"Celtic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The Celtic Dawn, I found this passage: "The thesis of their contention is that modern English, the English of contemporary literature, is essentially an impoverished language incapable of directly expressing thought." I am greatly unimpressed by such a statement. The chief reason ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... passes away, alas! In the short time that I have lived, there has been more change in the ideas and customs of my village than there was for centuries before the Revolution. Half of the Celtic, pagan, or Middle-Age ceremonials that I saw in full vigor in my childhood, have already been done away with. Another year or two, perhaps, and the railroads will run their levels through our deep valleys, carrying away, with the swiftness of lightning, our ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... says the Quarterly Review, "Louis drew the strain of Celtic melancholy with all its perils and possibilities, and its kinship, to the mood of day-dreaming, which has flung over so many of his pages now the vivid light wherein figures imagined grew as real as flesh and blood, and yet, again, the ghostly, strange, lonesome, and stinging mist under whose spell ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... preferred, although (as Prof. Sir John Rhys tells me) its second part -lana is an etymological puzzle. It now appears that in this, as in some few other cases, the Ravennas has kept the true tradition. The termination -landa is a Celtic word denoting a small defined space, akin to the Welsh 'llan', and also to the English 'land'; I cannot, however, find any other example in which it forms part of a place-name of Roman date. Vindo- ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... France, for instance, is justly said to be the mean term between the Latin and the German races. A Norman, as you may see by looking at him, is of the north; a Provencal is of the south, of all that there is most southern. You have in France Latin, Celtic, German, compounded in an infinite number of proportions: one as she is in feeling, she is various not only in the past history of her various provinces, but in their present temperaments. Like the Irish element and the Scotch element in ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... bookseller, who knew neither its author, title, or date, but I have since been informed the book is Williams' Observations on the Snowdon Mountains, published in 1802, a book well known to students of Celtic literature. ...
— Welsh Fairy-Tales And Other Stories • Edited by P. H. Emerson
... the daughters of the South borrowed from their Celtic and German neighbours, seems especially to have excited their indignation. Tertullian, in his treatise "De Cultu Foeminarum," declaims with his usual fiery rhetoric against this habit. "I see some women," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... "Guide to the Celtic Antiquities of the Christian Period" I have given the history of Irish art in the Christian period; in "New Grange (Brugh na Boine) and other Incised Tumuli in Ireland, the influence of Crete and the AEgean in the extreme west of Europe in early times," I have given as much as ...
— The Bronze Age in Ireland • George Coffey
... of it is that Brown had something of the Celtic spirit—the melancholy, the mystery of that sensitive and delicate temperament; but it is vitiated by what I can only call a schoolmaster's humour—cheap and silly, such as imposes on immature minds. When he was quite serious and ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Norman Macleod's exquisite sermons, M'Rury's religious compilations, Macleod's clever poetry The Lyre of the Grove, Campbell's Popular Tales of the West Highlands, and Magnus Maclean's manuals of Celtic Literature. There being a distinct dearth of comely Celtic reading that the ordinary native can understand, arrangements have been made for the translation into Gaelic in several volumes by competent scholars, of extracts from Mr. Lang's True Story ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... and the land, the farmer and the landlord, the poverty and the hospitality of the people, were all to be studied at first hand; and there were churches by the way at Swords and Rush which the archaeologist will seek in vain to match in any other country. The Bound Tower (Celtic no doubt) at the former place, and the battlemented fortalice, which is more like a castle than a church, at Rush, are ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... these Saxon and Celtic societies persecute an Arabian race, from whom they have adopted laws of sublime benevolence, and in the pages of whose literature they have found perpetual delight, instruction, and consolation? That is a great question, which, in an enlightened ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... growth arising from a natural human pleasure in similar sounds. "It lies deep in our human nature and satisfies an universal need." It is an established phenomenon in Sanskrit and Persian prosody, in Arabic, in Chinese, in Celtic, in Icelandic. Greek prosody, and Latin, which was based upon Greek, rejected it, partly perhaps because it was too simple an ornament for the highly cultivated Greek taste, especially on account of the great frequency ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... With Burton's love of roving adventure, of strange tongues, and of anthropology in its widest sense, the author of "The Bible in Spain" had many points in common. As it was, with brief intervals of solitary excursion in the "Celtic fringe" or the Near East, Borrow remained glooming at home, working himself up into a state of nervous excitement bordering upon dementia about a neighbour's dog or a railway bisecting his wife's land. The gloom, of course, was not chronic. ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... longing to be rid of the precision and order of everyday life drove them to the mountains, and to the literature of Wales and the Highlands, to Celtic, or pseudo-Celtic romance. To the fashion of the time mountains were still frowning and horrid steeps; in Gray's Journal of his tour in the Lakes, a new understanding and appreciation of nature is only struggling through; and when mountains became fashionable, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Germans, [Footnote: The Cimbri, who formed a portion of this invading body, had their original home in the modern peninsula of Jutland, whence came also early invaders of Britain, and they were probably a Celtic people.] had gathered a mass comprising, it is said, more than three hundred thousand men capable of fighting, besides hosts of women and children, and were marching with irresistible force towards the Roman ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... population, and attempt to ascertain the proportion of its different ingredients. There is Moorish blood, and there is Gothic, Roman, and Ph[oe]nician; some little Greek, and, older than any, the primitive and original Iberic. Perhaps, too, there is a Celtic element,—at least such is the inference from the term Celtiberian. Yet it is doubtful whether it be a true one; and, even if it be, there still stands over the question whether the Celtic or the Iberic element ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... force, the Celtic fire, These are thy manhood's heritage! Why rest with babes and slaves? Seek higher The place of ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... pretensions, he came and sat down by him, and talked about languages and literature. The writer, who was only a boy, was a little frightened at first, but, not wishing to appear a child of absolute ignorance, he summoned what little learning he had, and began to blunder out something about the Celtic languages and literature, and asked the Lion who he conceived Finn-Ma-Coul to be? and whether he did not consider the "Ode to the Fox," by Red Rhys of Eryry, to be a masterpiece of pleasantry? Receiving no answer to these questions from the Lion, who, singular ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... expression at all on the subject, which they didn't, each could have done it by his own favorite motto, so admirably expressive of his individual nature. "Donnez tete baissee!" (Go it baldheaded!) showed Ardan's uncalculating impetuosity and his Celtic blood. "Fata quocunque vocant!" (To its logical consequence!) revealed Barbican's imperturbable stoicism, culture hardening rather than loosening the original British phlegm. Whilst M'Nicholl's "Screw down the valve ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... of latter-day conception—the Celt of Arnold and Renan, and other writers following in their wake, who have woven misty impressions of a people whom they have met as strangers, and never really understood. Celtic literature is not a morbid literature. In Highland poetry there is more light than shadow, much symbolism, but no vagueness; pictures are presented in minute detail; stanzas are cunningly wrought in a spirit of keen ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... claim for themselves a pure and Valhallic origin, an exceptionally unmixed descent of the highest attributes. The primogenial origin may be hidden in obscurity, but the German people have absorbed Gauls, Serbs, Poles, Wends, and a medley of Slav and Celtic races which confound all claims to racial purity. Slavs settled in Teutonic countries and Teutons settled in Slavonic countries. The German colonists who invaded Russia at the invitation of Catherine II were imported to strengthen Russia, just as the Great Elector ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... AEschylus and Sophocles, Theognis and Alcaeus, to take a conspicuous part in politics and war; or even, as in the Age of Anne, to shine among wits and in society. Life has become, perhaps, too specialised for such multifarious activities. Indeed, even in ancient days, as a Celtic proverb and as the picture of life in the Homeric epics prove, the poet was already a man apart—not foremost among statesmen and rather backward among warriors. If we agree with a not unpopular opinion, the poet ought to be a kind of "Titanic" ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... leave him put 'em in for to-night," said the saloonkeeper grudgingly, his Teuton caution overcome by Celtic wile. ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... Celt, and all the salt seas that had flowed between him and Connaught these forty years and more had not washed the Celtic element from his blood, nor the belief in fairies from his soul. The Celtic nature is a fast dye, and Mr Button's nature was such that though he had been shanghaied by Larry Marr in 'Frisco, though he had got drunk in most ports of the world, though he had sailed with Yankee captains and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... with no regard for the Sabbath," returned Jim Hutch, sternly. Now Greeley had a fear of what the dour old Scotchman might tell upon him. It would not pay to lose his Celtic temper. ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... hand, sat his cousin, or rather half-cousin, the plain-featured but large-hearted Janet, whom the poor people about that neighborhood regarded as being something more than any mere mortal woman. If there had been any young artist among that Celtic peasantry fired by religious enthusiasm to paint the face of a Madonna, it would have been the plain features of Janet Macleod he would have dreamed about and striven to transfer to his canvas. Her eyes were fine, it is true: they were ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... was educated at Trinity College. His matchless "Melodies" are the delight of all lovers of music, and are sung all over the world. Archbishop McHale of Tuam translated them into the grand old Celtic tongue. Moore is the greatest of Ireland's song-writers, and one of the world's greatest. As a poet few have equaled him in the power to write poetry which charms the ear by its delightful cadence. His ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... we came to Monasterboice, where stood two great Celtic crosses. There are two ruined churches and a round tower. Here was an early religious establishment which existed before the ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... who stood near, for it was well-known that not a few of the laird's ancestors had taken kindly to mountain dew without the hampering influence of moderation, though the good man himself had never been known to "exceed"—in the Celtic acceptation of that term. ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... had been her Alma Mater. According to the venerable Bode and others, her noble and second rank flocked thither in the seventh century, where they were "hospitably received and educated, and furnished with books without fee or reward." Even at the present moment, the Irish or Celtic tongue is the only key to her remote antiquities and ancient nomenclature. The distinguished Lhuyd, in his Archaelogia Britannica, and the celebrated Leibnitz himself, place this latter beyond any possible shadow of doubt. Scarcely a ruined ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... perverse ingenuity begins at once to analyze the blood and discovers that the elements are not, when resolved, precisely the same. That, it is said, is the bond of the Anglo-Saxon race; whereupon a Scotchman insists, or a Welshman insists, that it is not all Anglo-Saxon, that there is something Celtic in its constitution, and that to speak of it as the Anglo-Saxon race, either in my country or in yours, is not in strictness historically accurate. Another finds that they are the great English-speaking peoples, whereupon an ingenious man points out that there ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Robert Faraday and Elizabeth his wife, who had ten children, one of them, James Faraday, born in 1761, being father to the philosopher. A family tradition exists that the Faradays came originally from Ireland. Faraday himself has more than once expressed to me his belief that his blood was in part Celtic, but how much of it was so, or when the infusion took place, he was unable to say. He could imitate the Irish brogue, and his wonderful vivacity may have been in part due to his extraction. But there were other qualities which ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... decidedly inflammable barrack-room argument was one of Corporal Dave McCullough's pet diversions. At this somewhat doubtful pastime he would exhibit a knowledge of human nature and an infinite patience worthy of a better object. From some occult reasoning of his Celtic soul the psychological moment he generally chose as being likely the most fruitful of results was either a few minutes before, or after ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... were developing in numerous cycles of varying merit, another group of narrative poems, created under different influences, came into being. These were the Romans Bretons, a series of romances in verse, inspired by the Celtic myths and traditions which still lingered in Brittany and England. The spirit of these poems was very different from that of the Chansons de Geste. The latter were the typical offspring of the French genius—positive, definite, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... not select some dusky-haired, dusky-eyed, olive-tinted oriental type, instead of a blonde who might safely venture into Valhalla as a genuine Celtic Iduna?" ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... I had had no news from that quarter since I left England. I heard that the Portuguese Jew had escaped—had vanished from his native heather when they went to get him. They had identified him as a German professor of Celtic languages, who had held a chair in a Welsh college—a dangerous fellow, for he was an upright, high-minded, raging fanatic. Against Gresson they had no evidence at all, but he was kept under strict observation. When I asked ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... studied Banneker out of placid, inscrutable eyes, soft as a dove's, while he chatted at large about theaters, politics, the news of the day. Afterward the applicant met the Celtic assistant, Mr. Mallory, who broadly outlined for him the technique of the office. With no further preliminaries Banneker found himself employed at fifteen dollars a week, with Monday for his day off and directions to report on the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... fashion both their labors and their flight. The arrival of the fox and dogs obliged them to remain concealed. The grotto extended the space of about a hundred toises, to that little slope dominating a creek. Formerly a temple of the Celtic divinities, when Belle-Isle was still called Kalonese, this grotto had beheld more than one human sacrifice accomplished in its mystic depths. The first entrance to the cavern was by a moderate descent, above which distorted rocks formed a weird arcade; the interior, very uneven ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... which they mystically apprehended, which eluded direct description, frustrated rhetoric, and was only to be come at by the magical suggestion of colour, music, and symbol. It is most familiar to us in the 'Celtic' verse of Mr. ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... She was passionate, she was vain, she was wayward, she was fierce as a little velvet leopard, as a handsome, brilliant plumaged hawk; she had all the faults, as she had all the virtues, of the thorough Celtic race; and, for the moment, she had in instinct—fiery, ruthless, and full of hate—to draw the pistol out of her belt, and teach him with a shot, crash through heart or brain, that girls who were "unsexed" could keep enough of the woman in them ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... were devoted to an explanation of the writer's wish to spend some time in the west of Ireland. Theophilus Lovaway had managed, in the middle of his professional reading, to study the literature of the Irish Renaissance. He had fallen deeply in love with the spirit of the Celtic peasantry. He described at some length what he thought that spirit was. "Tuned to the spiritual" was one of the phrases he used. "Desire-compelling, with the elusiveness of the rainbow's end," was another. Dr. Farelly grew despondent. If Theophilus expected life in Dunailin to be in the least ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... talk, in which the clock tinker indulged so freely, afforded his young friend no little amusement. His tongue had long obeyed the lilt of classic diction; his thought came easy in Elizabethan phrase. The slight Celtic brogue served to enhance the piquancy of his talk. Moreover he was really a man ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... fray. But under those strange horsemen Still thicker lay the slain: And after those strange horses Black Auster toiled in vain. 640 Behind them Rome's long battle Came rolling on the foe, Ensigns dancing wild above, Blades all in line below, So comes the Po in flood-time 645 Upon the Celtic plain:[61] So comes the squall, blacker than night, Upon the Adrian main. How, by our Sire Quirinus,[62] It was a goodly sight 650 To see the thirty standards Swept down the tide of flight. So flies the spray of Adria When the black squall ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... mystery which made it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St. Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism of Egypt first ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... to see your back," the man repeated, while his companions looked down at the Colonel with a strange fixedness. The Celtic nature, prone to sudden rage, stirred in them. The stranger who an hour before had been indifferent to them now wore the face of an enemy. The lake and the bog—ay, the secret grave yearned for him: the winding-sheet was high upon his breast. "Stay, and it's but once in your life you'll be ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... are thy pristine glories, Finlagan? The voice of mirth has ceased to ring thy walls, Where Celtic lords and their fair ladies sang Their songs of joy in Great Macdonald's halls. And where true knights, the flower of chivalry, Oft met their chiefs in scenes of revelry— All, all are gone, and left thee to repose, Since a new race and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... mastery of sea in Norse times; Christian missions and Columban church; viking invasion; Pictish language superseded by Gaelic; never dispossessed of upper parts of valleys throughout Norse occupation; conquered by Scots; language, "P" Celtic; Picts of Athole, Moray, Ross and Cat; Pictish church and Pictish province of Ross and Moray resisted Scottish civilisation; Normans accepted as chiefs; their Christianity; Norse drove clergy from Orkney, N.E. ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... parting, when the warmhearted Irishwoman clung to Maren and wept against her bosom, calling her all the hundred words for "darling" in the Celtic and vowing ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... luck-omens, portents, or mascots as had A. T. Stewart. With him success was a sequence—a result—it was all cause and effect. A. T. Stewart did not trust entirely to luck, for he, too, carefully devised and planned. But the difference between the Celtic and the Teutonic mind is shown in that Stewart hoped to succeed, while Astor knew that he would. One was a bit anxious; the other ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend. To these two original diversities may be reduced all those impertinent classifications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upon earth, "Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites," flock hither, and do naturally fall in with one or other of these primary distinctions. The ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... matters of the utmost secrecy, not fit to be trusted to the common character. If you were to write so to an antiquarian, he (knowing you to be a man of learning) would certainly try it by the Runic, Celtic, or Sclavonian alphabet, never suspecting it to be a modern character. And, if you were to send a 'poulet' to a fine woman, in such a hand, she would think that it really came from the 'poulailler'; which, by the bye, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... repeats itself in similar conditions of society, French, Norse, Celtic, and Achaean. "We never hear anything bad" of Diomede, Odysseus, or Aias, and the evil in Achilles's resentment up to a certain point is legal, and not beyond what the poet thinks natural and pardonable ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... than light. The inhabitants of these islands are nearly all long-headed, this being a characteristic of both the Nordic and Mediterranean races. The round-headed invaders, who perhaps brought with them the so-called Celtic languages at a remote period, and imposed them upon the inhabitants, seem to have left no other mark upon the population, though their type of head is prevalent over a great ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... consign her to the care of some reliable person, or put her in charge of the captain or stewardess, and in her anxiety to have the little girl she had written a second letter three days after she sent the first. In this she had suggested the stewardess of the Celtic, whom she knew, and with whom she assured Archie he could trust his child. But days and weeks went by, until it was past the middle of June, and still there were no tidings of Bessie; at last, however, there came a foreign letter, addressed in ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... occasion, no hag, but a largely-offended sibyl, whom nothing thereafter should ever appease. To forgive was a virtue unknown to Mistress Conal. Its more than ordinary difficulty in forgiving is indeed a special fault of the Celtic character.—This must not however be confounded with a desire for revenge. The latter is by no means a specially Celtic characteristic. Resentment and vengeance are far from inseparable. The heart that surpasses in courtesy, except indeed that courtesy, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... and the Tripitaka. But not only have we thus gained access to the most authentic documents from which to study the ancient religion of the Brahmans, the Zoroastrians, and the Buddhists, but by discovering the real origin of Greek, Roman, and likewise of Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic mythology, it has become possible to separate the truly religious elements in the sacred traditions of these nations from the mythological crust by which they are surrounded, and thus to gain a clearer insight into the real faith of the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... Celtic and Latin with Teutonic, Slavic, North African, Indochinese, Basque minorities overseas departments: black, white, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... see the words "Celtic London" at the head of a chapter we naturally feel inclined to ask, "Was there such a place? Was there any Celtic London?" Although it is almost impossible to answer such a question by either "yes" or "no," it may be worth ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... first fact, there can be no doubt; the child belongs to the Celtic race. He presents the type of a Celt in all its ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... held as great As German Emperor; and each knew how His evil part to play, nor mercy show. The German had one aim, it was to take All land he could, and it his own to make. The Pole already having Baltic shore, Seized Celtic ports, still needing more and more. On all the Northern Sea his crafts roused fear: Iceland beheld his demon navy near. Antwerp the German burnt; and Prussias twain Bowed to the yoke. The Polish King was fain To help the Russian Spotocus—his aid Was like the help that in their common trade ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... before him these little dark men, he enslaved their survivors or wedded their women, and in his turn fell into slavery to the cruel Druidic religion of his subjects. To these Iberians, and to the Celtic dread of them, we probably owe all the stories of dwarfs, goblins, elves, and earth-gnomes which fill our fairy-tale books; and if we examine carefully the descriptions of the abodes of these beings we shall find them not inconsistent with the earth-dwellings, caves, ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... translator himself apologises for as extravagant, may be thus converted into dreamful intuitions of hidden fact and poetic forecasting of future discoveries. Mr Arnold, in his Celtic Literature, seems to glance at such a capacity in Celtic man—"His sensibility gives him a peculiarly near and intimate feeling of nature, and the life of nature; here, too, he seems in a special way attracted by the secret before him, the secret of natural beauty and ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... which probably might not have found supporters elsewhere, was here fiercely defended by seven Highland ladies, who talked at the top of their lungs, and screamed the company deaf, with examples of Celtic EUPHONIA. Flora, observing the Lowland ladies sneer at the comparison, produced some reasons to show that it was not altogether so absurd; but Rose, when asked for her opinion, gave it with animation in praise of Italian, which she had studied with Waverley's ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... should be taken down from the lips of a native, and such as cannot be identified should be sternly rejected. The task that they have undertaken is a laborious one; but there is no county in England that affords such materials for tracing the influence of a subordinate upon a conquering race—of a Celtic language upon ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... friend certainly said something of the kind. He is also the one among us who is endowed with that Celtic temperament which would make ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the early Greeks to all the people living West of their country, the Romans included under that name only the tribes occupying the countries now known as France, Western Switzerland, Germany west of the Rhine, Belgium, and the British Isles. Blocked together under a generic name, the Celtic nation was, however, composed of many tribes, with separate dialects and customs. It has been surmised that two of these tribes, the British and Irish, early took possession of England and Ireland, where they flourished and subdivided until disturbed ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... of whom I speak, the associate of your own distant progenitor, was the founder of our house, as far as mere titles are concerned. We were but squires of Northumbria, of ancient Celtic descent, before the time of Queen Elizabeth. My ancestor at ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... Morris's wife was Miss Sarah Kane, daughter of Colonel John Kane, and she was beautiful even in her declining years. She also possessed the wit so characteristic of the Kanes, who, by the way, were of Celtic origin, being descended from John Kane who came from Ireland in 1752. She was the aunt of the first De Lancey Kane, who married the pretty Louisa Langdon, the granddaughter of John Jacob Astor. Their daughter, Emily Morris, made frequent ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... incomplete, yet incipient states, or inchoate nations, with an organization, individuality, and a centre of social life of their own. The families and tribes that migrate in search of new settlements carry with them their family and tribal organizations, and retain it for a long time. The Celtic tribes retained it in Gaul till broken up by the Roman conquest, under Caesar Augustus; in Ireland, till the middle of the seventeenth century; and in Scotland, till the middle of the eighteenth. It subsists still in the hordes of Tartary, the Arabs of the Desert, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... repair, This western frontier scanned with care?— In Benvenue's most darksome cleft, A fair though cruel pledge was left; For Douglas, to his promise true, That morning from the isle withdrew, And in a deep sequestered dell Had sought a low and lonely cell. By many a bard in Celtic tongue Has Coir-nan-Uriskin been sung A softer name the Saxons gave, And called the grot the ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... ground to the Phoenician colonists of ages ago. I am sure you know that! The Gaelic tongue is the genuine dialect of the ancient Phoenician Celtic, and when I speak the original language to a Highlander who only knows his native Gaelic he understands ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... river side from the bridge. From Kilkenny many interesting excursions may be made. To Kells, twelve statute miles, where there are the ruins of an important twelfth century priory. Two miles from Kells is Kilree, where are situate a ruined church, Round Tower, and Celtic cross, and a remarkable tomb slab in the church, on which is an ancient symbolic sculpture of a cock-in-a-pot crowing. Three miles from Kilree is Aghavillar, with ruined church, attached castellated house, and Round Tower. About seven miles from the city is ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... no more detains The vale of Tempe, or Ausonian plains; Northward he throws the animating ray, O'er Celtic nations bursts the mental day: And, as some playful child the mirror turns, Now here now there the moving lustre burns; Now o'er his changeful fancy more prevail Batavia's dykes than Arno's purple vale, And stinted suns, and rivers bound with frost, Than Enna's ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... time, while it was plentifully found in France, regarded as of Celtic make; but this is certainly not the case, as it is of Hunish and Hungarian "nationalitat" (nationality). An exactly scientific proof, it is true, according to our present knowledge, cannot be furnished; however, it will stand well enough until the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... under the Southern Cross they were joined by French Puritans, who had fought under Cond and who left their country after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and also by some persecuted sectaries from Piedmont. The two stocks, although one was of Teutonic and the other of Celtic origin, easily came together, and under the pressure of common interests and common dangers were consolidated and vulcanized: and if in the previous generation the English Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... interior, and settled in Rensselaer County, in the province of New York. The marriage of Benajah Douglass to Martha Arnold, a descendant of Governor William Arnold of Rhode Island, has an interest for those who are disposed to find Celtic qualities in the grandson, for the Arnolds were of Welsh stock, and may be supposed to have revived the strain ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... the Sign and Seal some of the heroes showed a surprising and uncontrollable likeness to Jim. Penelope never forgot the kiss in the vestibule. She never recalled it without a sense of loss that she was too young to understand and with a look in her eyes that did not belong to her youth but to her Celtic temperament. ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... probably the custom had its origin as far back as the feast of Flora, when pagan rites were performed in the country, or, perhaps, it originally was instituted to celebrate a victory over the Saxons; or it may be a remnant of some old Celtic observance. ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... unstained wools, white, grey, or brown. In those interesting islands I can dimly recall many other noticeable things and people, everywhere having received the warm welcome which is usually the privilege of a bookwright all the world over; visiting the Stones of Stennis with Mr. Petrie, the Celtic tower of Scalloway with Aytoun, and divers similar antiquities, as Maeshow and other refuges ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... traditions. In Armenia (as at Ani, Etchmiadzin, etc.) are also interesting examples of late Armeno-Byzantine architecture, showing applications to exterior carved detail of elaborate interlaced ornament looking like a re-echo of Celtic MSS. illumination, itself, no doubt, originating in Byzantine traditions. But the greatest and most prolific offspring of Byzantine architecture appeared after the fall of Constantinople (1453) in the new ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... nonum, a station or stage which is mentioned in the Itinerarium Hierosolymitanum, or description of the various routes to Jerusalem, a work compiled for the use of pilgrims; and its name is apparently derived from the Kymerian language, apparently a Celtic dialect, in which port signifies a stage, station, or resting-place, and nav or naou signifies nine; Port-nav, Latinized into Portus naonis, and Frenchified into Portenau, implies, therefore, the ninth station, and is at present ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... is Narbonne, the Celtic Venice, as it rises above the level landscape. The great seaport described by Greek historians six centuries before our own era, the splendid capital of Narbonese Gaul, rival of the Roman Nmes and of the Greek Arles, is now as dull a provincial ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... inaccesso ac praecipiti, lofty and steep. In like manner, jugo, ridge, summit, is contrasted with vertice, peak, height, cf. Virg. Ecl. 9, 7: molli clivo; Ann. 17, 38: colles clementer assurgentes. The Rhaetian Alps, now the mountains of the Grisons. Alp is a Celtic wordhill. Albion has the same roothilly country. Mons Abnoba (al. Arnoba) is the northern part of the Schwartzwald, or Black Forest.—Erumpat, al. erumpit. But the best MSS. and all the ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... that race and language need not go together at all. What philologist, for instance, could ever discover, if he had no history to help him, but must rely wholly on the examination of modern French, that the bulk of the population of France is connected by way of blood with ancient Gauls who spoke Celtic, until the Roman conquest caused them to adopt a vulgar form of Latin in its place. The Celtic tongue, in its turn, had, doubtless not so very long before, ousted some earlier type of language, perhaps one allied to the still surviving Basque; ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... are these truths illustrated in the conquest of the Celtic nations of Europe. They were barbarians; they had neither science, nor literature, nor art; they were given over to perpetual quarrels, and to rude pleasures. Ignorance, superstition, and unrestrained passions were the main features of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... hundred years ago since the story was transcribed from some old authority into the "Book of the Dun Cow," the oldest manuscript of Gaelic literature we possess.—Joyce's "Old Celtic Romances," p. 97. ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... merry men," boomed the voice of Gerald Moore, with a slightly Celtic roll of the "r's," as he drummed impatiently on the shutter of the cabin window, while his companion, Jack Blake, performed a similar tattoo on the adjoining window. "Faith, and it was daylight hours ago, and ye ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... hone, mavrone!' betokened the smouldering remains of emotion in the frieze coats and gaudy shawls assembled for'ard: the wisest of the party were arranging their goods and chattels 'tween-decks, where they must encamp for a month or more; but the majority, with truly Celtic improvidence, will wait till they are turned down at nightfall, and have a general ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Diogenes was one of his auditory, and he got up and began to walk: the answer was conclusive. You remember, if you have read Walter Scott, the learned demonstration of the antiquary who is settling the date of a Roman or Celtic ruin, I forget which; and the intervention of the beggar, who has no archaeological system, but who has seen the edifice in question both built and fall to decay. Reason as much as you like; if your reasonings do not accord with facts, you will have woven ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... that all the Belgae, who we have said are a third part of Gaul, were entering into a confederacy against the Roman people, and giving hostages to one another; that the reasons of the confederacy were these—first, because they feared that, after all [Celtic] Gaul was subdued, our army would be led against them; secondly, because they were instigated by several of the Gauls; some of whom as [on the one hand] they had been unwilling that the Germans should remain any longer in Gaul, so [on the other] they were dissatisfied that ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... The Celtic language affords many other possibilities, but an accurate knowledge of the locality is requisite ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... fiendish in the Celtic nature, some beast in the blood, which, when aroused, is exceedingly helpful in matters of this kind. In less than sixty seconds, I had demonstrated to the onlookers, and particularly to my opponent, that I had ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... Twenty-sixth Canto of the 'Inferno', in which the narrative of Ulysses brings with it a breath from the great romance of the antique world. It is noteworthy that before he graduated he took up with zeal and with distinction the study of Celtic literature—a corrective, perhaps, in its cooler tones, to the tropical motives with which his mind was stored. He was one of the editors of the 'Harvard Monthly', to which he ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... unspoilt Nausicaa of the North; descendant of the dark tender-hearted Celtic girl, and the fair deep-hearted Scandinavian Viking, thank God for thy heather and fresh air, and the kine thou tendest, and the wool thou spinnest; and come not to seek thy fortune, child, in wicked ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... but Tennyson did not feel England beyond the Border. There the Celt intruded, and he looked askance upon the Celt. The Celtic spirit smiled, and took its vengeance on him in its own way. It imposed on him, as his chief subject, a Celtic tale and a Celtic hero; and though he did his best to de-celticise the story, the vengeance lasts, for the more he did ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... and complexity? From many sources:—Provencal love-lore, Oriental subtlety, and Celtic mysticism—all blended by that marvellous dexterity, style, malice, and measure which are so utterly French that English has no adequate words for them. We said "Celtic mysticism," but there is something else about Chretien which is also Celtic, though very far from being "mystic". We talk a ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... at present, spoken throughout Great Britain, is neither the ancient primitive speech of the island, nor derived from it; but is altogether of foreign origin. The language of the first inhabitants of our island, beyond doubt, was the Celtic, or Gaelic, common to them with Gaul; from which country, it appears, by many circumstances, that Great Britain was peopled. This Celtic tongue, which is said to be very expressive and copious, and is, probably, one of the most ancient languages in the world, obtained once in ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... centuries ago, this country, now called England, was inhabited by a Celtic race known as the Britons, a warlike people, divided into numerous tribes constantly at war with each other. But in the first century of the Christian era they were conquered by the Romans, who added Britain to their vast empire and ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... rustications, the warning appeals of authoritative Deans—all these seemed gathered together into one last loud trumpet-call, as a tall, impressionable youth, carrying with him a spasm of feeling, a Celtic temperament, a moved, flashing look, and a surplice many sizes too large for him, dashed with a kind of quivering, breathless sigh, into the chapel of St. Boniface's just as the porter was about to close the door. This was ROBERT, or, as his friends lovingly called him, BOB SILLIMERE. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... anybody who did. Once I asked the Mulligan the question, when that chieftain assumed a look of dignity so ferocious, and spoke of "Saxon curiawsitee" in a tone of such evident displeasure, that, as after all it can matter very little to me whereabouts lies the Celtic principality in question, I have never pressed ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... successfully undermined the ancient and venerable lore. And thirdly, and worst of all, Disraeli never suspected that the French Revolution, which in the same breath he once contemptuously denounced as "the Celtic Rebellion against Semitic laws," was, in spite of its professed attack against religion, really a profoundly Christian, because a democratic and revolutionary movement. What a pity he did not know all this! What a shower of splendid additional ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche |
