the mind by the help of reason.... Whosoever, therefore, despising that supremacy ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... firmly, and wound with grim resolve. She was the very impersonation of that obstinate rationalism that grew up at the New-England fireside, close alongside of the most undoubting faith in the supernatural. ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the offspring of perfect Love as well as perfect Wisdom. Everywhere we are finding means to employ the secret forces of nature for our own benefit, or to ward off physical evils which seemed to our forefathers as inevitable, supernatural; and even the pestilence, instead of being, as was once fancied, the capricious and miraculous infliction of some demon—the pestilence itself is found to be an orderly result of the same laws by which the sun shines and the herb grows; a product of ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... MONDAY, May 26, and five following Days, a most curious Collection of BOOKS, the property of a Gentleman, including Works on Animal Magnetism, Mesmerism, and Mesmeric Sleep; Angels and their Ministrations; Apparitions, Ghosts, Hobgoblins, Presentiments, Second Sight, and Supernatural Appearances; Magical Practices and Conjuration; Daemonology, Spectres, and Vampires; Popular Superstitions, Popish Credulity, Delusions, Ecstacies, Fanaticisms, and Impostures; Astrology, Divination, Revelations, and Prophecies; Necromancy, Sorcery, and Witchcraft; Infatuation, Diabolical Possession, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... chest. At length, however, having slipped one arm into her gown, her toilette seemed so nearly finished that the impatience of her curiosity might safely be indulged. One moment surely might be spared; and, so desperate should be the exertion of her strength, that, unless secured by supernatural means, the lid in one moment should be thrown back. With this spirit she sprang forward, and her confidence did not deceive her. Her resolute effort threw back the lid, and gave to her astonished eyes the view of a white cotton counterpane, properly folded, reposing at one ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... curtains draped back on either side of the upper part of the composition. In the Madonna of San Giorgio Maggiore, at Verona, we have a much more attractive picture. The "gloria" encompassing the vision is clearly defined, giving so strong an effect of the supernatural that we cease to judge the composition by ordinary standards of natural law. The Virgin's white veil flutters from her head as if caught by some heavenly breeze. Her cloak floats about her by the same mysterious force, held in graceful festoons by ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... the presence of supernatural assistance! Circled in the embrace of my elbow-chair, my breast labours, liked the bloated Sibyl on her three-footed stool, and like her too, labours with Nonsense. Nonsense, auspicious name! Tutor, friend, and finger-post in the mystic mazes of law; the cadaverous ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... and ran up the stairs. The upper landing was in darkness and the door of the room which he knew to be Sir Michael's stood wide open. As he entered, a faint scent came to his nostrils. It brought him up short at the threshold, with a chill of supernatural dread. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... cunningly. It is permitted the medicine-man to decline the case when the patient has had treatment from any other, say the white doctor, whom many of the younger generation consult. Or, if before having seen the patient, he can definitely refer his disorder to some supernatural cause wholly out of the medicine-man's jurisdiction, say to the spite of an evil spirit going about in the form of a coyote, and states the case convincingly, he may avoid the penalty. But this must not be pushed ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... the Second Messenger does after his fight with the Greeks. Of course there is no great harm in making the Taurians bad shots as well as cowards, and possibly there is some value in the suggestion of a supernatural protection which is only saving its object for a crueller death. But very likely the two ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... what I hear, has seen better days," commented the Queensland doctor. "All over the world the primitive people endowed this humble form of animal—the serpentine—with a cunning and supernatural power surpassing that of the four-footed creatures. I think it was because in the cradle of the human family there were so many hurts from the bites of snakes and sea-eels—they couldn't guard against them—that man salved his wounds by crediting his ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... I found myself on the couch, and perceived that a cold (O how cold!) and dripping hand was clasped in mine. This reassured me, and I forgot the supernatural signs which accompanied his appearance. I imagined that he had been unfortunate, and had returned home. I opened my eyes, and beheld my loved husband and threw myself into his arms. His clothes were saturated with the rain; I felt as if I had embraced ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... husband?" and "Devil take me," striking himself on the forehead and tossing about. There are chances and occasions which occur so opportunely in this world that little-minded men refuse them credence, saying they are supernatural, but men of high intellect know them to be true because they could not be invented. One of the chances came to the poor advocate, even the day after that terrible one which had been so sore a trial to ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... A familiar voice rose above the whisperings of the jungle. A voice familiar, yet unreal; supernatural; a calm, commanding one that did not sound but echoed only in ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... black; then seeking out a cavern in a sequestered part of the Black Hills, he lay for several days, fasting and praying to the Great Spirit. In the dreams and visions produced by his weakened and excited state, he fancied like all Indians, that he saw supernatural revelations. Again and again the form of an antelope appeared before him. The antelope is the graceful peace spirit of the Ogallalla; but seldom is it that such a gentle visitor presents itself during the initiatory fasts of their young men. The terrible ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... succession We learn from stern experience Pictures of an inspired imagination An astonishing outbreak Soothing words of sympathy A rather bold assertion The most enthusiastic adherents Mere tepid conviction Eminently qualified for the task Almost supernatural charm In glowing and exaggerated phrases Somewhat rich and austere An inexhaustible theme Grave and undeniable faults Perfectly chosen language All the characteristics of a mob Given to grandiloquent phrase Peculiar vein of sarcasm ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... religion and morality with the orgies of African Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter—at times taking away the reader's breath—and, finally, the whole dominated everywhere by that marvellous Oriental fancy, wherein the spiritual and the supernatural are as common as the material and the natural; it is this contrast, I say, which forms the chiefest charm of The Nights, which gives it the most striking originality and which makes it a perfect expositor of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... is rather surprising, that any members should be found bold enough to declare, by their speeches and votes, that they were still attached to the interest of an abdicated deity. [19] The hasty conversion of the senate must be attributed either to supernatural or to sordid motives; and many of these reluctant proselytes betrayed, on every favorable occasion, their secret disposition to throw aside the mask of odious dissimulation. But they were gradually fixed in the new religion, as the cause of the ancient became more hopeless; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the natural-magic tendency of the human mind asserting itself. To some of us indeed this tendency is even greater in the case of the Snake than in that of the Tree. W. H. Hudson, in Far Away and Long Ago, speaks of "that sense of something supernatural in the serpent, which appears to have been universal among peoples in a primitive state of culture, and still survives in some barbarous or semi-barbarous countries." The fascination of the Snake—the fascination of its mysteriously ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... nothing for it to overflow on, when her father had taken his share. Now Lucinda loved the Parson most devoutly. Ever since the time when she could just remember watching through the dusk his white stockings, as they glimmered across the road to evening-meeting, and looked like a supernatural pair of legs taking a walk on their own responsibility, twilight concealing the black breeches and coat from mortal view, Lucinda had regarded her father with a certain pleasing awe. His long abstractions, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... the supernatural, and had had absolutely no apprehensions of coming across anything of a ghostly character—all my fears had been of malicious natives and tigers; they now, however, changed, and I was confronted with a dread of what I could not understand and could not ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... affirm anything concerning them; but if there are such, why not evil spirits, as well as wicked men? Many travellers who have been conversant with savages have been fully persuaded that their jugglers actually possessed some means of communication with the invisible world, and exercised a supernatural power which they derived from it. And not missionaries only have believed this, and old travellers who lived in ages of credulity, but more recent observers, such as Carver and Bruce, whose testimony is of great weight, and who were neither ignorant, nor weak, nor credulous ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... it to the Hospital, adding an autograph inscription. The flags are chiefly American and French. There are also several French eagles and some native Indian flags. On the latter the mark of a hand, supposed by the natives to be the impress of their chief's hand, recorded by supernatural agency, can be clearly seen. Every Sunday all the veterans who are not disabled by ill-health or infirmity take their places in the body of the chapel, almost filling it. Visitors and the Hospital officials sit in transverse ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... both historical and descriptive; the custom of slavery among them, and their religious beliefs; and the progress of Christianity in the archipelago—stating that the conversions therein now number 400,000. A supernatural appearance of a dead man's spirit, who describes the delights of the Christian heaven, is related in detail; this leads to many conversions among the natives, but some declare that "because there were Castilian soldiers in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... her, and the Finnish maiden was betrothed to him. Walking one evening by the lake, Donica heard the sound of the death-spectre, and fell lifeless in the arms of her lover. Presently the dead maiden received a supernatural vitality, but her cheeks were wan, her lips livid, her eyes lustreless, and her lap-dog howled when it saw her. Eberhard still resolved to marry her, and to church they went; but when he took Donica's hand into his own it was cold and clammy, the demon fled from her, and the body dropped ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... her mind any sense of the supernatural, she shut her eyes with confidence of coming sleep. While she was, however, still within the borders of wakefulness, and wholly conscious, she felt the Thing jump from the floor upon her legs, and crouch there with that deadening ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of his long musket and unerring skill as a marksman. He had brought with him from England a suit of mail, helmet and cuirass such as were worn by the soldiers of Cromwell. Clothed with these, his stately figure seemed to the sons of the forest something almost supernatural. One day some Indians, having taken away a horse of his, he put on his armor, pursued them alone, and soon overtook them. The chief of the party seeing him approach unsupported, advanced menacingly with uplifted tomahawk. Prescott dared him to strike, and was immediately taken at his word, ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... and respect for the deeds and productions of those long dead or in distant countries, in which the human spirit relieved itself from the oppressive expectation of judgment and vengeance which had paralysed it, as the beauty of the supernatural world was lost sight of behind its terrors, and witches and wizards engrossed the popular mind, in which for a time saints and angels had held the ascendancy. The future now became the return of a golden age; not a garish and horrible ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... heart. Perspiration came out in drops all along his forehead; his hands were also perspiring and cold, and his cold, sweat-covered shirt clung to his body, interfering with the freedom of his movements. With a supernatural effort of will-power he forced his fingers not to tremble, his voice to be firm and distinct, his eyes to be calm. He saw nothing about him; the voices came to him as through a mist, and it was to this mist that he made his desperate efforts to answer firmly, to answer loudly. But having ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... of fooling credulous multitudes with responses from Delphi, we have a Congress which can enact tariff regulations susceptible of interpretations enough to satisfy the love of mystery of the entire nation. Instead of loafing round Memnon at sunrise to catch some supernatural tones, we talk words into a little contrivance which will repeat our words and tones to the remotest generation of those who shall be curious to know whether we said those words in jest or earnest. All these mysteries made common and diffused ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... only consider the thing politically, which is exactly what he really does all through the book. The pope, from this point of view, asks for no other infallibility than that which is attributed to all sovereigns.[17] Without either vindicating or surrendering the supernatural side of the Papal claims, he only insists upon the political, social, or human side of it, as an inseparable quality of an admitted supremacy.[18] In short, from beginning to end of this speculation, from ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... supplied by the beautiful undulations of the coat, and the graceful fall of the pantaloons. And all this is by the potency of your tailor. His necromantic skill, unlike that of too many practisers of supernatural arts, is exercised only for the benefit of the world: and whilst Circe transformed the companions of Ulysses into brute beasts, the benevolent enchanter of our day transforms brute beasts into handsome and attractive men. Nay, had Olympus been furnished with a tailor, Brotheus would have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... is positive that no one above a "poor Irishman," can fail to see through such nonsense. Few even of educated Englishmen have any suspicion of the depth and solidity of the Catholic dogma, its wide and various adaptation to wants ineffaceable from the human heart, its wonderful fusion of the supernatural into the natural life, its vast resources for a powerful hold upon the conscience. We doubt whether any single reformed church can present a theory of religion comparable with it in comprehensiveness, in logical coherence, in the well-guarded disposition of its parts. Into this interior ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... for centuries has been, not whether there was any primitive oral language, but what that language was. Some literalists have indeed argued from the Mosaic narrative that because the Creator, by one supernatural act, with the express purpose to form separate peoples, had divided all tongues into their present varieties, and could, by another similar exercise of power, obliterate all but one which should be universal, the fact ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... that the proposition, The Duke of Wellington is mortal, is immediately an inference from the proposition, All men are mortal, whence do we derive our knowledge of that general truth? No supernatural aid being supposed, the answer must be, from observation. Now, all which men can observe are individual cases. From these all general truths must be drawn, and into these they may be again resolved; for a general truth is but an aggregate of particular ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... story is as old as human speech,—and perhaps even antedates it. A naive acceptance of the supernatural was unquestionably one of the primal attributes of human intelligence. The ghost story may thus quite conceivably be the first form of tale ever invented. It makes its appearance comparatively early in the annals of literature. Who that has read it ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... sentiments which may be regarded as strictly religious. Beads and rings were originally amulets to protect the wearer against invisible inimical powers, as they were talismans to confer upon their possessor supernatural gifts. We can get no distinct view back of this custom in time, but we may feel well assured that when gold had acquired such use, nature-worship had advanced far into the stage of symbolism. It was not the metal itself that was the ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... violence of their passions speedily transfers their belief to the side of the desires, or sets their actions above their belief. Hamlet alone presents the confused spectacle of a mind formed by the enlightenment of society in conflict with a position contrary to its laws; and he needs a supernatural apparition to determine him to act, and a fortuitous event to accomplish his project. If incessantly placed in an analogous position, the personages of a tragedy conceived at the present day according to the romantic system would offer ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... many nights in penitential prayer. For several days, the paralysis of years has been gradually loosening its fetters, and this morning, the distressing and ghastly distortion of one side of his face almost disappeared. Though his voice is well nigh gone, it returns fitfully, and his strength seems supernatural. Fearing that you might not arrive in time, I have written down his last confession, and here commit it ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... trolls; all malignant; and thus it is that, in these tales, the traditions about Odin and his underlings, about the Frost Giants, and about sorcerers and wizards, are confused and garbled; and all supernatural agency that plots man's ill is the work of Trolls, whether the agent be the arch enemy himself, or giant, or ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... than six thousand feet above sea-level, it lies in placid transparency. The surrounding heights are all the more pleasing to the eye because of their lingering winter-cover; and as we gaze upon the Lake, unruffled by the gentlest breeze, we marvel at the quiet,—almost supernatural,—radiancy of the scene. Lakes in other lands may present greater beauty of artificial setting,—beauty dependent largely upon picturesqueness, where vineyards and ivied ruins heighten the effect of natural environment,—but for nature pure and simple, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... degrading characteristics, is a state of actual hostility between master and slave, in which "a revolution of the wheel of fortune, in exchange of situation, is among possible events; and this may become probably by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take part with ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... they are any more supernatural than the telegraph and telefone and electric light, and many other seemin'ly supernatural works. And who knows but there may still be some hidden powers in nature that is the source of ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... names there six hundred years after the time when they were first graven. The columns have long perished, but the mound still marks the spot where the noblest heroes of antiquity, the MARATHONOMAKHOI repose. [Pausanias states, with implicit belief, that the battlefield was haunted at night by supernatural beings, and that the noise of combatants and the snorting of horses were heard to resound on it. The superstition has survived the change of creeds, and the shepherds of the neighbourhood still believe that spectral warriors ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... simple nature that had gradually and truly undergone that influence had been watched and studied by him, and had had its effect. The supernatural had made itself felt, and thenceforth he made it his study, in a quiet, unobtrusive manner, scarcely known even to his brother, but gradually resulting in heart-whole acceptance of faith, and therewith in full devotion of heart ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... picturesque figure of the whole, was laying off his coat and baring his arm, standing under the solitary lamp depending from the rafters, whose faint light served to give to all the scene an indefinite supernatural aspect. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... age we see no supernatural prodigies, because there are none to see; and when we are told that the reason why we see no prodigies is because we have no faith, we answer (if we be sensible), Just so. As long as people had faith, in plain English believed, that they could be magically cured of a disease, they thought ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... supernatural. How shall half-way judge of journey done? Shall this germ and protoplast of being Rest mid-life and say his race ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... generation, performed the function of reciting the exploits of the sovereigns and the deeds of heroes. They accompanied themselves on musical instruments, and naturally, as time went by, each set of raconteurs embellished the language of their predecessors, adding supernatural elements, and introducing details which belonged to the realm of romance rather than to that of ordinary history. These Katari-be would seem to have been the sole repository of their country's annals until the sixth ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... fountain; selfishness May not come near him, nor the little throng Of flitting pleasures tempt him from his path; The wandering beggars propagate his name, 305 Dumb creatures find him tender as a nun, And natural or supernatural fear, Unless it leap upon him in a dream, Touches him not. To enhance the wonder, see How arch his notices, how nice his sense 310 Of the ridiculous; not blind is he To the broad follies of the licensed world, Yet innocent himself withal, though shrewd, And can read lectures upon ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... his public ministry. The first glimpse we have of the mother is at the wedding at Cana. Jesus was there too. The wine failed, and Mary went to Jesus about the matter. "They have no wine," she said. Evidently she was expecting some manifesting of supernatural power. All the years since his birth she had been carrying in her heart a great wonder of expectation. Now he had been baptized, and had entered upon his work as the Messiah. Had not the time come ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... his treatment of scenery also, we have to observe the admirable dexterity of his compromises. The supernatural is accepted frankly with almost the childish popular belief in a dragon rolling a loathly bulk painfully, and breathing smoke. But note that the dragon, when it is thrown back into the pit, falls without sound; note that ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... same," said Sainte-Croix, still attributing what he heard to a supernatural being, "when one makes a compact of this kind, one prefers to know ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... occultist of my eminence. In the first place, the streets were infested with dugpas, or red-caps, a heretical sect, some members of which have arhat pretensions of a very high order—indeed I am ready to admit that I have met with Shammar adepts, who, so far as supernatural powers were concerned, were second to none among ourselves. But this was only the result of that necromancy which Buddha in his sixth incarnation denounced in the person of Tsong- kha-pa, the great reformer. They even deny the spiritual supremacy of the Dalai Lama at Lhassa, and own ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... Asiatics, the American nations had, instead of a regular priesthood, jugglers or sorcerers, who pretended to have supernatural power and knowledge. They appear to conform in every respect to the schamans of the Siberians, and the Fetiss-seers of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... gentlemen are not apt to admire a prodigious quantity of learning and masculine acquirements in the fair sex;—we usually consider a certain degree of weakness, both of mind and body, as friendly to female grace. I am not absolutely of this opinion; yet I do not see the advantage of supernatural force, either of body or mind, to female excellence. Hercules-Spinster found his strength rather an ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... and the surviving relatives who guard them wax rich off the offerings brought. "In the course of a very few years, as the recollection of the man's personality becomes misty, his origin grows mysterious, his career takes a legendary hue, his birth and death were both supernatural; in the next generation the names of the elder gods get introduced into the story, and so the marvellous tradition works itself into a myth, until nothing but a personal incarnation can account for such a series of prodigies. The man was an Avatar ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... extremes, became persuaded that the crucifixion of Jesus was a supernatural event. Testimonies of miracles, so frequent in unenlightened ages, were not wanting to prove that he was something divine. This belief, rolling through the lapse of ages, met with the reveries of Plato and the reasonings of Aristotle, and acquired force and extent, until the divinity of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... death of the body, led universally to the tedious idea of personal immortality. Just in a similar fashion the first gods arose, through the personification of the forces of nature, and these in the further development of the religions acquired greater and greater supernatural force, until by a natural process of abstraction, I might say of distillation, from the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods, in the course of spiritual development, at last the idea of the one all ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... the more beautiful, Nanda, —the woman that you love, or this female ape?' 'Oh, Master!' exclaimed Nanda, 'how can a lovely woman be compared with an ugly ape?' 'Perhaps you will presently find reason to make the comparison yourself,' answered the Buddha;—and instantly by supernatural power he ascended with Nanda to the San-Jusan-Ten, which is the Second of the Six Heavens of Desire. There, within a palace of jewels, Nanda saw a multitude of heavenly maidens celebrating some festival ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... which was passed round to the company. All that was expected in return was to cover bits of paper with writing, and thus convert them into amulets; for, in his capacity of sorcerer, the Christian is supposed to possess supernatural ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... clustered the twigs, and shone in the sun. Exclamations were uttered in every variety of tone; and although both Jacobi and Henrik protested that they could not discover any way of accounting for this supernatural phenomenon, still they did not escape the suspicion of being instrumental in the witchcraft, spite of all the means they used to establish their innocence. The opinion, however, was universally adopted, that good and not bad elves had been thus busily at work; and the fruit, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... forth from that jet-black head are full of meaning. Then his strange horse laughter by day and his weird, doleful cry at night, like that of a lost and wandering spirit, recall no other bird or beast. He suggests something almost supernatural in his alertness and amazing quickness, cheating the shot and the bullet of the sportsman out of their aim. I know of but one other bird so quick, and that is the humming-bird, which I have never been able to kill with a gun. The loon laughs the shot-gun to scorn, ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... their loveliness to scorn. Even in crises of graver difficulty, where sterner assailants are to be encountered than Helen's magical smile or Florence's magnetic eyes, the invisible presence seems to inspire her lover with supernatural valiance. Remember the story of Aslauga's Knight; when once through the cloud of battle-dust gleamed the golden tresses, horse and ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... sufferings in climbing over the mountains and in crossing the streams on our journey, this account of myself given by the Tibetans, and now repeated to me, struck me as almost cruelly ironical. I was pleased that the Tibetans credited me with such supernatural powers, for it would keep them from getting too ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... shape and proportions. Be it as it may, I could not recognize the place which I had so recently visited. I now climbed up some detached pieces of rock to look for lights. I sprang up with the elastic step of the roe, over huge broken fragments of rock, aided by a sort of supernatural strength, the stones rolling down and smashing with strange noises as I was springing over them. From these crumbling heights I looked eastward, and every way, but no friendly light, watch-fire, or supper-fire, was ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... along the streets. And in the similes, what pictures from animal life and manners! And then our enchantment is heightened by a prevailing duplication. Throughout, or nearly so, the transactions that are presented in the natural, are also presented in the supernatural. Thus we have earthly councils, heavenly councils; warring men, warring gods; kings of men, kings of gods; mortal husbands and wives, and sons and daughters; immortal husbands and wives, and sons and daughters. Palaces in heaven as on earth. The sea, in a manner, triplicates. Terrestrial steeds—celestial ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... when Hetty looked back upon these weeks, they seemed to her, not like a dream, which is usually the heart's first choice of a phrase to describe the swift flight of a happy time, but like a few days spent on some other planet, where, for the interval, she had been changed into a sort of supernatural child. Except at night, they were never in the house. The harsh New England May laid aside for them all its treacheries, and was indeed the month of spring. Their mornings they spent on the water, rowing or sailing; their afternoons in driving through ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... other explanation possible, Mrs. Whitelaw grew to believe quite firmly in the supernatural nature of that unforgotten cry. She remembered the unexplainable footstep which she had heard in the padlocked room in the early dusk of that new-year's-day, when Mrs. Tadman and she explored the ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the faithful, although it is declared that higher spiritual joys are the lot of the most favored. The faith of Mohammed was, in substance, Judaism, the religion of the Old Testament; power being set before holiness, however, in the conception of God, and the supernatural mission of Mohammed substituted for the future Messianic reign of righteousness and peace, and coupled with the emphatic proclamation of the last judgment. The law in the Koran is a civil as well as a moral code. Notwithstanding ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... greatness of France. He loved not ease, he loved not personal indulgence, he loved not sensual gratification. The elevation of France to prosperity, wealth, and power, was a limitless ambition. The almost supernatural success which had thus far attended his exertions, did but magnify his desires and stimulate his hopes. He had no wish to elevate France upon the ruins of other nations. But he wished to make France the pattern of all excellence, the illustrious leader at the head of all nations, guiding them to ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... plucks an anemone, and places it on an altar; he also bends his knee, he also raises his right hand to God. Dumb he is; but sometimes the dumb serve God acceptably. Yet still it occurs to you, that perhaps on this high festival of the Christian Church, he may be overruled by supernatural influence into confession of his homage, having so often been made to bow and bend his knee at murderous rites. In a service of religion he may be timid. Let us try him, therefore, with an earthly passion, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... none of the women had gone. What was more remarkable, in a house rather full of girls, nobody was sick; or, at least, everybody was well enough to be at dinner, and, after dinner, at the dance, which impatiently, if a little ironically, preceded the supernatural part of the evening's amusement. It was the decorum of a woman who might have been expected not to have it that Mrs. Westangle had arranged that the evening's amusement should not pass the bound between Saturday night ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... true that, almost with her next breath, these she qualified or contradicted. Also, she had suggested that her life had been prolonged far beyond our mortal span, for hundreds and hundreds of years, indeed; which, as Euclid says, is absurd, and had pretended to supernatural powers, which is still more absurd. Moreover, by a clever use of some hypnotic or mesmeric power, she had feigned to transport me to some place beyond the earth and in the Halls of Hades to show me what is veiled from the eyes of man, and not only me, but the savage warrior ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... boy is gone. I have sent him home. All is off. There was martyrs in old times," goes on Bill, "that suffered death rather than give up the particular graft they enjoyed. None of 'em ever was subjugated to such supernatural tortures as I have been. I tried to be faithful to our articles of depredation; but ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... with mingled feelings. If the words of Beth Cameron had created in his mind a notion that the mystery surrounding Black Rock was supernatural in character, the interview with Jonathan K. McGuire had dispelled it. That McGuire was a very much frightened man was certain, but it seemed equally certain to Peter that what he feared was no ghost or banshee but the imminence of some human attack upon his person or possessions. ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... were able to keep their terror under control. The mind could not imagine the frightful change that came over them, as soon as they were shut up in their bedroom. On the Thursday night, particularly, this transformation was so violently brutal, that it seemed as if accomplished in a supernatural world. The drama in the bedroom, by its strangeness, by its savage passion, surpassed all belief, and remained deeply concealed within their aching beings. Had they spoken of it, they would have ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... there interested him very much. We do not intend to describe all of the marvels unfolded for him in that venerable mildewed manuscript, for some of the more gruesome mysteries of the supernatural world are better left unrevealed; but let it be said at least, that one chapter intrigued Brother Ambrose immensely. So much so, that he shamelessly whipped out his scissors and, nipping that section, stuck it inside his rough wool robes so ...
— G-r-r-r...! • Roger Arcot
... unbelieving as Tobias, doubting as Paul; have mercy on me, O master! for in this hour the divine light of belief and knowledge banishes doubt from my sinful heart. I acknowledge thy supernatural power and heavenly wisdom! My whole being bows in humility before you and your sublimity, and henceforth I will only be your humble scholar and servant, the tool of your will. Forgive me, all-knowing one, if my heart doubted. Breathe upon me the breath of knowledge, and lay thy august right ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... ask, is a miracle? Is it something supernatural? Supernatural only in the sense of being above the natural, or rather, above that which is natural to man in his ordinary state. A miracle is nothing more nor less than this. One who has come into a knowledge of his true identity, of his oneness with the all-pervading Wisdom and Power, thus ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... had ever been proved, or that any useful end could be subserved by it. The tremendous potentialities of hypnotism and thought-reading, now passing into the region of science, were not then so remote but that an imagination like his must have foreshadowed them. The natural basis of the seemingly supernatural had not yet entered into discussion. He may, from the first, have suspected the existence of some mysterious force, dangerous because not understood, and for this reason doubly liable to fall into dangerous hands. And if this was so, he would necessarily ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... she watched his stiff one-sided progress across the yard. The vague horror of the unusual stole over her. A new phase of her father's character stood between her and all her old memories like a supernatural presence. She left the rest of the linen in the basket and sought her mother in the house. "Mother!" she called out, in a cautious voice, as soon as she entered the kitchen. Mrs. Berry's face looked inquiringly out of the pantry, and Rose motioned her back, went in herself, ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... grindstone, they fashioned these materials into an infinity of shapes—hearts, human fingers, serpents, animals, images of divinities. All these were amulets; and they were probably less valued for the charm of the workmanship than for the supernatural virtues which they were supposed to possess. The girdle-buckle in carnelian (fig. 210) symbolised the blood of Isis, and washed away the sins of the wearer. The frog (fig. 211) was emblematic of renewed birth. ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... means, unless it means that you and I are forgiven for a purpose; that the purpose, if I may so say, is something in advance of the means towards the purpose, the purpose being that we should be filled with all the strength and righteousness and supernatural life granted to us by the Spirit ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... muscle and the exercise of his intellect. Strength and skill—plus application. Nothing else gets either an individual or a race forward. Don't you see the force of that? Here is man with his fundamental, undeniable needs. Here is the earth with the fullness thereof. There's nothing mysterious or supernatural about it. Brain and brawn applied to the problems of living. That's all. And you can't dodge it. The first, pressing requirements of any man can only be filled in two ways. First by working and planning and getting for himself. Second by being able to compel the strength and skill of ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... all the rest of those present disbelieved in the existence of the condemned Dutchman. The state of the atmosphere, the strange, wild, awful look of the ocean, prepared our minds for the appearance of anything supernatural. The captain told me that I looked ill and tired from having been on deck so many hours, and insisted on my turning in, which I ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... very miraculous to be seen; nothing—except the trifles previously noticed—to confirm the idea of a supernatural peril environing the pretty Polly. The stranger it is true was evidently a thorough and practised man of the world, systematic and self-possessed, and therefore the sort of a person to whom a parent ought not to confide ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the missionary asked with a smile. "The old atavistic fear of the dark and the mysterious dangers that threatened our savage ancestors? Or is it an instinctive knowledge that there are supernatural powers, able to punish ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... characteristic, that they did not prevent the building from seeming to be deserted. It was a supernatural chant in ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... universe; but his happiness, consciousness, peace of mind, have gained all that his pride has lost. And, this point once attained, then will the miraculous adventures of a St. Theresa or Jean-de-la-Croix, the ecstasy of the mystics, the supernatural incidents of legendary loves, the star of an Alexander or a Napoleon—then will all these seem the merest childish illusions compared with the healthy wisdom of a loyal, earnest man, who has no craving ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... cestus of Venus endowed the wearer with magical attraction, so the immanence of the Infinite and the Eternal in "all that formal is and fugitive," binds it with beauty and produces a supernatural charm ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... at the saneness of this revived art and yet, here and there, he is surprised to discover, amid descriptions of nature that are full of humanity, disquieting flights towards the supernatural, distressing conjurations, veiled at first, of the most commonplace, the most vertiginous shuddering fits of fear, as old as the world and as eternal as the unknown. But, instead of being alarmed, he thinks that the author must be gifted with infallible intuition to follow out thus ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... had a far-off sense of her need of him and of her agony, he wrote. Marriage had not destroyed his supernatural sympathy. Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he wrote. It was on the day after New Year's day, and if Jane had behaved as if nothing had happened she would have written to him. But because she needed him, she could not bring ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... dogmas may have existed in some form elsewhere, they become new revelations to us, by her supernatural selection of them 306 ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... perorations: O ye vipers, The engine in him changes all the world, Reverses all the wheels of thought behind. For Nietzsche comes, and makes him superman. He dumps the truth of Jesus over—there It lies with his youth's textual skepticism, And laughter at the supernatural. ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... moment Paul hesitated. The thought of following this strange man at such an hour into the realm of the unknown, to investigate the supernatural, was uncanny, and he half wished he had not made the request. He knew the man to be no trifler. That which he promised, he would surely perform. Then, procuring a candle, ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... give a superstitious explanation to the whole matter; think I had received a supernatural warning and been satisfied with what they would call a spiritual manifestation. But I have not a bit of such folly in my composition. Living hands set up the type and printed the words which gave me so deathly a shock; and hands, with a real purpose ...
— A Difficult Problem - 1900 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... Pequot when frightened from his purpose, and in less time than it has taken to record them, as with drooping head he pursued his lonely way. Even what he considered the interposition of a supernatural power, had not shaken the determination of his spirit. The desire for revenge had been too long cherished to be given up at a single warning, however awful, or however strongly appealing to ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... life was characterised by a thousand trials and who was long the victim of a mental malady, wrote a poem on the crusade of Godfrey de Bouillon. The poem is full of the supernatural; the chief characters are Renaud, Tancred, the enchantress Armida, Clorinda. The inspiration of Tasso is specially mystic and lyrical; his facility for description is delicious. The repute of Jerusalem Delivered in the seventeenth century was immense, and all the literatures of Europe have innumerable ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... sense is termed Mystical, that is, above sense, supernatural; and this it is, when spiritually one expounds a writing which even in the Literal sense by the things signified bears express reference to the Divine things of Eternal Glory; as one can see in that Song of the Prophet which says that by the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt Judaea ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... admire and believe as improbable a story of dolphins. You are mightily out, said I, for this is no novel story which we believe, but it is recorded in the annals of Ino and Athamas above a thousand years ago. These passages are supernatural, quoth Solon and much above our reason; what befell Hesiod is of a lower kind, and more proper for our discourse, and if you have not heard of it before, it ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... off where I had mentioned the Pirate, which I hope you are reading to my aunt. The characters of the two sisters are beautiful. The idea of Brenda not believing in supernatural agency, and yet being afraid, and Minna not being afraid though she believes in Norma's power, is new and natural and ingenious. This was Joanna Baillie's idea. The picture of the sisters sleeping and the lacing scene is excellent, and there are not only passages of beautiful picturesque description, ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... are Christians or not—and then, having answered it, thinking thus, 'That text asserts that all Christians have this witness, therefore certainly I have it in some shape or other,' they say to themselves, 'I do not feel anything that corresponds with my idea of what such a grand, supernatural voice as the witness of God's Spirit in my spirit must needs be; and therefore I doubt whether I am a Christian at all.' I should be thankful if the attempt I make now to set before you what seems to me to be the true teaching of the passage, should be, with God's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... in his infancy lying in a coracle, on a salmon-weir, in the domain of Elphin, a prince of North Wales, who became his patron. During his life he arrogated to himself a supernatural descent and understanding, and for at least a thousand years after his death he was regarded by the descendants of the ancient Britons in the character of a prophet or something more. The poems which he produced procured for him ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... historian, notwithstanding, be convinced that Jesus Christ did extraordinary things, in the strict sense miraculous things, then, from the unique impression he has obtained of this person, he infers the possession by him of supernatural power. This conclusion itself belongs to the province of religious faith: though there has seldom been a strong faith which would not have drawn it. Moreover, the healing miracles of Jesus are the only ones that come ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the truth. She had completely subdued my will by her fascinations, and though I hated and, in private, ridiculed all supernatural dealings, I was prepared to try the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... lightly-clad men, appearing suddenly on board a craft moored out on the river, that the three boatmen sat immovable, in the attitudes in which they had been sitting at the entry of these strange visitors, without uttering a word. Superstitious by nature, they doubted whether there was not something supernatural in the appearance of the ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... ancestors. All the Africans we have met with are as firmly persuaded of their future existence as of their present life. And we have found none in whom the belief in the Supreme Being was not rooted. He is so invariably referred to as the Author of everything supernatural, that, unless one is ignorant of their language, he cannot fail to notice this prominent feature of their faith. When they pass into the unseen world, they do not seem to be possessed with the fear of punishment. The utensils placed upon the grave are all broken as if to indicate ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... visions for inspiration, but we must work in comparative shadow; otherwise, the very highest revelations would become monotonous, and we should long for still higher. And yet, are there not some whose desire is for constant revelation? Who would see supernatural sights, and hear supernatural sounds, and know all the realities towards which they are drifting, as well as those in which they must work? They would make this world a mount of perpetual vision; overlooking the fact that it has its own purposes, to be ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... its course, so the same Power thinks fit to let His own actings with men, whether of mercy or judgement, to go on in the ordinary course of natural causes; and He is pleased to act by those natural causes as the ordinary means, excepting and reserving to Himself nevertheless a power to act in a supernatural way when He sees occasion. Now 'tis evident that in the case of an infection there is no apparent extraordinary occasion for supernatural operation, but the ordinary course of things appears sufficiently armed, and made capable of all the effects that Heaven usually directs by ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... contract. Has it been the bond of kinship, or blood, or speech? No, for under this banner the British master has become the servant of the Hindoo, and the American has gone to lay down his life upon the veldts of Africa. Has it been the bond of that almost supernatural force, glorious patriotism? No, not even this, for while we "know no man after the flesh," we recognize our brother in all the families of the earth, and our General infused into the breasts of his followers the sacred conviction that the Salvationist's ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... Areopagite, was an Athenian by birth, and educated in all the useful and ornamental literature of Greece. He then travelled to Egypt to study astronomy, and made very particular observations on the great and supernatural eclipse, which happened at the time of ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... good of humanity, and form an order apart. They have God for their object, are altogether inspired by God (hence called infusae), and are taught by revelation. Given in connection with the natural faculties of intellect and will, they are exhibited in the attainment of the supernatural order of things. With intellect goes Faith, as it were the intellect applied to things not intelligible; with Will go Hope and Charity or Love: Hope being the Will exercised upon things not naturally desired, and Love the union of Will with what ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... is a contemptible cur and yet it is not his fault. He has heard sermons about all sorts of supernatural subjects for thirty years, and he has never once been warned against meanness, so of course he supposes that supernatural subjects are everything and meanness is nothing. But I will not detain you any longer now, for you ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... record in his crabbed, canine Latin, is that Villon showed such intimate acquaintance with certain physical peculiarities or whimsical adventures private to each damsel that she believed the speaker's knowledge to be little less than supernatural. Literature of the skittish sort must deplore the monastic reticence, but history can do no more than accept it and leave imagination to fill in the ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... full of picturesque rivers, tall mountains, and dreamy-looking lakes, attracting more tourists than any other place in America save Niagara, yet I will pass over its stern and rugged scenery to write of a man whose titles to our admiration are wholly of the supernatural order. ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... to cope with a material and not a supernatural being; still it was purely a venture, and at no previous time had there seemed so little hope of success. Nevertheless not a moment was lost in hauling out the net and placing it in position across the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... The old hag was one of those whose hearts adversity turns to very stone, and obstinately kept her door shut, impelled more probably by general hatred to the human race, than by the superstitious fears which seized her; although she perversely argued that she was startled at the supernatural melody and sweetness of tone, with which the benighted wanderer made her supplication. She admitted, that when she heard the poor petitioner turn from the door, her heart was softened, and she did intend to open with the purpose of offering her at least a shelter; but that ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... their territory; of rocks of lodestone, powerful enough to extract every particle of iron from a passing ship; of stagnant seas and fiery skies; of wandering saints and flying islands; all combined to invest the unknown with the terrors of the supernatural, and to deter the explorer of the great ocean. The half-decked vessels that crept along the Mediterranean shores were but ill-fitted to bear the brunt of the furious waves of the Atlantic. The now indispensable ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... is it wrong to feel what I feel, at the remembrance? If it be, reprove me sternly; teach me my duty, and I will thank thee. Surely there is something supernatural hovers over her! At least she resembles no other mortal! Then her kindness to me, her looks, her smiles, her actions, are all intentional benignancy. She is now but three chambers distant from me; enjoying ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... all good faith as though war were a duel in which the traitor was henceforth ruled out and unable to continue his outrages. Besides, the heroic resistance of Belgium was nourishing the most absurd illusions in his heart. The Belgians were certainly supernatural men destined to the most stupendous achievements. . . . And to think that heretofore he had never taken this plucky little nation into account! . . . For several days, he considered Liege a holy city before whose walls the Teutonic power would be ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... that he possessed the gift of prophecy. But he was not the only man of that day who dwelt so close to the confines of the spiritual world as to be alternately visited by angels and devils. Indeed, what tales of the supernatural Mather relates, what a juxtaposition of saints and demons! Of course, there was a foundation to build upon,—had not Mather himself in his family for more than a year a possessed girl, whose familiar haunted ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... to bring the four green warriors to his way of thinking, but in vain. Roban and Tarnan remained contemptuous. They would have thrown themselves upon him, but for the knowledge that no fifty unarmed men of the green race could have overcome his strength—to them supernatural. The two Urvanians were equally obdurate. This soft earth-being had given them everything; they had given him nothing and would give him nothing. Finally Seaton rose to his full height and stared at them in turn, wrath and determination blazing in ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... that it is needless to give an account of it. "But what is the meaning," he exclaims, "of this bold and poetic mixture of clowns and fairies, of mythology, and superstition, of high and low, of the earthly and the supernatural? And the scene is neither Athens nor Greece, but Shakespeare's own England; it is his own time and his own spirit." We are transported to an English grove in early summer with birds, flowers, soft breezes, and cooling shadows. What wonder ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... patience to let me tell him about it myself," says he. "He'll not, though, so I must make you understand in order that you may give him the facts. I want him to know. Of course, I can't pretend to explain the thing. It was psychic, that's all; supernatural, if you please. Must have been. For there I was, a confirmed duffer, playing that course exactly as Alexander McQuade would have played it had he been in my shoes. And he was, for the time being. At least, I claim that I was being controlled, or whatever you want to ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... his earlier self, or what the influence of such an experience as he relates may have done to strengthen the moral fibre, are points on which I can express no opinion, any more than I can pledge myself to the credibility of the supernatural element of his story. ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... and though at times unruly, were completely to be depended upon. Yet, while owning Sir Eustace to be a brave, gallant, and kind-hearted Knight, there were times when even they felt a shudder of dread and almost of hatred pass over them, when tales were told of the supernatural powers he was supposed to possess; when Leonard Ashton's adventure with the cats was narrated, or the story of his sudden arrival at Lynwood Keep on the night before the lady's funeral. His own immediate attendants might repel the charge with honest indignation, but many a stout warrior ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... answered. "In return for supernatural service rendered you during your lifetime, your soul reverts to me ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... Church, as an agency of the Holy Spirit, is to do its work are the Word of God and the Sacraments. They are sufficient for the purpose for which they are intended, because the Holy Spirit works through them and endows them with supernatural power. [Rom. ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... and many of the "practical" men whom he sought to convince was that he could see with his mind's eye solid land beyond the Sea of Darkness while they could not. To them the ocean, like the sky, had nothing beyond, unless it might be the supernatural world.[478] For while the argument from the earth's rotundity was intelligible enough, there were few to whom, as to Toscanelli, it was a living truth. Even of those who admitted, in theory, that Cathay lay to the west of Europe, most deemed the distance untraversable. Inductive proof of the existence ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... travellers imagine upon hearing shouts proceeding from the gibbet, but that the identical murderer of Mr. Knight had by some miracle come to life, and now called out, "Stop! stop!" with the intention of robbing and murdering them also? And they, feeling that supernatural odds were against them, ran forwards or backwards, not daring to look behind, as fast as their feet could carry alarmed and bewildered heads, leaving the fate of their carts to the sagacity of the horses. Finding ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... at us out of German-land through a pleasant, clear translation, and they remind us how easily the supernatural and loves to dwell in airborn castles. The beautiful instinct of reverence common to child-life is readily taken advantage of by writers for the young; but where in England we find in stories some angel-mother who discovers the treachery of her governess ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... the old gentleman was himself somewhat tinctured with superstition, as men are very apt to be who live a recluse and studious life in a sequestered part of the country, and pore over black-letter tracts, so often filled with the marvellous and supernatural. He gave us several anecdotes of the fancies of the neighbouring peasantry, concerning the effigy of the crusader which lay on the tomb by the church altar. As it was the only monument of the kind in that part of the country, it had always been regarded with feelings of superstition ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... now. It may suggest some considerations worth pondering, and among other things, may help to show the exaggeration of the functions of the office by the opposite extremes of priests and rationalists. The one school makes it the depository of exclusive supernatural powers; the other regards it as a master-stroke of organisation, to which the early rapid growth of Christianity was largely due. The facts seem to show that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... away their clubs and knives, and farming utensils took the place of bows and arrows and spears. This strange change in African savages came to be talked over among the people. It was so wonderful that the other tribes could account for it only as an instance of supernatural magic. There was nothing they knew of that would lead men like the Bechuanas to bring war to an end, and ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... saw the Church wishing to back out of the supernatural and anxious to explain it away where possible, we would keep our disbelief in the supernatural in the background, as far as we could, and would explain away our rejection of the miracles, as far as was decent; furthermore we would ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... proceeded with the exhibition, and it is unnecessary to add that if the Empress Dowager had invited Yuan to the meeting with the princes when they discussed the advisability of joining the Boxers on account of a belief in their supernatural powers, she might have been spared the ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... did smile In Fletcher, grew on this enchanted isle. But Shakspeare's magic could not copied be; Within that circle none durst walk but he. 20 I must confess 'twas bold, nor would you now That liberty to vulgar wits allow, Which works by magic supernatural things: But Shakspeare's power is sacred as a king's. Those legends from old priesthood were received, And he then writ, as people then believed. But if for Shakspeare we your grace implore, We for our theatre shall want it more: Who, by our dearth of ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... shouted to him to desist; the sound of the bell jarred on his nerves. It sounded like a summons, and a summons on that deserted craft was quite out of place. Who knew what mightn't answer it in the way of the supernatural? ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... spoken of soul as well as body. The old Roman instinct for ancestor-communion is too strong in him for that. But he acquiesces in their doctrine in so far as shadowy existence in another world inspires in him no pleasing hope. He displays no trace of the faith in the supernatural which accompanies the Christian hope of happy immortality. He contains none of the expressions of yearning for communion with the divine, of self-abasement in the presence of the eternal, which belong to Christian poetry. The flights of his ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... of personal magnetism is of much vaunted importance. It is like that horrid word, charm; no one knows what it means and seems to have a supernatural quality. The trial lawyer does not need either charm or magnetism. They are both nonsense. Like actors or fighters if they are sufficiently trained in their parts or know how to use their weapons, the lawyers' personal magnetism ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... science. In a paper singularly interesting—and in his biography important—on the "Nature and Authority of Miracle," read to the Metaphysical Society (February 11, 1873), he tried to clear up his position and to state a qualified belief in the supernatural. ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... Overpowered by supernatural awe at appearances, of which her faith permitted her not to question the reality, the Lady Eveline folded her arms on her bosom, and prostrated her forehead on the pavement, as the posture most fitting to ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... adequate to any idea of spiritual thought, consequently no words expressive of it; for ideas of thought are constituent of the words of language. This experiment they repeated again and again; whereby they were convinced that spiritual ideas are supernatural, inexpressible, ineffable, and incomprehensible to the natural man; and on account of this their super-eminence, they said, that spiritual ideas, or thoughts, as compared with natural, were ideas of ideas, and thoughts of thoughts; and that therefore they were expressive of qualities of qualities, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... acquired various extraordinary powers, such as subtlety of body, and the like, may animate several bodies at the same time, how much more capable of such feats must the gods be, who naturally possess all supernatural powers. The gods thus being able to assume several shapes, a god may divide himself into many forms and enter into relation with many sacrifices at the same time, remaining all the while unseen by others, in consequence of his power to render ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... the most thrilling poem in the English language. Each reperusal fascinates me more and more. It requires a dozen readings to initiate you fully into its weird, supernatural realms." ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... "Supernatural," he repeated. "That is new to me. As I remember the affair, it was highly sensational, perplexing—a blend of romance and Japanese knives—but I do not remember any abnormal element save ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... in the Renascence of Wonder, which was the renascence of religion....Men saw once more the marvel of the universe and the romance of man's destiny. They became aware of the spiritual world, of the supernatural, of the lifelong struggle of the soul, of the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... shall say but little. It is more appropriate for the members of that great and noble profession which is more intimately concerned with the spiritual advance of mankind. It is enough to say that, while the Church as an institution continues to exist, the belief in the supernatural and even in the spiritual has been supplanted in the souls of millions of men by ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... Washington recognized that the voice was not supernatural, he recovered his courage and at once disarmed the Major, who, watch in hand, was demanding if he supposed he had nothing else to do than to wait for him all night, by falling into his vein and acquiescing in all that he said in abuse of the yet absent duellists, ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... hitherto passed his days; and he recognises capabilities for pain and pleasure of which he had not yet suspected the existence. Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Captain Billings, ordering the hands at the same time to "stand by" the braces and topsail halliards; and, almost ere the crew could get to their respective posts, the clouds had disappeared, with what seemed a supernatural celerity from the heavens, letting the clear blue sky be seen again and the bright twinkling stars peep down to see what all the fuss was about, all being calm and ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... its present degrading characteristics, is a state of actual hostility between master and slave, in which "a revolution of the wheel of fortune, in exchange of situation, is among possible events; and this may become probably by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take part with us ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... not but admire the sibyl-like grandeur of his head and outstretched arms as he uttered these strange words. His voice was hoarse with some surging emotion; and if so poor a creature could have been the recipient of a supernatural inspiration, he might have sat at that moment for the portrait of one of the deformed soothsayers in a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... these strange notions must not be dealt with too severely, in a country like England, where (within the last 200 years, and in no uncivilised state of society) persons have been burnt for witchcraft; and in which, even in the present day, every vile imposture and godless pretence of supernatural power is sure of finding eager listeners and astonished admirers. The Boyl-yas, or native sorcerers, are objects of mysterious dread, and are thought to have the power of becoming invisible to all eyes but those of their brethren in the same evil ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... earliest years. Over that parish, he says, might have been written Dante's inscription over the entrance to the Inferno: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." After speaking of its physical misery and its supernatural and perfectly astonishing deadness, he says that he embarked on a voyage round the world, and had the opportunity of seeing savage life in all conceivable conditions of savage degradation; ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... of life grasped by means of this new world of experience, and that is, the spiritual side that lies between conduct and ideals; children have always accepted the supernatural quite readily and it is not to be wondered at, for all the world is new and therefore supernatural to them. Magic is done daily in children's eyes, and there is no line between what is understandable and what is not, until adults try to interpret ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... a sound and healthy mind, and he would allow no taint of morbidness to enter it. He knew that there was nothing supernatural in the world, but he did believe that this woman with the gray hair, the burning eyes and the sharp chin, looking as if it had been cut from a piece of steel, was the possessor of uncanny wisdom. Beyond a doubt she knew where the marksman was hidden, and, unless he watched her ceaselessly, ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... thought her brother's power of finding things out, little short of supernatural. "Don't you want to see her?" she asked meekly. "There is a thin place in the hedge behind the calycanthus bush, and she is walking to and fro studying something." Would Maurice declare he had already seen ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... subject, we shall find that the co-existence is purely accidental. If, as Sir Walter Scott observed, any event, such as the death of the person dreamt of, chance to take place, so as to correspond with the nature and time of the apparition, the circumstance is conceived to be supernatural, although the coincidence is one which must frequently occur, since our dreams usually refer to the accomplishment of that which haunts our minds when awake, and often presage the most probable events. Such a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... my friend, it seemed as though the world had come to an end, that the eternal laws had changed. I experienced the overwhelming dread that one has in presence of things supernatural, in presence of irreparable disaster. My boyish head whirled round and soared. I began to cry with all my might, without knowing why, a prey to terror, to grief, to a dreadful bewilderment. My father heard me, turned round, and, on seeing me, made as though he would rush at me. I believed that ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... try to bring my poor Jane into touch with psychic interests; it would comfort her to have the wonderful chance of getting into communication with Oliver. At present she scouts the whole thing, like all other forms of supernatural belief. Jane has always been a materialist. It is very strange to me that my children have developed, intellectually and spiritually, along such different lines from myself. I have never been orthodox; I am not even now an orthodox theosophist; I am not of the stuff ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... remorselessness of Siva or the cold indifference of Brahma. It was the dawn of a doctrine of faith, and in this character it was probably of later date than the rise of Buddhism. Indeed, the Brahmans learned this lesson of the value of Divine sympathy from the Buddha. The supernatural element ascribed to Krishna, as well as to Rama, was a growth, and had its origin in the jealousy of the Brahmans toward the warrior caste. His exaltation as the Supreme was an after-thought of the inventive Brahmans. As stated in a former lecture, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... for vedette duty. I relieve Butler. Not long till dawn, I think. Far to my left I hear sounds, as if an army is stirring. My time will be short on post. Where was I? Yes; the supernatural power of ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... other people in the world, believed in supernatural beings of many sorts, spirits of woods and rocks, Underwater People and an Underworld. They had stories of ghosts and flying heads and giants. Most of the tribes believed in animals that, when they were alone, laid off their animal skins and thought ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... shrieks and wailings, borne upon the night-breeze; whilst the few who have ventured within its walls, tell of shapes seen, and sounds heard, which would cause the stoutest heart to quail. For myself, I am no great believer in the supernatural, and have no doubt that imagination, united to the loneliness of the spot, and the strange freaks the wind plays through a large uninhabited house, have originated reports which we are sure would lose nothing in the recital; so if you are inclined to make ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... the position of importance which she had suddenly assumed in the housekeeper's eyes, Mrs. Wragge entered at full length into the narrative of her supernatural adventure. The breathless eagerness with which Mrs. Lecount listened to her description of the specter's costume, the specter's hurry on the stairs, and the specter's disappearance in the bedroom; the extraordinary ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... "the history of Glencardine Castle and the historic family is so full of stirring episodes that I really don't wonder that the ruins are believed to be the abode of something supernatural. My father possesses some of the family papers, while Sir Henry, when he bought Glencardine, also acquired a quantity. Only a year ago he told me that he had had an application from a well-known historical writer ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... fulfilment, but is constantly and anew realizing itself. The proceeding of God towards the different Churches and States is regulated by their conduct towards Him. The history of the world is a judgment of the world. But even to know this truth is, in itself, a supernatural gift; and they only are able to use it with safety, to whom God has given an insight into the mysteries of His government of the world. This becomes very evident, if we observe how often the predictions ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... very mysterious point in connection with the affair—something so strange that it bordered on the supernatural. No human being in Bramble County except the two boys had seen the double-seated sleigh. It had disappeared as if ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... last note of the song died away, quivering with a supernatural tenderness and passion, he brushed a tear from his eyes, lifted his hands high above his head and made a motion which said to her: ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... affections; sometimes this interest elevates me above my strength, makes me discover in nature, in my own heart, bold truths, expressions full of life, that solitary reflection would not have given birth to. I then believe myself acted upon by a supernatural enthusiasm, and feel that what is speaking within me is greater than myself. Often I quit the rhythm of poetry to express my thoughts in prose; sometimes I quote the finest verses of the different languages I am acquainted with. These divine verses, ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... from a Mouse; and this being overheard by the Tiger, he was very uneasy, and said to himself: "As long as this Hermit is alive, the disgraceful story of my former state will be brought to my ears"; saying which he went to kill his protector; but as the holy man penetrated his design with his supernatural eye, he reduced him to his former state of a Mouse. I repeat, therefore: "One of low degree, having obtained a worthy station, may seek ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... manner so distinct that he can well afford to acknowledge his debt to Sir JAMES BARRIE. As in Mary Rose, so here (though there are no supernatural forces at work) we have the sharp contrast between commonplace life, as lived by the rest, and the life of Fairyland, as coming within the vision of one only. And we were reminded too of the Midsummer-madness that overtook the company in Dear Brutus. I won't say that it wasn't natural ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... clearly he realizes what a deep spiritual blessing it is, to be found only in separation from the world, and direct fellowship with God, to be possessed fully only through a real Divine indwelling, may be in danger of looking too exclusively to the Divine side of the blessing, in its heavenly and supernatural aspect. He may forget how repentance and obedience, as the path leading up to holiness, must cover every, even the minutest detail of daily life. He may not understand how faithfulness to the leadings of the Spirit, in such measure as we have Him already, faithfulness ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... to explain, and I hope to the satisfaction of the candid and patient reader, the principal symptoms or circumstances of fever without the introduction of the supernatural power of spasm. To the arguments in favour of the doctrine of spasm it may be sufficient to reply, that in the evolution of medical as well as ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the outer world, and living on a rock singled out by supernatural visitants, the people remain more superstitious than even the superstitious Germans and Bretons who are their neighbours. Few of them can read or write. The new thoughts, opinions, and creeds of the present century do not reach them. They are contented with the old faith, bound up for them ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... really is anything wonderful or supernatural about these cures or whether they can be explained on simple, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... one, two, three, four, five, and resolved to rise immediately. My bed was partially screened by a long curtain looped up at one side. As I raised my head from the pillow, Rosa looked inside the curtain, and smiled at me. The idea of anything supernatural did not occur to me. I was simply surprised, and exclaimed, 'Why, Rosa! How came you here, when you are so ill?' In the old familiar tones, to which I was so much accustomed, a voice replied, 'I am well, now.' With no other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Smith were men of phenomenal capacity, who actually invented a religion and created a community by the apparent establishment of supernatural and occult powers. The phrenologists, the venders of patent medicine, the Christian Scientists, the single-taxers, and all who proclaim panaceas and nostrums make the same majestic and pontifical appeal to human nature. It is this mystical ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... comforting belief that departed spirits can minister to earthly creatures for good—can be felt moving in us, in a train of thought, and seen as visible manifestations, in a dream—with what pretense of reason can we deny that the same freedom of supernatural influence which is conceded to the departed spirit, working for good, is also permitted to the departed spirit, working for evil? If the grave cannot wholly part mother and child, when the mother's life ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... really anticipated something from the interview. The disappointment was keen. A moment of expectation; the thrill which comes to us all under the shadow of the supernatural, and then—this! a young and imaginative girl's dream, convincing to herself but supplying nothing which had not already been supplied both by the facts and his own imagination! A man had stood ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... absolute ideal itself in living reality. It seems to me that this consideration alone should satisfy the reflecting mind that Christ's character, though truly natural and human, must be at the same time truly supernatural and divine. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... passions speedily transfers their belief to the side of the desires, or sets their actions above their belief. Hamlet alone presents the confused spectacle of a mind formed by the enlightenment of society in conflict with a position contrary to its laws; and he needs a supernatural apparition to determine him to act, and a fortuitous event to accomplish his project. If incessantly placed in an analogous position, the personages of a tragedy conceived at the present day according to the romantic system would offer us the same ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... Stage of his Existence, in his setting out for Eternity; but cast thine Eye on that thick Mist into which the Tide bears the several Generations of Mortals that fall into it. I directed my Sight as I was ordered, and (whether or no the good Genius strengthened it with any supernatural Force, or dissipated Part of the Mist that was before too thick for the Eye to penetrate) I saw the Valley opening at the farther End, and spreading forth into an immense Ocean, that had a huge Rock of Adamant running through the Midst of it, and dividing ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... an unusual light or brilliance with your bodily eye, or in imagination, or if ye hear any wonderful supernatural sound with your ears, or if ye perceive a sudden sweet taste in your mouths or feel any warmth in your breasts, like fire, or any form of pleasure in any part of your body, or if ye see a spirit in a bodily form, as if he were an angel to fortify or ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... all sail to return to port. He confessed that he was himself very much astonished, and could in no way account for what he had witnessed. Had he not received the explanation we gave him, he should all his life have believed that the appearance he had beheld was produced by supernatural agency. ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... so dripping wet with the supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical—so surcharged with adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a poet of greater imaginative impulse than Emerson or Thoreau. ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... century could find nothing real and true that was not accompanied by the marvellous and the 'supernatural.' The nineteenth century could find nothing real and true that was. Which view was right and which was wrong? Was either complete? Of these two questions, the second alone is profitable at the present. Both views were right—in a certain way of contemplating; both views were wrong—in ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... folly! I can't tell why. With every reason to be in better spirits than usual, I am unaccountably, irrationally, invincibly depressed. What are we to conclude from that? Am I the object of a supernatural warning of misfortune to come? Or am I the object of a temporary derangement of the functions of the liver? There is the question. Who is to decide it? How contemptible is humanity, Arnold, rightly understood! Give me my candle, and let's ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... "seldom appears as a fixed law of nature...but rather as a blind necessity, depending on chance and not on law." The gods are mentioned by name in the poetic epitaphs only, and for poetic purposes, and even here only one in fifty of the metrical inscriptions contains a direct reference to any supernatural power. For none of these deities, save for Mother Earth, does the writer of an epitaph show any affection. This feeling one may see in the couplet which reads:[35] "Mother Earth, to thee have we committed the bones of Fortunata, to ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... a volume of smoke, which it would have taken the united efforts of a couple of Germans about five minutes to produce. He was quite veiled by the cloud, through which the gleam of his eyes seemed to Harry to have an almost supernatural effect. ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... on a charm when seen in the arrested aesthetic vision. "Every one can have observed that an object in itself agreeable to look on, like a bouquet of flowers, or the fresh face of a young girl, takes on a sort of magic and supernatural beauty if we regard it mechanically while listening to music." The intensity of concentration caused by the unity of form fuses with this suggested vividness of feeling from content and material, and the whole is felt ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... through the hell of the trenches have discovered some of the secrets of life and death. Many of them have known a reinforcement of spiritual power. It is quite natural that this fact should often be described in emotional form as direct interposition of angels and other supernatural agencies. Among these the most beautiful and tender stories are those of "The Comrade in White." In essence they are all testimony to the perennial fount of strength and comfort of religion—the human need which in all generations has looked up and found God a present help ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem
... thus carried at once into the supernatural, and here we find Cruikshank reigning supreme. He has invented in his time a little comic pandemonium, peopled with the most droll, good-natured fiends possible. We have before us Chamisso's "Peter Schlemihl," with Cruikshank's ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of evolution? In his case, instead of evolution, there was rather a revolution, as marked and complete as ever was found, perhaps, in the annals of salvation. If Lord George Lyttelton could account for the conversion of Saul of Tarsus only by supernatural power, what would he have thought of George Muller's transformation! Saul had in his favor a conscience, however misguided, and a morality, however pharisaic. George Muller was a flagrant sinner ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... missionary; intellectually renouncing their own paganism, but withheld by the prejudices of their families from giving up the heathenish customs of caste; admiring divine morality, but not perceiving the inability of man to attain the standard; and refusing to accept the mysteries in the supernatural portion of Revelation. Such was probably Serfojee; such was the celebrated Brahmin Ram Mohun Roy, with whom Bishop Middleton had much discussion, and of whom he had at one time many hopes, a man of very remarkable powers of mind and clear practical intelligence. ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... away; but La Pommeraye recognised in one of the servants, Etienne Brule by name, the man who had escaped uninjured from the famous encounter with Pamphilo de Narvaez, and who had ever afterwards regarded La Pommeraye as a being of a supernatural order. This man had been with De Roberval on his voyage, and from him, after an hour's cross-questioning, La Pommeraye at last elicited the truth. The remembrance of the horrors through which he had passed, and his terror of De Roberval's ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... guilt being principally established on their own confessions. But the most memorable matters in the history of the black art, were the contracts which those who practised it not unfrequently entered into with the devil, that he should assist them by his supernatural power for ten or twenty years, and, in consideration of this aid, they consented to resign their souls into his possession, when the period of the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... that is the most imposing which makes the other world interested in the events which befall our mortal lot. For the mere pomp and pride of it, your ghost is worth a dozen retainers, and it is entirely inexpensive. The peculiarity and supernatural worth of this story lies in the idea of the old wail piercing through the sweet entanglement of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for a moment ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... exploits, there will spring to life the heroes of old? How the power of your immensity enfolds me, and reverberates through all my being with a wild, strange spell, and flashes in my eyes with an almost supernatural radiance! Yes, a strange, brilliant, unearthly vista indeed do you disclose, O Russia, country ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... protection, and once outside that protection they were pariahs, subject to no law, and at the mercy of Egbo. This secret society was composed of select and graded classes initiated according to certain rites. Its agents were Egbo-runners, supposed to represent a supernatural being in the bush, who came suddenly out, masked and dressed in fantastic garb, and with a long whip rushed about and committed excesses. At these times all women were obliged to hide, for if found they would be flogged and stripped of their clothing. Egbo, however, had a certain power ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... gradually falling into decay, when one day to the surprise of everybody some natives appeared on the scene and occupied it, and later on Parrott & Co. leased the premises for their whisky agency. Let us hope that the material spirit has had the effect of exorciting the supernatural one. ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... suggestion. You think a Japanese crystal ought to make you feel supernatural, and so you imagine it does. But it doesn't any such nonsense. Now, I'll tell you why I like them. Only because they're so flawlessly perfect. In shape, colour, texture,—if you can call it texture,—but ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... down at her. "That is not a commonplace everyday occurrence to us, I assure you. The difference is that in this world of ours we can understand—or at least explain—these things as being scientific. And so they have not the terror of the supernatural." ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... singularly unexplainable missive, when as though to climax their own fears of the supernatural they saw themselves a ghost! And not only one ghost, ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion: Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life. Other writers disguise the most natural passions and most frequent incidents; so that he who contemplates them in the book will not know them in the world: Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful; the event ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... of unseasonable times. So, unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks were referred to the experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having resolved not to rob (under circumstances of uncommon atrocity) his particular friend and benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came into supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a shining light ever afterwards. (Note, that the benefactor came to no good.) Several swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in the same strain; it always appearing from the lessons of those very ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... possible that I, a rational man, not unacquainted with the leading scientific facts of our history, and hitherto an absolute and utter disbeliever in all the hocus-pocus which in Europe goes by the name of the supernatural, could believe that I had within the last few minutes been engaged in conversation with a woman two thousand and odd years old? The thing was contrary to the experience of human nature, and absolutely and utterly impossible. It must be a hoax, and yet, if it were a hoax, what was ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... and Bluenose had some suspicion that something was brewing, but whether a "whole gale," or "half a gale," or a "stiff breeze," they could not be expected to divine, not being possessed of supernatural gifts. ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... loves, and is loved in return. You will soon find that out from her gentle, almost supernatural ways and doings. For the present don't ask me the name of the other one. The happy ones, however, acted, met, talked, and exchanged their vows, without the father's knowledge. He has found them out, wants to take violent measures, and forbids any sort of intercourse ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... told me. Tell me all of it. You're my brother and I'm your sister. We're all we have in the world." And at that, as though timed by some miraculous and supernatural stage manager, there came a cry from the next room; a sleepy, comfortable, imperious little cry. Mizzi had awakened. Fanny made a step in the direction of the door. Then she turned back. "Tell me why Olga didn't come. Why isn't she here ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... brother's power of finding things out, little short of supernatural. "Don't you want to see her?" she asked meekly. "There is a thin place in the hedge behind the calycanthus bush, and she is walking to and fro studying something." Would Maurice declare he had ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... astonishment towards Heidi, who was sitting innocently on her bench with no appearance of anything supernatural about her. He continued, "I have noticed a change in you altogether, Peter. Whereas formerly you often missed coming to school for a week, or even weeks at a time, you have lately not stayed away a single day. Who has wrought this change ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... want to go and discourage the other flowers for? Is that the right spirit? is it considerate? is it kind? How do you suppose they feel when you come around—looking the way you look? And you so pink and sweet and dainty and lovely and supernatural? Why, it makes them feel embarrassed and artificial, of course; and in my opinion it is just as pathetic as it can be. Now then you want ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... but a translation, we may be (as in the place alleged we have been) beguiled or misled by the translation, while we should be searching the true sense of the Scripture, which cannot be attained in a natural way (and a commonwealth is not to presume upon that which is supernatural) but by the knowledge of the original and of antiquity, acquired by our own studies, or those of some others, for even faith comes by hearing. Wherefore a commonwealth not making provision of men ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... shied it with such dexterity, that it hit Bully Tom in the middle of his back, and falling on to the wet ground, went out with a hiss. This blow was an unexpected shock to the Bully, who thought the ghost must have come up to him with supernatural rapidity, and falling on his knees in the mud, began to roar ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... specimen of Arbuthnot's printing. Then there are Barclay's Argenis, and Raynal's Philosophical History of the East and West Indies, without which no book-stall is to be considered complete, and which seem to be possessed of a supernatural power of resistance to the elements, since, month after month, in fair weather or foul, they are to be seen at ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... thing supernatural in the matter had, strange to say, not yet entered the mind of any one of the servants. They had heard some stories of smugglers having secret passages into houses, and using their means of access for purposes of pillage, or with a view to frighten superstitious people out of houses which ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... that physician, like Paracelsus, makes no mention of the tympanitic inflation of the bowels. Moreover, most of those affected were only annually visited by attacks; and the occasion of them was so manifestly referable to the prevailing notions of that period, that if the unqualified belief in the supernatural agency of saints could have been abolished, they would not have had any return of the complaint. Throughout the whole of June, prior to the festival of St. John, patients felt a disquietude and restlessness which they were unable to overcome. They were dejected, timid, ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... from humanity, as it would to make him appear with the body of a man and the head of some bird or beast. Horus, finished off with the head of a hawk (that sacred bird who could look the sun in the face), became to the uneducated eye a supernatural being, which he would not have been with the face of a smiling youth. The child Horus, or Harpocrates, was not respected as was Horus of the Hawk Head. He was merely petted and loved. Even Set, god of evil, wasn't all bad. He was the Spirit of Storm and Strife in Nature, and had to ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... the stars, nor the light in St. Valentine's, but the black thing away off there on the earth," said a soft voice behind her, and Beverly started as if the supernatural had approached her. She turned to face the princess, who stood almost ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... contact of religion and morality with the orgies of African Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter—at times taking away the reader's breath—and, finally, the whole dominated everywhere by that marvellous Oriental fancy, wherein the spiritual and the supernatural are as common as the material and the natural; it is this contrast, I say, which forms the chiefest charm of The Nights, which gives it the most striking originality and which makes it a perfect expositor of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the Bucephalid strain was perhaps but another form of a story told by the Chinese, many centuries earlier, when speaking of this same region. A certain cave was frequented by a wonderful stallion of supernatural origin. Hither the people yearly brought their mares, and a famous breed was derived from the foals. (Rem. N. Mel. As. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... But other troubled forms of sleep she saw, Not to be mirrored in a holy song— Distortions foul of supernatural awe, And pale imaginings of visioned wrong; 540 And all the code of Custom's lawless law Written upon the brows of old and young: 'This,' said the wizard maiden, 'is the strife Which stirs the liquid surface ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Metronhena. Make for it with a pure intent and do your utmost endeavour to come into the hermitage, for therein is a true believer from Jerusalem, by name Abdallah, one of the holiest of men, whom God hath blessed with supernatural powers, such as dispel doubts and obscurity. Him certain of the monks seized by fraud and shut in an underground dungeon, where he has lain many a year. So, if ye desire to gain the favour of the Lord of the Faithful, ye cannot accomplish ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... appearing so often when I did not invite it. Once I caught myself on the verge of crying out, "Can't you wait? I will come presently!" and my uncle looked up as if I had spoken. Perhaps he had as good as heard the words; he possessed what almost seemed a supernatural faculty of divining the thought of another—not, I was sure, by any effort to perceive it, but by involuntary intuition. He uttered no inquiring word, but a light sigh escaped him, which all but made me burst into tears. I was on one ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... do the medicine-men dispute among themselves, but their followers engage even more vehemently in bitter strife. For instance, there is a national belief that the juby-juby nut, which grows in the forests in profusion, possesses some supernatural virtue that will make a man who chews it impervious to the weapons of his enemies. That this virtue exists is generally accepted; but when it comes to a discussion of how, when and where to chew the nut, much wrangling goes on; and such ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... Rowcliffe's room and the things in it,—the chair he had sat in, the pipe he had laid aside, the book he had been reading and that he had flung away. Outside the open window the trees of the little orchard, whitened by the moonlight, stood as if fixed in a tender, pure and supernatural beauty. She could see the flags on the path and the stones in the gray walls. They stood out with a strange significance and importance. As if near and yet horribly far away, she could hear ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... already, it seems, connected with the island, and had married a British lady named Helen.[325] Their son Constantine, a youth of special promise (according to the panegyrists), had been born at York, about A.D. 274, and now appeared on the scene to aid his father's operations with supernatural speed, "quasi divino quodam curriculo."[326] Extraordinary celerity, indeed, marked all these operations. Allectus was on his guard, with one squadron at Boulogne to sweep the coast of Gaul, and another ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... fact that Florozonde was the fashion. As regards her eyes, at any rate, the young man had not exaggerated more than was to be forgiven in an artist; her eyes were superb, supernatural; and now that the spangled finery of a fair was replaced by the most triumphant of audacities—now that a circus band had been exchanged for the orchestra of La Coupole—she danced as she had not danced before. You say that a gorgeous costume cannot improve a woman's dancing? ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... in earnest, he might have smiled at this, but her beauty, intensified as it was by the fervour of her feeling, seemed transfigured into something quite supernatural which for the moment ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... and as every effect must also be a cause, the effect produced by the collision of the atoms, must, as to something else, have been a cause. Then we have matter, force, law, order, cause and effect without a being superior to nature. Nothing is left for the supernatural but empty space. His throne is a void, and his boasted realm is without matter, without force, without law, without cause, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... unsophisticated eyes the achievement was all but supernatural, and it doubled his love ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... he,' said the Prince, 'that must be your chief teacher; for it is he, and he only, that can teach you clearly in all high and supernatural things. He, and he only, it is that knows the ways and methods of my Father at court, nor can any like him show how the heart of my Father is at all times, in all things, upon all occasions, towards Mansoul; ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... that something dreadful was going to happen to him on his way to the hotel. "Well, if I see anything in the papers to-morrow morning about a big man being run down by a motor-car in the fog, I'll know there's something in the supernatural," said the cool elf that dwelt in her head. But agony transfixed her like an arrow because her thought reminded her that this glorious being whose eyes blazed with serenity as other people's eyes blaze only with rage, was susceptible to pain and ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... breadth which makes of the scene not the reflection of one beautiful spot in the Venetian territory, but without loss of essential truth or character a very type of Venetian landscape of the sixteenth century. These herdsmen and their flocks, and also the note of warning in the sky of supernatural splendour, recall the beautiful Venetian storm-landscape in the royal collection at Buckingham Palace. This has been very generally attributed to Titian himself,[4] and described as the only canvas still extant in which he has made landscape ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... lens, I had penetrated beyond the grosser particles of aqueous matter, beyond the realms of infusoria and protozoa, down to the original gaseous globule, into whose luminous interior I was gazing, as into an almost boundless dome filled with a supernatural radiance. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... stepped into his shoes. I couldn't let it rest, though; but when an opportunity offered at last to meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones. They were all there. The supernatural being had not been touched after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts gaped black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures. A calamity had come to it, sure enough. The people had vanished. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... without warnings of this character, though they seem to have had less power to produce any serious impression upon his mind than in the case of Cassius. The most extraordinary warning which Brutus received, according to the story of his ancient historians, was by a supernatural apparition which he saw, some time before, while he was in Asia Minor. He was encamped near the city of Sardis at that time. He was always accustomed to sleep very little, and would often, it was said, when all his officers had retired, and the camp was still, sit alone in his tent, ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... me the ghastliest and most pitiful thing of all was an artifice which its maker had introduced for the purpose of conveying some suggestion of the supernatural to that mangled, malformed, less than human representation. Into the place of the wound made by the spear of Longinus, he had introduced a strip of crystal which caught the light at certain angles—more particularly when there were lighted tapers in the room—so that in reflecting this it ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... dull to modern readers; that these poems, so called, were little better than rhymed doggerels, written in couplets of eight-syllabled lines and having for their subjects the miraculous deeds of saints and heroes and the occurrence of supernatural or impossible phenomena; that the composers of these metrical romances and chronicles, although giving free rein to the imagination, were utterly destitute of poetic fancy and hence produced no true poetry; that, nevertheless, some writer was now and then inspired by a flash of ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... home to dinner, he was considerably surprised to find Mr Malison leaning on one of the rails of the foot-bridge over the Glamour, looking down upon its frozen surface. There was nothing supernatural or alarming in this, seeing that, after school was over, Alec had run up the town to the saddler's, to get a new strap for one of his skates. What made the fact surprising was, that the scholars so seldom ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... it is not surprising that he should laugh heartily at them. Occasionally, however, he was interrupted by gusts of wind, which, coming suddenly, God knows whence or why, cut his face, drove masses of snow into it, filled out his cloak-collar like a sail, or suddenly blew it over his head with supernatural force, and thus caused him constant trouble to ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... so I realized that this luminous wonder, which at the first look had so strong a touch of the supernatural in it, was no more than the manifestation of a natural phenomenon: being the shimmer of phosphorescent light upon the soaking rotten woodwork of the galleon and of the ships about her, as rotten and as old. But making ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... soothsayer and auger flourished, and after them came the parson and the priest; and the parson and priest must go. The preacher must go, and in his place must come the teacher—that real interpreter of nature. We are done with the supernatural. We are through with the miraculous and the wonderful. There was once a prophet who pretended to read in the book of the future. His place was taken by the philosopher, who reasons from cause to effect—a man who finds the facts by which he is surrounded and endeavors ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... fact been so, wherever the brake and lever of revelation have not arrested the decline and effected elevation? We are told nowadays of evolution, as if the progress of humanity were upwards; but if you withdraw the influence of supernatural revelation, the evidence of power in manhood to work itself clear of limitations and lower forms is very ambiguous at the best—in reference to morals, at all events. Evil is capable of development, as well as good; and perhaps Nebuchadnezzar's colossus is a truer representation ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... shortened to the imagination by the prevalent belief that by supernatural aid the miles could be actually lessened. Rabbi Natronai was reported to be able to convey himself a several days' journey in a single instant. So Benjamin of Tudela tells how Alroy, who claimed to be the Messiah in the twelfth century, not only could make himself visible ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... will—individuality, in short—so that there might be one single revelation of absolute truth. I have not thoroughly gone through the subject, but I hope to do so; and when I mark what I can only call a supernatural influence on an individual character, I view it as an evidence in favour of the system that produced it. My exposition of my opinions shocks you; I knew it would. But knowing this, and thinking it possible that an undoubting believer might ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... suggest to them the fitness on some occasions, of distributing without any hesitation the reward of death to their friends. For surely the logical conclusion of the Bishop of Peterborough, respecting the treatment due to old women who have nothing supernatural about them, holds with still greater force when applied to the case of old women who have everything supernatural about them; and while it might remain questionable to some of us whether we had any right to deprive an invalid who had no soul, of what might still remain to her of even painful earthly ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... Eliaute goat-herd, whom I unwittingly scared nearly out of his senses, and whose gratitude at finding himself confronting a kindly-disposed human being instead of some supernatural agent of destruction, is very great indeed. He was slumbering at his post, this gentle guardian of a herd of goats, stretched at full length on the ground. Surveying his unconscious form for a moment and carried away by the animal-like simplicity of his ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... of those high precipitous banks which, as we before noticed, overhung the road, so that she was placed considerably higher than Ellangowan, even though he was on horseback; and her tall figure, relieved against the clear blue sky, seemed almost of supernatural stature. We have noticed that there was in her general attire, or rather in her mode of adjusting it, somewhat of a foreign costume, artfully adopted perhaps for the purpose of adding to the effect of her spells and predictions, or perhaps from some traditional notions respecting ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... overwhelming surprises of Divine Love. Hence, to Thompson there was nothing irrational in the special revelation of God to man, in His Incarnation, His death on the cross, and His sacramental life in the Church. The Divine energy of God's love, as displayed in the supernatural revelation of Himself, seems to be even vaster and more intense than the Divine energy of creation displayed in the revelation of nature. Every new revelation of God's power and wisdom which science unfolds serves only to restore a balance in our mind between ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... whatever is supernatural, and especially the machines of the gods. If Homer was not the first who introduced the deities (as Herodotus imagines) into the religion of Greece, he seems the first who brought them into a system of machinery for poetry, and such a one as makes its greatest importance and dignity: for we ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... Thou must . . . sieve. Supposed to be one of the commonest signs of supernatural power. Cf. Macbeth, I. ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... early days of American history there was in New Jersey, as well as in New England and other parts of the country, a firm belief in the existence of witches and ghosts. Of course, there were people who knew enough not to put faith in supernatural apparitions and magical power; but there were so many who did believe in these things, that it was often unsafe, or at least unpleasant, to be an ugly old woman, or a young woman in not very good health, for it was believed that into such bodies the ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... Brett, I have had good cause to lose faith. My case defies analysis. It savours of the supernatural." ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... sufficient influence through their acknowledged power of exorcism and necromancy to lead a comfortable life at the expense of the credulous. The persons admitted into the society are firmly believed to possess the power of communing with various supernatural beings—manidos—and in order that certain desires may be realized they are sought after and consulted. The purpose of the present paper is to give an account of this society and of the ceremony of initiation as studied ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... filmy textures which clothe the vague shapes of the borderland between experience and illusion. This is perhaps because our people, who seem to live only in the most tangible things of material existence, really live more in the spirit than any other. Their love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry, but is apparently an effect from psychological influences in the past, widely separated in time and place. It is as noticeable among our Southerners of French race as among ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... Incarnation for its disclosure. If this is not a God-given prediction of the entrance into human form of the divine, it is something very like miraculous that, somehow or other, words should have been spoken, without any such reference, which fit so closely to the supernatural ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... decided, try to bring my poor Jane into touch with psychic interests; it would comfort her to have the wonderful chance of getting into communication with Oliver. At present she scouts the whole thing, like all other forms of supernatural belief. Jane has always been a materialist. It is very strange to me that my children have developed, intellectually and spiritually, along such different lines from myself. I have never been orthodox; I am not even now an orthodox theosophist; I am not of the stuff which can fall into line and ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... your soul yourself, and it's yours. This young dispenser of oils, substances, and mysteries wishes only to help you scrape off the rough edges and gouge out the bad spots. He will not steal it, nor distort it with his supernatural chisels, nor make fun of it. He can take nothing away, but only cauterize and neutralize, he says, so why not let him try? Tell him ...
— Death of a Spaceman • Walter M. Miller
... at different times during the progress of this Early age of astronomy. We should therefore naturally expect to find the astronomical allusions written from the standpoint of such scientific knowledge as had then been acquired. We cannot for a moment expect that any supernatural revelation of purely material facts would be imparted to the writers of sacred books, two or three thousand years before the progress of science had brought those facts to light, and we ought not to be surprised if expressions are occasionally used which we should not ourselves use to-day, ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... adjusted the bonnet and veil, which nothing but supernatural interference and an utter suspension of nature's laws could have reduced to any shape or form; and evidently flattering herself that it looked uncommonly neat, brushed off the sandwich-crumbs and bits of biscuit which had accumulated in her lap, and availing herself of John Browdie's ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... historic basis, and like its predecessor in the same category, Snarleyyow, depends largely for its interest on the element of diablerie, which is very skilfully manipulated. Here, however, the supernatural appearances are never explained away, and the ghostly agencies are introduced in the spirit of serious, if somewhat melodramatic, romance. Marryat's personal experience enabled him, with little research, to ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... highest missions and to teach great lessons. The student, upon leaving the subject, feels the same reverence experienced upon leaving a sacred place, where the spirit has been under the influence of the supernatural. Bolvar's ambition was the legitimate desire for glory, but he never wanted that power which consists in the oppression of fellowmen ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... write about the great poet. Lovely girls at afternoon receptions propounded to each other abstruse conundrums concerning what they were pleased to regard as obscure passages, while little coteries gathered, with airs of supernatural gravity, to read and discuss whatever bore ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... which Theists and Pantheists are condemned continually to encounter without ever being able to explain—the rock, so to say, upon which their optimistic systems strike, and are shattered to pieces—unless protected by the armour of supernatural faith. ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... last words an unbearable pang of self-conviction and remorse shot through my heart. I, who had not felt greatly the need of any supernatural aid, but rather that I was able to manage my own affairs with becoming discretion—of what saving power and grace could I speak to one who was weak enough to fall, and for whom there was no help in himself? ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... on a level with the great trio of the culmination, "possessing Leonardo's grace of colour and more than his industry, Michelangelo's force with more softness, and Raphael's sentiment with more devotion;" yet with just the inexpressible want of that supernatural genius which would have placed him above them all. His legacy to the world is a series of lessons from the very first setting of his ideal on paper to its finished development. The germ exists in the charcoal sketches at the Belle Arti and ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... bear to think of, the necessity she laid on him of going, as it were, for ever through the postern door. He was after all such a supernatural, such a disembodied thing. He had at times the eyes of a young divinity innocent of creation, untouched by the shames and terrors of the apparent world. And she knew it was the desire they had for each other that had brought him back from his ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... But as the prayer went on, he was moved by it. What force of the Holy Spirit swept over his dulled, brutal, coarsened life, nothing but the eternal records of the recording angel can ever disclose. But the same supernatural Presence that smote Paul on the road to Damascus, and poured through Henry Maxwell's church the morning he asked disciples to follow in Jesus' steps, and had again broken irresistibly over the Nazareth Avenue congregation, now manifested Himself ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... bottle—the fourth wonder of this extraordinary day. Jacob's strength was equal to the strength of all the shepherds; with his two arms alone he accomplished what usually requires the united forces of a large assemblage of men. He had been divinely endowed with this supernatural strength on leaving the Holy Land. God had caused the dew of the resurrection to drop down upon him, and his physical strength was so great that even in a combat with the ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... imagined them wearing him to death, that would not make his story tragic. Nor yet would it become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fire, and the great wind from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were conceived as sent by a supernatural power, whether just or malignant. The calamities of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly from actions, and ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... arm themselves with intrepidity. They conjured them not to allow fortune to vanquish them, nor to suffer the love they bore their families to render them unmindful of all they owed their country. A supernatural alacrity seemed to animate them, when they accompanied their husbands into distant countries, and even when they immured themselves with them in the fetid ships into which they were inhumanly crowded. Reduced to the most frightful indigence, they were seen to beg bread for themselves and families. ...
— Reminiscences of the Military Life and Sufferings of Col. Timothy Bigelow, Commander of the Fifteenth Regiment of the Massachusetts Line in the Continental Army, during the War of the Revolution • Charles Hersey
... ingenuous smile and the gleam on Pete's gun-barrel. They waited for the report, as Mary had, and then they heard steps and looked up to see that dude tenderfoot, still smiling, going straight toward the muzzle pointed at his head, his hands at his side in no attempt to draw. The thing was incredible and supernatural. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... will be a war to the death, for if Science wins it will do away with the personal God of the Jews, the Christians and the Muhammedans, the childish doctrine or dogma of future rewards and punishments, and everything connected with the supernatural. It will be shown that Law reigns supreme. The police representing Law and Order will be of more importance than the clergy. Even now we might do away with the latter, everybody becoming his own priest—a great economy. None of us knows what happens to us after death, all we can do is to hope for ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... them, is poor Herd, still so sad from his summer loss, plodding doggedly away. To watch him even now makes one feel how terrible is that dumb grief which has never learned to moan. And there is George Yeoford, almost too sober; and Murdon plying his pitchfork with a supernatural regularity that cannot quite dim his queer brigand's face of dark, soft gloom shot with sudden humours, his soft, dark corduroys and battered hat. Occasionally he stops, and taking off that hat, wipes his corrugated brow under black ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... incident which is commonly called the Transfiguration contained three distinct portions, each having its own special significance and lesson. The first was that supernatural change in the face and garments of our Lord from which the whole incident derives its name. The second was the appearance by His side of these two mighty dead participating in the strange lustre in which He walked, and communing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... repelled the insinuations which crept into him. Well! what interest could there be in the motive of this change? there clearly must be a motive, but it was only a consequence, an accessory; the important point was the supernatural will which had produced it. "In any case you have obtained more than you asked; you have even a better than the simple monk you wished for, you have the abbot of La Trappe himself!" And he cried: "Oh, to believe, to believe like these poor lay brothers, not to be endowed with a ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... my eyes, resolved to shut out the catastrophe of their broken necks and mangled limbs,—when thunders of acclamation shook the house; and, looking up, I beheld a transformation that seemed supernatural. The old great-coats, clumsy sabots, and hats, were scattered to the ground; and two youthful figures, glittering in white and silver, light and graceful as "feathered Mercuries," stood, hand in hand, poised ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... He fancied that all this was some supernatural temptation, and, unwilling to look at the markets any longer, turned towards Saint Eustache, a side view of which he obtained from the spot where he now stood. With its roses, and broad arched windows, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... there is nothing supernatural in a whirlwind, and the effect of a whirlwind is to twist everything round. Why should the heroine and the Honourable Augustus Bouverie not be submitted to the laws of nature? besides, we are writing a fashionable novel. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... that the creature was not of supernatural origin helped to raise a trifle the spirits of the men; and then came another diversion in the form of ravenous meat-eaters attracted to the spot by the uncanny sense of smell which had apprised them of the presence of flesh, killed and ready ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... great in such inventions. Anything suggestive of a Pony nightmare was delicious to him. He had even lost money (and he took to that toy very kindly) by getting up Goblin slides for magic lanterns, whereon the Powers of Darkness were depicted as a sort of supernatural shell-fish, with human faces. In intensifying the portraiture of Giants, he had sunk quite a little capital; and, though no painter himself, he could indicate, for the instruction of his artists, with ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... Forty," published in 1913. In the summer of 1915, accompanied by Franklin Booth, the illustrator, he made an automobile journey to his old haunts in Indiana, and the record is in "A Hoosier Holiday," published in 1916. His other writings include a volume of "Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural" (1916); "Life, Art and America," a pamphlet against Puritanism in letters (1917); a dozen or more short stories and novelettes, a few poems, and a three-act drama, "The ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... more often when his manner of life was changed for the better, and were both glad to see that he had found the jewel which adversity possessed. It happened that he was with them one evening when the conversation turned on supernatural appearances, the possibility of which was maintained by Julian and Owen, while Lillyston in his genial way was pooh-poohing them altogether. Hazlet alone sat silent, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the soul, to apply the whole man accordingly, to choose the good and refuse the evil. It had not been a lively resemblance of God to have a power of knowing and willing simply, unless these had been beautified and adorned with supernatural and divine graces of spiritual light and holiness and righteousness. These make up the lively colour, and complete the image of God upon ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... guided at every step by supernatural powers, he wanted no friend and no confidant. In the fleld, as in Thebes, he stood apart, and passed among his comrades for a reserved man, rough and proud, but with a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... here find a place. It is great painting in miniature, genius in its quintessence, a gem of perfect water. We may apply to it any simile that implies excellence in the smallest compass. None but a fine imagination would have conceived the supernatural agency that works old Scrooge's moral regeneration—the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and to come, that each in turn speaks to the wizened heart of the old miser, so that, almost unwittingly, he is softened by the tender memories ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... words, and twisted him round three times; at the third twist, the men in company seemed struck with astonishment and envy, the ladies clasped their hands, and some of them kissed his. Everybody declared his beauty to be supernatural. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... presence of Law, which accumulated experiences have gradually produced in the human mind. From generation to generation Science has been proving uniformities of relation among phenomena which were before thought either fortuitous or supernatural in their origin—has been showing an established order and a constant causation where ignorance had assumed irregularity and arbitrariness. Each further discovery of Law has increased the presumption that Law is everywhere conformed to. And hence, among other beliefs, has arisen the belief ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... which shine in misfortune. Woman was not kindled by lofty sentiments, since no one believed in them. The harmonies of home had no poetry and no inspiration, and they disappeared. The face of woman was not lighted by supernatural smiles. Her caresses had no spiritual fervor, and her benedictions were unmeaning platitudes. Take away the soul of woman, and what is she? Rob her of her divine enthusiasm, and how vapid and commonplace she becomes! Destroy ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... Addison became complete. Addison had from the first seen that Pope was false and malevolent. Pope had discovered that Addison was jealous. The discovery was made in a strange manner. Pope had written the Rape of the Lock, in two cantos, without supernatural machinery. These two cantos had been loudly applauded, and by none more loudly than by Addison. Then Pope thought of the Sylphs and Gnomes, Ariel, Momentilla, Crispissa, and Umbriel, and resolved to interweave the Rosicrucian mythology ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... offset to his comparatively brilliant prospects of going hungry and ragged there was the dim, long chance that he might win millions, provided his venture should be attended with a fair percentage of supernatural luck. That was all Bob McGraw had to cheer him on to victory—a million-to-one chance; yet, such was his peculiar mental make-up, the terrific odds ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... the soul, or rather this elevation and glory of thought, which draws with it the will and the affections, not by means of blind faith or supernatural grace, not through an irrational and mystical impulse, but by the strength of a reformed intellect and by a palpable and well-considered enthusiasm, which science and the contemplation of Nature alone can give, this is the keynote of the poem. It is composed ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... which he dwells on the alleged appearance of the murdered person: he quotes some authorities of ancient date, as St Augustine de cura pro mortuis gerenda (a favourite book of reference with the old writers on the supernatural) and also cites some cases which may be seen in Glanvil's, but more conveniently in Mr Lang's books. He does not, however, tell us more of those cases than is ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... attempts to succor me. If you are attacked, and this may possibly be the case, make, I pray you, no resistance save such as may be needed to get away. Above all, do not try to interfere on my behalf. One man, though endowed with supernatural strength, cannot overcome a mob, and your trying to aid me would not benefit me, and might cost you your life, and so deprive Chebron and Amuba of ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... gates of Paradise to ask mercy and release for him, telling his son that he will find the way thither by his father's foot-prints, burnt into the surface of the earth which was cursed for Adam's transgression. Seth finds and follows the supernatural marks, is welcomed by the angel at the gate of Paradise, and is permitted to look in. He beholds there, an Apocalypse of the redemption of the world. On the tree of life sit the Virgin and Child; while on the tree from which Eve plucked the apple, "the woman" is seen, having power over the serpent. ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... the mystery of the ocean song being thus forever kept alive, inland. Shells seem so much like work of human hands, and are often so marked as with letters, that it is not strange that faith soon found the supernatural in them. The magic shell of all others is the cowrie. Why the Roman ladies called it porcella, or little pig, because it has a pig's back, is the objective explanation of its name, and how from its gloss that ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... Bride!" And her face shone. They stood rooted to the soil. A fresh thrill of the supernatural ran through them. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... sensational novel; and realized the very original idea that truth is stranger than fiction. He could not exactly account for the presence of Owen Raynes, whom he had satisfactorily buried in the swamp, and whose clothes he had the honor to wear at that moment. He did not believe in things supernatural, and it never occurred to him that the form before him might ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... with any other relationship; God would punish her. Janet, in her conflict between alternate longing and repugnance, was not concerned with the laws and retributions of God. She felt, indeed, the need of counsel, and knew not where to turn for it, —the modern need for other than supernatural sanctions. She did not resist her desire for Ditmar because she believed, in the orthodox sense, that it was wrong, but because it involved a loss of self-respect, a surrender of the personality from the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... In the middle ages, it is said that the Jews at Oberwesel, farther down the river, crucified a Christian named Werner, and threw the body into the stream. Instead of descending with the current, it was carried by a supernatural agency up the river, from which it was taken at Bacharach, the town we are approaching, interred, and afterwards canonized. The chapel was built over the grave. Doubtless the story was invented to afford a pretext to rob and persecute the Hebrews, though in former ages such excuses ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... were some mendicants whose utmost efforts I even now felicitate myself on having withstood. Such was a phenomenon abridged of his lower half, who beset me for two or three years together, and, in spite of his deficiency of locomotive members, had some supernatural method of transporting himself (simultaneously, I believe) to all quarters of the city. He wore a sailor's jacket (possibly, because skirts would have been a superfluity to his figure), and had a remarkably broad-shouldered and muscular frame, surmounted by a large, fresh-colored face, which ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... exile, my sister herself was no more; she, too, had sunk beneath the effects of her imprisonment. These two voices, coming as it were from the grave—the dead interpreting the dead—had a powerful effect on me. I became a Christian. I did not, indeed, yield to any great supernatural light; my conviction came from my heart; I ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... appears to have been a very curious young man, of great personal beauty, extreme simplicity, and a certain magnetic attractiveness. He believed himself, further, to be in direct and constant communication with supernatural things, and would be set down now as a religious fanatic, deeply tinged with superstition. His parson, too, in these days, would be thought little better, but at the time in which they lived both would probably ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... porters paused for a moment, for he looked like one of those stone images, kneeling to all eternity on a mediaeval tomb, the work of some stone-carver's genius. The sham priest, with eyes as bright as a tiger's, but stiffened into supernatural rigidity, so impressed the men that they gently ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... closes his interesting volumes—from which we have here given a resume of only the opening chapters—with a remarkable prophecy, made in the court of Yucatan by the high-priest of Mani. According to the tradition, this pontiff, inspired by a supernatural vision, betook himself to Mayapan and thus addressed the king:—"At the end of the Third Period, [A.D. 1518-1542,] a nation, white and bearded, shall come from the side where the sun rises, bearing with it a sign, [the cross,] which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... the little children shouted: "Rrnoft Mbreti!" (Note.—The spelling Mpret was invented by The Times for reasons of its own.) The luckless refugees hoped that the Prince, as a sort of supernatural power, would arrive with an army, drive out the Greeks, and restore them to their homes. Numbers of Bektashi dervishes were among them, reverend white-robed men, who prayed me to send a special petition from them to King George, ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... fierce puffing at his pipe, and turned to look at his friend. The light of the dying sun touched his white hair and his thin face and showed the sudden, mysterious, supernatural fire in his deep eyes. The matter-of-fact Scot felt a strange sensation as of the ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... Angelo, we do not pretend to assign the precise key to the practice which he adopted. And to our feelings, after all that might be said in apology, there still remains an impression of incongruity in the visual exhibition and direct juxtaposition of the two orders of supernatural existence so potently repelling each other. But, as regards Milton, the justification is complete; it rests upon the following principle: In all other parts of Christianity, the two orders of superior beings, the Christian heaven and the Pagan pantheon, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... that my wife and myself endorse his belief that the occurrences at the home of the late Peter Grimm were of a supernatural nature. ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... your heart, and say: Now I have found the consoling truth, now my doubts have disappeared and my belief is made sure, and staunch, and consoling. That religion which shall best purify you, whose motives are entirely supernatural, which shall oblige you to exalt all humanity over yourself, which shall infuse a holy motive into your every thought, word and deed, which shall fill your life with a purpose unlike any it has hitherto known, shall make you happy ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... the kind of view which the "Examiner" is sure he would disclaim. At least, we see nothing in his scientific theory to hinder his adoption of Lord Bacon's Confession of Faith in this regard,—"that, notwithstanding God hath rested and ceased from creating, [in the sense of supernatural origination,] yet, nevertheless, He doth accomplish and fulfil His divine will in all things, great and small, singular and general, as fully and exactly by providence as He could by miracle and new creation, though His working be not immediate and direct, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... intuition or the original conception, out of which the divinity had arisen—a veil that might be stripped off without special damage. Pallas Athene might be indignant, when she found herself suddenly transmuted into the conception of memory: Minerva had hitherto been in reality not much more. The supernatural Stoic, and the allegoric Roman, theology coincided on the whole in their result. But, even if the philosopher was obliged to designate individual propositions of the priestly lore as doubtful or as erroneous—as when the Stoics, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... to return again after his next uneasy nap. One day he startled Aunt Hedwig by asking her if she believed in ghosts. Remembering his severe words in condemnation of her casual reference to these supernatural beings, it was with some hesitation that she replied that she did. Still more to her surprise, Gottlieb turned away from her hurriedly, yet not so hurriedly but that she saw a strange, scared look upon his face, and in a low and trembling voice ...
— A Romance Of Tompkins Square - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... he heard himself called names and picked up a stone which he hurled against the knight errant's breast with such force that it placed him flat on his back. Seeing this, Sancho Panza flew at the madman; but the youth seemed to possess supernatural strength, for he felled Sancho to the ground with one single blow, and then jumped on his chest and buckled his ribs. Having also beaten the old goatherd, he went ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... peculiarly its own; and just as psychology and pathology were found to hold the key to an understanding of such a phenomenon as witchcraft, so we may yet realise that a true explanation of religious phenomena is to be found, not in some supernatural world, but in the workings of natural ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... after death the soul is not visible is no demonstration that it does not still live. The condition of being unseen is the same condition which occurs while the body is living, so that intrinsically there is nothing exceptionable, or supernatural, in the life of the soul after death. Resting by the tumulus, the spirit of the man who had been interred there was to me really alive, and very close. This was quite natural, as natural and simple as ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... prints, does seem very ridiculous indeed; but I am bound, for truth's sake, to say, that I have seen more than I can account for, in that kind of thing. There are strange stories connected with my own family, which, perhaps, incline me to believe in the supernatural; and, indeed, without making the smallest pretence to the dignity of what they call a medium, I have myself had some curious experiences. I fear I have some natural proclivity towards what you despise. But I beg that my statement of my own feelings on the subject, may not ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... with heads white as the cotton all about them. Mr. Buck, the most picturesque figure of the whole, was laying off his coat and baring his arm, standing under the solitary lamp depending from the rafters, whose faint light served to give to all the scene an indefinite supernatural aspect. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... a collar for magistrates, which had the supernatural power of pressing the neck of the wearer if his judgments deviated from strict justice, and even of causing strangulation if he persevered in wrong doing. Moran, surnamed "the Just," was the wise counsellor of Feredach, an early king ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the dragonfly was no longer there. A long low wild cry was heard. I started, and my flesh creeped. The cry was repeated. "Es el—el mismo, y ningun otro. Me venga, Federico; me venga, mi querido!" shrieked poor Maria, with a supernatural energy, and with such piercing distinctness that it was heard shrill ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... unspeakable. He sat still, listening. He heard rats in the walls and a babel of jeering voices on the stair-case. The whole blackness of the room with the devilish, writhing thing on the floor became invested with supernatural significance. Then, dimly at first, and hardly comprehending the joy of it, he saw the window. A little later he saw the outlines of the things in the room. The night had passed and ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... description of the supernatural silence which reigned and which reminded of the silence in the arctic regions. There was not the slightest breeze, the snowflakes fell vertically, crystal-clear, the snow blinded the eyes, the sun appeared like a red hot ball with a halo, the sign ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... "The entire 'supernatural' occurrence was caused by a careless boy's love affairs, by a gust of southwest wind, by a sudden heavy rain, and by the chance that I had used English ink, the kind that water cannot blur. All these simple natural things made me act so foolishly toward a good friend, the sort of ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... Suffice it to say, that we did, after incredible hardships and privations, reach the Zambesi, which proved to be about a hundred and seventy miles south of where Billali left us. There we were for six months imprisoned by a savage tribe, who believed us to be supernatural beings, chiefly on account of Leo's youthful face and snow-white hair. From these people we ultimately escaped, and, crossing the Zambesi, wandered off southwards, where, when on the point of starvation, we were sufficiently ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... the illusions caused by light itself, and the influence of the imagination, are explained. These explanations are not at all abstract or scientific. Numerous striking facts and events, many of which were once attributed to supernatural causes, are narrated, and from them the laws in accordance with which they were developed are derived. The closing section of the book is devoted to Natural Magic, and the properties of Mirrors, the Stereoscope, ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... evil spirits haunted all solitary places, and ghosts stalked over the land by night. The use of charms and spells to guard against such creatures passed over into Christian times. Their memory also survives in folk tales, which are full of allusions to giants, dwarfs, goblins, and other supernatural beings. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... draught from a pitcher of claret, which he made use of without any cup, the warder went on, vindicating his own belief in the supernatural. ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... truth less needful in its bearing on modern theories which will have nothing to say to the supernatural, and in a fatalistic fashion regard history as all the result of an orderly evolution in which the importance of personal agents is minimised. To it Jesus, like all other great men, is a product of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to curse the people; keeping still his resolution, not to do it without that permission: which not being able to obtain, he had such regard to the command of God as to keep this resolution to the last. The supposition of his being under a supernatural restraint is a mere fiction of Philo: he is plainly represented to be under no other force or restraint than the fear of God. However, he goes on persevering in that endeavour, after he had declared ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... in sheer amazement. Down in his mean little heart there always had been a dark fear of this rather imposing man; in his mind there was a no uncertain estimate of the Colonel's almost supernatural power to read the thoughts ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... which they regained that symmetry with which nature had at first endowed them. Three years afterwards, in March, 1794, John Kemble was acting Macbeth at Drury Lane; and, in the "cauldron scene," he engaged some children to personate the supernatural beings summoned by the witches from that weird vessel. Little Edmund with his irons was the cause of a ridiculous accident, and the attempt to embody the ghostly forms was abruptly abandoned. But the child seems ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... an intense vehemence which seemed almost supernatural. Agnes shivered and trembled; a vague feeling of guilt overwhelmed and disheartened her; she seemed to herself the most lost and abandoned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... predominance fail. The boy is gone. I have sent him home. All is off. There was martyrs in old times," goes on Bill, "that suffered death rather than give up the particular graft they enjoyed. None of 'em ever was subjugated to such supernatural tortures as I have been. I tried to be faithful to our articles of depredation; but there came ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... almost all early literature is that it seems to have a double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselves continually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning. In the older epics the characters seem to be half typical and only half historical. Thus did the early poets endeavor to make realities out of appearances; for, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the generations of mankind ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... to Aristotle's rules, The Vade Mecum of the true sublime, Which makes so many poets, and some fools: Prose poets like blank-verse, I 'm fond of rhyme, Good workmen never quarrel with their tools; I 've got new mythological machinery, And very handsome supernatural scenery. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... not the supernatural parts of it, of course," replied Tregarthen; "but there is something in the fact that the land of Cornwall has unquestionably given up part of its soil to the sea. You are aware, I suppose, that St. Michael's Mount, the most beautiful and prominent object in Mounts Bay, has ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... daylight, close up to them, the sound came with the shock of the supernatural. Nothing stirred in all the land but the grass bending to the wind. There was not even a bird in the air; yet close to them an elephant was trumpeting shrilly and fiercely as ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... has ever baptized infants and enjoined the practice; she has ever answered to the prophecy as being "a word behind us, saying, This is the way; walk ye in it." Her teachers surely (according to the prophecy) have never been removed into a corner. But if we will not accept this supernatural mercy, then I say it is not unnatural that we should find ourselves in the same kind of doubt in which we commonly are involved in matters of this world. God has promised us light and knowledge in the Gospel, but in His way, ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... a comet, with many other occurrences afterwards found to belong to the regular course of events, are regarded as prodigies. The same delusion prevails as to moral phenomena, and many of these are ascribed to the intervention of demons, ghosts, witches, and other immaterial and supernatural agents. By degrees, many of the enigmas of the moral and physical world are explained, and, instead of being due to extrinsic and irregular causes, they are found to depend on fixed and invariable laws. The philosopher at last becomes convinced ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... revealing to him the truth of Christianity, and the vanity of philosophy and the world? Even if Pascal did this, our estimate of the matter could hardly be much affected. But there is no evidence that he himself attached a supernatural character to the incident. He felt, no doubt, that a real revelation had come to him, that his mind had been lifted in spiritual ecstasy away from the love of all that for a time had hid from him the presence of God and of a higher world. The moment ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... all the energies of religious fanaticism, and with immense temporal revenues at his disposal, with ecclesiastics, officers of his spiritual court, scattered all over Europe, who exercised almost a supernatural power over the minds of the benighted masses, was still perhaps the most formidable power in Europe. The new emperor, with immense schemes of ambition opening before his youthful and ardent mind, and with no principles of heartfelt piety to incline him to seek and love the truth, as a matter ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... question between two fa'r-minded men, ez hez lived alone," said Mr. Byers, with a gravity so supernatural that it could be referred only to liquor, "to ask ye in what sort o' way did Mrs. Byers ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... well as in America, the opinion had long prevailed that, by the aid of malignant spirits, certain persons possessed supernatural powers, which were usually exercised in the mischievous employment of tormenting others; and the criminal code of both countries was disgraced with laws for the punishment of witchcraft. With considerable intervals between ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... world in the Bruneswald. What was it then outside? Not to him, as to us, a world circular, sailed round, circumscribed, mapped, botanized, zoologized; a tiny planet about which everybody knows, or thinks they know everything: but a world infinite, magical, supernatural,—because unknown; a vast flat plain reaching no one knew whence or where, save that the mountains stood on the four corners thereof to keep it steady, and the four winds of heaven blew out of them; and in the centre, which was to him the Bruneswald, such things as ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... yet higher; it blew an icy blast from behind him as he cantered home. Through the hazy atmosphere a cloud of dun, vaporish red could be seen trailing over the dim fells. It poised above the ball crown of the Eel Crags like a huge supernatural bird ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
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