"Magically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... visionaries—at least the true ones—honour each other according to the degree of "eye" that each possesses. By "eye" the collector means a faculty of discerning a fine object quickly and instinctively. And, in fact, the trained eye becomes a magically fine instrument. It detects the fractions of a millimetre by which a copy belies its original. In colours it distinguishes nuances that a moderately trained vision will declare non-existent. Nor is the trained collector bound by the evidence of the eye alone. Of certain things he ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... his hand. On being admitted to his Majesty's presence, he, of course, proceeded to examine the royal thumb; which he suddenly wrenched with such violence, that the King called him a cursed rascal, and condescended to kick his shins. He soon found, however, that the doctor, had as it were, magically relieved his thumb from pain: and so grateful did he feel to Ward, whom he now termed his Esculapius, that he prevailed on him to accept a handsome carriage and horses, and shortly afterwards, presented his nephew, who subsequently became ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... departure was magically diffused. Amy said afterward that she began to understand what they meant when they talked about wireless telegraphy. For as the stage rattled and bumped along the dusty highway the next morning, figures appeared at the windows, handkerchiefs fluttered, and hands were waved in greeting and farewell. ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... floor, the boxes themselves serving, one as a table for the drugs, the other as a sort of counter where the druggist quickly compounded prescriptions, which the surgeons as hastily seized and personally administered. Carpenters were set at work; but of course shelves, etc., could not be magically produced, so we placed boards across barrels, arranging in piles the contents of the boxes ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... when she began to clear the tables of the things that had been wanted in the day, and to replace them by the things which would be wanted at night. We were only allowed to light the candles when they showed us the room magically put in order during the darkness as if the fairies had done it. She laughed scornfully at our surprise, and said she sincerely pitied the poor useless people ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... unable to pursue, dealt magically with some rocky ridges, which then rushed over the ice ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown
... shortly. He was gazing in much distaste at a brig to starboard, which was magically drawn up to the skies one moment and blotted from ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... night. When I returned to my hotel, a quiet man in dark clothes, who seemed interested in rubbing his finger nails with a silk handkerchief, appeared, magically, at my side. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... may—though by a fluke—have left a quantity of money to your widow, but her sole skill is to spend it. She has heard that there is such a thing as investing money. She tries to invest it. But, bless you, you never said a word to her about that, and the money vanishes now as magically as it once magically appeared in ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... sweetest craft that slips her moorings in the Round Pond is what is called a stick-boat, because she is rather like a stick until she is in the water and you are holding the string. Then as you walk round, pulling her, you see little men running about her deck, and sails rise magically and catch the breeze, and you put in on dirty nights at snug harbours which are unknown to the lordly yachts. Night passes in a twink, and again your rakish craft noses for the wind, whales spout, you glide over buried cities, and have brushes with pirates, and cast anchor on coral ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... actors' heads; in the Dusk of the Gods there is Gunther's hall, completely open on one side. Undefiled Nature, healthy and wild and sweet, is always present, and always in sympathy with the character of every scene. Besides being magically picturesque, the music is also continuously in a high degree dramatic, and it has yet another quality: it is charged with a sense of a strange, remote past—a past that never existed. No archaic chords or progressions occur, but ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... they were real doubles, those of slaves or vassals killed at the tomb, and who had departed along with the double of the master to serve him beyond the grave as they had served him here. A number of statues and images, magically endued with activity and intelligence, was afterwards substituted for this retinue of victims. Originally of so large a size that only the rich or noble could afford them, they were reduced little by little to the height of a few inches. Some were carved out of alabaster, granite, diorite, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... a letter's lineaments Though swollen to mainsail measure,—magically, I gather from your words; and on its face Are three vast seals, red—signifying blood Must I suppose? It moves on Dresden town, And dwarfs the city as it passes by.— You say ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... couple of eminent statesmen. Truly, a cosmopolitan crowd. What if the antecedents of some of the pleasure seekers here were known? I recognized many and it being my business to know such things, their stories came back to me magically. Skeletons at the feast? Oh, yes, grewsome ones, too. Just as well, an all-wise Providence has ordained our inability to see behind the veil. I knew that the woman opposite me could no more afford to lift her veil than ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... it, I think, to be an enchanted place, where every newly-arrived person became magically changed into a sort of Midas on a small scale; transforming everything he touched, if not into gold—the days of California were now over—at all events into Washington "eagles," or Mexican silver dollars, or even greenbacks, which were better than nothing, although ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... reversals were several. The Boston and Washington teams improved magically in new hands, while the Athletics went back a bit, partly because of too much prosperity and partly because of adversity. Having come from behind in 1911 and made a winning from a wretched start, the ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... parishioners, that, in spite of the prosperity of their fishing, they were unable to pay them. So the herrings left the district, and the parson could whistle for them, until he mended his ways and reduced his tithes, when they magically returned. ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... school, the Accademia di San Luca, founded in 1507 by Sixtus, when he called to Rome all the leading artists of Europe to assist in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, is an organization that magically links the present with the days of Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson, as it linked them, also, with the remote and historic past. The father of the present custodian of the Academy knew Thorwaldsen well. The grandfather ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Still she wanly persisted. And this was the more absurd in her because Salt Cellar offered very good scope for those legitimate effects of hers which we one and all admire. Was it nothing to her to have cut those black shadows across the cloisters? Was it nothing to her that she so magically mingled her rays with the candle-light shed forth from Zuleika's bedroom? Nothing, that she had cleansed the lawn of all its colour, and made of it a platform of silver-grey, fit for fairies ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... Joe's guard, darting his blade as though it were a foil. A cut opening magically on Joe's chest from the left nipple to navel, and ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... people that heard them first, the marble temples, the ivory palaces, the murderous throngs, are dust. The entire civilization from which they came has vanished. Yet, traced with a wooden reed on squares of clay, are flights of little arrows, from which, magically, it all returns. Miraculously with these books a world revives. Fashioned, some of them, at an epoch that in biblical chronology is anterior to man, they tell of creation, of the serpent, the fall and the deluge. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... and the Shaggy Man, Cap'n Bill and Uncle Henry, Tik-Tok and Professor Wogglebug. Glinda had the most splendid tent of all, except that reserved for Ozma, while the Wizard had a little one of his own. Whenever it was meal time, tables loaded with food magically appeared in the tents of those who were in the habit of eating, and these complete arrangements made the rescue party just comfortable as they would have been in their ...
— Glinda of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... continued the busy marquis, unfolding before the princess a magically fine lace texture, "this mantelet is sent by the Queen of France to the illustrious Princess Elizabeth. Only two such mantelets have been made, and her majesty has strictly commanded that no more of a ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... panic, the result of her interview with the Guatemalan general at the apartment house, vanished magically. She sat down at this unexpected friend's table with ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... at one time the very model of maidenly modesty and wisdom (336 ff.), at others an accomplished intriguante and demi-mondaine (549 ff., esp. 607 ff.). When the plot of the Ep. is getting hopelessly tangled, of a sudden it is magically resolved as by a deus ex machina and everybody decides ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... been satisfied with establishing such a system of communication that news and gossip are the common property of all nations. We have gone farther. We have established in every large region of population a system of voice-nerves that puts every man at every other man's ear, and which so magically eliminates the factor of distance that the United States becomes three thousand miles of neighbors, ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... hills of the interior of old Norway, and, although the weather is excessively hot, many of these are covered with snow. Everything is light, and transparent, and thin, and blue, and glassy, and fairy-like, and magically beautiful, and altogether delightful! There: have you made much of all that, good reader? If you have, be thankful, for, as I set out by saying, description of scenery, (at least to any good purpose), is impossible. The description of a man, however, is quite another thing. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... events have been dragging him nearer and nearer the gulf that yawns at his feet; while his destiny, hovering above him like an enormous vulture, hides the light from those who approach him. And the circles from above press magically forward to meet those from below: they advance, they contract, and then, uniting at last, their eddies blend and fasten upon what is ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... street more than a moment when she forgot that she was tired and short of sleep, and also very worried by affairs both private and public. Her body responded to the sun, and her mind also. She felt almost magically healthy, strong and mettlesome, and, further, she began to feel happy; she rather blamed herself for this tendency to feel happy, calling herself heedless and indifferent. She did not understand what it is to be young. She had ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... the different nations. On the shore, and round the castle battery, the congregated groups of lovely females traversed to and fro, and the witchery of blight eyes and beauteous faces upon the manly hearts of the sons of Neptune must have been magically triumphant. The Pearl beat the Arrow, and the Julia the Liberty,—thus equalizing the victory between the contending parties. The procession of the pilot boats, about forty in number, was a very animated scene; and in the sailing match of the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... corridor, Coleman felt the mournful owlish eyes of the German resting upon him. He took a case from his pocket and elaborately lit a cigarette. Suddenly there was a flash of light and a cage of bronze, gilt and steel dropped, magically from above. Coleman yelled: " Down!" A door flew open. Coleman, followed by the German, stepped upon the elevator. " Well, Johnnie," he said cheerfully to the lad who operated this machine, "is business good?" "Yes, sir, pretty good," answered the boy, grinning. ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... produced quite magically the slim, shining sword she had lent him once before. "Carry this," she said. "When it is drawn a certain door which would otherwise remain shut will open wide. And be of ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... which the hymn-writers sing, but which ordinary people have never seen. The golden harps were made for no other purpose than to produce celestial harmony. They suggest a scene in which peace and good-will come magically and reign undisturbed. Everything is exquisitely fitted for high uses. It is not so with the bayonet that was, and the poker that is. For it peace and good-will are afterthoughts. They are not even remotely suggested in its original constitution. ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... her chances of an invitation are small indeed, until her father is in a position to head a subscription list or an election fund, and then, presto! all the insuperable difficulties that previously existed, magically disappear. ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... on. The thing proved magically easy of accomplishment. By the fit of my clothing, if by nothing else, I could have told that several of my more noticeable convexes were becoming plane surfaces and gave promise in due season of becoming almost concave, some of 'em. But there was other and convincing testimony ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... Prince; 'as a bull nothing can injure me, but in my own form I am in no way magically preserved. All day long I have been chased by hunters, who saw in me, I suppose, a valuable prize. I was terrified of the hour of sunset arriving and finding me far from home. I used my utmost endeavour to reach this in time, but, alas! I was overcome with fatigue, from ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... they were entering, Truth, shattered into a thousand gleaming fragments, might be held in part, but never wholly. There man's quarry was the false Florimel, and she lured him on and he saw with magically anointed eyes. Too suddenly awakened, the imagination of the time was reeling; its sap ran too fast; wonders of the outer, revelations of the inner, universe crowded too swiftly; the heady wine made now gods, now fools of men. The white light ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... Mr. Tartar produced in the Admiral's Cabin by merely touching the spring knob of a locker and the handle of a drawer, was a dazzling enchanted repast. Wonderful macaroons, glittering liqueurs, magically-preserved tropical spices, and jellies of celestial tropical fruits, displayed themselves profusely at an instant's notice. But Mr. Tartar could not make time stand still; and time, with his hard-hearted fleetness, strode on so fast, that Rosa was obliged ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... forty-five, magically produced, it seemed, so quickly did it show in his hand, was making an icy ring against Dade's throat, and the words, the epithet for which he had hesitated, remained unspoken. Metallic, venomous and filled with a threat of death ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... down-stairs again there was another ring at the door. And my mother appeared magically out of the kitchen, but I was beforehand with her, and with a laugh I insisted on opening the front door myself this time. A young woman ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... seriously that one counts a thousand and forty-five forms for their combined present indicatives, and a trifle over ten thousand forms for the two fully expanded verbs; and yet the language, he hastens to add, is so magically simple that even a Basque child never makes ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... perfectly enchanting. The window itself, as you look upward, or rather as you fix your eye upon the center of it, from the remote end of the abbey, or the Lady's Chapel, was a perfect blaze of dazzling light; and nave, choir, and side aisles seemed magically illumined. We declared instinctively that the Abbey of St. Ouen could hardly have a ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the door of the shrine. We have not as yet discovered any of the statues employed in the ceremonial, but we know what they were like, what part they played, and of what materials they were made. They were animated, and in addition to their bodies of stone, metal, or wood, they had each a soul magically derived from the soul of the divinity which they represented. They spoke, moved, acted—not metaphorically, but actually. The later Ramessides ventured upon no enterprises without consulting them. They stated their ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... chintzes, his dimities and his veilings with a grand and lavish hand. Bang went his blue pencil through 3/11, and nobly he subscribed 1/0-3/4. Prices fell like nuts. A lofty one-and-eleven rolled down to six-three, 1/6 magically shrank into 4-3/4d, whilst good solid prints exposed themselves at ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... in a moment. One little sentence had done it. There was no more trouble. Philip had found coal. That meant relief. That meant fortune. A great weight was taken off, and the spirits of the whole household rose magically. Good Money! beautiful demon of Money, what an enchanter thou art! Ruth felt that she was of less consequence in the household, now that Philip had found Coal, and perhaps she was not sorry ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... us, is on the whole breath and sunlight; the breath of living creatures who have lived in the vast swamps and forests of some primeval world, and the sunlight which transmuted that breath into the leaves and stems of trees, magically locked up for ages in that black stone, to become, when it is burnt at last, light and carbonic acid as it was at first. For though you must not breathe your breath again, you may at least eat your breath, if you will ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and at the top of this dream-like hill, the gray ancient castle with bugles and the roll of drums sounding behind its ramparts. Bridges leaped across a valley edged with gardens connecting the Old Town with the New Town. Wherever his eyes fell, all was romance and memories of romance, a magically ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... fragrant secrets of the Indian grove, And splendors of the Indian looms, inwove With gold and silver flowers: "for, now," said they, "Our eyes have seen this thing sought day by day; By the all-conscious, silent sky well-known, And, specially, of yon white star fore-shown Which, bursting magically on the sight, Beckoned us from our homes, shining aright, The silver beacon to this holy hill: Mark if it sparkles not, aware and still, Over the place: The astral houses, see! Spake truth: Our feet ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... poured from the palace fronts and the hotels. Every movement of the fairy flotilla was repeated in the illuminated water, every torch-tip and scarlet lantern and flake of green or rosy fire; above all the bright full moon looked down as if surprised. It was magically beautiful in effect. Katy felt as if her previous sober ideas about life and things had melted away. For the moment the world was turned topsy-turvy. There was nothing hard or real or sordid left in it; it was just a fairy tale, and she was in the middle of it as she ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... The clouds vanished magically from Fairy's face, and she leaned forward with that joy of wedding anticipation that rules ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... impassion'd grandeur roll, Yet in full power simplicity is thine. Proceed, sweet bard! and the heaven-granted fire Of pity, glowing in thy feeling breast, May nought destroy, may nought thy soul divest Of joy—of rapture in the living lyre, Thou tunest so magically: but may fame Each passing year ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... a real woman, or more likely the buried puppet Charila, the Spring-Maiden, was brought up from the ground to enact and magically induce ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... soldier to apply the match to the batteries of cannon, not a sailor to assist in maneuvering the fleet, not a shepherd for the flocks. After the ruin of the village, and the destruction of the forts which dominated it, a ruin and a destruction operated magically without the co-operation of a single human being, the flame was extinguished, the smoke began to descend, then diminished in intensity, paled, and disappeared entirely. Night then came over the scene; ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... sitting at the feet of Epicurus, we had thrust uncertainty aside, and, thanking Heaven that we had fallen so magically upon our own, confined our conversation to the events of our journey, and compared enthusiastic notes regarding the wonders, entertainments, and perils ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... named our new home the "Sunshine" apartment and assured each other that we were very well pleased, and when one morning as I set out for the office I noticed that the lower halls and stairway had suddenly taken on an air of spruce tidiness—had been magically transformed over night, as it were—I was so elated that I returned to point these things out to the Little Woman. She came down to the door with me and agreed that it was quite wonderful, and added the final touch to our satisfaction. ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... comparatively simple structure—but by virtue of an ideal harmony in things; since it was natural and fitting that what had come from a hen should lead on to a hen again. The ideal nature possessed by the parent, hovering over the passive seed, magically induced it to grow into the parent's semblance; and growth was the gradual approach to the perfection which this ancestral essence prescribed. This was why Aristotle's God, though in character an unmistakable ideal, had to be at the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the hour when the passengers arose, and the ship was presently alive. The news swept from lip to lip magically; in all parts of the ship I saw men and women talking, with their faces pale with consternation and horror. I had not the courage to break the news to Miss Le Grand, and asked the doctor, a quiet, gentlemanly man, to speak to her. I was on the poop looking after the ship when the doctor ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... round me in the surprise of the moment, as if I had expected to see the title magically inscribed for us on ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... valleys, and out of the wool-white waves sudden sharp dark forms upthrust like strange masters of the deep. Towers took shape and islands upheaved, crowned with dark fortresses. To the west a vast and inky-black Gibraltar magically appeared. Soon the sea was but a prodigious river flowing within the high walls of an ancient glacier, a ghost of the icy stream that once ground its slow way ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... Of any hand that is no more, of any hand that never was, of any touch that might have magically changed her life? Or does she listen to the Ghost's Walk and think what step does it most resemble? A man's? A woman's? The pattering of a little child's feet, ever coming on—on—on? Some melancholy influence is upon her, or why should so proud a lady close the doors and sit alone ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... antiquity, many cities of Italy had kept the remembrance of the connection of their fate with certain buildings, statues, or other material objects. The ancients had left records of consecrating priests or Telestae, who were present at the solemn foundation of cities, and magically guaranteed their prosperity by erecting certain monuments or by burying certain objects (Telesmata). Traditions of this sort were more likely than anything else to live on in the form of popular, unwritten legend; but in the course of centuries the priest naturally ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... desert, but the real picture was more wonderful than her imagination could have painted. The sun had just dropped behind the waving line of dunes and dragged the fierce wind with him like a tiger in leash. All the world was magically still after the constant purring and roaring of the new-conquered beast. The voice of the Muezzin chanting the sunset call to prayer—the prayer of Moghreb—seemed only to emphasize the vast silence. Up from the shimmering ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... bumped her head, and getting out of and into her clothes was a fascinating exercise in contortion. She was entranced by the wash-room with its hot and cold water and its basin of apparent silver, whose contents did not have to be lifted and splashed into a slop-jar, but magically emptied themselves at ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Tim added, a single shiver of joy running through all three of them at once. The enchantment of their own dim memories of the dawn—of a robin, of swallows, and of an up-and-under bird flashed magically back. ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... seeing an Amish family group might easily wonder if he had not been magically transported to some secluded spot of Europe, far from the beaten paths of modernity. But in the cosmopolitan population of Lancaster the Amish awakes a mere moment's interest to the majority of observers. If a bit of envy steals into the heart of the little Amish ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... the century's turn, abounded in legend. Stories were told of fabled gunmen whose bullets always magically found their mark, of mighty stallions whose tireless gallop rivaled the speed of the wind, of glorious women whose beauty stunned mind and heart. But nowhere in the vast spread of the mountain-desert country ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... Winwood called his subtle Italian way, he induced his patron to discuss the speeches before the process of composition. These discussions, involving the swift rapier play of intelligences, Colonel Winwood enjoyed. They stimulated him magically. He sat down and wrote his speeches, delightfully unconscious of what in them was Paul and what was himself; and when he delivered them he was proud of the impression he had made ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... it only to the sesame of a sad voice those portals spring magically back? But for his sake she must needs pause on the threshold of attainment, and stifle that ambition which of itself precluded consideration of a calm, uneventful existence. She was young and full of courage, but the pathos of his years smote her heart; something inexplicable had awakened her ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... rebuilt this house—for them and their grandsire—whose trail was almost at its end. How happy he was in their presence! They, too, were happy because they were young, the sun was shining and their home was magically restored. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... her flashed across the doctor's vision magically. The emerald wings, slashed with scarlet and yellow, wheeling and swooping about her head, ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... the story better without her, yet I was glad—how glad!—to have her seated there, an attentive presence in a simple gown, white as the seafoam—from which, there was no further doubt in my mind, she had magically sprung. ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... way from trunk to trunk, with a delicious, half-scared sense of adventure and novelty. She stopped at last by a thin trunk whose bark glimmered faintly. She felt it with her cheek, quite smooth—a birch tree; and, with her arms round it, she stood perfectly still. Wonderfully, magically silent, fresh and sweet-scented and dark! The little tree trembled suddenly within her arms, and she heard the low distant rumble, to which she had grown so accustomed—the guns, always at work, killing—killing men and killing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... raiment of silvery white, her heart yearning for her old love and her own city. Already her thought is far from Paris. Was her heart ever with Paris? That is her secret. A very old legend, mentioned by the Bishop of Thessalonica, Eustathius, tells us that Paris magically beguiled her, disguised in the form of Menelaus, her lord, as Uther beguiled Ygerne. She sees the son of Priam play the dastard in the fight; she turns in wrath on Aphrodite, who would lure her back to his arms; but to his arms she ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... closely against the book-shelves, against the book-shelves which magically had grown up in front of the door by which he had entered. He was in the place of books and roses—in the haunt ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... fortunes which people had not earned; but surely they were created somehow; and as the universe, when the divine fiat had formed the world, was richer, rather than poorer, so, we felt, must these values so magically growing into our fortunes be good, rather than evil, and honestly ours, so far as we might be able to secure them to ourselves. I said as much to Jim one day, at which he smiled, and remarked that if we got to monkeying with the ethics ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... man of affairs, who had taken, rather late in life perhaps, to playing the part of a French country gentleman; he returned with a store of acute observations and pleasant anecdotes, a little older, a little mellower, otherwise unchanged. Of those magically expanded views, those sudden yawnings of sympathetic depths, that nowadays every one may count on winning, if not by a week in Brittany, at any rate by a month in Manitoba, we find scarcely a trace. In the sixteenth century that sort of thing was unusual. Even in those days there ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... the one link that tied the Volskys to their dingy quarters! With Pa gone the family could seek cleaner, sweeter rooms—rooms that would have been barred to the family of a drunkard! With Pa gone the air would clear, magically, of some of ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... observed to Shawn, when Simon handed him the insubstantial and gay object and restored the gold token. They were at a window in the circular room; the couch had magically melted away. ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... mountain youth turned a strangely sobered face and fixed his blue eyes on the engineer as though he were searing every feature of that imperturbable young man in his brain forever. It was not a bad face, but the avenging hatred in it was fearful. Then he, too, saw the Blight, his face calmed magically and he, too, stared at her, and turned away with an oath checked at his lips. We went on—the Blight thrilled, for she had heard much of our volunteer force at the Gap and had seen something already. Presently I looked back. Prisoner and captors were climbing the little ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... writing it, with sighs, at the desk in her stuffy, uncomfortable bedroom. As Hilda gazed at the formation of the words, she could see the unhappy Sarah Gailey writing them, and the letter was like a bit of Sarah Gailey's self, magically and disconcertingly projected into the spacious, laughing home of the Orgreaves, and into the mysterious new happiness that was forming around Hilda. The Orgreaves, so far as Hilda could discover, had no real anxieties. They were a joyous lot, favoured alike by temperament ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... over his body, furious, though somewhat disheartened at seeing their champion come to grief; but they had to deal with a blade that had kept half a dozen Hungarian swordsmen at bay, and, with point or edge, it met them every where, magically. They were drawing back, when Delaney, recovering from the first effects of his fearful wound, crawled forward, gasping out curses that seemed floating on the torrent of his rushing blood, and tried to grasp Mohun by the ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... is tried one realizes that hitherto there has been an effort necessary for the adequate production of such effects, whereas now the bow seems endowed with a consciousness quite en rapport with that of the player, and difficulties vanish magically. It seems voluntarily to carry into effect the player's wishes without any physical ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... padded down the aisle with that walk which is a peculiar result of flat feet and twenty years of swaying car. Emma followed. He stopped before Lower Six and drew aside the curtain. It was that lower which can always be produced, magically, though ticket sellers, Pullman agents, porters, and train conductors swear that it does not exist. The key to it is silver, but to-night Emma McChesney Buck had unlocked it with finer metal. Gold. Pure gold. For William drew aside ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... and unlike every woman he had known—including his wife—she had an integrity of her own, seemingly beyond the reach of all influences economic and social. All the more exasperating, therefore, was a propinquity creating an intimacy without substance, or without the substance he craved for she had magically become for him a sort of enveloping, protecting atmosphere. In an astonishingly brief time he had fallen into the habit of talking things over with her; naturally not affairs of the first importance, but matters such as ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... signal, there broke forth, as of one voice, the low-distant strains of the most enchanting music. The voices and the tones from the musical instruments were so harmoniously and wonderfully blended that the result was magically effective. The strains increased in volume—they seemed to approach nearer and nearer—until the whole edifice resounded and re-echoed as though filled with one vast orchestra sounding forth the Anthem of Creative Life, "We Praise Thee, ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... thing undertaken was to place in the old Norman choir the magically lovely choir stalls (1245-1315) which happily still remain to us. Perhaps it was their enthusiastic loveliness which led about 1320 to the rebuilding of the Presbytery and the lovely tabernacle in the back of ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... approached a gate that amazingly was a gate. Hinges, yes; and mechanical complications, and a pendant cord on each side. I tugged at one and the gate magically opened. As we passed through I tugged at the other and it magically closed. This was luxury ineffable to one who had laboured with things that seemed to be kept merely for the sake of a jest that was never of the best and was staling with use. It would also be, I hoped, an object ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... from the situation. But she did not speak; she could not speak; and soon she knew that her own silence had bound her. She yielded herself with poignant and magnificent joy to the profound drama which had been magically created by this apparently commonplace dialogue. The climax had been achieved, and she was conscious of being lifted into a sublime exultation, and of being cut off from all else in the world save him. She looked at him intently with a sadness that was the cloak ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... North of Scotland. There are Elizabethan references to the poem, and a twelfth century romance turns on the main idea of sleep magically induced. The lover therein is more fortunate than the hero of the ballad, and, finally, overcomes the spell. The idea recurs ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... remarkable proof of Tennyson's ingenuity in construction. Tales about the birth of Arthur varied. In Malory, Uther Pendragon, the Bretwalda (in later phrase) of Britain, besieges the Duke of Tintagil, who has a fair wife, Ygerne, in another castle. Merlin magically puts on Uther the shape of Ygerne's husband, and as her husband she receives him. On that night Arthur is begotten by Uther, and the Duke of Tintagil, his mother's husband, is slain in a sortie. Uther weds Ygerne; both recognise ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... And rustle round and down the strand. No other sound . . . If it should hap, The ship that sails from fairy-land! The silken shrouds with spells are manned, The hull is magically scrolled, The squat mast lives, and in the sand The gold prow-griffin ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... seems that the boy's room, which was the middle one, whirled around on a pivot, while the adjoining rooms occupied by Bilbil and Rinkitink remained stationary. The little King also found a breakfast magically served in his room, and while he was eating it, Klik came to him and stated that His Majesty, King Kaliko, desired his presence in the ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum
... the Institute had sprung up—not exactly in a night, but in a marvellously short space of time. There was more of interest about it, too, than about the Aladdin buildings; for whereas the latter were evolved magically out of that mysterious and undefinable region termed Nowhere, the Miss Robinson edifice came direct from smoky, romantic London, without the advantage of ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... before them, instantly recognisable, though his appearance magically bettered expectation. The committee, virtuously true to the course of action they had planned, had passed Emmet by without a look, but the people surged to their feet and cheered, as they saw the President pause and take their ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... and genius to admit of its being plucked out by the roots for critical examination. The bigger meaning is there—we all see it, and recognize that it stamps The Lollard as good drama. Each playwright must work out his own meanings of life for himself and weave them magically into his own playlets; this is something that cannot be added to a man, that cannot be satisfactorily explained when seen, and cannot be taken away ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... The line of separation was marked—so marked, indeed, that it seemed a vast, rose-colored billow rolling, widening and sweeping onward like a swell of the ocean shoreward. On it came rapidly, till the whole landscape was magically changed. The flowers, the trees, the grass, the waters of the lakes, the white buildings, the costumes of the people in the streets, even the sky, changed in aspect. The white clouds looked like fire-lit smoke, and far toward the ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... beads. A small package neatly done up in leaves probably contained his lunch. He teetered along with a mincing up and down step, every movement, and the expression of his face displaying a fatuous self-satisfaction. When we looked back again this youth had magically become two. Then appeared two women and a white goat. All except the goat were dressed for visiting, with long chains of beads, bracelets and anklets, and heavy ornaments in the distended ear lobes. The manner people sprang apparently ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... reflection in the mists which we call the "specter in the brocken." Hoakaku means "to have a vision," a power which seers possess. Since the spirit may go abroad independently of the body, such romantic shifts as the vision of a dream lover, so magically introduced into more sophisticated romance, are attended with no difficulties of plausibility to a Polynesian mind. It is in a dream that Halemano first sees the beauty of Puna. In a Samoan story (Taylor, I, 98) the sisters catch the image ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... all was the way it seemed—magically—to be producing such beneficent results. John and Paula were reconciled by it,—or at least as soon as it happened. Paula had come down from Ravinia that very day, had had some sort of scene with her husband, and the two had been almost annoyingly at one upon every ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Sometimes a flitting half-memory, of a novel to be written, a novel it was important that he should write, tantalised him for a space before vanishing again; and sometimes whole novels, perfect, splendid, established to endure, rose magically before him. And sometimes the memories were absurdly remote and trivial, of garrets he had inhabited and lodgings that had sheltered him, and so forth. Oleron had known a good deal about such things in his time, ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... the tale of that disastrous defeat on the beach at Galveston. When he had finished the story, which he ingeniously elaborated, Alaire was doubled over her saddle. It was the first spontaneous laugh she had had for days, and it seemed to banish her worries magically. Alaire was not of a melancholy temperament; gaiety was natural to her, and it had required many heartaches, many disappointments, to darken her ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... with Genghis Khan, who had a wonderful steed of brass, magically obedient to the wish of the rider, together with a magical mirror, sword, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Bluejay, "is the important official called the Guardian of the Entrance of Paradise. Sir Guardian, permit me to introduce to you two children of men who have been magically transformed into skylarks against their will. They are not quite birds, because their heads retain the human shape; but whatever form they may bear, their natures are sweet and innocent and I deem them worthy to associate for a brief time with your splendid and regal race. Therefore I have ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... effort to shake off her grip. He looked at the dark cloud of her hair that had ruled him so magically, and the memory of old delights made him grip a great handful almost inadvertently as he spoke. "Dear Leopard," he said, "we humans are the most streaky of conceivable things. I thought I hated you. I do. I hate you like poison. And also I do ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... queerly and saw a face quite terribly different from other human faces. The covering was taken from her, snowflakes touched her cheek, a lantern shone in her eyes, and she was lifted and carried into a warm, pleasant-smelling place from which were magically and completely banished all sound and bitterness of storm. She tried to see where she was, but her eyes looked on incredible colors and confusions, so she shut them and passively allowed herself to be handled by deft ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... that the most magically beautiful effect of all was produced by the Peeresses, in suddenly and simultaneously donning their coronets. It was as though the stars had somehow kept back their radiance till the young moon revealed herself in all her ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... Then, suddenly darting away from this lofty and solemn view, he indulged in some wild story of native humour, which convulsed the whole audience with laughter. Yet, before the burst had subsided, he touched another string of that harp which so magically responded to the master's hand. He described the long career of calamity through which an individual born with a glowing heart, brilliant faculties, and an aspiring spirit, must struggle, in a country filled with the pride of independence, and yet for ages in the condition of a province. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... boyhood days he found to be magically changed. New faces met him on all sides. The old log cabin where his father and mother had resided, was deserted and its dilapidated walls were crumbling with decay. The once happy inmates were scattered over the face of the earth, while many of their voices were hushed in death. Kit Carson felt ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... sympathetically, and lo! I was succeeding! He turned the page with the incredible rapidity and dexterity of which only great pianists seem to have the secret, and in conjunction with my air in the bass he was suddenly, magically, drawing out from the upper notes the sweetest and most intoxicating melody I had ever heard. The exceeding beauty of the thing laid hold on me, and I abandoned myself to it. I felt sure now that, at any rate, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... snowy satellites lifted themselves into the clouds. All those luminous battlements and turrets and pyramids—the Mole, the Grandes Jorasses, the Aiguilles du Midi, the Dent du Geant, the Aiguilles d'Argentiere— were now suffused with a glow so magically delicate that the softest tint of the blush rose would have seemed harsh and ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the work of an instant. The oncoming attendant recited a catalogue of the foods at his disposal; and the phrase "welsh rarebit" caught his attention. He must have a welsh rarebit; he had not had a welsh rarebit since he was at school. It magically arrived, on an oriental tray, set on a ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... and Carpeaux, or about the marvellous harmony of the East facade! But a flick of the cane towards the half-hidden moulding! And George had felt with a thrill what an exquisite curve and what an original curve and what a modest curve that curve was. Suddenly and magically his eyes had been opened. Or it might have been that a deceitful mist had rolled away and the real Louvre been revealed in its esoteric and sole ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... whither. When he was caught, brought up in custody, and turned over to the ladies, with, Behold, your King! to be caressed, courted, admired, and flattered, the king of beauty and fancy would too commonly bolt; slip away, steal out, creep off; unobserved and almost magically he vanished; thus mysteriously depriving his fair subjects of his much-coveted, long looked-for company." If he had been fairly caged and found himself in congenial company, he let time pass unheeded, sitting up all night ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... types of sea, the small waves en papillote, and peruke-like puffs of farinaceous foam, which were the delight of Backhuysen and his compeers. If one could but arrest the connoisseurs in the fact of looking at them with belief, and, magically introducing the image of a true sea-wave, let it roll up to them through the room,—one massive fathom's height and rood's breadth of brine, passing them by but once,—dividing, Red Sea-like, on right hand and left,—but ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... he took her offered hand and said "How do you do," in his turn, and merely to repeat the ordinary words seemed magically to restore the situation to the normal. Indeed, he was so much relieved, and it was so natural to be shaking hands, to be conventionally greeting, that he forgot he had only a towel on and his professional manner came ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Lizer's greasy fingers over the yellow keys of that demented piano in a vain endeavour to teach her "choones", of which her mother expected her to learn on an average two daily, it seemed as though I had a mountain lifted off me, and I revived magically, got out of bed ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... the English family with whom she stayed that it was unfortunately impossible, because the place was closed for a week, and she had only three days there. Upon that lady's going to the Museum, as she assured me, alone to the gate, self-introduced as an American lady, the gate flew open, as it were magically. I am unwillingly bound to add that she certainly was young and exceedingly pretty. Still, the porter of that institution is of an obese habit, and, according to the best of my observation of him, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... He was particularly interested in his work just then. There was a great saddle of clay, and he scooped it up magically. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... to place implicit confidence in the superior diplomatic powers of their Gascon comrade, and to have been seriously impressed by the gravity of his statement concerning the thrust of Nevers, so death-dealing, so unwardable, so almost magically fatal, for they readily agreed to his proposition. Places were rapidly found for Cocardasse and Passepoil at the table. AEsop returned to his seat and his little sinful book. It was deepening dusk by now, but the hunchback knew his Aretino by heart, and the open page ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... glanced fearfully behind him, like a hunted man. All Nature seemed dead. The forests which covered the sides of the mountain were sleeping, lying heavy beneath a weight of sadness. The still air was magically clear and transparent. There was never a sound. Only the melancholy music of a stream—water eating away the rock—sounded the knell of the earth, Christophe went to bed in a fever. It the stable hard by the beasts stirred as restlessly and ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... and three weeks," said Billy, remembering something, "the difference is sometimes no greater than between Tweedledum and Tweedledee." He smiled humorously at the other young man, a frank, likeable smile that softened magically the bluntness of his young mouth. "That's why I came to you. You are the only soul I know to be interested in Miss Beecher's welfare. The Evershams are off up the Nile—and they'd probably be helpless, anyway. Besides, you know more about this blamed Egypt of yours ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... hurried, clinging to the house wall for a thin strip of shade, too narrow even to cover their feet. All the windows of the stores were open, and within the offices, with a little thinking, a little turn of the pen, and a little tracing in ink, men were magically warding off impending disaster, or adding thousands to the thousands accumulated already—men, too, were writing without thinking, mechanically copying or posting, scribbling letters of form, with heads clear or heads aching, with hearts burning ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... is absent, the characters he has cut in the glass will, the poet hopes, magically defend his mistress against the seductive entreaties ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]
... voice, magically softened, broke in. "Cut out the rough stuff. You better go home and think it over. Bein' a private ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... dinner-dance. When you went to the Landis mansion, you drove directly into the building, which had a court so large that a coach and four could drive around it. The entire ground floor was occupied by what were said to be the most elaborately equipped stables in the world. Your horses vanished magically through sliding doors at one side, and your carriage at the other side, and in front of you was the entrance to the private apartments, with liveried flunkies ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... one and the same; it is the motive behind that makes it good or evil; and his motive was entirely unselfish. He knew—provided he was not first robbed of self-control—how vicariously to absorb these evil radiations into himself and change them magically into his own good purposes. And, since his motive was pure and his soul fearless, they could not work ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... indeed beautiful, and so very calm and still that the glassy water reflected every little cloud in the sky; and on the seaward horizon everything was quivering and magically turned upside down— islands, trees, icebergs, and all! A solitary gull, which stood not far off upon a stone, looked so preposterously huge from the same atmospherical cause, that I would have laughed immoderately, had ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... of animals and human beings who have been magically transformed into different kinds ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton |
