"Mystical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fairly read. And should you set your heart upon them, We lack not beets—but some are dead, While others have policemen on them. And be the dewfall dear to you, Possess your poet's soul in patience! Your notes shall soon be falling dew,— Most mystical ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of such talks as did seem to penetrate the question was this, that among these stop-the-war people there are really three types. First there is a type of person who hates violence and the infliction of pain under any circumstances, and who have a mystical belief in the rightness (and usually the efficacy) of non-resistance. These are generally Christians, and then their cardinal text is the instruction to "turn the other cheek." Often they are Quakers. If they are consistent they ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... topaz, the emerald, the chryso-beryl, several varieties of rock-crystal, and also of the finer jaspers. The Sacred Writings prove that the Jews were acquainted with a considerable variety of ornamental stones, as may be seen in the description of the mystical city in the book of Revelation, of which "the twelve gates were twelve pearls." But the present inhabitants of Canaan, regardless of the natural wealth with which the hills and the valleys abound, trust to violence for ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... which come out of a recognized human need. If a man proposed that the judges of the Supreme Court be reduced from nine to seven because the number seven has mystical power, we could ignore him. But if he suggested that the number be reduced because seven men can deliberate more effectively than nine he ought to be given a hearing. Or let us suppose that the argument ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... scattered and discordant parts, then became a source of future punishments and rewards, in which divine justice was supposed to correct the vices and errors of this transitory state. A spiritual and mystical system, such as have mentioned, acquired so much the more credit as it applied itself to the mind by every argument suited to it. The oppressed looked thither for an indemnification, and entertained the consoling hope of vengeance; the oppressor expected by the costliness of his ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... work referred to is a curiosity in literature. It exemplifies forcibly the abstruse and mystical researches in which the literati of the ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... Spirit took on him the substance of man and was united with humanity as a whole, according to the Pauline interpretation, which was generally accepted by our race. The divine nature was continually imparted to man, the body and members in which the divine spirit was incarnated, since the Church or mystical community of Christians was the temple of God. Through this lively sense of the divine incarnation, the Christian avatar with which the race had been acquainted under other forms, God was no longer essentially distinguished from mankind in the form of a number of concrete beings, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... her mother. They were both brown-eyed, and inclined to be mystical, such women as treasure religion inside them, breathe it in their nostrils, and see the whole of life in a mist thereof. So to Miriam, Christ and God made one great figure, which she loved tremblingly and passionately when a tremendous sunset burned out the ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... question of race rather than of creed; that the vigorous life of the West shrinks from its antithesis, and that its unimaginative common-sense finds a bodiless condition too lacking in solidity of comfort; whereas the more dreamy, mystical East, prone to meditation, and ever seeking to escape from the thraldom of the senses during earthly life, looks on the disembodied state as eminently desirable, and as ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... sure way to solve the difficulty, but Skippy was too overcome by his emotion to imagine it. Instead, he sat down and contemplated it with a mystical veneration. ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... abrupt craggy islands rose from the water, assuming every imaginable and unimaginable shape in the uncertain light; while on the right the eye ranged over the inky lake till it was lost in thick darkness. A thin, transparent night-fog added to the mystical appearance of the scene, upon which I looked with mingled feelings of wonder and awe. The only distinct sound that could be heard was the measured sound of the paddles, which the men plied in silence, as if unwilling to break the stillness of the night. Suddenly the guide uttered in a hoarse ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... to me, that, in this matter, the undertakers, digging a little too deep below the surface of the present age, have thrown out some of the mystical and grotesque remains of a very antique religious faith, which look as singular just now to the eyes of common people as would an Egyptian temple with its sacred Apis in Broadway, or a Sphinx on Boston Common. To the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... himself by Clara's side, and carefully studied her face, with his hand on her pulse. There was no sympathy here between the dreamy mystical temperament of the patient and the downright practical character of the doctor. Clara secretly disliked her medical attendant. She submitted impatiently to the close investigation of which he made her the object. He questioned ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... chores at his home in Pennsylvania. It was the boys who faced and conquered hard physical jobs that became the men of endurance later." He had seen and shared the devotion of the missionary spirit, and had seen, too, how largely it failed of fruit by being spent on supernatural conversion and mystical emotion. He knew the tropical temperament, common to Hawaiian and negro,—how accessible to transient fervor, how deficient in persistence and continuity. He had watched his father's operations, as minister of public instruction under the Hawaiian king; his experiments in more practical and ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Richard.] Richard of St. Victor, a native either of Scotland or Ireland, was canon and prior of the monastery of that name at Paris and died in 1173. "He was at the head of the Mystics in this century and his treatise, entitled the Mystical Ark, which contains as it were the marrow of this kind of theology, was received with the greatest avidity." Maclaine's Mosheim, v. iii. cent. xii. p. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... 551 B.C., was as practical in intellect as Laoutse was mystical, and has exerted an extraordinary influence upon the Chinese race. For this reason it seems important to give ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Burke's theory of statecraft. It is the inspiration of the sublimer science, which accepts the hypothesis of evolution as taught by Darwin and Spencer, yet bows in reverence before the unnamed and incommensurable force lodged as a mystical purpose within the unfolding universe. It was the wisdom of that child of Stratford who, building better than he knew, gave to our literature its deepest and most persistent note. If anywhere Shakespeare seems to speak ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... may be that it originated from the quadripartite vaulting of the Normans, the segmental groins of which, crossing diagonally, produced to appearance the pointed arch. It may be that it was derived from that mystical figure of a pointed oval form, the vesica piscis. It may be, lastly, that it was suggested simply by the intersection of semicircular arches, so frequently found in ornamental arcades. The last cause may perhaps be the true ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... this strangely mystical land So shadowy, lone and so dim, And my castle's a port on the ocean strand, Where they wait for the ferryman grim, To row them away from the silvery beach Beyond the foam of the tide, Where a palace looms far away from their reach, Whose gates are closed with a clang to each Who have chosen the ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... strangely increases the confusion is that all the terms of language change meaning as employed by their pen. They speak of God, of duty, of religion, of immortality; their pages seem sometimes to be extracted from mystical writings; but these sacred words have for them a totally different meaning than for the ordinary run of their readers. Their God is not a Being, their religion is not a worship, their duty is not a law, their immortality is not the ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... grand divisions,—Heaven and Earth—which are united to one another by that mystical bond, the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The personages whom the Church has most honoured for learning and holiness, are ranged in picturesque and animated groups on either side of the altar, on which the consecrated wafer is exposed. ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... ii. p. 88. and p. 141.).—The mystical meaning of "Haemony" is evolved by Coleridge in a passage which occurs in his Statesman's Manual, appendix B., and which cannot fail to interest ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... Raphael, Dante, Rousseau, Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of humanity as the higher and more divine." (Dowden, III.) Within the last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of instinct in men, reaching its climax in romantic love. The modern lover is like a sculptor ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Belle wax sentimental over me, I hailed her proposition with outward indifference but inward joy. Securing a gondola to ourselves, in it we were gently swayed through canal and under bridge in the mystical evening light. ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... goes on to relate how when the human being who has used this mystical ointment betrays his extended vision in some way to a fairy, the latter strikes or stabs him in the eye, thus depriving him not only of the etheric sight, but of that of the denser physical plane as well. (See The Science of Fairy Tales, by E. S. ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... came back to the camp and crawled quietly under the rug, where we watched the mystical monument till the flaming tropical ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... Trismegistus, a mystical writer of the Neo-Platonist school; Thebes, etc.: subjects of Athenian Tragedy; Buskin'd: tragic; Musaeus: ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the uraeus swelled its blue throat, the scarabaeus unfolded its wings, the animal-headed gods pricked up their jackal ears, sharpened their hawk's-beaks, wrinkled their baboon faces, and drew into their shoulders their vulture or serpent necks as if they were endowed with life. Mystical consecrated boats (baris) passed by on their sledges drawn by figures in attitudes of sadness, with angular gestures, or propelled by half-naked oarsmen, they floated upon symbolical undulating waves. Mourners kneeling, their hand placed on their blue ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... the rarest altitudes of speculation. The words of Christ sank into the mind of John and, after lying there for half a century, grew up into the wonderful forms we inherit in his Gospel and Epistles. But even the mind of John was not equal to the exigency of the Church; it was too fine, mystical, unusual. His thoughts to this day remain the property only of the few finest minds. There was needed a thinker of broader and more massive make to sketch the first outlines of Christian doctrine; and he was found ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... Watch tick'd behind the panel'd oak, Inexplicable tremors shook the arras, And echoes strange and mystical awoke, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... "Edris," was also performed by the Thomas Orchestra. It is based upon Marie Corelli's novel, "Ardath," which gives opportunity for much programmism, but of a mystical highly colored sort for which music is especially competent. It makes use of a number of remarkably beautiful motives. One effect much commented upon was a succession of fifths in the bass, used legitimately enough to express ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... she is expected to read her Bible or some religious book, or engage in some meditation which is in keeping with the holy day. Where this idea originated, the writer is unable to say. He, with those who have observed this mystical quiet hour, is puzzled concerning its religious efficacy. One naturally asked those in authority why not a "quiet" hour for the boys as well. There seems to be either a very high compliment paid to the boys or quite an unpardonable insinuation on the inherited tendencies ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... of intimate thought or cherished fancy was for your eyes only; it was my first approach to your maidenly heart, a mystical wooing, which neglected no resource, near or remote, for the enhancement of its charm, and so involved all ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... tiny columns of smoke arose from the smouldering ruins of once happy homes. The heat and dust were almost insufferable, but as the sun declined a cool breeze sprang up, and later a flood of moonlight clothed the landscape with a mystical beauty. It shone coldly on the few deserted homes which the hand of the destroyer had spared, and to me it seemed that its silvery rays were like the pale fingers of a mourner who places white wreaths upon the grave of love. In the soft wind I ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... God"). These are the lines upon which investigation should run. And of late years there is a notable improvement of tone in treating of symbolism or idolatry: the Lingam and the Yoni are now described as "mystical representations, and perhaps the best possible impersonal representatives of the abstract expressions paternity and maternity" (Prof. Monier Williams in "Folk-lore Record" vol. iii. part i. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... darkest green had wreathed itself about the pillars of the veranda on that side; and it was at a frame-like opening in the massive foliage of this that the upper part of her pure white figure now stood revealed in the last low, silvery, mystical light. The sinking of the moon was like a great death on the horizon, leaving the pall of darkness, the ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... the Imperio-Davido-classical school of French art, and the namby-pamby mystical German school, which is for carrying us back to Cranach and Duerer, and which is making ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at the request of Dichu (but for what cause I know not), did the saint build the church, having its aspect against the north, and looking toward the southern point. Perchance that by this mystical structure the worshippers of idols might be persuaded from the northern coldness of unbelief unto the meridian fervor of the faith and the charity of Christ—the which to this day is called Sabhall ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... sixteen, and not until the last two or three years of my life have I known anything at all of that phase of existence which is expressed by the word 'society.' I indulge in this preamble in order to apologize in advance, for any breaks I may make in that mystical line of talk which you call, ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... whispered that a supernatural communication, of a nature obvious even to the exterior senses, had produced this wonderful change; and though some mentioned the proselyte as an enthusiast, none hinted at his being a hypocrite. This singular and mystical circumstance gave Colonel Gardiner a peculiar and solemn interest in the eyes of the young soldier. [4] It may be easily imagined that the officers of a regiment, commanded by so respectable a person, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... more than bowing acquaintance with Salmael and Malchidael, the guardian angels of England. Among his works are his autobiography, and his "Observations on the Life and Death of Charles, late King of England." The rest of his effusions are pretentious, mystical, muddle-headed rubbish, half nonsense half knavery, as "The White King's Prophecy," "Supernatural Light," "The Starry Messenger," and "Annus Tenebrosus, or the Black Year." The rogue's starry mantle descended on his ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... failed to provide hats. The modern mind is that which says that if we only cut off the heads of two of the little boys, they will not want hats; and then the hats will exactly go round. The suggestion that heads are rather more important than hats is dismissed as a piece of mystical metaphysics. The assertion that hats were made for heads, and not heads for hats savours of antiquated dogma. The musty text which says that the body is more than raiment; the popular prejudice which would ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... connection to trace the influence of Boehme-ism on 'the fierce sectaries of Lower Germany,' on Anabaptism, and on the illuminati of the ultra Puritans in England, bringing forth Independent Fifth Monarchy men, George Fox, Flood, Law, and Pordage. The seeds of this mystical heresy were obscurely transmitted to New England, which has always had some 'GOD-Smith,' or Mathias with his 'Impostures,' lurking among the vulgar. I have no doubt that, through traditional influence at least, a Joe Smith and the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... had scarcely pronounced the mystical rhymes, than, as we have mentioned in the conclusion of the last chapter, an appearance, as of a beautiful female, dressed in white, stood within two yards of him. His terror for the moment overcame his natural courage, as well ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... purpose was the discovery of the background and environment of seventeenth century Quakerism. There can be little doubt, I think, that I have here found at least one of the great historical sources of the Quaker movement. This volume, together with my Studies in Mystical Religion, will at any rate {vi} furnish convincing evidence that the ideas, aims, experiences, practices, and aspirations of the early Quakers were the fruit of long spiritual preparation. This movement, as a whole, has never been studied ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... mystical letters of the Ephesians, there was an item, that a man should always have in his mind some one or other of ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... Codex Telleriano-Remensis gives the more intelligible rendering "there is their home whither they descend," and adds that it is synonymous with Xochitlycacan, "the place where the flowers are lifted." It was the mystical Paradise of the Aztecs, the Home of the Gods, and the happy realm of departed souls. The Codex just quoted adds that the gods were born there, which explains the introduction of ...
— Rig Veda Americanus - Sacred Songs Of The Ancient Mexicans, With A Gloss In Nahuatl • Various
... is pleasing, no matter whether we are listening to "the murmuring pines and the hemlocks," the softly sounding Angelus, the gossiping looms, the whir of wings in the drowsy air, or seeing the barns bursting with hay, the air filled with a dreamy and mystical light, the forest arrayed in its robes of russet and scarlet and yellow, and the stars, those "forget-me-nots of the angels," blossoming "in ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... affliction, poverty, disease and self-mortification. He found the steps to the higher consciousness and its power only through slow self-conquest and comradeship with pain, and this was the inheritance he handed down through the centuries. To think in terms of mystical wisdom meant human denial of all sentient life. Unification was bought through total consecration to the subjective and the absolute, in which the ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... to In Memoriam, earlier than 1830. Yet they already contain the chief speculative tendencies of In Memoriam; the growing doubts caused by evolutionary ideas (then familiar to Tennyson, though not to "ordinary English readers"), the longing for a return to childlike faith, and the mystical experiences which helped Tennyson to recover a faith that abode with him. In these things he was original. Even as an undergraduate he was not following "a train of thought made familiar" by authors ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... childhood and innocence, which Wordsworth entered fearfully and pathetically as an alien traveller, he moves with the simple and assured ease of one native. He knows the mystical wonder and horror that Coleridge set forth in The Ancient Mariner. As for the beliefs of Shelley, they are already fully developed in his poems. "The king and the priest are types of the oppressor; humanity is crippled by "mind-forg'd manacles"; love is enslaved ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... pipe, and the fire-light, Whose mystical circles of red Protect me alone with the shadows; The smoke-wreaths engarland my head; And the strains of a waltz, half forgotten, The favorite waltz of the year, Played softly by fairy musicians, Chime sweetly and low on ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... refracted light from the not risen but rising truth,—a scheme of physics and physiology compounded of Cartesian mechanics and empiricism (for it was the credulous childhood of experimentalism), and a corrupt, mystical, theurgical, pseudo-Platonism, which infected the rarest minds under the Stuart dynasty. The only not universal belief in witchcraft and apparitions, and the vindication of such monster follies by such men as Sir M. Hale, Glanville, Baxter, Henry More, and a host of ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... I answered; "there were but a few pages written on. It came to me quite early in your life that you were not going to be the model heroine. I was looking for the picture baby, the clean, thoughtful baby, with its magical, mystical smile. I wrote poetry about you, Robina, but you would slobber and howl. Your little nose was always having to be wiped, and somehow the poetry did not seem to fit you. You were at your best when you were asleep, but you would ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... of mystical, almost Gnostic sensibility that shows up even among those hackers not actively involved with neo-paganism, Discordianism, or Zen. Hacker folklore that pays homage to 'wizards' and speaks of incantations and demons has too much psychological truthfulness ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her inmost heart, and you learn her secrets—arcana unintelligible to you in the new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win new color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once charmed away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your motion. Now, at ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... incredulous age. People, particularly judges, are hard-headed practical men of affairs. My defence was suited more for an age of mystical tendencies. Why, will you believe it, sir, my own lawyer, the man to whom I paid eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents for championing my cause, told me the defence was rubbish, devoid even of literary merit. What chance could ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... romance. George Eliot's dictum that we are, each one of us, but an omnibus carrying down the traits of our ancestors, does not appear at all to hold here. This fanciful realist, this naive-wistful humorist, this dreamy mystical casuist, crossed by the innocent bohemian, this serious and genial essayist, in whom the deep thought was hidden by the gracious play of wit and phantasy, came, on the father's side, of a stock of what ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... life, and link the present with the past—a hint, perhaps, for reticence in our descriptions. The gentlemen and ladies of the court had spent a summer night in long debate on love, rising to the height of mystical Platonic rapture on the lips of Bembo, when one of them exclaimed, 'The day has broken!' 'He pointed to the light which was beginning to enter by the fissures of the windows. Whereupon we flung the casements wide upon that side of the palace which looks toward the high peak of Monte Catria, and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... But it was keenly alive in Jeff's mind, and he was in the strange necessity which men in the flush of life and health often feel of seeking counsel of those who stand in the presence of death, as if their words should have something of the mystical authority of the unknown wisdom they are about ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... real object of the descent of this high spirit on to our planet. If the human race had earnestly centred upon that instead of losing itself in vain dreams of vicarious sacrifices and imaginary falls, with all the mystical and contentious philosophy which has centred round the subject, how very different the level of human culture and happiness would be to-day! Such theories, with their absolute want of reason or morality, have been the main cause why the best ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... about to pass from the watershed of the Nasse to the east fork of the Iskoot, on which those far-shining prairies were said to lie, with their flowery meadows rippling under the west wind. If we could only reach that mystical plateau, our horses would ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... of the fourteenth century. They seem indeed to be the later blossomings of the great springtime of English literature, the period which produced Chaucer and Langland, an innumerable company of minstrels and ballad-makers, and the mystical poet, ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... his influence from Geneva over most of the Helvetic congregations, and was diligent in persuading them to recede from the unambiguous plainness of Zwingle's doctrine,—which reduced the Lord's supper to a simple commemoration,—and to admit so much of a mystical though spiritual presence of Christ in that rite, as might bring them to some seeming agreement with the less rigid of the followers of the Lutheran opinion. At the same time Bucer, who presided over the flourishing church of Strasburg, was engaged ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... mystical reveries of the ancients are still law in a great part of the philosophic world; and being adopted by modern theology, it is heresy to abandon them. They tell us "of aerial beings, of spirits, angels, demons, genii," and other phantoms, which are the object of their meditations, ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... its utmost contentment and desire. This is marriage. This is attainment to that state of more perfect existence which terrestrial life procures for the soul of man, never thenceforth in all its future changes to be lost. The incorporeal mingling, the mystical union of two varied emanations of life; as Light and Heat intermarry in their offset and passage from the sun; and Truth and Love from the breast of ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... was not renewed. Philip was rather averse to Amine practising those mystical arts, which, if known to the priests, would have obtained for her, in all probability, the anathema of the Church. He could not but admire the boldness and power of Amine's reasonings, but still he was averse to reduce them into practice. The ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Feeling how requisite it was he should put himself right, in every respect, with the lady of his choice, he made a fresh confession of his religious faith. His Catholicism, he told her, was outwardly of the Bossuet and Bonald type, but was esoterically mystical, Saint-Johnian, which form alone preserved the real Christian tradition. Somewhat encouraged by vague inquiries from Madame Hanska as to the income required by a household for living in Paris, he entered into particulars with ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... those who were speakers of the truth, but it turned into boiling water and scalded the wicked when they tried to drink of it. Chapter LXIV is an epitome of the whole Book of the Dead, and it formed a "great and divine protection" for the deceased. The text is of a mystical character and suggests that the deceased could, through its recital, either absorb the gods into his being, or become himself absorbed by them. Its rubric orders abstention from meats, fish and women on the part of those who were ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... priest after a silence, "you are doing this too drastically? Religion, it seems to me, has to be apprehended in a different region, the mystical region, the region ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to a volume published in 1800, Coleridge rejected and criticised it as wholly untenable. All three, however, may be considered as comrades in a revolt against the conventional diction of eighteenth century poetry, from which Coleridge's "dreamy tenderness" and mystical flights of fancy were as remote as Wordsworth's rusticity and almost prosaic studies ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... still by a new spine, with a limited power of modifying its form,—spine on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a right angle; and, between the lines of this mystical quadrant, all animate beings find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, or the snake, as the type of prediction of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the spine, nature puts out smaller spines, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of interest, and a consequent inability to retain them in his memory. A little more practice in the strict logic of geometry, a little more familiarity with the physical laws of the universe, and the phenomena to which they relate, would possibly have repressed the tendency to vague and mystical speculations which he was too fond of indulging. In the philosophy of the human mind, he was in no danger of the materializing theories of some ancient and modern schools; but in shunning this extreme, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... in Germany, take a very broad and a very primitive view with regard to marital relations and to the greater freedom in these relations in the Socialistic State of the future: "The whole of our sexual morality (as such), in so far as it has a rational, as opposed to a mystical, basis, is nothing but a 'plant' to save the ratepayers' pockets by fixing the responsibility for the maintenance of children on the individuals responsible for the procreation of them. To the consistent ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... army life, his periods of professorship, we can not help but wonder at the amount of writing Mickiewicz did. And his life was not a long one; it did not reach to sixty years. But during the working years allotted him, before a mystical melancholy—which was threatening to degenerate into madness—had impaired his faculties, his mind was unusually brilliant, creative and marvelously disciplined. It obeyed at will. At one time he was professor of Latin in Lausanne; at another time he held the chair of Slavic ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz
... other mystical natures, a certain something had been developed in the soutar not unlike a spirit of prophecy—an insight which, seemingly without exercise of the will, sometimes laid bare to him in a measure the thoughts and intents of hearts in which he was more than usually interested; or perhaps it was rather ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... with impatient perplexity. You cannot understand how sane creatures could imagine they had joined issue at all in most of these controversies. All the old methods of systematic thinking, the queer absurdities of the Aristotelian logic, have followed magic numbers and mystical numbers, and the Rumpelstiltskin magic of names now into the blackness of the unthinkable. You can no more understand our theological passions than you can understand the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods only by ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... controversy with the Quakers, who had recently found their way to Bedford. The foundations of the faith, he thought, were being undermined. The Quakers' teaching as to the inward light seemed to him a serious disparagement of the Holy Scriptures, while their mystical view of the spiritual Christ revealed to the soul and dwelling in the heart, came perilously near to a denial of the historic reality of the personal Christ. He had had public disputations with male and female Quakers from time to time, at the Market Cross at Bedford, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... unfolding themselves to the Egyptian antiquarian, and of wandering with him for a moment amid the marvellous creations of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies, with a talisman which shall unfold for his instruction and amusement their mystical and romantic history. ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... Case (c. 1660-1700) was a famous astrologer and physician. He succeeded to Lilly's practice in London. In a darkened room, wherein he kept an array of mystical apparatus, he pretended to show the credulous the ghosts of their departed relatives. Besides his astrological works he wrote one serious treatise, the Compendium Anatomicum nova methodo institutum (1695), in which he defends Harvey's theories ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... it was a real ship, you old dotard!" said the skipper gruffly and looking angrily at him. "Of course it was," he added, while our new acquaintance looked at us, unable, naturally, to understand the mystical allusion; but Captain Applegarth soon turned his roving thoughts into another direction by asking him a second question. "How long did you keep in sight of your vessel after leaving ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... only definitive in themselves, but give us the means of completing those parts of it which are not found in them. Considered, then, as a living body, the primitive Christian community was distinguished by its high sacerdotal, ceremonial, mystical character. Which among modern religious bodies was it like? Was it like the Wesleyans? was it like the Society of Friends? was it like the Scotch Kirk? was it like any Protestant denomination at all? Fancy any model Protestant of this day in a state of things so different ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... of the crowd has been much studied lately, by Le Bon and other writers in France, by Mr. Graham Wallas in England. I think that Le Bon is in danger of making The Crowd a mystical, superhuman entity. Of course, a crowd is made up of individuals, who remain individuals still. We must not accept the stuffed idol of Rousseau and the socialists, 'The General Will,' and turn it into an evil spirit. There is no General Will. All we have a right to say is that individuals ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... without ceasing to be a paradox. But there is another historic element that must also be realized. Without saying anything more of its tremendous essence, it is very necessary to note why even pre-Christian Rome was regarded as something mystical for long afterwards by all European men. The extreme view of it was held, perhaps, by Dante; but it pervaded mediaevalism, and therefore still haunts modernity. Rome was regarded as Man, mighty, though fallen, because it was the utmost that Man had done. It was ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... wool-work now fashionable in Cranford. As for the use of the globes, I had never been able to find it out myself, so perhaps I was not a good judge of Miss Matty's capability of instructing in this branch of education; but it struck me that equators and tropics, and such mystical circles, were very imaginary lines indeed to her, and that she looked upon the signs of the Zodiac as so many ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... exhibentibus, expresses the belief that these pictures, besides their direct and simple reference to the Lord's Supper, exhibit also the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. The bread he considers as the obvious material symbol, the fish the mystical symbol of the transubstantiation. His interpretation is at least doubtful. The bread was to be eaten in remembrance of the Lord, and the fish was represented as the image which recalled his words, that have been perverted by materialistic imaginations so far from their original meaning,—"This ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Time, from the Decree for the Restoring of Jerusalem, after the Babylonish Captivity, there seem to remain a matter of Two Thousand and Three Hundred Years, unto that New Jerusalem, whereto the Church is to be advanced, when the Mystical Babylon shall be fallen. At the Resurrection of our Lord, there were seventeen or eighteen Hundred of those Years, yet upon the Line, to run unto, The rest which remains for the People of God; and this Remnant in the Line of Time, is here in our Apocalypse, variously Embossed, ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... art-relics." As a matter of fact the representation is not even rare in Japan. It is to be found not only upon stone monuments, but also in religious paintings,—especially certain kakemono suspended in temples. These kakemono usually display the footprints upon a very large scale, with a multitude of mystical symbols and characters. The sculptures may be less common; but in Tokyo alone there are a number of Butsu-soku-seki, or "Buddha- foot stones," which I have seen,—and probably several which I have not seen. There is one at the ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the mystical caverns of beauty, poetry, and romance are hidden the graves of buried hopes, but even amid the corn and potatoes of daily life rise the ghostly head and foot stones of aspirations dead and put away out of sight, dead in the body, in daily ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a very whimsical Treatise, entitled, William Ramsey's Vindication of Astrology. This profound Author, among many mystical Passages, has ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... I do not understand you,' the colonel said, after a pause. 'Have you been reading mystical books? I did not know there ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... no observational utility. It could afford no indication of time, because a pole-star moves very slowly, and the pole-star of Cheops' day must have been in view through that tunnel for more than an hour at a time. But, apart from the mystical significance which an astrologer would attribute to such a relation, it may be shown that this slant tunnel is precisely what the astrologer would require in order to get ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... the day! For, dark and despairing, my sight I may seal, But man can not cover what God would reveal: 'T is the sunset of life gives me mystical lore, And coming events cast their shadows before. I tell thee, Culloden's dread echoes shall ring With the bloodhounds that bark for thy fugitive king. Lo! anointed by heaven with the vials of wrath, Behold where he flies on his desolate path! Now, in darkness and billows, he sweeps from my sight: ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... all these fables and fancies. Her own singular experiences in this enchanted region were certainly not suggested by anything she had heard, and may be considered psychologically curious by those who would not think of attributing any mystical meaning to them. We are at liberty to report many things without attempting to explain them, or committing ourselves to anything beyond the fact that so they were told us. The reader will find Myrtle's "Vision," as written ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... amorous homicide who would set on one perfect moment the seal of eternity, in Porphyria's Lover, and that of the other occupier of the mad-house cells, Johannes Agricola, whose passion of religion is pushed to the extreme of a mystical antinomianism. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... rarely moved by an inspiration drawn from nature to desert the conventional couplet, he nevertheless had something of the spirit of the new movement. In 1783 the artist-poet Blake began to write verse which is absolutely untrammelled by convention, mystical, strange, and unequal. Three years later a volume by Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland, contained the outpouring of a passionate soul in musical verse, and in 1798, two years after his ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... everything that we are to-day, unless by some strong effort of repentance and change we break the fatal continuity, and make a new beginning by God's grace. But let us lay to heart this, as a very solemn truth which lifts up into mystical and unspeakable importance the things that men idly call trifles, that life is one continuous whole, a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... speaking about very high and mystical truths, about all Christians being the temple of God, about God dwelling in men, about men and women being His sons and daughters; these are the very truths on which so often fervid imaginations have built up a mystical piety that had little to do with the common rules of right and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... home." The old man had thought her touched by delirium then, though her words were but the parable of a mind fed by the poetry of life, by a shy spirit, to which meditation gave fancy and farseeing. David had come by his idealism honestly. The half-mystical spirit of his Uncle Benn had flowed on to another generation through the filter of a woman's sad soul. It had come to David a pure force, a constructive and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... upon the question of government and control. They had no essential political teaching. Many, but by no means all, were inspired by the democratic idealism of the first French Revolution. They believed in a mystical something that was wiser and better than any individual,—the People, the Common Man. But that was by no means the case with all of them. The Noyes community was a sort of Theocratic autocracy; the Saint Simonian tendency was aristocratic. The English Socialism that ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... the same time a great stirring towards missionary work. He offered his services to the Church Missionary Society. He often stayed in Dublin with Lord Congleton. In 1828, when they were walking together, one of those strange mystical approaches of soul to kindred ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... searches with care, though with tremulous haste, For the spell that bewitches the king; And under her tongue, for security placed, Its margin with mystical characters traced, At length he discovers a ring." SOUTHEY, ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... birth to death, out of confusion The secret creeps Across the deeps From its eternal centre In the soul. Communion is the cause and the conclusion And the unfailing sacrament Not only of the mystical frequenter Of temples, where the body of the dead Creates divine The living body through the bread And wine, But God discovers and discovers His beauty in all lovers. And, to make His beauty whole, Body and body, soul and soul, combine His one ...
— The New World • Witter Bynner
... reality of "The Communion of Saints." Amid the solemnities of worship "and memorial we thus learn that the living and the dead are bound together by ties that are eternal, ties that no change of time can break, because before God they are one in the Mystical Body ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... student of medicine, and of philosophy under Weisse, in Leipsic; 1844-81 professor in Goettingen; died in Berlin). Like Fechner, gifted rather with a talent for the fine and the suggestive than for the large and the rigorous, with a greater reserve than the former before the mystical and peculiar, as acute, cautious, and thorough as he was full of taste and loftiness of spirit, Lotze has proved that the classic philosophers did not die out with Hegel and Herbart. His Microcosmus (3 vols., 1856-64, 4th ed., 1884 seq; English translation by Hamilton ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... have no desire to be united with God—you may call him Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, to quote Pope. They are, as a rule, without mysticism and constantly without that ecstasy which makes Southwell, Crashaw, and the greatest of all the mystical poets writing in ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... interesting study. In fact, the whole Caernarvon coast, which stretches away to the south-west in the long peninsula that forms Cardigan Bay, is full of pleasant and attractive locations for student and tourist, and entwined around all are weird legends of the heroes and doings of the mystical days of the dim past, when Briton and Roman contended for the mastery of this ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... and freshness, but with the partiality of a neophyte. Some portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long. These were based on the mystical or sacramental principle, and spoke of the various economies or dispensations of the eternal. I understood them to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the outward manifestation of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable:[1] Scripture was an ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... of Leonardo, in art as in science. For him the artist also must relate himself directly to the visible world, in which is the only inspiration; to accept any formula is to see with dead men's eyes. That has been said again and again by artists, but not with Leonardo's mystical and philosophical conviction. He knew that it is vain to study Nature unless she is to you a goddess or a god; you can learn nothing from reality unless you adore it, and in adoring it he found his freedom. How different is this doctrine from that with ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... whole of this mystical dissertation appears to have been inspired by some remarks in Castiglione's Libro del Cortegiano—which Margaret was no doubt well acquainted with, as it was translated into French in 1537 by Jacques Colin, her ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... as the brooding soul of the world, cannot fail of its oracular promise as to Woman. "The mothers," "The mother of all things," are expressions of thought which lead the mind towards this side of universal growth. Whenever a mystical whisper was heard, from Behmen down to St. Simon, sprang up the thought, that, if it be true, as the legend says, that Humanity withers through a fault committed by and a curse laid upon Woman, through her ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... revelations, which correspond with one another like the petals of a mystical rose. The third, which deals with the divine judgment upon Jerusalem, corresponds with the fifth, which contains God's judgment upon {279} Rome. Here we see the triumph of God over corrupt religion ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... festival in which they appeared, though without any mystical signification. In the Panathena, the daughters of the Metceci, or foreign residents, carried Parasols over the heads of Athenian women as a mark ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... is another Picture, reader mine! I gave you one in the first Canto;[13]— This is more solemn, mystical, and fine,— Like something in the ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... neatly placed in a wooden box as though for a journey. Here was his staff, and here were his sandals,—a new pair and an old. In another corner there stood the magical figures by the power of which the prince was to make his way through Hades. The words of the mystical "Chapter of the Flame" and of the "Chapter of the Magical Figure of the North Wall" were inscribed upon them; and upon a great roll of papyrus twenty-two yards in length ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... but it is not so solidly built as the castle of Kerek. The greater part of the wall and several of the bastions and towers are still entire. The ruins of a well built vaulted church are now transformed into a public inn or Medhafe. Upon the architraves of several gates I saw mystical symbols, belonging to the ecclesiastical architecture of the lower empire. In several Arabic inscriptions I distinguished the name of Melek el Dhaher. Where the hill does not consist of precipitous rock, the surface of the slope is covered with a pavement. Within ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... appearance, he was by no means deficient in intelligence. The courage displayed in his taming exercises (which he gravely attributed to his recent conversion), a solemn and mystical style of speech, and a hypocritical affectation of austerity, had given him a species of influence over the people he visited in his travels. Long before his conversion, as may well be supposed, Morok had been familiar with the habits of wild beasts. In fact born in the north ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the spirit as well as the manner of the established system. The church had not fundamentally modified the significance of the dogma of the fall and depravity of man; education was still conceived as a process of eradication and suppression of the mystical old Adam. The new current flowed in channels far away from that black folly of superstition. Men at length ventured once more to look at one another with free and generous gaze. The veil of the temple was rent, and the false mockeries of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... from Bossuet and Fenelon. But how shall we satisfy ourselves now whether, for instance, Christianity is holding its own? Who can tell what vagary or what compromise may not be calling itself Christianity? A bishop may be a modernist, a chemist may be a mystical theologian, a psychologist may be a believer in ghosts. For science, too, which had promised to supply a new and solid foundation for philosophy, has allowed philosophy rather to undermine its foundation, and is seen eating its own words, through the mouths of some of its accredited spokesmen, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... earnest, "in all these fables certain philosophers could easily discover symbolic significations of the highest morality. I have myself written a treatise to prove that Puss in Boots is an allegory upon the progress of the human understanding, having its origin in the mystical schools of the Egyptian priests, and evidently an illustration of the worship rendered at Thebes and Memphis to those feline quadrupeds of which they make both ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the three Commandments that refer directly to God, prescribes a rest from toil, and profane works; and in commemoration of the mystical repose of the Lord after the six days' creation, designates the Sabbath or seventh day as a day that shall be set apart and made sacred to God. The peculiarity of the commandment is that it interferes ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... treated of fantastic subjects,—somewhat in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe—has made me more susceptible for all that world which lies beyond and about the world of every-day life. I have sought after,—and yet feared—the mystical; cool and lucid as I can be at times, I have always had an inclination ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... apparitions. Sometimes the rustling of birds taking flight, would sound in his ears like the timid frou-frou of a skirt, and Julien, fascinated by the mysterious charm of these indefinite objects, and following the impulse of their mystical suggestions, would fling himself impetuously into the jungle, repeating to him self the words of the "Canticle of Canticles": "I hear the voice of my beloved; behold! she cometh leaping upon the mountains, ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... and done nothing else. Even in size the Mysterium is an immense piece of work. In the English edition it occupies the whole of the third quarto volume of 507 pages; and then for its matter it is a still more amazing production. To say that the Mysterium Magnum is a mystical and allegorical commentary upon the Book of Genesis is to say nothing. Philo himself is a tyro and a timid interpreter beside Jacob Behmen. 'Which things are an allegory,' says the Apostle, after a passing ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... is so rich with a beauty mystical and idealistic that Monica draws instinctively nearer to Desmond, with that desire for sympathy common to the satisfied soul, and ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... among gamblers who value them as mascots. Among some mulberry plots belonging to different owners I saw a little wooden shrine, evidently for the general good. It was there, it was explained, "not because of belief but of custom." The evening was drawing in and Fuji showed itself blue and mystical above the dark greenery of the country. As I gazed a sweet-sounding gong was struck thrice in the temple. Three times a day there is heard this summons to other thoughts than those of ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... by saying the oracles have spoken; that through these mystical means they have made themselves known to mortals. The next question would naturally be, When, where, or to whom have these oracles spoken? Where are these oracles? An hundred voices raise themselves in the same moment; ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... Hebrew thought, but in the organization on which it rested. For my own part, when I try to understand Christianity as a mass of doctrines, Gnostic, Trinitarian, Monophysite, Arian and the rest, I get no further. When I try to realize it as a sort of semi-secret society for mutual help with a mystical religious basis, resting first on the proletariates of Antioch and the great commercial and manufacturing towns of the Levant, then spreading by instinctive sympathy to similar classes in Rome and the West, and rising ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... his superior. He now wishes Mr. Brien Moon would evince more exactness in holding inquests, and less anxiety for the fees. Mr. Winterflint depends not on his own decisions, where the laws relating to debtors are so absurdly mystical. "Rest here, boy," he says; "I won't be a minute or two,—must do the thing straight." He seeks the presence of that extremely high functionary, the gaoler (high indeed wherever slavery rules), who, having weighed the points with great legal impartiality, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... that my father belonged to the old orthodox school of theology; and in consequence the language both of his hymns and of his sermons was mystical and symbolic—a style of speech which, in more than one sense, I should call a stone-language, because it requires an overwhelming power to burst its walls, and free from this outer shell the life contained within. But what the full strength of later life ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... a flaming arrow of death fell on his flock, and pierced the heart of his dearest! Silent the music now, as the shepherd entered the mystical temple of sorrow: Long he tarried in darkness there: but when he ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... monstrous organ in the wrong place. That wood and metal giant, standing as a stone bridge to mock the eyes' efforts to dodge past it and have sight of the exquisite choir beyond, and of an east window through which the humble worshipper in the nave might hope, in some rare mystical moment, to catch a glimpse of the ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... she wore a species of sightly handkerchief like a turban upon her head and about her person those mystical swathings in which old ladies of the African race delight. But she most pleasured our sense of beauty and moral fitness when, after the last pan was washed and the last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and, taking her stand at the kitchen door, laded the soft evening air ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... for the period of youthful faith," and may take its place among the most charming and pathetic of all those numberless effusions of genius in which individual feeling is but the echo of the universal heart. But the poem on "The Ideal and Life" is highly mystical and obscure;— "it is a specimen," says the critic we have just quoted, "of those poems which were the immediate results of Schiller's metaphysical studies. Here the subject is purely supersensual, and does ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... ceremonial dress, her air of aloofness, her vague eyes, and the dignity of her carriage, she had already produced some part of their effect before the seance had begun. She had been wont to sail into the room, distant, mystical. She had her audience already expectant of mysteries, prepared for marvels. Her work was already half done. But now of all that help she was deprived. She was no longer a person aloof, a prophetess, a seer of visions; she was simply a smartly-dressed ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... fence she sits whenever the weather will allow, as I believe going through 'the rites of the Flower.' At least when I called upon her there one day, in a boat, I found her wearing a white robe and singing some mystical ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... name to the gratitude of some future Hermes, had in his manuscripts reduced into a system many scattered theories of others, and many dogmas of his own. Over these, for they were simpler and easier than the crabbed and mystical speculations in the printed books, she more especially pored; and she was not sorry at finding fresh reasons for her untutored adoration of the stars ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... placed all beings about himself, and is present with them in an ineffable manner, exempt from the universality of things. Hence, every being entering into the ineffable sanctuary of its own nature finds there a symbol of the Father of all. And by this mystical impression which corresponds to his nature they become united with their original, divesting themselves of their own essence and hastening to become his impression alone; and, through a desire of his unknown nature and of the fountain ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... owns. There is deep and blessed mystery involved in this wonderful prerogative, that the loving, believing heart has God for its possession and indwelling Guest; and people are apt to brush such thoughts aside as mystical. But, like all true Christian mysticism, it is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... appear to have little or nothing in common. Francis was emotional, mystical, seraphic; Arnold was cultured, cold, and critical. Yet Francis threw an extraordinary spell over the scholarly mind of Arnold, and, dissimilar as were their lives, in death ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... how insignificant he was and how insignificant every one is in this world where beings, agitated like grains in a van, are mixed and separated by a shake of the rustic or of the god. This idea of the agricultural or mystical van represented measure and order too well to be exactly applied to life. It seemed to him that men were grains in a coffee-mill. He had had a vivid sensation of this the day before, when he saw Madame Fusellier grinding ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... city to which he had removed no one knew the son of Vishnu Swami, and no one cared to invite him to the house. Once he attempted his usual trick upon a knot of sages who, sitting round a tank, were recreating themselves with quoting mystical Sanskrit shlokas[FN140] of abominable long-windedness. The result was his being obliged to ply his heels vigorously in flight from the justly incensed literati, to whom he had said "tush" and "pish," at least a dozen times ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... apt to be greatly influenced by the mystical or awe-inspiring, and is disposed to morbid piety. He has an outer religiousness without corresponding strictness of morals; indeed the sentiment of religious exaltation may be in great contrast to his habitual conduct, which is a mixture ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... which was of the nature of the Tussaud Museum or a masquerade, positively frightened Amedee. He had recently been to his first communion, and was still burning with the mystical fever, but so much ugliness offended his already fastidious taste and threw him ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... "Jonah" is the prophet denouncing the Nineveh of his day and the Babylon of this. The teaching—and there is teaching in every one of them—is plain and ethical. So also, with the Greek myths; they teach plainly—they hold no esoteric interpretations. Watts is no Neo-Platonist weaving mystical doctrines from the ancient hero tales; he is rather a stoic, a moralist, a teacher ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... "it would appear to be unreasonable; yet still, perhaps, it has some reason on its side. The maxim, indeed, given on this subject in the mystical doctrines,[29] that we men are in a kind of prison, and that we ought not to free ourselves from it and escape, appears to me difficult to be understood, and not easy to penetrate. This, however, appears to me, Cebes, to be well said: that the gods take care of us, and that we men are one of their ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... this. There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future—and that ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... To the law. His obscure tenacity on that point had in it something incomprehensible and a little awful; something, as it were, mystical, quite apart from his anxiety that he should not be suspected of "countenancing any doings of that sort." Seven-and- thirty virtuous years at sea, of which over twenty of immaculate command, and the last fifteen in the Sephora, seemed ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... a consolation, and though there may have been jugglers in the outer courts of these temples, as there have been in the courts of all temples, no mere actor could make an Egyptian priest of himself. Their very alphabet has a regal enchantment in its lines, and the same aesthetic-mystical power remains in their pylons and images under the blaze of the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practised by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... the importance of this music and its inherent beauty. In consequence of the entire absence of show passages in the Brahms works, and his uniform adherence to lofty and poetic ideals, together with his fondness for deep and somewhat mystical and meditative effects, his nature has been misunderstood by the greater part of the musical world. It has been charged against him that his music is purely mechanical in its construction, and that he took delight in putting together forbidding and repelling figures without regard for the convenience ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... thing more. Beware of making this a dead formula. If absolution be not a living truth, it becomes a monstrous falsehood; if you take absolution as a mystical gift conveyed to an individual man called a priest, and mysteriously efficacious in his lips, and his alone, you petrify a truth into death and unreality. I have been striving to show that ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... departed, That the chief who bore the symbol Lay beneath in dust and ashes. And the Jossakeeds, the Prophets, The Wabenos, the Magicians, And the Medicine-men, the Medas, Painted upon bark and deer-skin Figures for the songs they chanted, For each song a separate symbol, Figures mystical and awful, Figures strange and brightly colored; And each figure had its meaning, Each some magic song suggested. The Great Spirit, the Creator, Flashing light through all the heaven; The Great Serpent, the Kenabeek, With his bloody ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... extremely revered both by the Greeks and Romans. He had a magnificent temple at Pylos. Near the river Corellus, in Boeotia, he had also an altar, for some mystical reason, in common with Pallas. His chief festival was in February, and called Charistia, because their oblations were made for the dead. Black bulls were the victims offered up, and the ceremonies were performed in the night, it not being lawful to sacrifice to him in the ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... thousand or half million of dollars, provided he has no slaves. To come to be the owner of negroes, and of more and more negroes, is the social ambition, the aristocratic purpose and pretension of the whole Southern people. It is by virtue of this mystical prestige of the institution itself; which couples the charms of wealth with the exercise of authority, or a certain show of official supremacy on the part of the master; which begins by subjugating the imagination of the poorer classes, the whites throughout the South, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Mary there nor Jesus called. We are unable to think of Mary as present amid the tumult of worldiness and frivolity, the endless chatter over dress and decoration, which so commonly precedes the celebration of a sacrament which is the symbol of "the mystical union that there is betwixt Christ and His Church." That deep piety which puts God and God's will before all else would strike a jarring note here, where the dominant note is still the pagan note of the decking of the slave for her new master. It is perhaps not without significance ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... taken the fancy of the two daughters of the house. They were neither pretty nor ugly, but he shewed himself gracious towards them like a man who understands his business. I had, however, already made such great progress in my mystical education, that I considered the compliments he addressed to the girls ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... entirety, we see that it was naturalistic rather than supernaturalistic, and rationalistic rather than mystical. These gifted men saw no clear indication for the existence of a supreme being; very few of them speak of the deity in the role of Providence and fewer still believed ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... fifteenth century; or, as one penetrates into the gloom of the mighty dungeons where heroes and the brothers of kings, and saints and scientists have died their long death—as one gropes through the black night of the Crypt, where a faint, mysterious glint of light falls aslant the mystical face of the Black Virgin; as one climbs to the light beneath the ogive arches of the Aumonerie, through the wide-lit aisles of the Salle des Chevaliers, past the slender Gothic columns of the Refectory, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... recondite, cabalistic, inscrutable, secret, dark, mystic, transcendental, enigmatical, mystical, unfathomable, hidden, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... this chamber are white, divided by red and yellow zones into compartments, in which are depicted the symbols of the principal deities—as the eagle and globe of Jove, the peacock of Juno, the lance, helmet and shield of Minerva, the panther of Bacchus, a Sphinx, having near it the mystical chest and sistrum of Isis, who was the Venus Physica of the Pompeians, the caduceus and other emblems of Mercury, etc. There are also two ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... printing, of beautiful bindings, and possesses an incomparable Baudelaire (edition tiree a un exemplaire), a unique Mallarme. Catholicism being the adopted religion of the Decadence—for its venerable age, valuable in such matters as the age of an old wine, its vague excitation of the senses, its mystical picturesqueness—Des Esseintes has a curious collection of the later Catholic literature, where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find their place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello, the amalgam of a monstrous ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons |
