"Celtic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... to be bothered with material questions of government and administration. They should leave such cares to the stolid, practical English, and devote the leisure they would thus obtain to the further exercise and development of what someone had called "the starfire of the Celtic nature." Ireland should look upon England as her working-housekeeper. And as for the addition of Irish saints to the Calendar, the stumbling-block was their excessive number. "'T is an embarrassment of riches. If we were once to begin, we could never leave off till we had canonised nine-tenths ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... associated with several of the megalithic remains.[A] "At Carnac, near Quiberon," says M. De Cambry, "in the department of Morbihan, on the sea-shore, is the Temple of Carnac, called in Breton 'Ti Goriquet' (House of the Gories), one of the most remarkable Celtic monuments extant. It is composed of more than four thousand large stones, standing erect in an arid plain, where neither tree nor shrub is to be seen, and not even a pebble is to be found in the soil on which ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... plaintive music and poetry, his favourite instruments being the bagpipe and fiddle: but unlike the Greek be shows little aptitude for trade; and unlike the Bulgarian, he is very lazy in agricultural operations. All this corresponds with the Scottish Celtic character; and without absolute dishonesty, a certain low cunning in the prosecution of his material interests ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... to remind those who may be forgetting that Tir-na-n'Og is the land of eternal youth and joyousness—the Celtic "Land of Heart's Desire." It is a country which belongs to us all by right of natural heritage; but we turned our backs to it and started journeying from it almost the instant we stepped ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... of Celtic poetry—I've found a stunning idea for music. What a tone-poem it will make! Here it is. What colour, what rhythms. It is called The Shadowy Horses. 'I hear the shadowy horses, their long ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... observation with regard to the Celtic women, in Plutarch, on the virtues of women. The North Americans pay a ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... kept his public servants looking under their beds o' nights for things neither ornamental nor useful, were mere Fata Morganas, Brocken specters or disease of the imagination. Winston has evidently been misled by a mere than Boeotian ignorance blithely footing it hand-in- hand with a vivid anti-Celtic imagination. He does not know that Ireland was the seat of learning and the expounder of law, both human and divine, when the rest of Europe was a wide-weltering chaos in which shrieked the demons Ignorance and Disorder. He was ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... reckoned among the masters of Latin poetry and eloquence. It is not probable that the islanders were, at any time, generally familiar with the tongue of their Italian rulers. From the Atlantic to the vicinity of the Rhine the Latin has, during many centuries, been predominant. It drove out the Celtic—it was not driven out by the Teutonic—and it is at this day the basis of the French, Spanish, and Portuguese languages. In our island the Latin appears never to have superseded the old Gaelic speech, and could not stand its ground before the German.' It was in the fifth century ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... this other portion of their ancestry, belonging to the earlier population which the Aryans overcame and absorbed. That this primitive population was tolerably numerous is evident from the fact that the Aryans, particularly of the Latin, Teutonic, and Celtic nations lost in absorbing it many vocal elements and many grammatical inflections of their speech. They gained, at the same time, the self-respect, the love of liberty, and the capacity for selfgovernment, ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... first Celtic voice that has spoken commandingly out of musical art, achieved that priority through natural if not inevitable processes. Both his grandfather and grandmother on his father's side were born in Ireland, of Irish-Scotch parents. ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... responsively. He was the somewhat surprising offspring of the union between Nan's Early Victorian aunt, Eliza, and a prosaic and entirely uninteresting Scotsman. Red-haired and freckled, with the high cheekbones of his Celtic forebears, he was a young man of undeniable ugliness, redeemed only by a pair of green eyes as kind and honest as a dog's, and by a voice of surprising charm ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... to "Wedded," and then to the sister's dress and close-fitting headgear which disguised Rosamund. And suddenly the impulsiveness which was her inheritance from her Celtic and Latin ancestors took complete possession of her. She got up swiftly and ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... journey, and, following his instructions, we soon reached Gordale Scar. It was interesting to note the difference in the names applied to the same objects of nature in the different parts of the country we passed through, and here we found a scar meant a rock, a beck a brook, and a tarn, from a Celtic word meaning a tear, a small lake. Gordale Scar was a much more formidable place than we had expected to find, as the rocks were about five yards higher than those at Malham Cove, and it is almost as difficult to describe them as to climb ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... ancients on the subject of the eternity of matter, Higgins, in his learned work on Celtic Druids, says: ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... here you first played ball[67] and backgammon,[68] that you hawked, coursed, rode, shot with the bow. I omit the fact that for the sake of your boyish presence students of letters came hither from all parts; and that it was due to you as an individual that our nobility, anxious to shed the slough of Celtic speech, imbued itself now with the style of oratory, now with the measures of the Muse. And this specially kindled the love of the community[69] that you forbade those whom you had already made Latins[70] to remain barbarians.[71] For it could never slip ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... written three notes to two, and this difficult musical form is represented by the three shadows dancing before two people. "A Deserted Farm" is a lyric description of the now beautiful "Hill Crest" as he found it. "The Spirit Call" is suggested by the Celtic vein of mystery and haunting sadness pervading most of the ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... 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 enough, would frequently, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... something 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
... the priests or ministers of religion among the ancient Celtic nations in Gaul, Britain, and Germany. Our information respecting them is borrowed from notices in the Greek and Roman writers, compared with the remains of Welsh and Gaelic ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... throughout the stream of English lyrical poetry. In Mr. Yeats there was more romanticism than he would care to admit, though the Elizabethan ideal which he cherished and his own power of concentration did much to subdue and chasten the insubordinate, vaguely aspiring spirit which in lesser Celtic poets turns to froth, with no undercurrent of human truth to give significance to its flaky beauty. Fiona Macleod is the classic instance of this frothy Celtic spirit which is unstayed by human truth or relevance to life; and there is much of this in contemporary Irish poetry. Mr. Yeats is not ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... and hardships, and when he became perfected in the military art, as in the case of Caesar amid the marshes and forests of Gaul and Belgium. The fame of Caesar rests as much on his conquests of the Celtic barbarians of Europe as on his conflict with Pompey; but whether Cyrus obtained military fame or not in his wars against the Turanians, he doubtless proved himself a benefactor to humanity more in arresting the tide of Scythian ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... finely molded features, and highly sensitive facial expression combine to constitute a type which is more beautiful than any other we meet in France, and it belongs to the fairest section of the French population. When we cross over to England, however, unless we go to a so-called "Celtic" district, it is hopeless to seek among the blondest section of the community for any such beautiful and refined type. The English beautiful woman, though she may still be fair, is by no means very fair, and from the English standpoint she may even sometimes appear somewhat ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... born in Norfolk, Virginia, August 15, 1839, whither his parents, natives of Ireland, had immigrated not long before. He possessed the quick sensibilities characteristic of the Celtic race; and his love for Ireland is reflected in a stout martial ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... she was usually called with good-natured contempt, was an important personage, if only as a standing illustration of the attitude of Forsytes towards the Arts. She was not really 'little,' but rather tall, with dark hair for a Forsyte, which, together with a grey eye, gave her what was called 'a Celtic appearance.' She wrote songs with titles like 'Breathing Sighs,' or 'Kiss me, Mother, ere I die,' with a refrain ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that a proportion of the original Brythonic population may have survived. This northern portion of the kingdom of Northumbria was affected by the Danish invasions, but it remained an Anglian kingdom till its conquest, in the beginning of the eleventh century, by the Celtic king, Malcolm II. There is, thus, sufficient justification for Mr. Freeman's phrase, "the English of Lothian", if we interpret the term "Lothian" in the strict sense; but it remains to be explained how the inhabitants of the Scottish Lowlands, outside Lothian, can be ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... in behalf of a large number of contributors, presented to our Bishop the pastoral staff which was borne before him in the procession this morning, calling his attention to the figures upon it, of St. Andrew, the patron-saint of Scotland, St. Ninian, one of the early Celtic evangelists, St. Augustine of Canterbury, as representing the English succession, St. John, to whom the Scotch Communion office (and with it our own) is traced, Bishop Kilgour, the senior consecrator of Bishop Seabury, and Bishop Seabury himself. Our own Bishop replied in words which ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... towards legends of the saints and Biblical paraphrase, away from the native heroes of the race; while later events completed the exclusion of Germanic legend from our literature, by substituting French and Celtic romance. Nevertheless, these few brief references in Beowulf and in the small group of heathen English relics give us the right to a peculiar interest in the hero-poems of the Edda. In studying ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... powers of the world. But it is nevertheless clear at first sight that the constituent elements of the population were far from being completely fused. In many places in the two great islands the old Celtic stock still existed with its original character unaltered. The Germanic race, which certainly had an indubitable preponderance and was sovereign over the other, was split into two different kingdoms, which, despite the union of the two crowns, still remained distinct. The hostility ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... agriculture 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 both worth a ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... and learned Celtic Polyglott Grammar, giving a Comparative View of the Breton, Gaelic, Welsh, Irish, Cornish, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... the Ashmolean Museum. From his early youth he devoted himself with indefatigable zeal to the acquisition of learning. He was fond of natural history and British antiquities, but his favourite pursuit, and that in which he principally distinguished himself, was the study of the Celtic dialects; and it is but doing justice to his memory to say, that he was not only the best Celtic scholar of his time, but that no one has arisen since worthy to be considered his equal in Celtic erudition. Partly at the expense of the university, partly at that of various ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... peace and serenity of some old cathedral, and, notwithstanding her defiant frame of mind, a feeling of something akin to reverence crept over Honor as she crossed the threshold. Her impressionable Celtic temperament could not fail to be influenced by outward surroundings: she had a great love of the beautiful, and this ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... their friendship, till years of wrong and robbery, and want and insult, drove them to desperation and to war. They were barbarians, and their warfare was barbarous, but not more barbarous than the warfare of our Saxon and Celtic ancestors. They were ignorant and superstitious, but their condition closely resembled the condition of our British forefathers at the beginning of the Christian era. Macaulay says of Britain, "Her inhabitants, when first they became known to the Tyrian mariners, were ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... is hard to follow in detail, since datable evidence is scanty. In general, however, the instances of really native fashions or speech which are recorded from this or that province belong to the early Empire. To that age we can assign not only the Celtic, Iberian, and Punic inscriptions which we find occasionally in Gaul, Spain, and Africa, but also the use of the native titles like Vergobret or Suffete, and the retention of native personal names and of that class of Latin nomina, like Lovessius, which are formed out of native names. In ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... worship, and subsequently extended to the Christian community (ecclesia) itself. Similarly the Greek word ecclesia ([Greek: ekklesia]), "assembly," was very early transferred from the community to the building, and is used in both senses, especially in the modern Romance and Celtic languages (e.g. Fr. eglise, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... bade me read to him, generally from the novels of George Eliot, or from certain romances running through the New York Ledger by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. These were generally stories of the times of the Irish Kings, in which gallowglasses and lovely and aristocratic Celtic maidens disported themselves. My mother, after her conversion, disapproved of the New York Ledger. In fact, there were families in Philadelphia whose heads regarded it with real horror! In our house, there was a large stack of this interesting periodical, which, with many volumes ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... hardly be mistaken in supposing that, among the relics of antiquity still existing in Sardinia, the monoliths, of somewhat similar character with the Celtic remains at Carnac, Avebury, and Stonehenge, and common also in other countries, belong to the earliest age. These Sarde monoliths are found in several parts of the island, being, as the name expresses, single stones, or obelisks, set upright in the ground. In Sardinia they are called ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... from the time of William the Conqueror; and the grand old castle, connected with almost every era of English history, had for its nucleus a Saxon stronghold, which succeeded a Roman fortress, as that in turn succeeded a Celtic camp. The ruin covers a large space of ground on a hill overlooking the old town. There is no majesty of beetling crags, no girdle of turbulent sea, but the dignity of its size, its age, its story, is all-satisfying. It is a good, a fitting spot for an American to make a pilgrimage to. A noble, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... the river assumes a character of its own, distinct from all its tributaries, so in English literature there is a time when it becomes national rather than tribal, and English rather than Saxon or Celtic or Norman. That time was in the fifteenth century, when the poems of Chaucer and the printing press of Caxton exalted the Midland above all other dialects and established it as the literary language ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... constantly changing and progressing. The bards who sang upon the earth centuries ago—Homer, Virgil, the Greek and Roman, the Celtic and Saxon writers of old—have passed beyond the spirit sphere which I inhabit to a spirit planet still more refined, and have left behind only the ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... Snowdon's vales To Severn's silver strand! [4] For all the grace of that old race Still haunts the Celtic land. And, dear old Ireland, God save you, And heal the wounds of old, For every grief you ever knew ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and learned professor in Trinity College, Dublin, a cynic and a humorist, is reported once to have wondered "why the old Irish, having a good religion of their own, did not stick to it?" Living in the "Celtic twilight," and striving to pierce backward into the dawn, reading romance, tradition and history, I have endeavoured to solve something of the mystery of the vast "Celtic phantasmagoria," I can but echoe the professor. ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... qualities they lacked, but the secret of his hold on them was in his own rich nature. He was not only a born man of letters, he was a deeply emotional human being whose appeal was as much to the heart as to the head. The romantic Celtic mysticism of 'Aylwin,' with its lack of fashionable Celtic nebulosity, lends itself, if you will, to laughter, though personally I saw nothing funny in it: it seemed to me, before I was in touch with the author, a work of genuine expression from within; and that it truly was so I presently knew. ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... regions of Central Europe, the Celts and 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 domains. Nine years before (B.C. 113), these barbarians had defeated a Roman ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... say, because Elohim and Jehovah are sometimes interchanged in the text? Can they believe that any Jew, who could concoct a book like Genesis, did not also know that Elohim was a plural noun? Can they any more, then, believe that a Celtic man with brains enough to fabricate poems like Fingal and Temora did not know that the Gaelic name for the sun was feminine? Can they see no other way of accounting for such alleged variations of gender, and number, and case, than by forgery, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... He recited his poems readily, however. He had them all in his memory. Some indeed had never been written down. They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the reeds,[FN1] seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen. Suddenly it seemed to me that he was peering about him a little eagerly. "Do you see anything, X——-?" I said. "A shining, winged woman, covered ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... Scottish Highlanders, though it is by no means confined to them. Occasional instances of it have appeared in almost every nation, but it has always been commonest among mountaineers and men of lonely life. With us in England it is often spoken of as though it were the exclusive appanage of the Celtic race, but in reality it has appeared among similarly situated peoples the world over. It is stated, for example, to be very common among the ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... Volumes, Celtic Bards, Chiefs, and Kings.—In Two Volumes, Wild Wales, Its People, Language, and Scenery.—In Two Volumes, Songs of Europe; or, Metrical Translations From all the European Languages. With brief Prefatory Remarks on each Language and its Literature.—In Two Volumes, Koempe Viser; Songs about ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... the elder Yankee homes about, and the owners prepare to abandon them,—not always, however, let us hope, without turning, at the expense of the invaders, a Parthian penny in their flight. In my walk from Dublin to North Charlesbridge, I saw more than one token of the encroachment of the Celtic army, which had here and there invested a Yankee house with besieging shanties on every side, and thus given to its essential and otherwise quite hopeless ugliness a touch of the poetry that attends failing fortunes, and hallows decayed gentility of however poor ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... itself up to the disputation, Lady Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer—though she, it is true, did not say very much—a novelist, a mechanical expert of some sort, a railway peer, geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no clearly definable position, but all quite unequal to the task of maintaining that air of reverent vagueness, that tenderness of touch, which is by all Anglican standards imperative in so deep, so mysterious, and, nowadays, ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... of 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 of ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... sat David Lloyd George, with thick gray hair and snapping Celtic eyes. Alert and magnetic, he was on the edge of his chair, questioning and interrupting. Frankly ignorant of the details of continental geography and politics, naive in his inquiries, he possessed the capacity for acquiring effective information ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... schoolroom. The school was started and had the good fortune of its first four years' life under the care of a notable gentlewoman, Miss Annie Cragg Farthing, who was yet at its head at the time of this visit, but who died suddenly, a martyr to her devotion to the children, a year later; and a great Celtic cross in concrete, standing high on the bluff across the river, now marks the spot of her own selection—a spot that gives a fine view of Denali—where her body rests, and also the Alaskan mission's sense of the extraordinary ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... book lore In the cities of lengthy engagements Showing him pages of learning That he turned from to life's open volume, Acquiring indelible lessons, Loyalty, candor, clear seeing, Sincerity, plain speaking, love of his own, Passion for all things American. From Jerry, his father, Came Celtic humor, delight in the dance, And devotion to things of the theatre; From Helen, his mother, Depth, Celtic devotion to things of the spirit, Fineness of soul. Early he turned from his fiddle To write popular songs And tunes so whistly and ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... drama of hopeless struggle. The "second sight"—called "the gift" in Campbell of Kilmhor, and an incident also in The Riding to Lithend—was a sort of prophetic vision altogether credited among Celtic peoples, as among those of Scott's Lady of the Lake. When the mother sees the "riders to the sea,"—her drowned son and her living son riding together,—she feels convinced that he must soon die. The sharp cries of her grief and, above all, the peace of her resignation ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... exclusively Latin under the empire. After the annexation of Spain, Gaul and Brittany, the old Iberian, Celtic and other religions were unable to keep up the unequal struggle against the more advanced religion of the conquerors. The marvelous rapidity with which the literature of the civilizing Romans was accepted ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... race and blood in her was not towards, but against; not friendly, but hostile. The nearer she came to the English life, the more certain forces in her, deeply infused, rose up and made their protest. The Celtic and Latin strains that were mingled in her, their natural sympathies and repulsions, which had been indistinct in the girl, overlaid by the deposits of the current American world, were becoming ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Celtic (Scottish and Irish) immigrants during the late 9th and 10th centuries A.D., Iceland boasts the world's oldest functioning legislative assembly, the Althing, established in 930. Independent for over 300 years, Iceland ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... who formed the bulk of the great ruling families; all the well-known aristocratic names of mediaeval Italy are without exception Teutonic. In Gaul it was the rude Frank who gave the aristocratic element to the mixed nationality, while it was the civilised and cultivated Romano-Celtic provincial who became, by fate, the mere roturier. The great revolution, it has been well said, was, ethnically speaking, nothing more than the revolt of the Celtic against the Teutonic fraction; and, one might add also, the revolt of the civilised Romanised ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... spontaneous 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 ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Conquest of Gaul—and its success which opened the ancient and immemorial culture of the Mediterranean to the world. It was a revolution which for rapidity and completeness has no parallel. Something less than a hundred small Celtic States, partially civilized (but that in no degree comparable to the high life of the Mediterranean), were occupied, taught, and, as it were, "converted" into citizens of ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... newspapers or even in encyclopedias. Again the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average sceptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the base of the hill called Penniel or Penniel-heugh: and it is hoped that the etymological derivation of that word now to be hazarded will not imply in the etymologist the credulity of a Monkbarns. Pen, it is known, signifies in the Celtic language "a hill". And the word heil, in the Celto-Scythian, is, in the Latin, rendered Sol. In the Armoric dialect of the Celtic also, heol means "the sun:" hence, Penheil, Penheol, or Penniel, "the hill of the sun." Beyond the garden ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 28. Saturday, May 11, 1850 • Various
... railway station being at Clonmel. This miniature city has been the scene of many a heart-stirring event in the distant past. Here Cromwell was for a time held at bay, and his fanatical hordes made their Celtic opponents pay in blood for their patriotic and desperate defense ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... deeply superstitious, violent in their prejudices, obstinate withstanders of all novelty, rude, dull, stupid, perverse, and hardly redeeming a narrow and blinding covetousness by a stubborn and mechanical industry. Their country has been fixed upon as the cradle of Celtic nationality in France, and there are some who believe that here the old Gaulish blood kept itself purer from external admixture than was the case anywhere else in the land. In our own day, when an orator has occasion to pay ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... that throughout my journey, and I have passed in many villages, nothing heard I of this great political upheaval in the Empire. Probably the people of the Lebanons cherish not the Revolution. There is so much in common, I find, between them and the Celtic races, who always in such instances have been more royalists than the king. And I think Mt. Lebanon is going to be ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... 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 ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... his Celtic timbre pitched to the sky, "if I could be shtayin' a day or two longer I'd finish ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... making a gesture; and there was always that faint suggestion of the Scotch accent, whether they spoke English or broke into Dutch. When I remarked upon it, Cousin Cornelia laughed and said it was perhaps the common Celtic ancestry; and that if the Dutch heard Gaelic talked, they could recognize a few words ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... in his Discourse of December, 1889. And first we have some account of the extraordinarily various racial strains which were contributed to form the significant figure of the fifteenth-century Spaniard. On the ancient Iberian stock was grafted Celtic, Greek, Phoenician, and Carthaginian blood; and to these infusions succeeded the great invasion of the Visigoths of ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... said something of the kind. He is also the one among us who is endowed with that Celtic temperament which would make him sensitive to ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was originally written, "Jakorna," was of Scandinavian origin, and it was, in all probability, a mythmic rhyth—No, beg pardon, he should say a rhythmic myth (Cheers) sung by a wandering Sam Oar Troupe on their visiting Egypt and the Provinces before the time of the Celtic-Phoenician O'SIRIS, or at least before the reign of RAMESES THE FIRST, ancestor of the great Scotch RAMSEY family—(Cheers)—at one of the social entertainments given on a non-hunting day by that eminent sportsman NIMROD. Then came the question of where was "the corner" in which Jakorna ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... southern, Gallia Cispada'na, was possessed by the Boi'i, Leno'nes, and Lingo'nes. 7. These plains were originally inhabited by a portion of the Etrurian or Tuscan nation, once the most powerful in Italy; but at an uncertain period a vast horde of Celtic Gauls forced the passage of the Alps and spread themselves over the country, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... recent work, called 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 ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... cold, because you are not prone To bursts of eloquence or flights of feeling; You do not emulate the fretful tone Of those who turn from boastfulness to squealing; Your temperament, I am obliged to own, Is not expansive, Celtic, self-revealing; But some of us admire you none the less ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... Morris family. Mr. 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 visits to our house. She was renowned for both ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... the character of our old Saxon ancestors, and the legends connected with their first invasion of the country; and above all at the magnificent fables of King Arthur and his times which exercised so great an influence on the English mind, and were in fact, although originally Celtic, so thoroughly adopted and naturalised by the Saxon, as to reappear under different forms in every age, and form the keynote of most of our fictions, from Geoffrey of Monmouth and the medieval ballads, up to Chaucer, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... extreme materialism and Madonna worship. When European thought—between 1820 and 1860, let us say—rebelled against every kind of orthodoxy, and, as always happens with rebellion, made mistakes and went too far, France played a wretched role. It is a Celtic land, and Celtic it will remain; it desires, not personal freedom, but a despotic levelling, not equality before the law, but the base equality which is inimical to excellence, not the brotherhood that is brotherly love, but that which gives the bad the right to share with the good. That is why the ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... those rationalising, unimaginative, and merely clever professors, who have so 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 ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... That's business. But here, in this sanctuary, everything is sacred. There is nothing here but choice, essential pieces, the best of the best, priceless things. Look at these jewels, Beautrelet: Chaldean amulets, Egyptian necklaces, Celtic bracelets, Arab chains. Look at these statuettes, Beautrelet, at this Greek Venus, this Corinthian Apollo. Look at these Tanagras, Beautrelet: all the real Tanagras are here. Outside this glass case, there is not a single genuine Tanagra statuette in the whole wide world. What a delicious ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... lying a few miles to the south of Westchester, and the road between Millbrook and Spotswood was, and is, the most direct route thither from the Dutch settlements. The garb and other appointments of the stalwart Canadian Teuton of those days were such as to make him easily distinguishable from his Celtic or Saxon neighbor. He usually wore a long, heavy, coat of coarse cloth, reaching down to his heels. His head was surmounted by a felt hat with a brim wide enough to have served, at a pinch, for the tent of a side-show. His wagon was a great lumbering affair, constructed, ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... it by the shape and consistence of the mud or sand which gathered at the bottom of the great Wealden lake, or filled up the hollows of the old inland cretaceous sea. Paradoxical as it sounds to say so, the Celtic kingdom of the Regni, the South Saxon principality of AElle the Bretwalda, the modern English county of Sussex, have all had their destinies moulded by the geological conformation of the rock upon ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... enter upon the system of landholding in Scotland or Ireland, which appears to me to bear the stamp of the Celtic origin of the people, and which was preserved in Ireland long after it had disappeared in other European countries formerly inhabited by the Celts. That ancient race may be regarded as the original settlers of a large portion of the European continent, and its land system possesses a remarkable ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... in the Notes I bought from a country 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
... man, with a mild expression of countenance, blue eyes, a long, straight-pointed nose, high cheekbones, and light flaxen hair flowing down almost to his shoulders. He made some observation to me in a dialect which sounded as being a mixture of German, Celtic, and English; but the sense ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... whether William Baxter is authority for anything. When you see a word quoted from one of the languages or dialects which the moderns call Celtic, that word will very commonly be found not to exist. When at a loss, quote Celtic. If W. Baxter says (see No. 13. p. 195.) that buarth papan means the sun's ox-stall, or, in other words, that papan means the sun, I should wish to know where else such a name ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 18. Saturday, March 2, 1850 • Various
... very little harm had been done except the breaking of the glass, of which alone he had been thinking. This was a damage not to be repaired: as for the scratch that accompanied it, its scar was of no great consequence, as even when mounting the 'cat-dath, or battle-garment' of the Celtic Club, he adhered, like his ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... who knows how rapidly his language has become the language of commerce over the world; how it has almost extinguished the ancient Celtic tongues in Scotland and Ireland; how quickly in the United States it has driven Spanish out of the South West, and has come to be spoken by the German, Scandinavian, and Slavonic immigrants whom that country receives, it is surprising to find that Dutch holds its ground ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... had followed Napoleon from Egypt to Waterloo laid here by their younger fellows who still dreamt of future glory under their world-conquering Emperor. And when all this phastasma cleared away came another picture of the Celtic patriots raising the cairn and cutting the sweet old Roman ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... from Mr. Higgins's Celtic Druids, for the loan of which and a portion of this article, we thank our friend "JAMES SILVESTER," whose valuable note on "Circular Temples" must ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... to north of the Round Tower stands "The Cathedral" illustrating almost every phase of ecclesiastical architecture which flourished in Ireland from St. Patrick to the Reformation—Cyclopean, Celtic-Romanesque, Transitional and Pointed. The chancel arch is possibly the most remarkable and beautiful illustration of the Transitional that we have. An extraordinary feature of the church is the wonderful series of Celtic arcades and panels filled with archaic sculptures in relief ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous
... to explain that she was not the marrying kind. Then, brick-red and bull-necked, he tried to tell her in his groping Celtic way that he wanted children, that she meant a lot to him, that he was going to try to make her the happiest woman south ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... resentment toward governmental authority, hatred toward individuals acting for the rulers developed into feuds. In some such way the making of poteen and feuds were linked hand-in-hand long before the Anglo-Celtic and Anglo-Saxon set foot in ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... of his contemporaries, and of posterity;—he who destroys, or heedlessly neglects it, deserves the reprobation of the civilized world. As Dr. Stukely indignantly hung, in graphic effigy, the man who wantonly broke up the vast and wondrous Celtic Temple of Abury, so every other similar delinquent should be condemned to the literary gibbet. The miserable fanatic who fired York Cathedral is properly incarcerated for life, and thus prevented from doing further public ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... Long, meant, they say, either a lake, a wood, a populous place, a plain, or a ship-town. This last conjecture is, however, now the most generally received, as it at once gives the modern pronunciation, to which Llyn-don would never have assimilated. The first British town was indeed a simple Celtic hill fortress, formed first on Tower Hill, and afterwards continued to Cornhill and Ludgate. It was moated on the south by the river, which it controlled; by fens on the north; and on the east by the marshy low ground of Wapping. It was a high, dry, and fortified point of communication ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Argils.—The Cimmerians, a people mentioned by Herodotus, who occupied principally the peninsula of the Crimea, are distinguished by Prichard from the Cimbri or Kimbri, but supposed by M. Amedee Thierry to be a branch of the same race, and Celtic. Many of their customs are said to present a striking conformity with those of the Cimbri of the Baltic and of the Gauls. Those who inhabited the hills in the Crimea bore the name of Taures or Tauri, a word, Thierry says, signifying mountaineers in both the Kimbric and Gaulish idioms. The tribe ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... personal appearance of Mr. Miller, or "Old Red," as he was familiarly named by his scientific friends, will not be forgotten by any who have seen him. A head of great massiveness, magnified by an abundant profusion of sub-Celtic hair, was set on a body of muscular compactness, but which in later years felt the undermining influence of a life of unusual physical and mental toil. Generally wrapped in a bulky plaid, and with a garb ready for any work, he had ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... worshipped a goddess of the earth and of fire under the common name of Fornax, dea fornacalis. Grimm mentions a stone found at Cleves with the remarkable inscription—DEAE HLUDANAE SACRVM C. TIBERIVS VERVS, and remarks that Hludana was neither a Roman nor a Celtic goddess, and could be no other than Hlodyn, which shows the identity of the ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... and soft luxuries, declared these modern followers of Ambrose and Chrysostom, were the agencies of Satan in the undermining of morals. Pulpits thundered. The press sneered at the new Pied Piper of Hamelin, and poets sang of him. One Celtic bard named him "Master of the Still Stars and of ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... earnestness which has given those two great fakirs a posthumous vogue," Cairy remarked with a yawn. "If it were not for America,—for the Mississippi Valley of America, one might say,—Ibsen would have had a quiet grave, and Shaw might remain the Celtic buffoon. But the women of the Mississippi Valley have made a gospel out of them.... It is as interesting to hear them discuss the new dogmas on marriage as it is to see a child ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... domain: By whom unequal Camoeens, borne along A torrent-stream, majestic, wild, and strong, Sung India's clime disclosed, and fiery showers Bursting on Calicut's perfidious towers: By whom soft Maro caught Maeonian fire, And plaintive Ossian tuned his Celtic lyre:— If still 'tis thine o'er Morven's heaths to rove, Tago's green banks, or Meles' hallow'd grove, Assist me thence—command my growing song To roll with nobler energy along! Before me Life's extended vale appears, Onward I hasten thro' the gulf of years, ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... simple manners of his beloved Lutetia; where the amusements of the theatre were unknown or despised. He indignantly contrasted the effeminate Syrians with the brave and honest simplicity of the Gauls, and almost forgave the intemperance, which was the only stain of the Celtic character. If Julian could now revisit the capital of France, he might converse with men of science and genius, capable of understanding and of instructing a disciple of the Greeks; he might excuse the lively and graceful follies of a nation, whose martial ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... corresponding to a list then formed of about two hundred and fifty words. In this I have made such progress, that within a year or two more I think to give to the public what I then shall have acquired. I have lately seen a report of Mr. Volney's to the Celtic Academy, on a work of Mr. Pallas, entitled Vocabulaires Compares des Langues de toute la Terre; with a list of one hundred and thirty words, to which the vocabulary is limited. I find that seventy-three of these words are common to that and to my vocabulary, and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... to have something to do with the Celtic genius. One can always understand a Scottish Celt better by comparing him with an Irish one or a Welsh; and it will certainly prove illuminative in the present case to remember Mr. W.B. Yeats while one is thinking of Fiona Macleod. To the present writer it seems that the woman-soul is ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... The case for a Celtic origin is equally improbable. From the time when the Senones burned Rome in 390 B.C. till Caesar conquered Gaul, the fear of invasions from this dread race never slumbered. During the weary years of the Punic war ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... love; NEGATION, in Negative Propositions, as, I do not Love; and Limitation, wavering as between two, in the Dubitative or Questioning Forms of the Proposition, as, Do I love? Do I not love? The Celtic tongues have special modal forms to express these modifications ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and she laughed in a short and satisfied way. Willoughby turned and stared at her, disbelieving the evidence of his ears. But her face showed him quite clearly that she was thoroughly pleased. Ethne was a Celt, and she had the Celtic feeling that death was not a very important matter. She could hate, too, and she could be hard as iron to the men she hated. And these three men she hated exceedingly. It was true that she had agreed with them, that she had given a feather, the fourth ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... thousands of native Irish, Celtic in race and Catholic in religion. Like their Scotch-Irish neighbors to the north, they revered neither the government nor the church of England imposed upon them by the sword. How many came we do not know, but shipping records of the colonial period show that boatload after ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... traces of British song and story than if the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being borderers for over six hundred years. But the Welsh had their own national traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form, entered into the general literature of Europe. The French came into contact with the old British literature in two places: in the Welsh marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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; though ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... she might sell the family arms, such things being in great demand with the chivalry; her antique furniture, too, was highly prized by our first families. Thus Lady Swiggs contemplated these mighty relics of past greatness. Our celtic Butlers and Brookses never recurred to the blood of their querulous ancestors with more awe than did this memorable lady to her decayed relics. Mr. Israel Moses, she cherished a hope, would give a large sum for the portrait; the family arms he would value at a high ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... transmission by inheritance or testamentary disposition must be abolished. The property is to be held by a tenure resembling that of gavel-kind. It belongs to the community, and the priests, chiefs, or brehons, as the Celtic tribes call them, to distribute it for life to individuals, and to each individual according to his capacity. It was supposed that in this way the advantages of both common and individual property might be secured. Something of this prevailed originally in most nations, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... type: shown by that dark young woman over there, with the melancholy air. She must be a Celtic type. What is obvious is that there is great liveliness in these people, great elegance in their movements. They are like actors ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... (says Lord Byron,) "struck me forcibly by their resemblance to the Highlanders of Scotland, in dress, figure, and manner of living. Their very mountains seem Caledonian, with a kinder climate. The kilt, though white; the spare, active form; their dialect Celtic, in the sound, and their hardy habits, all carried me back to Morven."—Notes to the Second Chapter of Childe ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott |
