"Preternatural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ask if 'Mollsey to her Babe' and 'The Canary' might not be passed on to Friendly Leaves. And as to Flinders, when I went to the G.F.S. Conference at Darminster I met the man full in the street, and, of course, I inquired afterwards how he came there. So there's nothing preternatural about it.' ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... appearance of being a friend. His suspense, however, was terminated at last by his suddenly coming upon an apparition of the spirit of Creusa, which rose before him in a solitary part of the city, and arrested his progress. The apparition was of preternatural size, and it stood before him in so ethereal and shadow-like a form, and the features beamed upon him with so calm and placid and benignant an expression, as convinced him that the vision was not of this world. AEneas saw at a glance that Creusa's ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... respectable house in a shady angle adjoining Portman Square. We go out to dinner in solemn procession. We admire the preternatural solidity of the furniture and the plate. The hostess is a fine woman, "with neck and nostrils like a rocking-horse, hard features and majestic headdress." Her husband, large and pompous, with little light-colored wings "more like hairbrushes than hair" on the sides of ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... which are so efficient and powerful in the accomplishment of their end as those which a faithful wife makes to rescue and save her husband. The heart, generally so timid, seems to be inspired on such occasions with a preternatural courage, and the arm, at other times so feeble and helpless, is nerved with unexpected strength. Every one is ready to second and help such efforts, and she who makes them is surprised at her success, and wonders at ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... a storm"—(possibly part of the relics of Mrs. Bronte's possessions, contained in the ship wrecked on the coast of Cornwall)—"and whose pages were stained with salt water; some mad Methodist Magazines full of miracles and apparitions, and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; and the equally mad Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... have this preternatural solemnity, as if each was a study in style after the favorite Addisonian model. One wonders if he did not, in the privacy of his own room and with the door locked, venture to throw his hat to the ceiling and give one hurrah under his breath at the discomfiture of ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... life of a hunter, pitting his skill and strength against the marvellous instincts and quick perceptions of the brute, training his senses to preternatural acuteness, but blunting his more tender feelings, his sole aim to shed blood and take life, dependent on luck for his food, exposed to deprivations, storms, and long wanderings, his chief diet flesh, we may more readily comprehend that conspicuous disregard of human ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... Byron's works will probably not be disputed. It has more than the fatal mysticism of Macbeth, with the satanic grandeur of the Paradise Lost, and the hero is placed in circumstances, and amid scenes, which accord with the stupendous features of his preternatural character. How then, it may be asked, does this moral phantom, that has never been, bear any resemblance to the poet himself? Must not, in this instance, the hypothesis which assigns to Byron's heroes his own sentiments and feelings be abandoned? I think not. In noticing the deep ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... of Will's, more or less poetical, appeared to support Mr. Keck, the editor of the "Trumpet," in asserting that Ladislaw, if the truth were known, was not only a Polish emissary but crack-brained, which accounted for the preternatural quickness and glibness of his speech when he got on to a platform—as he did whenever he had an opportunity, speaking with a facility which cast reflections on solid Englishmen generally. It was ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... upon the notion that human society is competent to furnish, from its own resources, an administrator of the kind I have imagined. The pigeons, in short, are to be their own Sir John Sebright.* A despotic government, whether individual or collective, is to be endowed with the preternatural intelligence, and with what, I am afraid, many will consider the preternatural ruthlessness, required for the purpose of carrying out the principle of improvement by selection, with the somewhat drastic thoroughness upon which the success ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... have lifted his against the dire goddess of his murderous superstition. Jasper could not resist a belief that the life of this dreadful protectress was, somehow or other, made essential to his; that, were she to die, he should perish in some ghastly and preternatural expiation. But for the last few months he had, at length, escaped from her; diving so low, so deep into the mud, that even her net could not mesh him. Hence, perhaps, the imminence of the perils from which he had so narrowly escaped, hence the utterness of his present destitution. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... children seated themselves on the floor when their little legs refused further service, and imitated diligently all the low reverences and signs of the cross made by their parents. Those of larger growth stood with the preternatural repose and dignity of the adult Russian peasant, and followed the liturgy independently. One little girl of seven, self-possessed and serenely unconscious, slipped through the crowd to the large image of the Virgin near the altar, grasped ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... directs us to read seek. The crown to which fate destines thee, and which preternatural agents endeavour to bestow upon thee. The golden round ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... great owl, you came a cropper that time! [He and PODBURY indulge in a subdued bear-fight up the stairs, after which they enter the Upper Hall in a state of preternatural solemnity. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various
... already attained a height which mere books do not record." "Unpublished MSS. by Leonardo contain discoveries and anticipations of discoveries," says Mr. Hallam, "within the compass of a few pages, so as to strike us with something like the awe of preternatural knowledge." ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... cousine. It may have been the red fezzes in the carriage of the Turkish ambassador which frightened the prince's grays, or Mrs. Champignon's new yellow liveries, which were flaunting in the Park, or hideous Lady Gorgon's preternatural ugliness, who passed in a low pony-carriage at the time, or the prince's own want of skill, finally; but certain it is that the horses took fright, dashed wildly along the mile, scattered equipages, pietons, dandies' cabs, and snobs' pheaytons. Amethyst was screaming; and the prince, deadly ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... from many lands and of many nations, and their languages were diverse. In amazement some of them said: "Behold, are not all these which speak Galileans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?" While many were impressed by the preternatural ability of the brethren, others in mocking tones said the men were drunken. This instance of Satanic prompting to inconsiderate speech is especially illustrative of inconsistency and rash ineptitude. Strong drink gives to no man wisdom; it steals away his senses ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... have the power of motion, and an instinct that he must move, and move in one direction. He managed to rise and lean against the pedestal of the statue, and its shade by this time protected him. Then an intense desire came upon him to get home, and that desire gave him a temporary preternatural strength. It came upon him as a duty to leave Sicca for his cottage, and he set off. He had a confused notion that he must do his duty, and go straight forward, and turn neither to the right, nor the left, and stop nowhere, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... to regard the adepts of the Rosy Cross as beings of sublime elevation and preternatural physical powers, masters of Nature, monarchs of the intellectual world.... But here in their own acknowledged manifestos they avow themselves a mere theosophical offshoot of the Lutheran heresy, acknowledging the spiritual supremacy of a temporal prince, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... evening. Small children were not much to Lucilla's taste, and her nephew was not a flattering specimen. He had the whitened drawn-up appearance of a child who had spent most of his life in a London cellar, with a pinched little visage and preternatural-looking black eyes, a squeaky little fretful voice, and all the language he had yet acquired decidedly cockney. Moreover, he had the habits of a spoilt child, and that a vulgar one, and his grandmother expected his aunt to think him ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... than in the material world, it is useful to know. "That are the dishes whom you must be and to abstain"; while the meaning of "This girl have a beauty edge" is scarcely clear unless it relates to the preternatural acuteness of the fair sex in these days of board schools and ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... afternoon, as the entranced collector sat musing alone near a window in his father's office, his exalted mood was not affected by the falling of a preternatural darkness over the town, nor was he roused to action by any perception of the fact that the other clerks and the members of the firm had gone home an hour ago; that the clock showed him his own duty to lock up the office and not keep his mother "waiting ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... wiping from my brow the cold sweat that stood there in great drops. I felt certain that I had been face to face with something unexplainable by the ordinary laws of nature. I was as well as usual. I had read nothing of late that could have conjured up such a figure. As to preternatural manifestations of such a kind—I had but that very day, and but an hour or two ago, passed supercilious judgment on what I thought the credulity of ignorant rustics. And yet here I was, the victim to some such hallucination—unless it was possible that I ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... character of alchymists. The union of the two pretensions is not at all surprising. It was to be expected that those who assumed a power so preposterous as that of prolonging the life of man for several centuries, should pretend, at the same time, to foretell the events which were to mark that preternatural span of existence. The world would as readily believe that they had discovered all secrets, as that they had only discovered one. The most celebrated astrologers of Europe, three centuries ago, were alchymists. Agrippa, Paracelsus, Dr. Dee, and the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... number two. At this rate, providing there were no interruptions, he could finish the whole twenty. He went at his job with a handy adroitness which was almost scientific, it was so much like surgery, like dissection. His mind was bent, with a sort of preternatural calmness and cleverness, upon the business of parrying lance thrusts, aiming his revolver, and delivering sabre cuts. It was a species of fighting intellection, at once prudent and destructive. It was not the headlong, reckless, pugnacious rage of the old Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... pounds," said Lord Spencer. "The spectators were now absolutely electrified. The Marquess quietly adds his usual ten" and so there an end. "Mr Evans, ere his hammer fell, made a short pause—and indeed, as if by something preternatural, the ebony instrument itself seemed to be charmed or suspended in the mid air. However, at ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... had much better spend your holidays here;" and he got up from the table, leaving Geoff in a tumult of feelings which words can scarcely describe. He had suffered a great deal during the past year, and had said little. A sort of preternatural consciousness that he must keep his own secret, that he must betray nothing to his mother, had come upon him. He sat now silent, his little face twitching and working, a sudden new, unlooked-for horror stealing over him, that he was to be separated from ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... his own strength and force of character. Once having entered on the new path, he reached, in the Third Symphony, the pinnacle of greatness almost at a bound. He was now, at thirty-four, at the height of his colossal powers. His titanic genius in its swift development showed an ability almost preternatural. One immortal work of genius succeeded another with ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... dreamed that the roof of the house had fallen in, and that, at the same instant, the doors had been burst open, and some robber or assassin had stabbed her husband as he was lying in her arms. The philosophy of those days found in these dreams mysterious and preternatural warnings of impending danger; that of ours, however, sees nothing either in the absurd sacrilegiousness of Caesar's thoughts, or his wife's incoherent and inconsistent images of terror—nothing more than the natural and proper effects, ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... yesterday in passing to exchange a couple of words with Katerina Ivanovna, poor woman. That was sufficient to enable me to ascertain that she is in a position—preternatural, if one may ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a drop of pure water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only indistinct and imperfect forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural state of excitement. ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... with its occupants had disappeared as completely as if some master of subtle chemistry had volatilized it into gas. Indeed, among the various conjectures which were put forward in the public Press, there were some which seriously asserted that supernatural, or, at least, preternatural, agencies had been at work, and that the deformed Monsieur Caratal was probably a person who was better known under a less polite name. Others fixed upon his swarthy companion as being the author of the mischief, but what it was exactly which he had done could never ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Ida had no very clear idea. She had visions of toiling through the wood over and over again, looking vainly for something that could never be found; of being suddenly surrounded and cut off by swollen streams; and of crawling, unclean beasts with preternatural feelers who got into her boots. Then these heavy dreams cleared away in part, and the stream seemed to ripple like the sound of church bells, and these chimed out the ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... had vanished. There were no materials of conjecture; no probabilities to be weighed, or suspicions to revolve. Human artifice or power was unequal to this exploit. Means less than preternatural would not furnish ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... door, so there was little difficulty in getting him to his place comparatively unobserved. Llewellyn took him by the arm, and after a little stumbling, helped him safely to his seat, where he assumed a look of preternatural gravity. But Eric sat near the head of the first table, not far from Dr. Rowlands' desk, and none of the others had to go to that part of the room. Graham grasped his arm tight, led him carefully down stairs, and, as they were reaching ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... and yet, far away, in dim recesses of the soul, at long distances from the flesh, each recognised the other. And it was an evening, too, in which to take care of other things than the ways and speech of every day. The heat, the hush, and the stillness appeared well-nigh preternatural. A sadness breathed over the earth; all things seemed new and yet old; across the spectral river the dim plains beneath the afterglow ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... slightest disposition in them to quarrel. Of course, it is of the street-boy—the biricchino, the boy in his natural, unreclaimed state—that I speak. This state is here, in winter, marked by a clouded countenance, bare head, tatters, and wooden-soled shoes open at the heels; in summer by a preternatural purity of person, by abandon to the amphibious pleasure of leaping off the bridges into the canals, and by an insatiable appetite for polenta, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... like Socrates; he may walk barefooted, and have domestic griefs, and be deprived of his comforts—but he is serene, for the soul triumphs over the body. Now, what motive so grand as to save the immortal part of man. This desire filled the ancient Christian orator with a preternatural enthusiasm, as well as gave to him an unlimited power, and an imposing dignity. He was the most happy of mortals when led to the blazing fire of his persecutors, and he was the most august. The feeling ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... of time allows a large range of influence and of silent, unconscious operation to the vast and potent ideas that brooded over this awful Hebrew literature. Too little weight has been allowed to the probable contagiousness, and to the preternatural shock, of such a new and strange philosophy, acting upon the jaded and exhausted intellect of the Grecian race. We must remember, that precisely this particular range of time was that in which the Greek systems of philosophy, having thoroughly completed their evolution, had suffered ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... and all the worn, dingy furniture of the room seemed to the little clerk with the shining face to be strangely new. The chief clerk, sitting at a dusty old roll-top desk in the corner, looked up at Mr. Neal sharply as he entered. The chief clerk always looked up sharply. There was a preternatural leanness about the chief clerk which was accentuated by his sharp hawk's nose, and when he looked up quickly from his position hunched over his desk, his sharp little eyes pierced his subordinate through and through, and his glasses, perched halfway down his nose, trembled from ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... him broadwise, and too many sharp angles of him angle-wise. One of those shambling male human creatures, born to be indiscreetly candid in the revelation of buttons; every button he had about him glaring at the public to a quite preternatural extent. A considerable capital of knee and elbow and wrist and ankle, had Sloppy, and he didn't know how to dispose of it to the best advantage, but was always investing it in wrong securities, and so getting himself into embarrassed circumstances. Full-Private Number One ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... of preternatural gravity, he advances, seizes the arm of John Burrill, drags him toward Constance, and ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... confidence. These men whom we had thus surprised, and who, no doubt, imagined that we were about to destroy them, having apparently never seen nor heard of white men before, must have taken us for something preternatural; yet from the extremity of fear that had prompted them to set their woods in flames, they in a brief space so completely subdued those fears as to approach the very beings who had so strongly excited their alarm. The savage who had been the principal actor in the scene, was an elderly ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... wore an air of outraged and offended dignity; and Daisy not only maintained that solemn silence, but she looked grieved and hurt. Our little ones were not accustomed to be snubbed, and took it hard when such an experience did befall them; but there was a preternatural gravity about them now, which ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... think that there lurked in her also such vile forces, such odious possibilities! For of course I understand that this dreadful thing which has sprung out at me is neither supernatural nor even preternatural. No, it is a natural force which this woman can use and society is ignorant of. The mere fact that it ebbs with her strength shows how entirely it is subject to physical laws. If I had time, I might probe ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... certain preternatural lights in a forest, discovered to a Galician peasant, in the beginning of the ninth century, the spot, in which was deposited a marble sepulchre containing the ashes of St. James. The miracle is reported with sufficient circumstantiality ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... not least, the marvellous Ethiope, Changing his skin by preternatural skill, Whom every setting sun's diurnal slope Leaves whiter than ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... young man had disappeared through the porter's lodge, Uncle Benjy showed preternatural activity for one in his invalid state, jumping up quickly without his stick, at the same time opening and shutting his mouth quite silently like a thirsty frog, which was his way of expressing mirth. He ran upstairs as quick as an old squirrel, and went to a dormer window which ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... Tree—young actors who likewise endeavour to make up for the lack of anything like dramatic passion by pretending to control it: the control being feigned by a set jaw or a hard, throaty, uncadenced voice of preternatural solemnity. These ladies, too, wore plagiarised gowns of the most 'original' style, plagiarised hats, glittering plagiarised smiles; and yet they so evidently looked down on every one else in the omnibus, whom, perhaps, after all, it had been kinder of me to describe ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... o'clock when the party broke up; Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Micklewham walked home together, and as they were crossing the Red Burn Bridge, at the entrance of Eglintoun Wood,—a place well noted from ancient times for preternatural appearances, Mr. Micklewham declared that he thought he heard something purring among the bushes; upon which Mr. Snodgrass made a jocose observation, stating, that it could be nothing but the effect of Lord North's strong ale in his head; and we ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... occultism is meant the belief in, and the claim to be able to use, a certain range of forces neither natural, nor, technically, supernatural, but more properly to be called preternatural—often, though by no means always, for evil or selfish ends. Some extend the term occultism to cover mysticism and the spiritual life generally, but that is not a legitimate use of either word. Occultism seeks to get; mysticism to give. ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... so frankly and in such majesty, finding its own aptest words by its unconscious instinct, that the aged minister was presently aware of a preternatural power at his side. Was this woman a witch, genius, demon, or the very priestess of ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... which accounted for its untenanted condition, but certain money was supposed to be hidden away, to discover which every attempt had hitherto been in vain. "It was therefore proposed," says the author, "that some person should lodge in the chapel for a night to obtain preternatural information respecting it. Two persons at length complied with the request to do so, and, aided by strong beer, approached about nine o'clock the hallowed walls. They trembled exceedingly at the sudden appearance of a white owl that flew from a broken ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... call upon the other gods in the same manner, the clouds, which had been deepening and darkening, suddenly obscured the sun; a distant peal of thunder rolled along the heavens; and, at the same moment, from out the dark recesses of the temple, a voice of preternatural power came forth, proclaiming, so that the whole multitude heard the words,—'God is but one; the King ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... publications, correspondence at home and abroad, and the influence of their learning, talents, industry, and zeal in the work, these two men promoted the prevalence of a passion for the marvelous and monstrous, and what was deemed preternatural, infernal, and diabolical, throughout the whole mass of the people, in England as well as America. The public mind became infatuated and, drugged with credulity and superstition, was prepared to receive every impulse of blind fanaticism. The stories, thus collected and put everywhere ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... lifts her eyes,—dark eyes, of preternatural largeness; brilliant, too, but not with the sparkle of the diamond; brilliant as deep clear wells are, in which the mellow moonlight sleeps fathom-deep between black walls of rock; and round them, and round the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... as the dealers in the preternatural, who in such cases were called in, are termed, did all that in them lay—but in vain. Father Tom came down, and tried what holier rites could do, but equally without result. So little Billy was dead ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... these blemishes are:—Miss Blandford falls in love with a plough-boy at first-sight, which she certainly would not have done, but that some preternatural agent whispered to her, he was a young man of birth. But whether this magical information came from the palpitation of her heart, or the quickness of her eye, she has not said.—A reader will, however, gladly impute the cause of her sudden ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton
... L. E. D.—This bark is a strong astringent; and hence stands recommended in haemorrhagies, alvine fluxes, and other preternatural or immoderate secretions. ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... of the most gigantic and appalling deceptions that has ever fallen upon Christendom? The Bible in the plainest terms, declares that in the last days malign influences will be let loose upon the world; false pretensions will be urged upon the minds of men; and deceptions, backed up by preternatural signs and wonders, will develop to such a degree of strength, that, if it were possible, they would deceive the very elect. Is it possible that Spiritualism may be the very development of evil, against which ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... crowd the universe, and the a priori ideas of an unconditioned Cause and an infinite Intelligence which arise in the mind in presence of these facts, are inadequate to produce the logical conviction that it is the work of an intelligent mind, how can any preternatural display of power produce a rational conviction that God exists? "If the universe could come by chance or fate, surely all the lesser phenomena, termed miraculous, might occur so too."[94] If we find ourselves standing amid an eternal ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... and apparently preternatural effect arising from this cause, is the spectre of the Hartz Mountains in Hanover. There is one particular hill, called the Brocken, in which he appears, terrifying the credulous, and gratifying the ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... seem that the artist had worked with alternate dissolutions of amethyst, topaz, ruby, garnet, and emerald. Look at the first three windows, to the left on entering, about an hour before sun-set:—they seem to fill the whole place with a preternatural splendor! The pattern is somewhat of a Persian description, and I should apprehend the antiquity of the workmanship to be scarcely exceeding three hundred years. Yet I must be allowed to say, that these exquisitely sparkling, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... convent for a large part of the day, and if Eglentyne desired to communicate with her sisters, she was urged to do so by means of signs. The persons who drew up the lists of signs which were in use in medieval monastic houses, however, combined a preternatural ingenuity with an extremely exiguous sense of humour, and the sort of dumb pandemonium which went on at Eglentyne's dinner table must often have been more mirth-provoking than speech. The sister who desired fish would 'wag her hands displayed sidelings in manner of a fish tail'; she who wanted ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... mothers, and brothers, and kindred. In the assemblage of the Apostles (already referred to) at the Death of Ananias, we look upon men whom the effusion of the Spirit has equally sublimated above every unholy thought; a common power seems to have invested them all with a preternatural majesty. Yet not an iota of the individual is lost in any one; the gentle bearing and amenity of John still follow him in his office of almoner; nor in Peter does the deep repose of the erect attitude ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... always wit[h]out exeption: If t[h]ere be a supernatural cause (for we are sure t[h]eir is no natural one) for t[h]ese t[h]ings, t[h]ey will declare it, if not; t[h]ere must needs be a preternatural won. ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... a "funny man" among the quadrupeds, I should name another dweller of the Southwestern prairies, the jack-rabbit,—John II. let us call him. Nobody ever gets quite accustomed to the preternatural ears of this hare. In proportion they are to those of others of the Leporidae nearly what the ears of the mule are to those of the horse. When this bit of bad drawing, as big as a fawn and weighing ten pounds or so, jumps up before you and bounds away at railroad speed, he makes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... the marriage-life, interrupted as it is by daily cares and small trifles, those works of Christian usefulness cannot be so continuously carried on as in the other. But is there not a deep meaning to be learned from the old expression—that celibacy is an angelic state? that it is preternatural, and not natural? that the goodness which is induced by it is not, so to speak, the natural goodness of Humanity, but such a goodness ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... understanding so much expanded as during this visit to Laxton. The incessant demand made upon me by Lady Carbery for solutions of the many difficulties besetting the study of divinity and the Greek Testament, or for such approximations to solutions as my resources would furnish, forced me into a preternatural tension of all the faculties applicable to that purpose. Lady Carbery insisted upon calling me her "Admirable Crichton;" and it was in vain that I demurred to this honorary title upon two grounds: first, as being one towards which I had no natural aptitudes ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... so soon as my hand finds its cunning again in London,—so soon as I can see there what is to be done or said. All goes decidedly better, I think. My Wife was and is much healthier than last year, than in any late year. I myself get visibly quieter my preternatural Meditations in Hades, apropos of this Annandale of mine, are calm compared with those of last year. By another Course of Lectures I have a fair prospect of living for another season; nay, people call it a "new profession" I have devised ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Hon. Percival did come in, Gwen was at the piano, and Adrian at the right distance for hearing. Nothing could have been more irreproachable. The newcomers, having been audibly noisy on the stairs, showed as hypocritical by an uncalled-for assumption of preternatural susceptibility to the absence of other members of their party acknowledging their necessity to make up a Grundy quorum. There is safety in number when persons are of opposite sexes, which ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... clear to demonstration thou art smit: the Queen of Hearts would see a 'man of genius' also sigh for her; and there, by art-magic, in that preternatural hour, has she bound and spell-bound thee. 'Love is not altogether a Delirium,' says he elsewhere; 'yet has it many points in common therewith. I call it rather a discerning of the Infinite in the Finite, of the Idea made Real; which discerning again may be either true ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... fro, in that deserted and inauspicious chamber, while his voice, in broken sentences, was also imperfectly audible, as if maintaining a muttered dialogue. These eccentric practices gradually invested him, in the eyes of his domestics, with a certain preternatural mystery, which enhanced the fear with which they habitually regarded him, and was subsequently confirmed by his giving orders to have the furniture taken out of the ominous suite of rooms, and the doors nailed up and secured. ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... own house his wrath mounted to the cold and inflexible bitterness of arctic destruction, but his mind seemed to clarify into a preternatural alertness such as the absinthe-drinker fancies gives a razor edge to his thought functions. Like the keenness of absinthe it was hallucination. The tremendous thrill of a madness that had been cumulative through months and had finally reached the ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... of the room the screaming "Monsieur l'Administrateur" of the frail, hairy Frenchman seemed to acquire a preternatural shrillness. The explorer of the Capitalist syndicate was still enthusiastic. "Ten million dollars' worth of copper practically in sight, Monsieur l'Administrateur. Ten millions in sight! And a railway coming—a railway! ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... amusing, but to his infinite disgust he discovered as soon as he spoke that she was amused. She laughed outright, and evidently only checked herself because he looked so furious. In consideration for his feelings she assumed an air of mild but preternatural seriousness. ...
— A Fair Barbarian • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted, most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity,—soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life,—and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said Robert Hall, "is the self-control by which he preserved himself calm, while he kept all in excitement around him. He was the last man to be infected by fanaticism. His writings abound in statements of preternatural circumstances; but it must be remembered that his faults in these respects were those of his age, while his virtues were ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... unfortunate were contemptible snobs, and the sooner they were found out the better; and I want to find out my score or two of very dear friends who have eaten ice-cream at our house. I hope I may have a chance to wait on 'em. I'll do it with the air of a princess," she concluded, assuming a preternatural dignity, "and if they put on airs I'll raise the price of the goods, and tell them that since they are so much above other people they ought to pay double price for everything. I don't believe they'll all turn up their noses at me," she added, after a moment, her face becoming ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... men pause to regard him as a miracle of conceit and assurance rather than as a prophet; and that his commonplaces about "olive leaves," "calumets," "universal brotherhood," "fatherland," etc., have no more influence than the maudlin rigmarole of the madman whose preternatural force is lost in senility. It is time for Elihu Burritt to go back to his shop: the world wants a ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... hidden and terrible, something that looks at him from the blank sky when he is alone among the garden beds, something which haunts empty rooms and the dark brake of the woodland. Moreover, a child, with its preternatural sensitiveness to pain, its bewildered terror of punishment, learns, side by side with this, that the God Whom he is to love thus tenderly is the God Who lays about Him so fiercely in the Old Testament, slaying the innocent with the guilty, merciless, harsh, inflicting the irreparable stroke of death, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... There is much inconsistency in the passages of the poem in which the Vanars are spoken of, which seems to point to two widely different legends. The Vanars are generally represented as semi-divine beings with preternatural powers, living in houses and eating and drinking like men sometimes as here, as monkeys pure and simple, living is woods and ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... this criticism appears perfectly just and appropriate; but, from the concluding paragraph, Whewell evidently imagines that by "creation" Lyell means a preternatural intervention of the Deity; whereas the letter to Herschel shows that, in his own mind, Lyell meant natural causation; and I see no reason to doubt (The following passages in Lyell's letters appear to me decisive on ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... observe how the children fled from his approach, breaking up their merriest sports while his melancholy figure was yet afar off. Their instinctive dread caused him to feel more strongly than aught else that a preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black crape. In truth, his own antipathy to the veil was known to be so great that he never willingly passed before a mirror nor stooped to drink at a still fountain lest in its peaceful bosom he should be affrighted ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our fear of their consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness. We can no more take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all objects without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by their preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead, are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... groaning I cannot tell; probably, as I was somewhat a spoiled child before this, it might have ended in her completely finishing me; but she was roused up from her state of half syncope by a vigorous attack from my teeth, which, in the agony of suffocation, I used with preternatural force of jaw from one so young. I bit right through everything she had on, and as my senses were fast departing, my teeth actually met with my convulsive efforts. My granny, roused by the extreme pain, rolled over on her side, and then it was that my mother and aunt, who supposed that ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... the thought. There was no time for anything but action. And his senses seemed gifted with preternatural acuteness. He saw a child near him put her little hand into that of a soldierly-looking man, and heard her whisper—"You won't leave me, papa?" And the answer—"Never, my darling. Don't fear." Just behind him a ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... and stores of all kinds could be bought on board the ships. There was, too, an entire absence of the heavy and continuous work in the wet trenches. The great drawback to the position was, indeed, the absence of excitement and change, and the quiet seemed almost preternatural after the almost continual boom of cannon ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... needs there hardly to eat, drink, or sleep, for the act of breathing will give life enough;" an atmosphere of such telescopic clearness as to explain many of the strange stories which have been lately told of Antony's seemingly preternatural powers of vision; a colouring, which, when painters dare to put it on canvas, seems to our eyes, accustomed to the quiet greys and greens of England, exaggerated and impossible—distant mountains, pink and lilac, quivering in pale blue haze—vast sheets of ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... One opens his Christmas stories in this later day—'The Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted Man, The Cricket on the Hearth,' and all the rest—and with "a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed," asks himself for the preternatural virtue that they once had. The pathos appears false and strained; the humor largely horseplay; the character theatrical; the joviality pumped; the psychology commonplace; the sociology alone funny. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... examine into a matter which it was acknowledged that laymen must in the last resort determine? And could any thing be more opposite to the whole spirit of Protestantism than the notion that a certain preternatural power of judging in spiritual cases was vouchsafed to a particular caste, and to that caste alone; that such men as Selden, as Hale, as Boyle, were less competent to give an opinion on a collect or a creed than the youngest and silliest chaplain who, in a remote manor house, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... stopped me, to join in the duties of the congregation; but I must confess that curiosity to hear the preacher of such a wilderness, was not the least of my motives. On entering, I was struck with his preternatural appearance. He was a tall and very spare old man; his head which was covered with a white linen cap, his shrivelled hands, and his voice, were all shaking under the influence of a palsy; and a few moments ascertained to me that he was ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... on December 16th from the front of Notre Dame, carrying 3,000 lights. This balloon was unmanned, and at its departure apparently behaved extremely well, causing universal delight. During the hours of darkness, however, it seems to have acquitted itself in a strange and well-nigh preternatural manner, for at daybreak it is sighted on the horizon by the inhabitants of Rome, and seen to be coming towards their city. So true was its course that, as though with predetermined purpose, it sails on till it ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... this matter of chastity!" wrote James Hinton forty years ago. "Think of that line: 'A woman who deliberates is lost.' We make danger, making all womanhood hang upon a point like this, and surrounding it with unnatural and preternatural dangers. There is a wanton unreason embodied in the life of woman now; the present 'virtue' is a morbid unhealthy plant. Nature and God never poised the life of a woman upon such a needle's point. The whole modern idea of chastity has in it sensual exaggeration, surely, in part, remaining ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... own wounds, he has gashed himself with splinters of rock, and howled, in a delirium of pain and pleasure, at the sight of his own blood. His sharpened eyesight sees Jesus from afar, and, with the disordered haste and preternatural agility which marked all his movements, he runs towards Him. Such is the introduction to the narrative of the cure. It paints for us not merely a maniac, but a demoniac. He is not a man at war with himself, but a man at war with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... monkey talk, pursued a scant arm's length behind by that infuriated cow. Did any one help him? Not any. Every man of that crew was hanging weak from laughter to the horn of his saddle or the top of the fence. The preternatural solemnity had broken to little bits. Men came running from the bunk-house, only to go into spasms outside, to roll over and over on the ground, clutching handfuls of herbage in the agony of ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... daughter dreamed also what was to happen, and so, in obedience to her vision, would not eat when she was hungry, nor drink when she was thirsty. However that was, I would risk the event of the prosecution on this single circumstance, that, without the interposition of some preternatural cause, this conduct of the prisoner's must appear to exceed all bounds of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... here a voluptuous weakling, nor is his court the centre of vice and cruelty and imbecility: the misery of the time is touched but lightly, and the Maid of Arc herself is invested with a certain faint degree of mysterious dignity, ultimately represented as being in truth a preternatural gift; though whether preternatural, and if so, whether sent from above or from below, neither we nor she, except by faith, are absolutely ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... metropolis in Europe eddying around its walls, was a sacred island in the tumultuous main. Through the perpetual twilight, tall columnar trunks in thick profusion grew from a floor chequered with prismatic lights and sepulchral shadows. Each shaft of the petrified forest rose to a preternatural height, their many branches intermingling in the space above, to form an impenetrable canopy. Foliage, flowers and fruit of colossal luxuriance, strange birds, beasts, griffins and chimeras in endless multitudes, the rank vegetation and the fantastic zoology of a fresher ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... convinced, he shall still insist that when an artery is divided, a preternatural route is, as it were, opened, and that so the blood escapes in torrents, but that the same thing does not happen in the healthy and uninjured body when no outlet is made; and that in arteries filled, or in their natural state, so large a quantity of blood ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... was a woman. How did you find the other planets this morning, my dear? Is it true that Saturn has lost one of his rings? and has the Sun recovered from his last attack of spots? I really fear," he would add, turning to Hilda, "that this preternatural activity in your comet-parent portends some alarming change in the—a—atmospheric phenomena, my child. I would have you on your guard!" and then he would look at her and sigh, shake his head, and apply himself to the ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... Yet the truth is gradually leaking out. People shake their heads ominously, especially when there is anything in them; and parsons are looked upon with a growing suspicion. They look bland, they assume the most virtuous airs, and sometimes they affect a preternatural goodness. But in all this they are excelled by the noble Pigott, whose bald head, venerable beard, and benevolent appearance, qualified him to sit for a portrait of God the Father. Gentlemen, it won't do. You will have to bolt or confess. The ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... has been computed, with some exaggeration, that were they all collected together, they might prove sufficient for building a ship of the line. To account for this extraordinary diffusion of so limited a quantity, the Catholic writers have been obliged to assert its preternatural growth and vegetation, which the saint already quoted ingeniously compares to the miracle of the loaves and fishes.[5] That the guardians of this cross at Jerusalem should have had recourse to such evident and undoubted falsehood, should, I think, very much increase our doubts whether the Cross ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... disciples closed on a face, every line of which they knew and loved—a face full of wisdom and resolve and deep-founded peace, showing marks of trouble, of trial, of endurance, of premature age; their eyes opened upon a face that shines with a preternatural radiance—a face expressing, more than ever face had done, the dignity and glory and joy of perfect harmony with God. He was God-possessed, and the Divine glory shone from His face. It was at the moment of his yielding all to God that Jesus attained His highest glory. Man's ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods
... a danger, it pleased the Divine Mercy to found upon earth a permanent institution of an exceptional, wonderful, almost preternatural character, through which the preservation of the principal doctrines, that form the substance of revealed religion, could be insured to mankind. As seeds of rare and precious plants are preserved with ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... Fathers. Yet all agreed it was a great and good and perfect government,—subject only to the predatory incursions of a Hydra-headed monster known as a "Ring." The Ring's origin was wrapped in secrecy, its fecundity was alarming; but although its rapacity was preternatural, its digestion was perfect and easy. It circumvolved all affairs in an atmosphere of mystery; it clouded all things with the dust and ashes of distrust. All disappointment of place, of avarice, of incompetency or ambition, was ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... finger to a dial which stood on the mantel-piece, announced that if he did not take warning and repent, his life and sins would be concluded at the same hour of the third day after the visitation. By a preternatural light in the chamber he observed distinctly everything around him. While the warning spirit was speaking, he saw the time was twelve o'clock. Darkness came, and the apparition disappeared. Lord Lyttelton's companions laughed at his superstitious fears, and endeavoured to convince ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... it is rather difficult to discuss seriously in the present day, both the personages and their environment being too preternatural for any direct application to be drawn from them, as reflecting modern society, found indiscreet champions as determined as its aggressors. Violently denounced by M. Capo de Feuillide, of the Europe litteraire, it was warmly defended by M. Gustave Planche, in the Revue des Deux Mondes. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... and to arrange his cabinet of specimens from the marvellous in human nature. But certainly in modern times, any historian, however little affecting the praise of a philosophic investigator, would feel himself called upon to remove a little the taint of the miraculous and preternatural which adheres to such anecdotes, by entering into the psychological grounds of their possibility; whether lying in any peculiarly vicious education, early familiarity with bad models, corrupting associations, or other plausible key to effects, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... other things! I started to find myself alone—for ever alone, without a creature to love me. I looked round the room for help; I saw the tables, the chairs, the places where she stood or sat, empty, deserted, dead. I could not stay where I was; I had no one to go to but to the parent-mischief, the preternatural hag, that had "drugged this posset" of her daughter's charms and falsehood for me, and I went down and (such was my weakness and helplessness) sat with her for an hour, and talked with her of her daughter, and the sweet days we had ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... edge of the mighty stream; the rushing waters washed their feet. The poor woman would fain have drawn back, but she could not, such was the preternatural power exercised over her by ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... therefore, as a creature of energies and great purposes, he must have been the wreck which he seems to suppose. Opium gives and takes away. It defeats the steady habit of exertion, but it creates spasms of irregular exertion; it ruins the natural power of life, but it developes preternatural paroxysms of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... His great face was yellow and seemed in that moment of a preternatural flabbiness; his beady eyes were beadier ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... heroes of ancient German stock, who had learned the arts of war and peace in the service of a foreign and haughty world-empire. Determination, concentration of purpose, constancy in calamity, elasticity almost preternatural, self-denial, consummate craft in political combinations, personal fortitude, and passionate patriotism, were the heroic elements in both. The ambition of each was subordinate to the cause which he served. Both refused the crown, although each, perhaps, contemplated, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... frozen each other by their primness; and your faculties feel the numbing effects of the atmosphere the moment you enter it. All those thoughts, so nimble and so apt awhile since, have disappeared—have suddenly acquired a preternatural power of eluding you. If you venture a remark to your neighbour, there comes a trite rejoinder, and there it ends. No subject you can hit upon outlives half a dozen sentences. Nothing that is said excites any real interest in you; and you feel that all you say is listened to with apathy. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... endeavor to explain natural phenomena by supernatural theories, and while they do not assign preternatural powers to witches and demons, they yet persist in attempting to pervert facts of science, and delude themselves with faith in some supernatural force. The clergy state that the physician cures disease through the mediation of God, the physician merely playing the part ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... sharper and clearer-sighted than all the rest of the world! He would like that advantage. And why might he not have it? Already he perceived a marked difference from his usual sensuous condition. It was unnatural, preternatural,—and yet, a state which could be produced at will. It was easily done. Just homoeopathy, in fact. A little sniff, a minute dose, and he could see and hear with a miraculous clearness; but people would take a dozen, and then ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... shadow, but the large, bright black eyes beam upon Gladys, with preternatural lustre, and the raven hair shines against the white pillow that supports her head. The broad, massive figure of the father, in its rough work-a-day clothes, is also in shadow. One elbow rests upon the arm of Netta's sofa, one hand smooths ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... wrought through his intercession. In 1621, under the Polish king, Sigismund III, and again in 1676, under Yan Sobieski, the Poles won pronounced victories over Turkish armies which far outnumbered their own, and attributed these preternatural successes ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... warning and without fading the smile ceased to be. Under its effulgence the observer unfamiliar with Mr. Rae's smile was moved, to a responsive geniality of expression, but in the full tide of this emotion he found himself suddenly regarding a face of such preternatural gravity as rebuked the very possibility or suggestion of geniality. Before the smile Mr. Rae's face was like a house, with the shutters up and the family plunged in gloom. When the smile broke forth every shutter was flung wide to the pouring sunlight, and every window full of flowers ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... bottom, and is the chief spring of that motion. And also the dictates of humour and biassed wills are usually more violent and fierce than the dictates of conscience; for wanting the authority of God to back their assertions and prescriptions, they must make up that with an addition of preternatural force and strength. Hence, such as are purely led by conscience, are pliable, humble, and ready to hear and receive information; whereas, others are headstrong and pertinacious, unwilling to receive ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... certainly as free from "superstition" as the protector could desire. It was reserved for Robespierre hereafter to make the sanguinary painter believe in the Etre Supreme. The boy was early sensible of his ugliness, which was almost preternatural. His benefactor found it in vain to reconcile him to the malice of Nature by his philosophical aphorisms; but when he pointed out to him that in this world money, like charity, covers a multitude ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... aperture. This rarely requires operation, as it may generally be returned with ease, and even cured by a proper bandage and compress. Ventral hernia, commonly called umbilical, is generally a protrusion of viscera through a new preternatural aperture in the fibrous tissues close to the navel, may often attain a large size, is liable to strangulation, and is ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... in descriptive beauty. The theme of this was the development of the soul through the experience of sin. There is a haunting mystery thrown about the story, like a soft veil of mist, veiling the beginning and the end. There is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the preternatural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as original as Shakspere's Caliban, or Fouque's Undine, and yet quite on this side the border-line of the human. Our Old Home, a book of charming papers on England, was published in 1863. Manifold experience of life and contact with men, affording scope ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... something rather too preternatural about this, though she could well believe it, as she looked at the wonderful manner in which the watches turned themselves out. It frightened her, and they proceeded farther on, and came to much artillery, carefully ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... myself their shapes, their fierce gesticulations, their earrings, bound heads, rags, and weapons, the vile scowls on their swarthy, grimacing faces. My anxiety beheld them as plainly as anything seen with the eyes of the body. And, with my sharpened hearing catching every word with preternatural distinctness, I felt as if, the ring of Gyges on my finger, I had sat invisible at ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... again the desperate, haunted look with which the stricken child had said in answer to some plea, "A criminal's daughter has no place in this world but with the suffering and the lost"; and nerved anew, she faced again his anger which might well be righteous, and with almost preternatural insight, boldly declared: ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... schoolroom came back to me, redolent with the incense of fennel covertly stowed away in my desk, and gazed again in silent rapture on the round, red cheeks and long black braids of that peerless creature whose glance had often caused my cheeks to glow over the preternatural collar, which at that period of my boyhood it was my pride and privilege to wear. As I fear I may be often thought hypercritical and censorious in these articles, I am willing to record this as one of the advantages of our new house, not mentioned in the advertisement, ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... Browning's words carried with them a certain sense of pain in the thought that they could in any thing stand apart. Happily the theoretical fire-eater had faith superior to his own arguments;—faith in a woman's insight as finer than his own;—and he is let off with a gratified rebuke for preternatural submissiveness and for arraying her in pontifical garments of authority which hang loose upon so small a figure. The other application of his doctrine of resisting evil was even more trying to her feelings ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... women she sat bolt upright, a red spot burning on either cheek-bone, her eyes bright with nervous excitement while she answered the careless small talk with preternatural seriousness. At such times Symes himself talked rapidly to hide the gaucheries of her speech, and they were ordeals which he took care should be ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... There was hasty hope, or idle exultation, or pious fear, or panic terror, in the hearts of the leading spectators of that awful drama, according to the prejudices or principles they maintained. Over all the three kingdoms there was a preternatural calm, resembling that physical stillness which in other latitude precedes ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... that time it has been many times revised and altered, we may say that it is substantially the Bible with which we are familiar. The peculiar genius which breathes through it, the mingled tenderness and majesty, the Saxon simplicity, the preternatural grandeur, unequaled, unapproached, in the attempted improvements of modern scholars, all are here, and bear the impress of the mind ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... seven faces, like those of the Seven Sleepers, gradually elongated into preternatural extent. The ecclesiastical councillor, a young man, but already famous throughout Germany for his sermons printed or preached, was especially aggrieved by such offensive personality; Monsieur Flitte ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... something and hang on," the red-faced man said to me. All his bluster had gone, and he seemed to have caught the contagion of preternatural calm. "And listen to the women scream," he said grimly—almost bitterly, I thought, as though he had been ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... colder than usual. It might have been imagination, but he fancied her whole manner was less cordial than before. And he said to himself, "She has heard I am going, and she is annoyed, and is not glad to see me." There was a preternatural solemnity about their conversation which neither of them could break through, and in a few minutes they both looked as though they had ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... executed, she threw her arms wildly into the air, and uttered one piercing shriek so full of preternatural rage and despair, that it might fitly have ushered a soul into those realms where hope ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... of Lyell's arguments, which it would be cruel to reproduce, the writer continues:—'When, therefore, upon such slender grounds, it is determined, in answer to those who insist on its universality, that the Mosaic Deluge must be considered a preternatural event, far beyond the reach of philosophical enquiry; not only as to the causes employed to produce it, but as to the effects most likely to result from it; that determination wears an aspect of scepticism, which, however much soever it may be unintentional in the mind of the writer, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... Macbeth receives no comfort, no additional security. He has by guilt torn himself live-asunder from nature, and is, therefore, himself in a preternatural state: no wonder, then, that he is inclined to superstition, and faith in the unknown of signs ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Foe, even in 'Robinson Crusoe,' gives a very inadequate picture of the mental torments to which his hero is exposed. He is frightened by a parrot calling him by name, and by the strangely picturesque incident of the footmark on the sand; but, on the whole, he takes his imprisonment with preternatural stolidity. His stay on the island produces the same state of mind as might be due to a dull Sunday in Scotland. For this reason, the want of power in describing emotion as compared with the amazing power of describing ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... expedient to free myself from the suspicion of having entered into compact with a daemon, or of being myself an emissary of the grand foe. Here, however, there was no reason to dread a similar imputation, since Ludloe had denied the preternatural pretensions of these ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... 'Mollsey to her Babe' and 'The Canary' might not be passed on to Friendly Leaves. And as to Flinders, when I went to the G.F.S. Conference at Darminster I met the man full in the street, and, of course, I inquired afterwards how he came there. So there's nothing preternatural ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his face, which, as he sat, was not visible to his brother. Then with preternatural ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... "that I refuse to accept the factitious aid your thoughts have lately been bringing to me. You see I have preternatural senses. Because I was born in the snows of the mountains I am no whit whiter than those born in the purlieus of the police stations of the cities. We are simply of the same human nature. When I win regard, it must be for no idle fancy, but for ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... JOHNSON. 'Sir, I am not defending their credibility. I am only saying, that your arguments are not good, and will not overturn the belief of witchcraft.' (Dr Fergusson said to me, aside, 'He is right.') 'And then, sir, you have all mankind, rude and civilized, agreeing in the belief of the agency of preternatural powers. You must take evidence: you must consider, that wise and great men have condemned witches to die.' CROSBIE. 'But an Act of Parliament put an end to witchcraft.' JOHNSON. 'No, sir; witchcraft had ceased; and therefore an Act of Parliament was passed to prevent ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... the enormity of the matter by my father's replying, "William! I would rather see you in your grave than in a dancing-school." I could only understand that I had not been lifted by the divine grace from the condition of total depravity in which I had been born, and I knew that the preternatural indication of my redemption, which would be recognized in the descent of the spirit in the form of the revival frenzy, was wanting. I longed for it, prayed for it, and considered myself forsaken of God because it would not come, but come ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... by cries of "Good! good!" "That's so!" "Sound doctrine, that!" "The Judge knows what's what!" Only one person, the questioner, a young man with a preternatural head, was unappeased. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... were riveted on some object unseen by other mortals! A glance sufficed to show to myself, at least, that he was in a state of tense nervous excitation, similar to that of a subject of mesmerism. A preternatural power seemed to possess him. He moved and spoke like a somnambulist, with the same insulation from surrounding minds and superiority to material obstacles. I had long known him as a brave officer; but here was something more than bravery, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... swayed a little. And with marvellous rapidity the whole position started up before her. She saw, with preternatural insight, into its nooks and corners. Something he had said one day, when they were talking of the Church view of marriage and divorce, lighted all up. So he had really never known about her! At ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... have their "men of medicine," in whose preternatural powers they place the most implicit confidence; by working on the superstitious fears of the people, these impostors obtain much authority. They are allowed to take the lead in every affair of importance; and, in short, all their movements are, in a great measure, regulated ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean |
