"Mysterious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gossip, or the crops, and then Mrs. Hopper would go on silently sewing, and "Pa," his white head bent over a "Farmer's Almanac," made long and painful calculations on a scrap of paper in which he seemed to get much mysterious assistance from the almanac. ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... thoughts, his great longings would have been impressed upon you. The father might have had a dash of humour in him, the mother's early girlhood would have lent itself to pretty writing. For the ice we would have had a mysterious lake in the wood, said to be haunted. The boy would have loved o' twilights to stand upon its margin. He would have heard strange voices calling to him. You would have felt ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... blow for The General! He wrote at the end of the year: "This has been, is, and will be, to the end of my earthly chapter, a mysterious and painful dispensation—at least, so it appears at the moment. What God may do for me in the future, and how He may make it work for my good does not at present appear. But He is able to make it ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... say that the belief in His all-encompassing nearness makes those phenomena even more difficult of explanation than they were before. The devout deist could always comfort himself with the thought that, however mysterious God's standing afar off might be, by and by, when He drew nigh again, He would deal out even-handed justice to all; but such comfort is not open to those who explicitly deny God's remoteness, but on the contrary assert ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... now become endemic, by which her European provinces are ravaged, depopulated and reduced to the greatest misery. She is profiting now by her experiences after the Crimean War. As long as she remains inactive, the influence she exercises on general politics by her mere extent, and the mysterious power which seems to be the corollary of it, far exceeds her actual strength. On her descending into the arena, however, this optical illusion is dissipated, as was apparent in the recent Turkish War; her prestige was lessened. No steps will therefore be taken ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... the jogi sat with his face turned away, and the more the king pressed him the more silent and mysterious he became. At last, after much persuasion, ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... brought him. He lay asleep swathed in his swaddling clothes like a mummy in its wrappings, a motionless, mysterious being, but he seemed to his mother beautiful—more beautiful than anything she had seen in those vague visions of happiness she had indulged in at the convent, which were never to be realized. She kissed his little ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... and spoke like another Pitt.(300) He attacked the Duke of Argyll on favouring Jacobites, and produced some flagrant instances, which the Scotch Duke neither answered nor endeavoured to excuse, but made a strange, hurt, mysterious, contemptuous, incoherent speech, neither in defence of the bill nor in reply to the Duke of Bedford, but to my Lord Bath, who had fallen upon the ministry for assuming a dispensing power, in suffering ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... to the science of nutrition is still very imperfect, is certain; but, I think there is reason to believe, that we are upon the eve of some very important discoveries relative to that mysterious operation. ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... emptying this, Miss Gushing was horrified to find two human ears, apparently quite freshly severed. The box had been sent by parcel post from Belfast upon the morning before. There is no indication as to the sender, and the matter is the more mysterious as Miss Cushing, who is a maiden lady of fifty, has led a most retired life, and has so few acquaintances or correspondents that it is a rare event for her to receive anything through the post. Some years ago, however, when she resided at Penge, she let apartments ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a sort of doze, when I thought I heard some one talking in a low voice close to my ear. I started into a sitting posture, and listened a moment. It was pitch dark; I could see nothing. I soon, however, discovered that the mysterious sounds proceeded from the berth above me. It was my friend reciting, either for my amusement or his own, the poem he had favoured me with in the morning. He was apparently nearly asleep, and he drawled the half-uttered sentences through his nose in the most ludicrous manner. He was recapitulating ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... These mysterious articles were followed, however, by others which were more within their range of comprehension—by a pair of dumb-bells, a purple cricket-bag, a set of golf clubs, and a tennis racket. Finally, when the cabman, all top-heavy and bristling, had staggered ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and probably as such wore his first surtout. We hear of him reporting later in the Lord Chancellor's Court, probably for some daily paper; but beyond the exception which I shall mention presently, we have no record of his taking an active and direct part in any of those mysterious rites that go to ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... shoulder' circuiting the mount, As we have ever us'd." So custom there Was usher to the road, the which we chose Less doubtful, as that worthy shade complied. They on before me went; I sole pursued, List'ning their speech, that to my thoughts convey'd Mysterious lessons of sweet poesy. But soon they ceas'd; for midway of the road A tree we found, with goodly fruitage hung, And pleasant to the smell: and as a fir Upward from bough to bough less ample spreads, So downward ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... dusted my outer garments and ran to the Senate House, and I was just in time to see the Prince take his degree and join in the acclamations. This ended, I ran back to the feet of the Megatherium, and in a few minutes the royal party entered the mysterious gangway above described. They halted, I half thought in a spirit of mischief, to contemplate the furniture of the schools, and the Vice-chancellor (Whewell) pointed out the beauties of the dirty spot where Queen Bess had sat two hundred and fifty years before, when she presided ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... feel rather awkward, and she was at once relieved and sorry when he walked away to join another early riser who had come out upon the lawn. For some mysterious reason Emily Fox-Seton liked him. Perhaps his magnificence and the constant talk she had heard of him had warmed her imagination. He had never said anything particularly intelligent to her, but ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the ritual, symbols, and names of the Rose-Croix were borrowed from the Templars, and that the Order was divided into seven degrees, according to the seven days of creation, at the same time signifying that their "principal aim was that of the mysterious, the investigation of Being and ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... of the green book had passed with no apparent result of grave importance, but the spirit of mischief which had caused this book to be found was by no means asleep in the school. Pranks were played in a most mysterious fashion with ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... and yet she seldom hurried by it or averted her eyes. It had an unpleasant fascination for her, and a mysterious reproach, which she did not seek to fathom. She walked on thoughtfully to-day; and when, at the next corner, she turned into the street that led toward home, she was given a surprise. Arthur Russell came rapidly from behind her, lifting his ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... innkeeper as in some singular way an authority on motor cars; as being deep in the secrets of the mechanism, management, and mismanagement of motor cars; holding the man all the time with a glittering eye like the Ancient Mariner. Out of all this rather mysterious conversation there did emerge at last a sort of admission that one particular motor car, of a given description, had stopped before the inn about an hour before, and that an elderly man had alighted, ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... that bore the frail bark which carried me and my fortunes was carrying me smoothly and unconsciously along towards the mysterious abyss where all that exists is engulfed. Its course lay through a vast desert; and the banks which passed before my eyes were of fearful sameness. Indescribable lassitude took possession of my whole being. I had never, knowingly, practised evil; I had ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... agreed with Chess, and against Ruth's better judgment it was determined to come back to this locality after dinner and lurk about the mysterious island in the ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... fastidious lady), and apparently enjoying the company of noted intellectual people as well as the best of them. And who knows, if he had spoken, what light he might have shed on what seemed to mere mortals as mysterious, abstruse, and occult problems? Perhaps, after all, he liked that "salon" because in reality he found so much to amuse him in the conversation; and perhaps he was, under that guise of friendly interest in noted scientists, ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... taste or smell or feeling; but it forms an image of some kind which it presents to the intellect. This power at once proceeds to form, not a brain-picture, but an intellectual or abstract image of the object presented. For instance, you see this book, and at once you, in some mysterious way which has never yet been explained, impress some image of it on your brain. That you do so is clear from the fact that the image remains when the book is withdrawn. That material image or brain-picture is the phantasm. It is not an idea, though it is often improperly so called. ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... water, on entering or leaving the cathedral. Such have been the countless thousands of times that this piece of marble has been so touched, that, purely, from such friction, it has been worn nearly half an inch below the general surrounding surface. I have great doubts, however, if this mysterious piece of masonry be as old as the walls of the church (which may be of the fourteenth century), which they pretend to say ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... knocked out of his wits by suggestion—that he, too, does things in association that he would never think of doing singly. The fact may be accepted, but the reasoning raises a doubt. The numskull runs amuck in a crowd, not because he has been inoculated with new rascality by the mysterious crowd influence, but because his habitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely. In other words, the numskull is vicious, but a poltroon. He refrains from all attempts at lynching a cappella, not because it takes suggestion to make him desire to lynch, but because it takes the ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... and novelties of her new surroundings; now she began to enjoy them. The salt air was delicious; the light morning mist over the bay, as she saw it when she went to take her morning bath, held a whole day of sunlit promise within its mysterious folds; the soft low hum of the distant city, which she could hear when the waves were still, made the solitude and the freshness and the purity of the island seem doubly rare and sweet. And her baby began to be now to Diana the most wonderful of delights; more than ever ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... their light, nor in the lovely oval contour of her sweet, healthily pallid face. No, it is in her mouth—sensitive, strong yet gentle, suggestive of all the passion and suffering and striving that have built up her life. Her mouth—the curve of it—I think it is, that sends from time to time the mysterious thrill through her audiences. And I imagine those who know her best look always first at those strangely pale lips, curved in a way that suggests bitterness melting into sympathy, sadness changing into mirth—a way that seems ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... we to recite one half of this mystery, which we were let into by our late dissatisfaction, all the world would be in love with disrespect; we should wear a slight for a bracelet, and neglects and contumacies would be the only matter for courtship. Unlike to that mysterious book in the Apocalypse, the study of this mystery is unpalatable only in the commencement. The first sting of a suspicion is grievous; but wait—out of that wound, which to flesh and blood seemed so difficult, there is balm and honey to be extracted. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... him unmercifully about his "bogy." This, I got from Tammy, who had heard them both ragging him during the second dog-watch the following day. There was another thing Tammy told me, that showed how the Second Mate bothered about his inability to understand the mysterious appearance and disappearance of the man he had seen go aloft. He had made Tammy give him every detail he could remember about the figure we had seen by the log-reel. What is more, the Second had not even affected to treat the matter lightly, nor as a thing to be sneered ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... their neighbors, laid their fingers on their lips and were silent." The affair created almost as much sensation throughout Europe as in Spain. Philip, in his despatches to other courts, spoke in such vague and mysterious language that it was impossible to tell what he meant, and the most varied ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... love for it; I can feel myself blushing. "It is the moon!" I say softly and passionately; "it is the moon!" and my heart strikes toward it in a soft throbbing. So for some minutes. It is blowing a little; a stranger wind comes to me a mysterious current of air. What is it? I look round, but see no one. The wind calls me, and my soul bows acknowledging the call; and I feel myself lifted into the air, pressed to an invisible breast; my eyes are dewed, I tremble—God is standing near, watching me. ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... 'Mamma and I were sitting on the hotel piazza the other day, watching two young Spaniards who were performing feats of horsemanship. They dropped four-bit pieces on the dusty road, and riding up to them at full speed clutched them from the ground in some mysterious way that was perfectly wonderful. Then Nick Gutierrez mounted a bucking horse, and actually rolled and lighted a cigarette while the animal ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became the medical adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the disease interested the physician, but he was strongly moved to look into the character and qualities of the patient, these two men, so different in age, came gradually to spend much time together. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... like a victim suddenly released from the stake, and the narrow escape I had had from the mysterious chamber of doom made that dungeon still more awful. There were very few sentences to the chamber afterward, and gradually its name disappeared from our talk and from our fear. Now and then some boy asked, "What ...
— Harper's Young People, November 4, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... emotions. The race, the species, is claiming the individual, endeavouring to secure the individual for its greater ends. In the space of a few years the almost sexless boy and girl have become consciously sexual, are troubled by the still mysterious possibilities of love, are stirred to discontent and adventure, are reaching out imaginatively or actively towards what is at last the recommencement of things, the essential fact in the perennial reshaping of the order of the world. This is indeed something of a second birth. At its beginning ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... she did not understand nor seek to analyse, but which seemed to link the troubled past and the unknown future by a band of gold. Wherever she might go, or whatever might become of her, she could never lose Walter out of her life. It was the love of the child merging into the mysterious hope of the woman, but she did not understand it yet. Had he known even in part how she felt, it had saved him many a bitter hour; but as yet that solace was denied him. That hot, rebellious young heart must needs go through ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... spines instead of their finger-tips—were slashed into and made mincemeat of or extolled to the skies. Then the "patty-pats," with their little dabs of yellow, blue, and red, in imitation of the master Monet; the "slick and slimies," and the "woollies"—the men who essayed the vague, mysterious, and obscure—were set up and knocked down one after the other, as is the custom with all groups of painters the world over when the never-ending question of technique is tossed into the middle of ...
— The Man In The High-Water Boots - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of the mysterious power of the demon, who had threatened a certain courtier possessed of considerable strength of mind, suddenly occurred to Genji, who thought self-possession was the only remedy in present circumstances, and recovering his composure a little, said to Ukon, "She cannot ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... shirt, and abruptly I was galvanized into alertness. Just above the soft collar where his movements had crushed it down I saw unmistakably the loop of a tiny black thread of wire projecting upward! Conclusive proof! This was one of the mysterious enemies! One of the apparitions which had thrown all Bermuda into a turmoil stood ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... let us say, which the necromancer was uttering, only sounded but too much like "hokey-pokey kickeraboo abracadabra," and the rest of the mysterious sounds with which the conjurer at juvenile parties seeks to invest his performance with additional wonder, for the benefit of his ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... back against the old gray wall, the nest of his family for countless generations, with the scent of the flowers in his nostrils, and the sound of the bees in his ears, it had begun to dawn upon him that he had lost the stream of his childhood, the mysterious, infinite idea of endless, inexplicable, original birth, of outflowing because of essential existence within! There was no production any more, nothing but a mere rushing around, like the ring-sea of Saturn, in a never ending circle of formal change! ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... are made up of a series of trifles, in each of which a separate act of will and choice is involved. Looking to the way in which character is made, as coral reefs are built up, by a multitude of tiny creatures whose united labours are strong enough to breast the ocean; looking to the mysterious way in which the greatest events in our lives have the knack of growing out of the smallest; looking to the power of habit to make any action of the mind almost instinctive: it is of far more importance that we should become accustomed to apply this precept of seeking guidance ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... containing the needful formul and ritual for counteracting the malevolence of the evil spirits and for healing the sick. Pure or "holy" water and the number seven were regarded as endowed with mysterious power in the performance of these magical rites; thus magical threads were ordered to be bound seven times round the limbs of the sick man, with phylacteries attached to them on which were inscribed "sentences from a ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... The ceremonies against which we dispute are more than matters of mere order, forasmuch as sacred and mysterious significations are given unto them, and by their significations they are thought to teach men effectually sundry mysteries and duties of piety. Therefore they are not free nor indifferent, but more than men have power to ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... window fired that shot across the street at him, as he bent over the lamp in the Brunell cottage. He had one problematic advantage—it was possible that he had not been recognized as the intruder in the deserted house. He must contrive by hook or crook to obtain a glimpse of the mysterious newcomers, and learn the cause of their interest in the Brunells and their affairs. They were in all probability emissaries of Paddington's—possibly one of them ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... which are equally common in real life, are never mentioned. Typhoid is fairly frequent, but scarlet fever is unknown. Heart disease is common, but then heart disease, as we know it, is usually the sequel of some foregoing disease, of which we never hear anything in the romance. Then there is the mysterious malady called brain fever, which always attacks the heroine after a crisis, but which is unknown under that name to the text books. People when they are over-excited in novels fall down in a fit. In a fairly large experience I have never known anyone do so in real life. The ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the osprey pool, remarked that he received a line that afternoon saying the mysterious builder of the corner in Northern Consolidated had been discovered in Robert Lance Bayard. The old gray buccaneer would at once learn the terms upon which they ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... was tidying myself up, my mind was busy with the strange tangle things were got into. The mysterious Master Freake, after turning the Mayor into his pliant tool, had apparently disappeared. The Colonel had not breathed a word of explanation, and seemed to feel so secure that he was dawdling in the town as if no enemy were at ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... early Sabbath morning of October 18, 1889. I had a congregation of millions all over the world to appeal to. I stood before them, accredited in the religious course I had pursued, approved as a minister of the Gospel, upheld as a man and a preacher. The hand of Providence is always a mysterious grasp of life that confuses and dismays, but it always rebuilds, ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... higher blessings, is sealed by the blood of Christ. He represents both God and man. In His death, may we not say that the manhood and the Godhead are parted, and we, standing as it were between them, encompassed by that awful sacrifice, and enclosed in its mysterious depths, enter into covenant with God, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... jacketed, filed into the neat sitting room with its bright carpet, its cheerful fire, its side table with a snowy cloth on which shining tea and coffee pots were standing, their hearts thrilled with satisfaction. In a large stuffed rocking chair, Prossy's old mother, wrapped up in a shawl and some mysterious ill health which seemed to forbid any exertion, received them with genteel languor ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... cub awakened to find his mother absent at her hunting. The moonlight at the entrance to the cave called him and he trotted out. Save for the thunder of the falls, the night was very still. He stood upon the ledge before the cave, looking down upon the wilderness, mysterious and alluring in the moonlight, and ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... not consist for me in one particular symptom, look, or confession, in any one external circumstance against which I could have fortified myself. It was an invisible miasma diffused in the surrounding atmosphere; it was in the air and light, in the expiring season, in my lonely life, in the mysterious proximity of another equally isolated existence; it was in the long excursions which took me from her and made me feel the more forcibly the unconscious attraction which recalled me; in her white dress, ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... how much suffering she underwent in secret, night after night, as she lay awake, in her perplexed musings on that one absorbing thought. Yet they were like those vague nightly terrors of wolves, darkness, or mysterious horrors, from which little children often suffer so much, without revealing them, and entirely shake off by day; for Marian awoke in the morning to cheerfulness and activity, with spirits undepressed, full of interest in things around; and only when reminded of ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... I was then so anxious to find in them? The date of a pious foundation—the name of some monkish imagier or copyist— the price of a loaf, of an ox, or of a field—some judicial or administrative enactment—all that, and yet something more, a Something vaguely mysterious and sublime which excited my enthusiasm. But for sixty years I have been searching in vain for that Something. Better men than I—the masters, the truly great, the Fauriels, the Thierrys, who found so many ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... tell how this mysterious stranger had stated to him that it would be possible to get plenty of money to back the proposition of a strike in the Empire Shops. The new plant was just ready to start up, and fresh swarms of men were coming in; what was wanted ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... serious, and being poetry made it still more so. "Don't you do it, else you'll rue it!" That's what my father used to tell me a score of times a day, when I was a boy, and the words somehow came in my mind that night. Therefore I resolved to speak 'em and make 'em sound so mysterious as I could, just when the young ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... nobler, braver creature, is arrayed in a wretched flimsy finery of tights and spangles, parading his physical weakness and inferiority in the toggery of a mountebank. The tiger, vast, sleepy-eyed, mysterious, lies motionless in the front of his cage, the gorgeous stripes of his velvet coat following each curve of his body, from the cushions of his great fore paws to the arch of his gathered haunches. The watchfulness and flexible activity of the serpent and the strength ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... smiles for the first time these ten days; you pass by plantations of ship-masts, and forests of steam-chimneys; the sailors are singing on board the ships, the bargees salute you with oaths, grins, and phrases facetious and familiar; the man on the paddle-box roars, "Ease her, stop her!" which mysterious words a shrill voice from below repeats, and pipes out, "Ease her, stop her!" in echo; the deck is crowded with groups of figures, and the sun ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was nothing mysterious in this. The boy followed implicitly the dictates of nature within him. He was amiable, straightforward, sanguine, and intensely earnest. When he laughed he let it out, as sailors have it, "with a will." When there ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... suddenly before a lifeless and decaying redwood-tree with an expression of disgust and impatience. It was the very tree he had passed only an hour before, and he now knew he had been describing that mysterious and hopeless circle familiar enough to those lost in ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... Philip was assassinated in the most mysterious and extraordinary manner.[B] Olympias was generally accused of having been the instigator of this deed. There was no positive evidence of her guilt; nor, on the other hand, had there ever been in her character and conduct any such indications of the presence ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... save for his piercing and mysterious eyes, had no explanation to give. All he said was, "Me no see all sides house same time"; so suggesting that, as the room had windows on all three sides, Louise must have escaped while he made his supposed sentry- go, slip-slopping round the house. Mazarine showed what he thought ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... through his soul, and he opened his eyes. The little woodland glen was steeped in soft moonlight; and, if it looked wonderful and beautiful when the sun shone upon it, how much more so now, when the very light was mysterious, and suggestive of something beyond! Around the mound there doated—for that word only can express their motion—like bright and fleecy clouds, a band of lovely beings, resembling none he had ever seen before. As he gazed upon them, he thought not of creatures of earthly ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... rustle, scarce audible, yet still he heard it, and under such circumstances it seemed most mysterious. In an instant he was all attention. He lay motionless, yet listened with intense watchfulness, peering at the same time into the dark room, where the moonlight struggled ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... just north of Italy, though, as we now know that Asia was the cradle of our race, and especially of that portion of it that has peopled Europe, we suppose that all the dwellers on the boot-shaped peninsula had their origin on that mysterious continent at some ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... escape. He was quit in this way of the ponderous gratitude of Mr. Killian, and of the confidential gratitude of poor Ottilia; but of Fritz he was not quit so readily. That young politician, brimming with mysterious glances, offered to lend his convoy as far as to the high-road; and Otto, in fear of some residuary jealousy and for the girl's sake, had not the courage to gainsay him; but he regarded his companion ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... over the mysterious Pacific we shall for a brief period take our leave of Frank Chadwick and Jack Templeton, than whom no more courageous lads (nor men, either, for that matter) engaged in the greatest war of ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... like the Hittites of Asia Minor, [3] are a mysterious race. No one as yet has been able to read their language, which is quite unlike any Indo-European tongue. The words, however, are written in an alphabet borrowed from Greek settlers in Italy. Many ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... meaning of his plan was to withdraw from the self-chosen post of censor. His only alienation was an occasional disappearance for a few days. I never asked him where he went, and had never spoken to him concerning his mysterious remark about having been in Surrey. Neither had I heard anything of his being there from father. Once he told me that his father had explained the marriage of old Locke Morgeson; but that it was not clear to him that we were ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... what authority we know not, that his royal highness, after passing a sleepless night in vain conjectures, despatched at an early hour, one of his privy- counsellors to Brummel, offering carte blanche if he would disclose the secret of that mysterious cravat. But the "atrox animus Catonis" disdained the bribe. He preferred being supplicated, to being bought, by kings. "Go," said he to the messenger, with the spirit of Marius mantling in his veins, "Go, and tell your master that you have ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... man was living, his brethren blamed him for having treated me with fairness. But, I trust, now that he has left the shore touched by the mysterious sea that never yet has borne, on any wave, the image of a homeward sail, this crime will be forgiven him by those who still remain to ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... in the waning afternoon of life, when her smooth brown hair was as yet unstreaked with grey and her cheeks had still a splash of colour in them, she fell ill of some mysterious malady—mysterious, at least, to the sympathetic villagers—and one dreary day in the blustering autumn she was aware in her heart that the ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... was second vice-president. As a token of sympathy with this undertaking, Mr. Lyons offered to procure her a free pass on the railroads over which she would be obliged to travel. This pleased Selma greatly, for she had always regarded free passes as a sign of mysterious and enviable importance. ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... pitiless philanthropy; and under what pretext? "To save," said they, "the money of the poor." Alas! has a poor man ever obtained from a piece of money enjoyments as sweet and innocent as those which the mysterious urn of fortune contained for him? Cut off from all the sweets of life, how many delicious hours did he introduce into the bosom of his family when, every two weeks, he put the value of a day's labor on a quatern. Hope had always her place at the domestic hearth. The garret was peopled with illusions; ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... everything is reserved exclusively for the enjoyment of the people in divisions one and two, while the workers subsist on block ornaments, margarine, adulterated tea, mysterious beer, and are content—only grumbling when they are unable to obtain ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... of himself, he was sure she was a good girl. In short, though Harry had never read a novel in his life, she was a little angel, even if she had no wings. He even went so far as to believe she was a little angel, commissioned by that mysterious something, which wiser and more devout persons would have called a special providence, to relieve his wants with the contents of her basket, and gladden his heart by the sunshine of her sweet smile. There is something in goodness which always finds its ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... of anything you would want to shut up in that drawer," said Laura, laughing at my mysterious face, which she said looked about as secret as a hen-coop with the chickens all flying out between the slats. "In the first place, you haven't any secrets, and are not likely to have; and next, you will show us (Mr. Sampson ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... remarkable occurrence took place: we were visited by the Arctic rose gull (Rhodostethia rosea). I wrote as follows about it in my diary: "To-day my longing has at last been satisfied. I have shot Ross's gull," [48] three specimens in one day. This rare and mysterious inhabitant of the unknown north, which is only occasionally seen, and of which no one knows whence it cometh or whither it goeth, which belongs exclusively to the world to which the imagination aspires, is what, from the first moment I saw these tracts, I had always hoped to discover, as my ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... keep from flying south when the summer is over. She watched all the fields around Glamerton; she knew what response each made to the sun, and which would first be ripe for the reaping; and the very day that the sickle was put in, there was Annie to see and share in the joy. How mysterious she thought those long colonnades of slender pillars, each supporting its own waving comet-head of barley! Or when the sun was high, she would lie down on the ground, and look far into the little forest ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... her eyes through it, and now they were sweeter, more mysterious, more provocative of haunting thoughts. It flashed over him with dread certainty that he had fallen in love with her. The shock struck him mute. He had no reply for the rancher's hearty farewell. Then the car lurched away and dust rose ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... awhile before I dared to move; and even when I found courage to rise, I stood listening with a beating heart, expecting a footfall on the stairs or that something—I knew not what—would rush on me from the closed doors of this mysterious house. But the silence endured. The sparrows outside twittered, the cricket renewed its chirp, and at length, drawing courage from the sunlight, I moved forward and lifted the dog's coat from the floor. ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... contest between Austria on the one hand, who was struggling to maintain her position in Italy, and France with Sardinia on the other. Sardinia, under the guidance of Cavour, had joined the alliance of England and France against Russia; and in July 1858 an interview at Plombieres, under rather mysterious circumstances, between Cavour and Louis Napoleon, led to effective confederacy; a marriage, arranged or suggested at the same time, between Princess Clothilde of Sardinia and a cousin of the Emperor, brought the two illustrious houses still closer ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... which has been described as mystical has its roots in the East, in the great Oriental religions. The mysterious "secret" taught by the Upanishads is that the soul or spiritual consciousness is the only source of true knowledge. The Hindu calls the soul the "seer" or the "knower," and thinks of it as a great eye in the centre of his being, which, ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... had no small gift of intuition; proved by the facility and fervour with which she could adapt her mind to widely different conceptions of life. This characteristic, aided by the perspicacity which is bestowed upon every jealous woman, perchance enabled her to read the mysterious Sibyl with some approach to exactness. Were it so, prudence should have warned her against a struggle for mere hatred's sake with so formidable an antagonist. But the voice of caution had never long audience with Alma, and was not likely, at any given ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... infant sorrow or infant fear. She sat on her nurse's knee, scarcely speaking, but continually falling into those reveries which we see in quiet children even at that early age, and never without a mysterious wonder, approaching to awe. Of what can ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... 2. But that mysterious Providence, the wisdom of whose ways is above human comprehension, had visited her with wasting sickness, and her little means had become exhausted. It was now, too, midwinter, and the snow lay heavy and deep ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Puritan, the man of the world, and the vagabond. There was something too of the obsolete soldier of fortune, with the cocked and feathered hat, worn audaciously on one side. There was also a touch of the elfin, the uncanny—the mysterious charm that belongs to the borderland between the real and the unreal world—the element so conspicuous and so indefinable in the art of Hawthorne. Writers so different as Defoe, Cooper, Poe, and Sir Thomas ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the world affords a newspaper reporter so much satisfaction as gathering up the details of a bloody and mysterious murder, and writing them up with aggravating circumstantiality. He takes a living delight in this labor of love—for such it is to him, especially if he knows that all the other papers have gone to press, and his will be the only one that will contain the dreadful intelligence. ...
— Editorial Wild Oats • Mark Twain
... goodwill they began to prepare a meal, but hardly had it been dished up, and placed upon the table, before another band of soldiers marched up and surrounded the house. The beggar man had gone into Perth, and told people about the mysterious knight who had bought his old cloak in order that he might go and see the English soldiers, and when the rest of the soldiers in the town got to hear of it, they had suspected at once who he really was, and had come to ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... resurrection hindered him for a while from making any movement; and when this had passed, and he was able to reflect more calmly, he comprehended all. He had simply been duped by an Indian ruse; which explained the mysterious addition to the number of the corpses, and the lessened distance between himself and that which had been ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... the mysterious Thyrza, can any modern eroticism equal them, for large and troubled abandonment; natural as gasping human speech and musical as ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... breath of incense came when the doors were opened. The Hindus prostrated themselves on the floor, and hid their faces; it was explained as their oriental custom, but it is certainly favorable to Thaumaturgy. Two days afterwards I was told, being then at sea, that while we visited the shrine a mysterious bell had sounded. No such incident was mentioned at the time, and I felt quite sure that Madame Blavatsky and myself were the only persons present whose testimony would be trustworthy. The interior of the shrine was inlaid with metal work. There were ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... a mysterious and unusual silence, prepared to carry out his employer's plans. His preparations were not extensive. First, he polished his silver spurs. Then he borrowed a coat from one of the boys, brushed his Stetson, and with the business instinct of a Hebrew offered Hi Wingle nine dollars for ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... on his coat and crossed the yard, after a day's work that had passed like a pleasant hour, being gilded with such delightful anticipations, the foreman of the works made him a mysterious signal. Henry saw it, and followed him into his office. Bayne looked carefully out of all the doors, then closed them softly, and his face betrayed anxiety, ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... anywhere else. She outlived the horrors of the Revolution and speaks in her memoirs of the man Bertin. She never knew who he was nor whence he came. All that she knew was that he came to her like some mysterious agent of God, bringing help, counsel, a semblance of happiness, at the moment when she was at the end of all her resources and saw grim starvation staring her and her children in the face. He appointed all sorts of strange places in out-of-the-way Paris where she was wont ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... for the East in April, 1783. It is impossible not to sympathise with the feelings of a scholar about to visit places over which his studies had thrown the charm of a mysterious interest; to explore treasures that had rested as yet in darkness to European eyes; and to approach the imagined cradle of human science and art. During his voyage he made the following memoranda of objects for his ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... does Beauty think about it?" this one had asked, laughing. She had arrived at the end of a discussion just as Joan was leaving the room. And then she gave a long low whistle, feeling that she had stumbled upon the explanation. Beauty, that mysterious force that from the date of creation has ruled the world, what does It think? Dumb, passive, as a rule, exercising its influence unconsciously. But if it should become intelligent, active! A Philosopher has dreamed of ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... instance of a prince, capable of holding the reins of government, who had adopted a similar course. All Europe was astonished at the resolution of Charles, and all historians of the period have moralized on the event. But it ceases to be mysterious, when we remember that Charles was no nearer the accomplishment of the ends which animated his existence, than he was thirty years before; that he was disgusted and wearied with the world; that he suffered severely from the gout, which, at times, incapacitated him for the government ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... gave it pride and passion; his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature. The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are nature's own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now of this ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... parted him from the time fixed for his escape. Besides, there was one thing that engaged his most anxious thought—in what way was the escape to be effected? They had told him to hope for it, but had not told him what was to be hidden in the mysterious pate. And what friends awaited him without? He had friends, then, after five years in prison? If that were so he was indeed a highly favored prince. He forgot that besides his friends of his own sex, a woman, strange to say, had remembered him. It is true that she had not, perhaps, been scrupulously ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sight directly underneath. Mr. Sladden broke the panes of the wonderful window and wrenched away with a poker the lead that held them. Just as the glass broke he saw a banner covered with golden dragons fluttering still, and then as he drew back to hurl the poker there came to him the scent of mysterious spices, and there was nothing there, not even the daylight, for behind the fragments of the wonderful window was nothing but that small cupboard in ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... a governess in the Yellett family, moreover, one from that mysterious centre of culture, the East, had not only rent the neighborhood with bitter factions, but had submitted the Yelletts to the reproach of ostentation. In those days there were no schools in that portion of the Wind River country where the Yelletts grazed their flocks and ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... last new acquisition, the latest addition to his wardrobe, lay solemnly smoothed down upon the top, Freddy's patience could bear no more. Bursting into a long howl of affliction, he called aloud upon Nettie to explain that mystery. Was he going to be sent away? Was some mysterious executioner, black man, or other horrid vision of fate, coming for the victim? Freddy's appeal roused from her work the abdicated family sovereign. "If I'm to be sent away, I shan't go!" cried Freddy. "I'll run off and come back again. I shan't go anywhere ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... under the influence of the Gospel. The Salvation Army Officer, instead of standing upon some dignified pedestal, to describe the fallen condition of his fellow men, in the hope that though far from him, they may thus, by some mysterious process, come to a better life, goes down into the street, and from door to door, and from room to room, lays his hands on those who are spiritually sick, and leads them to the Almighty Healer. In its forms of speech and writing the Army constantly exhibits this ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... best acquainted with the order of nature and the mysterious designs of Providence assure us with confidence that all this is as it should be; that woman is not meant to grow and flourish singly, but to hang on man, and to depend on him, like the vine upon the elm. If we remember ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... faint. But she did not. She was strong and well and had never fainted in her life. She rallied in a moment and tried to think. Something had happened to David. Something dreadful, perhaps, and she must go at once and find out. Still it must be something mysterious, for the man had said it was private. Of course that meant David would not want it known. David had intended that the man would come to her and tell her by herself. She must go. There was nothing else to be done. She must go at once and get rid of this awful suspense. ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... that, never fear; it will be my turn the moment they are sure of him—she will inherit everything. Now, let me tell you what's happening. From being a strong, healthy man, my father has, since Travers's arrival, begun to be attacked by a mysterious malady. He has periodical fainting-fits, sometimes convulsions. He'll be feeling better for a day or so; then, without a word of warning, whilst you're talking to him, he'll drop like a shot bird and go ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... the orator of music: we want them both,—the mysterious whispers and the resolute pleadings from the better world, which calls us not to slumber here, but press daily onward to ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... "The Hundred and First Regiment," the essay on "Human Stupidity," and numerous dramatic pieces of a more or less ephemeral kind, has just fallen a victim. It has been generally understood that M. Noriac died from a mysterious malady which has not long since been recognised by French physicians as the "smoker's cancer." It is alleged that the deceased man of letters suffered for two whole years from the ravages of this dreadful ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... time these two perfected modern aristocrats stood regarding the difficult problem of the Anglo-Saxon citizen, that ambiguous citizen who, obeying some mysterious law in his blood, would neither drill nor be a democrat. Bert was by no means a beautiful object, but in some inexplicable way he looked resistant. He wore his cheap suit of serge, now showing many signs ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... conduct of Henry with regard to Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, implies how different an opinion he had of them; that in the first case, he used natural and most rational methods prove him an impostor; whereas his whole behaviour in Perkin's case was mysterious, and betrayed his belief or doubt that Warbeck was ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... These occurrences, with the mysterious surrender of Union City to Forrest, on the 16th of March, so incensed the commander of the Department that a strong force was organized, and in command of General S. D. Sturgis, started, on the 30th ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... elderly slave of a petticoat compelled to leave the mistress who too repeatedly deceives him. In vain he tried to hide his profound and consuming melancholy; it was too plain that he was suffering from one of the mysterious complaints which the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... them as idle tales, and they believed them not."[1363] After all that Christ had taught concerning His rising from the dead on that third day,[1364] the apostles were unable to accept the actuality of the occurrence; to their minds the resurrection was some mysterious and remote event, not a present possibility. There was neither precedent nor analogy for the stories these women told—of a dead person returning to life, with a body of flesh and bones, such as could ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... and each found himself looking directly into the little ring of a revolver's muzzle. A tall, slim figure in faultless evening dress stood behind them, half in the shadows. This mysterious stranger had jet black hair, and wore a ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... The affront to the Brahmans is the immediate occasion for the slaughter but hardly its actual cause; and, if it is argued that the Yadavas must first be destroyed in order to render Krishna's withdrawal from the world complete, we must then assume that the Yadavas are in some mysterious way essential parts of Krishna himself. Such a status, however, does not seem to be claimed for them and none of the texts suggest that this is so. The ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... stitching rapidly, "is such a mysterious one, and has in these days of general improvement, secured for itself a relative meaning which benefits as many as it injures, and particularly, as regards one's personal virtues or defects, which are many or few according to the disposition of the speaker towards ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... to himself that only Lucinda could rival her in beauty. Her golden locks fell down in such length and quantity that they not only covered her shoulders, but concealed everything except her feet, and the bystanders more than ever desired to know who this mysterious beauty might be. Some one advanced, and at the noise the beauteous phantasy raised her head, and thrust aside her locks with both hands, to see what it was that had startled her. No sooner did she perceive them ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... do," said her mother. "But, of course, I know you didn't mean to do wrong. Still, as it happened, no great harm was done, but you should have told me about it at the time. It was not right to be so mysterious about it, nor to have it as a secret. You two children are too small to have secrets away from Father and Mother, unless they are little ones, like birthday surprises and the like. Now, don't listen under ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandpa Ford's • Laura Lee Hope
... you were puzzled by some mysterious likeness,"—Tom began eagerly, smiling at her. And stopped short, open-mouthed, assailed by so apparently preposterous a recognition that for the minute it left him ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... from across the tomb, as if to assure you that thoughts of you had followed them as far as there. Judge, then, how touched I was in receiving the legacy destined for me—that light, elegant, and mysterious gift, chosen to recall to me unceasingly the tie that had existed between us. It was a lace veil, the one she wore the day of ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... "the slickest crook in America" finding himself somewhat hampered in his native haunts, the seething underworld of New York, because the police suspected him of certain daring and mysterious burglaries although they had no positive proof against him, had chosen to shift his base of operations South for awhile. But the Southern authorities had been urgently warned to look out for him; in consequence they had been so ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... since. If Mr. Murthwaite is right, the Indians are likely to be on the lookout at the bank, towards the end of the month too—and something serious may come of it. What comes of it doesn't matter to you and me except as it may help us to lay our hands on the mysterious Somebody who pawned the Diamond. That person, you may rely on it, is responsible (I don't pretend to know how) for the position in which you stand at this moment; and that person alone can set you right in ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... black and mysterious, the sky was studded with stars when he called her, and she laboriously drew on her stockings and boots. Well back from the fire he had arranged a seat for her, using a saddle-blanket for a covering, and upon this she ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... particularly odd to Rip was that, though these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed. Nothing interrupted the stillness of the scene but the noise of the balls, which, whenever they were rolled, echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... tore under their feet; there was a glorious moon that observed every tattered weed sticking up through the whiteness, and etched it with its shadow. The town lay under the moon almost dramatic, almost mysterious, so withdrawn it was out of the cold, so turned in upon its own soul of the fireplace. It might have stood, in the snow and the silence, for a shell and a symbol of the humanity within, for angels or other strangers ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... but the extreme duskiness prevented her perceiving what it was. Almost fainting with terror, she had yet sufficient command over herself to check the shriek that was escaping from her lips, and, letting the curtain drop from her hand, continued to observe in silence the motions of the mysterious figure she saw. It seemed to glide along the remote obscurity of the apartment, then paused, and, as it approached the hearth, she perceived, in the stronger light, what appeared to be a human figure. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... of causing everything to miscarry, took it into their heads to confide it at once to two hundred men, in order "to test the effect," as the ex-Colonel Beville said later on, rather naively. They read the mysterious document which had just been printed to the Gendarmes Mobiles, who were drawn up in the courtyard. These ex-municipal guards applauded. If they had hooted, it might be asked what the two experimentalists in the coup d'etat ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... Jacobite demonstration in England, amounting in most places to riot. In London, and all over England, so far as one can judge, the popular feeling appears to have been rather with the Jacobites than against them. Stout Jacobites toasted a mysterious person called Job, who had no connection with the prophet, but whose name contained the initial letters of James, Ormond, and Bolingbroke; and "Kit" was no less popular, because it stood for "King James III.," while the mysterious symbolism of ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... interesting experiments in vivisection, that the one needful endowment for a critic of American letters is the power to induce within himself "a profound murmur of ancestral voices, and to experience a mysterious inflowing of national experience, in meditating on the names of Mark Twain, Whitman, Thoreau, Lincoln, Emerson, Franklin, and Bradford." Compare "Is There Anything To Be Said for Literary Tradition," in The Bookman for October, 1920. Any candid consideration ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... left to the companionship of her own sad thoughts, and unable to see Olga alone for even a moment, more than one painful and unutterably bitter discovery had been made. She felt that indeed her childhood had flown for ever, that the sacred mysterious chrism of womanhood had been ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... immediately, added new horrors to the gloom. Apparitions, claps of thunder, earthquakes, heightened the terror and amazement; whilst the person to be admitted, overwhelmed with dread, and sweating through fear, heard, trembling, the mysterious volumes read to him, if in such a condition he was capable of hearing at all. These nocturnal rites gave birth to many disorders, which the severe law of silence, imposed on the persons initiated, prevented from coming to light, as St. Gregory ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... which so attract everybody, including myself. The Happy Recruit (METHUEN) might as well (or even better) have been plotless. There is the central figure, Carl Siemens, who comes to England from abroad in his youth and has an unremarkable career, and there is a mysterious and rather tiresome trunk which is mentioned from time to time and finally opened; but apart from these the book is but a collection of little episodes more or less about the same people, the Maynard family ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... flung up his arms like a lost spirit. The monk took the helm in a tired way; he did not seem much astonished for he came from an ignorant part of the world in which it is not uncommon for lost spirits to shriek when they see the curious shape which the Professor had just seen on the top of the mysterious ball, but he took the helm only just in time, and by driving it hard to the left he prevented the flying ship from smashing into St. ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... lengthy note may be closed fitly with the following mysterious remark in Doughty's usual quaint style (vol. I, p. 127), in connexion with the murder of a Bagdad Jew who tried to reach Kheibar: "But let none any more jeopardy his life for Kheibar! I would that these leaves might save the blood of some: and ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... sail to China on a mysterious mission. Long before he sailed, Chris met the enemies who would try and stop him—evil Claggett Chew, the dandy Osterbridge Hawsey, the treacherous old beggar Simon Gosler. With a Nubian boy Chris brought to life with magic, he set out ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... atrocities of Mr. Squeers, and the last even less attractive for the sweetness and sadness of its foreshadowing of a child's death, than for those strange images of a vague, deep thoughtfulness, of a shrewd unconscious intellect, of mysterious small philosophies and questionings, by which the young old-fashioned little creature has a glamour thrown over him as he is passing away. It was wonderfully original, this treatment of the part that thus preceded the close of Paul's little life; and of which the first conception, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... twisting columns of smoke from the tall stacks caught the last of the sunlight and formed slow, changing cloud-shapes—rolling hills of brightness with soft, shadowy valleys and canons of mysterious depths between—towering domes and crags and castled heights—grim, ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... These mysterious impressions suggested the existence of an undiscovered, or possibly an undeveloped principle in nature, which time and investigation would ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... that he would have nothing for it but to confirm his correspondents in their disappointment with him by declaring that art was a personal matter, and that though longer, it was not wider, deeper, or higher than life, and could not be. It might be mysterious in being personal, but it was not necessarily petty. It would be great if the artist was so, but not otherwise; it could be fine on no other terms. There was a theory and an appearance that it existed somehow apart from the artist and that it ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells |
