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More "Magical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and travel along the Upper Columbia, where several steamers now ply between busy marts, of themselves attest what magical effects the years have wrought. Besides gold, lead for miles is found along the Kootenay. Red hermatite, iron ore, traces of copper, and plumbago are found along the main Bitter Root. Cinnabar is said to exist ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... state of ecstasy are supposed to be inspired by the gods. During their trance such men are questioned as to the will of the divine. Sometimes they become renowned through their reputed performance of an occasional miracle. Again, as magical and religious ceremonies become more complicated, there is a deliberate training of an expert class to perform these essential acts. And, whatever be the source of the selection of the priestly class, the immense influence which their functions are regarded as having on the welfare ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... stopped running he had begun to plot again. Even though he had made the great renunciation he could not help hoping. It was the kind of hope that, when one is very young, follows on the heels of absolute despair, and is based on magical impossibilities. It was like his birthday hopes, which had been known to rise triumphant above the most obvious and discouraging facts. After all there was to-morrow. He would tell Christine everything—open his heart to her as to a good and understanding friend—and she would give ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... good knight Barbazan in an iron cage, from which he would not come out, alleging that he was a prisoner on parole.[2135] Jeanne, on the contrary, had been careful to promise nothing, or rather she had promised to escape as soon as she could.[2136] Therefore the English, who believed that she had magical powers, mistrusted her greatly.[2137] As she was being prosecuted by the Church, she ought to have been detained in an ecclesiastical prison,[2138] but the Godons were resolved to keep her in their custody. One among them said she was dear to them because they ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... every word of her strange, magical voice there went from him some shred of innocence and illusion. It was, of course, his innocence, his ignorance that had made him tolerant of a Grand Display, that had filled him with admiration for the Young Ladies of ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... eradicated. But when the old miserly feeling came over him, and he began to dole out grudgingly the means with which to make his family comfortable, his wife would pleasantly say: "You are taking it out of the wrong pocket, John!"—words which seemed to have a magical effect upon ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... ill-gotten gains never prosper, and the Prince found that the stolen ring brought him ill-luck after all. The Witch-maiden had never rested night nor day until she had found out where the ring was. As soon as she had discovered by means of magical arts that the Prince in the form of a bird was on his way to the Eastern magician, she changed herself into an eagle and watched in the air until the bird she was waiting for came in sight, for she knew him at once by the ring which was hung round his neck by a ribbon. Then the eagle pounced upon ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... David, the Next King of Israel? On Reading Omar Khayyam The Beggar's Valentine Honor Among Scamps The Gamblers On the Road to Nowhere Upon Returning to the Country Road The Angel and the Clown Springfield Magical Incense The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotos King Arthur's Men Have Come Again Foreign Missions in Battle Array Star of My Heart Look You, I'll Go Pray At Mass Heart of God The Empty Boats With a Bouquet of Twelve Roses St. Francis of Assisi Buddha ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... immediately obeyed; and a cylinder covered with inscriptions was drawn out from its hiding-place of twenty-four centuries, as fresh as when deposited there by the hands, probably, of Nebuchadnezzar himself! The Colonel added in a note that the fame of his magical power had flown to Bagdad, and that he was besieged with applications for the loan of his wonderful instrument to be used in the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... There seemed something magical in the communication—something that awakened all the sympathies of the poor bereaved woman; and she felt she could ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... a clever fellow, although of a very odd complexion, which was the same color as your olives. Well, this Arab, whenever he had done eating or working, used to sit down to rest himself, as I am resting myself now, and smoked I cannot tell you what sort of magical leaves, in a large amber-mouthed tube; and if any officers, happening to pass, reproached him for being always asleep, he used quietly to reply: 'Better to sit down than to stand up, to lie down than to sit down, to be dead than to lie down.' He was an acutely melancholy Arab, and I ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... compelling even a peaceful man like myself to forsake invention for war, and the workman's frock which I love, for the armour which I love not, when peace shall smile again on the country, and I shall have time to perfect the work of my hands, I shall present it to my royal master, a magical supremacy of power, which shall for ever raise him and his royal progeny above all use or need of subsidies, ship-money, benevolences, or taxes of whatever sort or name, to rule his kingdom as independent of his subjects in reality as ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... since fled Flit over the brain, like the ghosts of the dead,— Bright visions of glory that vanished too soon; Day-dreams, that departed ere manhood's noon; Attachments by fate or falsehood reft; Companions of early days lost or left; And my native land, whose magical name Thrills to the heart like electric flame; The home of my childhood; the haunts of my prime; All the passions and scenes of that rapturous time When the feelings were young, and the world was new, Like the fresh bowers of Eden unfolding to view; All, all ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... and Aunt Victoria were all alone together—or with only the silent, swift-fingered, Pauline in attendance during the wonderful processes of dressing or undressing her mistress. These occasions seemed to please Aunt Victoria best also. She showed herself then so winning and gracious and altogether magical to the little girl that Sylvia forgot the uncomfortableness which always happened when her aunt and her father were together. As they came to be on more intimate terms, Sylvia was told a great many details about Aunt ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... that with almost magical silence the whole wall at the end of the corridor was sliding back to reveal an enormous amphitheatre in the center of which stood a vast circular table. Ranged in a semicircle about that table, stood fifteen incredibly ancient men ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... in wrath we acknowledge how well He the "Pleasures of Memory" who drew, For mankind from his magical shell Gives the "Pains of ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... named the island, after our ship, Predpriatie: we now tacked to stand out to sea for the night, and at break of day again made towards the island, under feelings of strong excitement. The many telescopes which our eager curiosity pointed towards its object, seemed each endued with the magical power of conveying different images to the sight. Some of us saw what others saw not, till these delusions of the imagination vanished before the conviction produced by rising columns of smoke visible ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... their way to the Isles of Shoals, what was it that had most impressed him at Manchester? Was it not an evening spent in a cottage amid the rocks, close by the water, in the company of charming people? To be sure, there were the magical reflection of the moonlight and the bay, the points of light from the cottages on the rocky shore, the hum and swell of the sea, and all the mystery of the shadowy headlands; but this was only a congenial setting for the music, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation of natural affections, or of any state probable or possible in human life. Nothing here "excites or assuages emotion:" here is "no magical power of raising phantastic terror or wild anxiety." The events are expected without solicitude, and are remembered without joy or sorrow. Of the agents we have no care; we consider not what they are doing, or what they are suffering; we wish only to know what ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... ferocious assaults upon her own master passion, her ruling principle. George Sand was one whose entire life signally attested the power of a "saving grace," resident in the creative and recuperative energies of nature, resident in the magical, the miracle-working, powers of the human heart, the powers of love and sympathy. She was a modern spiritual adventurer who had escaped unscathed from all the anathemas of the old theology; and she abounded, like St. Francis, in her ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... American history was the conversion in the autumn of 1861 of a defeated rabble and a multitude of raw militia into a splendid fighting machine. The very excellence of this achievement was part of his undoing. It was so near to magical that it imposed on himself, gave him a false estimate of himself, hid from him his own limitation. It imposed also on his enemies. Crude, fierce men like the Vindictive leaders of Congress, seeing this miracle take place so astoundingly soon, leaped at once to the conclusion that he could, ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... settlement, as the fort, with its guns, and the houses, were already erected. It was a Sabbath morning, and at the usual hour a bell summoned the settlers to worship. Tuscarora seemed to fancy that some magical ceremony was going forward, and was afraid to enter; but Tecumah, less superstitious than his father, and prompted by curiosity, begged leave to attend, accompanied by several other young men. Though they were unable to comprehend a word, their countenances ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... doings—Item, what our Lord God said; and lastly, of the magical experiment performed upon George Putkammer and ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... by the moon, and redolent of flowers that had been made magical by the alchemy of night, surrounded them. They came to a spot where a circular wall of foliage, rising behind stone benches, hemmed in a fountain, above which a marble antique warrior was lifting in his arms a marble girl, who struggled against that seizure ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... sweet cadence, and he would string together some simple words to them, and sing them to himself with gentle content. The song of the reapers on the upland, or the rude chanting in the little church had a magical charm for him; and Mistress Alison would hear the boy, in his room overhead, singing softly to himself for very gladness of heart, like a little bird of the dawn, or tapping out some tripping beat of ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of his state-room. And between you and me and the binnacle, reader, not to let it go any further, I believe it was poor Mary's letter, with its "dear luv" and its "sweet kisses," that was at the bottom of Jack's resolve. For had she not written, as plain as quill can write, the magical sentence, "Yes, missus misses you; so do I"? It didn't matter a spoonful of tar about the "so do I," but there was the "missus misses you." Ah! it was around these simple, euphonious words that hope hung ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... no heaviness nor languor in her eyes, her voice, as heretofore. Under the white silk sunshade which screened her from the hot sunlight, she looked like some young bride beneath her veil, or a maiden waiting to yield to the magical enchantments of Love. ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... essayed another trick. He brought out a bottle, apparently empty, and said that it was a magical flask. ...
— Joe Strong on the Trapeze - or The Daring Feats of a Young Circus Performer • Vance Barnum
... unconscious appeal. Perhaps the brain had been stunned asleep, but the deep-down soul was awake. It was calling to Beverley's soul, and the call had to be answered, or the vow would be broken. Roger Sands' wife dared not break such a vow lest she should be punished and lose her magical happiness. ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... out, and as they walked homewards through the forest, purple and vaporous in the evening light, they drew closer together; and Dion looking into her eyes saw there a new gleam, violet, magical, shining, there was the presence of ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... the little party opposed to them, another ordered them to hurry to the walls, a third to seize the gate and see that it was not opened. The confusion reached its height as the Scots poured in through the open gate. The garrison, surprised and confounded as they were at this, to them, almost magical seizure of the castle by their foes, fought bravely until the governor and many of the officers were killed. Some of the men threw down their arms, and others, taking advantage of their knowledge of the castle, made their way to the gate and escaped ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... be written of amulets, cups, and horns of magical power, from the divining cup of Genesis to the Amalthean horns, and the goblet of Oberon, which he gave to Huon of Bordeaux, the supernatural power of which, passing into an hundred shapes of fiction, may be found ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... "Say, what magical charm, or 'Open Sesame,' did you use on this?" asked Allen, after vainly trying. "We can't make it ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... the world, strange and mysterious was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, the sky and the river flowed, the forest and the mountains were rigid, all of it was beautiful, all of it was mysterious and magical, and in its midst was he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself. All of this, all this yellow and blue, river and forest, entered Siddhartha for the first time through the eyes, was no longer a spell of Mara, was no longer the veil of Maya, was no longer a pointless and ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... "I am arguing against that proverb. Enough is not as good as a feast. It is far better. There is something magical and satisfying in the art of leaving off. Good advice is infinitely more potent when it is brief and earnest than when it dribbles into vague exhortations. Many a man has been worried into vice by well-meant but wearisome admonitions to be virtuous. A single word of true friendly ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... to penetrate my soul when I enter, as if I were in a holy temple. 'Thou standest in a holy place,' I would say. A loud word, a heavy footstep, makes me shudder, as if an infidel were desecrating the place. I stand speechless, in a magical atmosphere that wraps my whole being, scarcely daring to lift my eyes. A perfect stillness comes over my soul; it seems to be soaring ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... kindly; everything in it is feminine, from its name upwards. It has well been given the name of 'the fair city.' Its masses of palaces and churches stand out light and wonderful like the graceful dream of a young god; there is something magical, something strange and bewitching in the greenish-grey light and silken shimmer of the silent water of the canals, in the noiseless gliding of the gondolas, in the absence of the coarse din of a town, the coarse rattling, and crashing, and uproar. 'Venice is dead, ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... dreamed about the subject uppermost in his mind. He thought that, after several days' patient watching, he finally discovered his man; but all attempts to capture him were unavailing. When he pursued, the rebel would disappear in a magical way, that was perfectly bewildering. Finally, he dreamed that the rebel assumed the offensive, and one day he met him in the street, carrying in his hand something that looked like a lump of coal, which he threw at Frank. It proved, however, to be a torpedo, for it exploded with a loud report, ...
— Frank on the Lower Mississippi • Harry Castlemon
... at him, voiceless from the surprise of it. The magical neck was absorbed in the chest again, and he ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... a river which probably derived its magical character from Celtic traditions: it was long the boundary of Briton and Saxon.—These places are introduced, as being near the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of the Pied Piper becomes for the first time credible to me (albeit confirmed by the Hameliners dating their legal instruments from the period of his exit), as I behold how those strains, without pretence of magical potency, bewitch the pupillary legs, nor leave to the pedagogic an entire self-control. For these reasons, lest my kingly prerogative should suffer diminution, I prorogue my restless commons, whom I follow into the street, chiefly lest some mischief may chance befall them. After ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... with a magical charm—the result of the union of opposite emotions; as when shame and courage, timidity and daring, love and heroism, meet and are blended together in a wonderful harmony—a miracle seen only in the magic ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... which generally produced some slight incident which she styled an adventure. She was kind to Coningsby, but had no time to indulge in the lengthened conversations which he had previously found so magical. Mr. Melton was always on the scene, the monopolising hero, it would seem, of every thought, and phrase, and plan. Coningsby began to think that Beaumanoir was not so delightful a place as he had imagined. He began to think that he had stayed ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... done these three hundred years. And the condition is this, that every year I present unto the Demon one who hath at my persuasion assigned his soul to him in exchange for power, riches, knowledge, magical gifts, or whatever else his heart chiefly desireth; nor until this present year have I perilled the fulfilment of my obligation. Seest thou these scrolls? They are the assignments of which I have spoken. It would amaze thee to scan the subscriptions, and perceive in these the signatures of ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... the tent and the strange things which formed the Musungu's personal baggage and furniture. After gazing in stupid wonder at the table, on which was placed some crockery and the few books I carried with me; at the slung hammock, which he believed was suspended by some magical contrivance; at the portmanteaus which contained my stock of clothes, he ejaculated, "Hi-le! the Musungu is a great sultan, who has come from his country to see Ugogo." He then noticed me, and was ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... in high veneration by their deluded brethren; not so much for their knowledge of medicine as for the magical power which they are supposed to possess. It is for their interest to lead these credulous people to believe that they can at pleasure hold intercourse with the munedoos, who are ever ready to give them whatever ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... whole alta Roma, beginning with slaves carrying mosaics for their refined masters, and ending with patricians, who were so fond of beautiful things that one of them for instance used to kiss at every moment a superb vase, stands before our eyes as if it was reconstructed by a magical power from ruins ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... no fear concerning his ability to fill the role. He had proven equal to the task before now; and there were not a few, particularly among those acknowledging the magical Red Fox as their totem, who secretly cherished a belief that Paul knew more about the secrets of Nature than any two ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... my life I remember nothing more formidable than my uncle's entrance into that little Pompadour drawing-room, at ten that evening. The fine head, with its silver hair thrown into relief by the entirely black dress, and the divinely calm face, had a magical effect on the Comtesse Honorine; she had the feeling of cool balm on her wounds, and beamed in the reflection of that virtue which gave light without ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... words, she took the paper and tobacco from his unresisting hands; and with a facility that, in Desborough's eyes, seemed magical, rolled and presented him a cigarette. He took it, still seated, still without a word; staring with all his eyes upon that apparition. Her face was warm and rich in colour; in shape, it was that piquant triangle, so innocently sly, so saucily attractive, so rare in our more ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... good-bye. I saw his white figure glide across the great open space that the moon made white as it was. And when the shadows took him I still heard the faint sound of his flute, calling to his heart and to the distant Oreida through the magical stillness ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... vibration rapidly increased, he then gave a sharp order or two, and in an instant almost the men came pouring up from the various hatches upon deck, but so quickly and quietly that the transformation was almost magical. ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... he closed the secret door, "but there is nothing magical about it, after all. It was a simple matter to have an electric light plant smuggled up here in sections. It was an equally simple matter to obtain rugs and cushions from the Castillo de Ruiz, ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... which has risen as rapidly as an American city, and with the same fits and starts. Magical prosperity is succeeded by a general insolvency among builders and land speculators; after a few years of fallow another start takes place, and so on—speculation follows speculation. Birkenhead has had about four of these high tides of prosperous ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... than a dram, or ounce of theirs," those loathsome and fulsome filthy potions, heteroclitical pills (so he calls them), horse medicines, ad quoram aspectum Cyclops Polyphemus exhorresceret. And though some condemn their skill and magnetical cures as tending to magical superstition, witchery, charms, &c., yet they admire, stiffly vindicate nevertheless, and infinitely prefer them. But these are both in extremes, the middle sort approve of minerals, though not in so high a degree. Lemnius lib. 3. cap. 6. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... written long afterwards, from her recollections, from her own oblique point of view; in a beautifully shrill humor; running, not unnaturally, into confused exaggerations and distortions of all kinds. Not mendaciously written anywhere, yet erroneously everywhere. Wilhelmina had no knowledge of the magical machinery that was at work: she vaguely suspects Grumkow and Seckendorf; but does not guess, in the mad explosions of Papa, that two devils have got into Papa, and are doing the mischief. Trusting to memory alone, she misdates, mistakes, misplaces; jumbles ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Trask, and turned to see Shanghai Tom staring into the bowl, his eyes fairly popping out of his head at this magical cookery which transformed a sea-beach into ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... the mandate of the magnanimous Abbas, I saw there the beautiful Tamira with the gazelle eyes, the rose of Ispahan, brilliant as the azure campac which only grows in Paradise. Her glance produced on me the magical effect of the seal of Solomon, and I resolved to take her for my wife. I went this very morning to her father, but his word was given to you; and Bebut-kazi is the only obstacle to my happiness. Listen! I possess great riches, and have powerful ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... madness," says Pentheus, "has confounded your minds, O ye warlike men,[80] descendants of the Dragon? Can brass knocked against brass prevail so much with you? And the pipe with the bending horn, and these magical delusions? And shall the yells of women, and madness produced by wine, and troops of effeminate {wretches}, and empty tambourines[81] prevail over you, whom neither the warrior's sword nor the trumpet could affright, nor troops ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... warrior was the highest aim among all ancient peoples of note, as it is still among many barbarous peoples. When we remember that in the Norseman's heaven, the time was to be passed in daily battles with magical healing of wounds, we see how deeply rooted may become the conception that fighting is man's proper business and that industry is fit only for slaves and people of low degree. That is to say, when the chronic struggles of races necessitate perpetual wars there is evolved an ideal of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... W. Shaumann. Bio-Dynamic Agriculture: An Introduction. Spring Valley, New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1976. A good introduction to this philosophical/mystical system of farming and gardening that uses magical compost ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... hisses appeared to have as little effect on him. From the first word to the last, he was master of the platform, and no one dreamed of contesting his right to it. His gestures were his own, and could not be imitated, for they were the creation of the moment. There was something magical in this art of his, and if his wisdom and judgment had only equalled it, he might have counted among the ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... Pennine Alps without veiling their summits. We soon had under our eyes a second sky, a lower sky, a sea of clouds, whence emerged a perfect archipelago of peaks and snow-wrapped mountains. There was something magical in it, which the greatest ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... not only in these magical transitions and transformations that Browning's joy in soul was decisively coloured by his joy in power. A whole class of his characters—the most familiarly "Browningesque" division of them all—was shaped under the sway of this master-passion; the noble army of "strivers" who succeed and of ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... grasping thing, man? Who talks of religion, country, wife, children? This petty mineral can purchase them all! Oh, what a bright joy speaks out in your white cheek, my beauty! What are all human charms to yours? Why, by your spell, most magical of talismans, my years may walk, gloating and revelling, through a lane of beauties, till they fall into the grave! Pish! that grave is an ugly thought,—a very, very ugly thought! But come, my sun of hope, I must eclipse you for ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... parents are the wine-god Bacchus and the sorceress Circe. The former, mated with Love, is the father of Mirth (see L'Allegro); but, mated with the cunning Circe, his offspring is a voluptuary whose gay exterior and flattering speech hide his dangerously seductive and magical powers. He bears no resemblance, therefore, to Comus as represented in Ben Jonson's Pleasure reconciled to Virtue, in which mask "Comus" and "The Belly" are throughout synonymous. In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Comus is a "drinker ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... Gnostics in Syria; and another, of the secret virtues which were supposed to reside in gems: especially in the old Roman and Greek gems, carved into intaglios with figures of heathen gods and goddesses. Lapidaria, or lists of these gems and their magical virtues, were not uncommon in the Middle Ages. You may read a great deal that is interesting about them at the end of ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... sent thirty-two bullets zipping and singing in amongst the trees. Before the convicts recovered from their surprise, forty-eight more leaden messengers whined through the air above them. The effect was magical, the convicts ceased their fire, and puzzled and alarmed by the sudden leaden hail, sought shelter behind the largest trees ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... chilometri into the pass, where you leave the river, then the road, always winding about the hills, runs level for four miles, and at last drops for five miles into Fivizzano. All the way the mountains stand over you frighteningly motionless and threatening, till the woods of Fivizzano, that magical town, hide you in their shadow, and evening comes as you climb the last hill that ends in the Piazza before the door ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... san," she rhythmically droned, three being the magical number that would bring good luck if the petals were properly arranged and the number ...
— Little Sister Snow • Frances Little
... of his kind, disposed of his boat, the last tie, if tie there was, that bound him to his present life. Waterman he had always been, and now had come to him the call of the Father of All Waters. The tang of the salt in his nostrils conjured up dreams as magical as those invoked by the wand of the poppy god. Wrapped in their rosy mantle, he walked the streets for the next two days, and on the third he took his way to the dock where lay the fire junk that was to bear ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... since her arrival at the mountain camp. It was a wild and picturesque scene at any time, but now the effect of the intense white light, falling on splintered rock, hanging tree, and glancing stream was magical indeed. Rita lay down on her face at the edge of the precipice, as she had seen the soldiers do, and lowered her jar carefully. As the water gurgled placidly into the jar, her eyes roved here and there, taking in every detail of the marvellous ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... ran through his frame. The Lieutenant repeated his question, and, getting no answer, looked round for orders. The Captain met the look, and crying savagely, 'Answer will you, you mule!' struck the half-swooning miserable across the back with his switch. The effect was magical. Covered, as his shoulders were, the man sprang erect with a shriek of pain, raising his chin, and hollowing his back; and in that attitude stood an instant with starting eyes, gasping for breath. Then he sank back against the wall, moving his mouth spasmodically. His ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... monarchy. Others said that the founder of the new kingdom was a Parthian satrap, the son of a noble, and that, having long meditated revolt, he took the final plunge in consequence of a prophecy uttered by Artabanus, who was well skilled in magical arts, and saw in the stars that the Parthian empire was threatened with destruction. Artabanus, on a certain occasion, when he communicated this prophetic knowledge to his wife, was overheard by one of her attendants, a noble damsel named Artaducta, already affianced to Artaxerxes and a sharer ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... with care, those, then living might see most of those naked rocks clothed with verdure, for the progress of vegetation in such a climate, favoured by those accidental causes which seemed to prevent that particular region from ever suffering by droughts, is almost magical, and might convert a wilderness into a garden in the course of a ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... and Mrs. Custard hobbled down stairs, and the children hopped, skipped, and jumped up stairs, both wondering what would come of this magical ...
— Red, White, Blue Socks, Part First - Being the First Book • Sarah L Barrow
... purchases in which he had been employed, such as Indian flowers, poppingjays, birds' feathers, spices, Greek wines, and diamonds. Requested by us, the judge, to say if he had furnished certain ingredients of magical conjuration, the blood of new-born children, conjuring books, and things generally and whatsoever made use of by sorcerers, giving him licence to state his case without that thereupon he should be the subject to any further inquest or inquiry, the said al Rastchid ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... which the soul, separated from the body, was believed to accomplish in the various divisions of the lower regions, are related in this book. It contained also a collection of prayers for the use of the deceased in the other world, and of magical formulae intended to secure the preservation of the mummy from decay, and to prevent its possession by an evil spirit, till the ultimate return of the soul of the deceased. Many of these rituals are also found written, not in hieroglyphics, but in hieratic characters, which are an abbreviated ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... killed. Having regard to the Kumaon rite, it may be surmised that these legends commemorate the death of a Natni or acrobat during the performance of some feat of dancing or sliding on a rope for the magical benefit of the crops. And it seems possible that acrobatic performances may have had their origin in this manner. The point bearing on the present argument is, however, that the Nat performed special functions for the success of the village ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... raised himself from the mantelpiece against which he was leaning. Never had he thought so brilliantly, and he regretted that no magical stenographer should be there to register his thoughts as they passed. But they were gone.... Resuming his position against the mantelpiece, he continued ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... ascribes this gift of heaven to Joseph's skill in magical arts: Cum magicas ibi artes (Egypto) solerti ingenio ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... pearly lamp of heaven. The subtle sorrow of this world of magical moonlight filled his soul. Then the hopelessness and tragedy of all it symbolized were unfolded to him, and, extending his arms in a vague wild sympathy, in a vague wild ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... my departure from the presbytery had brought me back the next morning in a close litter, and departed immediately afterward. When I became able to collect my scattered thoughts, I reviewed within my mind all the circumstances of that fateful night. At first I thought I had been the victim of some magical illusion, but ere long the recollection of other circumstances, real and palpable in themselves, came to forbid that supposition. I could not believe that I had been dreaming, since Barbara as well as myself had seen ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... to gaze upon a vast space, the limits of which extended far beyond my vision. An atmosphere of magical luminousness permeated the entire field of view. I was amazed to see no trace of animalculous life. Not a living thing, apparently, inhabited that dazzling expanse. I comprehended instantly, that, by the wondrous power of my lens, I had penetrated beyond the grosser particles ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... up and flaunted above us like a bunch of the weed floating there in the water beneath and dyeing all the shallows so that they looked like caves of cool emerald, and wide off and over them the west burned smoulderingly red like a furnace. Many a time since, I've felt the magical color between those banks and along those meadows, but then I felt none of it; every wit I had was too awake and alert ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... King Frodi had a magical quern, or hand mill, called Grotti; the largest quern ever known in Denmark. Now Grotti, which ground either gold or peace for King Frodi as he willed, was stolen by a sea king named Mysing, who ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... which stands in the Oriental mind for the United States, is a sacred passport and password. It is a magical word. It opens doors that are locked to all the rest of the world; it tears down barriers, century-old, that have been barricading certain places for ages past. That simple word opens hearts that would ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... a word covers too large a space of meaning, is the frequent occasion of the introduction of another, which shall relieve it of a portion of this. Thus, there was a time when 'witch' was applied equally to male and female dealers in unlawful magical arts. Simon Magus, for example, and Elymas are both 'witches', in Wiclif's New Testament (Acts viii. 9; xiii. 8), and Posthumus in Cymbeline: but when the medieval Latin 'sortiarius' (not 'sortitor' ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... than a guess. Owing to the number of proper names and technical terms which we have no means of understanding, it is often quite impossible to know the drift of large paragraphs, and even of whole chapters. Since many of the chapters were treated merely as having a magical efficacy either when recited or when inscribed on something buried with the body, it was of small consequence whether or not the words were understood. The bare recital or writing of names of gods, etc., had ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... been a magical or arbitrary government of the world that has been for ages the dominant one in the human mind. People have supposed that these invisible beings desired them to do certain things, to refrain from doing certain other things, and they have expected them ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... reconstruction. It was the dull season from the builder's standpoint, and Persis had no difficulty in securing workmen in sufficient numbers to hurry the work with what seemed to herself, as well as to Joel, almost magical despatch. A generous check deposited to her credit in the Clematis Savings Bank had relieved Joel's earlier apprehensions. The bequest was no hoax. But his constitutional parsimony rebelled against the outlay as if each expenditure had meant want in the future. While his dignity demanded that ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... for three days, being unable to find game. On another occasion they fell in with a tribe of bushmen who harassed them with poisoned arrows, killing two of their best men, and were only prevented from annihilating them through the terror inspired by their firearms, which they took for magical instruments. ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... a deep water-hole, splashing into it clothes and all, that nothing from the dead might attach itself to them. They changed their wet attire after their arrival at the house. Later in the evening a magnificent hikuli feast was held. The Indians sat around the big fire, which cast a magical light over the tall old pine-trees around the patio, while the dancers moved about in their fantastic way through the red glow. Such a scene makes a deeper impression than any that could be ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... planets, and a number of fancied numerical relations were adduced on the subject. The absurdity of this doctrine is obvious enough, especially when we observe that, as is now well known, there are two large planets, and a host of small planets, over and above the magical number of the regular solids. In Kepler's time, however, this doctrine was so far from being regarded as absurd, that its announcement was hailed as a great intellectual triumph. Kepler was at once regarded with favour. It seems, indeed, to have been the circumstance which brought ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... their attention, and the special opportunities of attacking them. Those problems were of no higher order of complexity than those I had been accustomed to for years, in fact, most of them were not very complex from a purely intellectual viewpoint. There was nothing inherently uncanny, magical or wizardly about their occupation whatever. It was nothing but plain hard work and keeping everlastingly at it. Now, what was the actual thing behind that chemical laboratory that we did not have at ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... sooner had she done so than she found herself flitting over rocks and rough places with perfect ease, and at such speed, that, when she looked back, in a moment, she had already left the old woman far behind, and out of sight. They were magical shoes; but, no matter how fast they skimmed over the ground, Dorel, out of pure love, continued to go before, talking and laughing and ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... dinner the tables disappeared with magical rapidity and a dance began. While I was talking in a corner behind a table, a large album containing views of Irkutsk was presented to me as a souvenir of my visit. The golovah was prominent in the presentation, and when it was ended he urged ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... of me,' he will write in a day of foreboding. A most significant trait is this—in the tedium of trench days, or when imminent peril silences the idle tongues, he gathers the greatest number of these magical flowers. In those moments when speech fails, his soul is serene, it has free play, and we hear its own fine sounds. Hitherto we had heard the repetition of the word of courage and of brotherhood uttered by all our gathering armies. But here, in battle, face to face with the eternities, that ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... know anything about the said laws. Loose conceits, fancies of the private judgment, were excusable enough in the Elizabethan poets. In their day, nature was still unconquered by science; medieval superstitions still lingered in the minds of men and the magical notions of nature which they had inherited from the Middle Age received a corroboration from those neoplatonist dreamers, whom they confounded with the true Greek philosophers. But, now that Bacon has spoken, and that Europe has obeyed him, surely, among the most practical, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... contrivers, in mimicry of the real festival cars. Games of soldiers are of two types. When copied from the historical fights, one boy, with his kerchief bound round his temples, makes a supposed marvelous and heroic defence. He slashes with his bamboo sword, as a harlequin waves his baton, to deal magical destruction all around on the attacking party. When the late insurrection commenced in Satsuma, the Tokio boys, hearing of the campaign on modern tactics, would form attack and defence parties. A little company armed with bamboo breech-loaders would march to ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... find it, and could tell from its appearance all that had befallen his family. And Martin was called by Glooskap Uch-keen (M.), "my younger brother." The Lord of men and beasts had a belt which gave him magical power and endless strength. And when he lent this to Martin, the younger brother could also do great deeds, such as were ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... (it is not proper to look on at magical arts), and then in a moment, saw the right hook on his cast; but Jaqueline was not in the boat. She had turned herself into an artificial fly (a small black gnat), and Dick might set ...
— Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia - being the adventures of Prince Prigio's son • Andrew Lang
... Only I wanted the magical influence of love like yours to take the cruelty out of my heart, to smooth down all the rough edges, and to make me feel like an ordinary girl. I feel like an ordinary girl now in many ways, except that I could never give you ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... mentioned apropos of the tempo di menuetto of the eighth symphony), [Footnote: Ferdinand Hiller] to play the eighth Prelude and Fugue from the first part of "Das Wohltemperirte Clavier" (E flat minor), a piece which has always had a magical attraction for me. [Footnote: i.e. Prelude VIII., from Part I. of Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues.] He very kindly complied, and I must confess that I have rarely been so much taken by surprise. Certainly, there was no trace here of ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... Palestine professes to drive devils out of people (perhaps alluding to the exorcists of the early church.) He makes Eucrates speak of one Pancrates, who would take a broom or the pestle of a wooden mortar, and upon saying a couple of magical words, it appeared to become a man, drew water, and ordered food. When Pancrates had no further need of him, he spoke a couple of words, and the man was a pestle again. Eucrates tried this himself, but having made the pestle a man, and told him to bring water, he forgot how to change ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... against the starry sky when the camp-fire blazed up. The color of the foliage seemed indescribably blue-green, something never seen by day. Every line shone bright, graceful, curved, rounded, and all thrown with sharp relief against the sky. How magical, exquisitely delicate and fanciful! The great trunks were soft serrated brown, and the gnarled branches stood out in perfect proportions. All works of art ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... one General, with a quivering voice, "the respected governor of our ancient capital gave a grand dinner. The table was set for one hundred persons, with wonderful luxury. The gifts of all lands seemed to have appointed a rendezvous at this magical feast. There was the golden sterlet of the Sheksna, the pheasant, nursling of the Caucasian forests, and strawberries, that great rarity in our north ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... tried: but they were all bad and obvious failures. Against the possible tameness of the domestic novel; against the too commonly actual want of actuality of the historic romance; he set this new fantastic activity of his, which was at once real and unreal, but where the reality had a magical touch of the unfamiliar and the very unreality was stimulating. He might have a hundred faults—he was in fact never faultless, except in Pickwick, which is so absolutely unique that there is nothing ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... beggar maid, and Patricia caught the vision of a slender, airy figure, glittering beneath its gauzy draperies with the sparkle of bright gold, and with the glint and shimmer of rosy clanking bracelets and anklets, and the spangled glory of the rose-crowned headpiece stirring a magical memory of Persia. ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... depth, and could only be approached from the southward, the precipitous ledge of which I have already spoken cutting off all access in other directions. Through the middle of the valley ran a brawling stream of the same magical-looking water which has been described. We saw several strange animals about the dwellings, all appearing to be thoroughly domesticated. The largest of these creatures resembled our common hog in the structure of the body ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... her feeling into words than it is for the youth who has enchantingly rendered the gentle poetry of Ben Jonson's "Sad Shepherd," or for him who has walked the boards as Southey's Wat Tyler. His association, however, is quite as clinging and magical as is the child's although he can only say, "Gee, I wish I could always feel the way I did that night. Something would be doing then." Nothing of the artist's pleasure, nor of the revelation of that larger ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... outspread wings above the brown, limpid depths of her eyes. He could not tell that she was still little more than a girl; barely eight-and-twenty. For him she was ageless:—protector and playfellow, essence of all that was most real, yet most magical, in the home that was his world. Unknown to him, the Eastern mother in her was evoking, already, the Eastern spirit of ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the Gipsies were now the only persons addicted to such wickedness; but this is not the case; for it is well known that almost every town is cursed with an astrological, magical, or slight-of-hand fortune-teller. There are two now in Southampton; and their wretched abodes are visited not only by vain and ignorant servants, but often by those who belong to the higher circles, and not unfrequently by ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... became "magical" in our sense of the term only when the growth of knowledge revealed the fact that the measures taken were inadequate to attain the desired end; while the "magician" continued to make the pretence that he could attain ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... collector. Uncomfortably near him on the dark wall he began to be aware of something marvellous on old gold when tea interrupted his observations. Tea with Emma was always engrossing. The mere practice and etiquette of it brought the gentlewoman in her into a lovely salience. Her hands and eyes became magical, her talk light and constant without insistency. A symbolist might imagine eternal correspondence between the amber brew and her sunny hair. It was easy to adore Emma at tea, and generally she did not resent a discreetly ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... cries of joy, repeating mona, mona signifying beautiful. The mirrors were at first received with the most delight, but this soon changed into terror; they evidently conceived there was something magical about them, and flung them all into the sea. The coloured glass beads had then the preference, but the distribution caused many disputes. Those who had not obtained any, wished to deprive the rest of them by force. The clamour and quarrelling were increasing, when the voice of the ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... he had forsaken God, and God had forsaken him, and given him up to demoniacal delusions. Nor does Josephus's strange account of the root Baara [Of the War, B. VIII. ch. 6. sect. 3] seem to be other than that of its magical use in such conjurations. As for the following history, it confirms what Christ says, Matthew 12;27 "If I by Beelzebub cast out demons, by whom do your Sons cast ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... and gardenia, and through the swaying boughs of palm and mimosa there are glimpses of rugged mountains, their summits veiled in clouds, of purple sea with the white surf beating eternally against the reefs, whiter still in the yellow sunlight or the magical moonlight ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is the simple and appropriate ceremony we call confirmation. We claim for it no magical powers. It is not a sacrament. It adds nothing to the sacrament of baptism, for that is complete in itself. There is no conferring of Grace by the pastor's hands, but simply a directing of the Church's prayers to ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... on which the countess threw ever so slight an emphasis, by reason of the pride that the mistress of a house takes in showing that she only receives people of distinction as visitors in her house, produced a magical effect. The Count's stiff manner relaxed at once as he ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... as anything. Then the man did lots more tricks, and he called a boy, and told him to take Lulu and Bawly back home, after he had given them each ten cents. For his regular trick duck and frog were all well again, and he could do magic with them. So that's how Lulu and Bawly were in a magical show, and they told all their friends about it and everyone was so surprised that they said: "Oh! Oh! Oh!" ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... which he yielded, the bad things in his writings, the sectarian obloquy which pursued him, have veiled from popular apprehension some of the sweet and noble qualities of his heart. Notwithstanding his perverse lower impulses, he was one of the most princely and magical of the immortal lords of fame. So far from there being any lack of permanent value and power in his verse, any falling from his established rank, the most authoritative critics, more generally today than ever before, acknowledge him to be the greatest lyric poet that ever ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... the bouquet of rich wine, never cloying, exquisite, might well have seemed magical to the dry Puritans, I mused. It should stay by me tonight, like a promise ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... lad was as incomprehensible to the others as to Kobylin himself. The rapidity with which the blows were delivered, and the ease with which Godfrey had evaded the rushes of his opponent, seemed to them, as to him, almost magical, and from that moment they regarded Godfrey as being possessed of some strange power, which placed him altogether apart from themselves. Osip and the other men of the same stamp warmly ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... of seven feet radius was drawn on the ground in white chalk. At the centre of the circle were inscribed, in yellow chalk, certain magical figures representing Mercury, and about them was drawn, in white chalk, a triangle within a circle of three feet radius—the centre of the circle being the same as that of the outer circle. Within this inner circle were then placed the three captive werwolves. It would be ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... god Vishnu, notwithstanding that tulsi bears the title of Krishna's bride, probably because of the latter being an incarnation of Vishnu. On these occasions pots of this plant are painted and adorned with tinsel. A magical circle is traced in the garden and the plant is put in the middle of it. A Brahman brings an idol of Vishnu and begins the marriage ceremony, standing before the plant. A married couple hold a shawl between the plant and the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... toil for daily wages are beginning to understand that capital, though sometimes vaunting its importance and clamoring for the protection and favor of the Government, is dull and sluggish till, touched by the magical hand of labor, it springs into activity, furnishing an occasion for Federal taxation and gaining the value which enables it to bear its burden. And the laboring man is thoughtfully inquiring whether in ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... this, I gave some of it to Hans, also to Umslopogaas, who was with the wounded Zulus, who, we found, were progressing well towards complete recovery, and lastly to Goroko who also was worn out. On all of these the effect of that magical brew ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... There's a magical Isle up the River Time Where the softest of airs are playing; There's a cloudless sky and a tropical clime, And a voice as sweet as a vesper chime, And the Junes with the roses ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... above the ancients, that whereas they were faine by their magical charms to represent the Moones approach, wee cannot onely bring her lower with a greater innocence, but may also with a more familiar view behold ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... he murmured, biting his last crust in delight. "What relief! what fire! Where can one find such transparency of color! such magical ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... of which the tawdry decorations of our modern operas can give but a faint idea. Devotees and sinners, intent upon winning the favor of a new saint, lighted thousands of candles in his honor inside the vast church, and these scintillating lights gave a magical aspect to the edifice. The black arcades, the columns with their capitals, the recessed chapels glittering with gold and silver, the galleries, the Moorish fretwork, the most delicate features of this delicate carving, were all revealed in the dazzling brightness like the ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... completed, printed, and published on December 1, 1816; but without the magical words, "by the Author of 'Waverley,'" on the title-page. All doubts as to the work being by the author of "Waverley," says Lockhart, had worn themselves out before the lapse ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... it (or under it). In the present state of things there is not much to be expected from effusions and feeble attempts of that kind. On the other hand I am expecting something great, beautiful, and magical from the Symphonic form into which you will shape this story—a story which just as easily becomes dry and tedious as, on the other hand, it can be melting. Take care that we bring your work to a hearing at the next Tonkunstler-Versammlung ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... sprinkled the essences appropriate to the cult of Selenis, we took off all our clothes, and holding the letter concealed in my left hand, with the right I graciously led Madame d'Urfe to the brink of the bath. Here stood an alabaster cup containing spirits of wine which I kindled, repeating magical words which I did not understand, but which she said after me, giving me the letter addressed to Selenis. I burnt the letter in the flame of the spirits, beneath the light of the moon, and the credulous lady told me she ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... my little speech was magical. Pepper glanced at McQuhair, Moffatt crimsoned and nudged McKenzie, Wiry Ben slipped off the window-seat and shyed his hat across the kitchen, whilst Long Tom, the bullock-driver, "thanked me kindly for mentioning of it;" and every body got up directly and took their hats off. I ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... pioneers in the great work of redemption. What emotion and what pride for them! To complete the work they are ready to sacrifice their lives. The French nation with one heart spurs them forward, and on the folds of their flag are inscribed the magical names Liberty and Right. Long live ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... that will help you, Asa Thor. Lucky for you I am mistress of magical things. Take this staff in your hands. It is a staff of power and will stand you instead ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... a dream. Aloof in those dark heavens paused Destiny, With her last star descending in the gleam Of the cold morrow, from the emptied sky. The hour, the distance from her old self, all The novelty and loneness of the place Had left a lovely awe on that fair face, And all the land grew strange and magical. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... known to modern times had no place in Rich's pantomimes. These were divided into two parts, the first being devoted to scenic surprises and magical transformations of a serious nature, and the last to all kinds of comic antics, tumbling and dancing. No allusions to passing events or the follies of the day ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... better than talk, book, art, (Thou hast, O Nature! elements! utterance to my heart beyond the rest—and this is of them,) So sweet thy primitive taste to breathe within—thy soothing fingers my face and hands, Thou, messenger—magical strange bringer to body and spirit of me, (Distances balk'd—occult medicines penetrating me from head to foot,) I feel the sky, the prairies vast—I feel the mighty northern lakes, I feel the ocean and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... had a magical effect. The intervening time between past and present closed up for him, and moved by an impulse which he had combated for fifteen years, he seized her two hands and ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... contest their supremacy. These last—the fourth immigration—are depicted to us as accomplished soothsayers and necromancers who came out of Greece. They could quell storms; cure diseases; work in metals; foretell future events; forge magical weapons; and raise the dead to life; they are called the Tuatha de Danans, and by their supernatural power, as well as by virtue of "the Lia Fail," or fabled "stone of destiny," they subdued their Belgic kinsmen, and exercised ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... to which Japanese are commonly accustomed in their differences of opinion to refrain from blows makes many of their quarrels harmless. The threat to send for the policeman or the actual appearance of the policeman has an almost magical effect in calming a disturbance. The Japanese policeman believes very much in reproving or reprimanding evil doers and in reasoning with folk whose "carelessness" has attracted attention. Sometimes for greater impressiveness ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... nor bolt, nor grate, And yet men durance there abide, In dungeon scarce three inches wide; With roof so low, that under it 1140 They never stand, but lie or sit; And yet so foul, that whoso is in, Is to the middle-leg in prison; In circle magical conflu'd, With walls of subtile air and wind, 1145 Which none are able to break thorough, Until they're freed by head of borough. Thither arriv'd, th' advent'rous Knight And bold Squire from their steeds alight At th' ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... 'Thanks, my Creator! thanks!'—Your highness says that M. Baleinier has often found me in my solitude, a prey to a strange excitement: yes, it is true; for it is then that, escaping in thought from all that renders the present odious and painful to me, I find refuge in the future—it is then that magical horizons spread far before me—it is then that such splendid visions appear to me, as make me feel myself rapt in a sublime and heavenly ecstasy, as if I ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... repent; but in what terms? "Oui, ma foi! il faut s'amender. Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette vie-ci, et puis nous songerons a nous." After Moliere comes the artist-enchanter, the master of masters, Mozart, who reveals the hero's spirit in magical harmonies, elfin tones, and elate darting rhythms as of summer lightning made audible. Here you have freedom in love and in morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you, attracting you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... studying the relations between the theory of evolution and socialism, and which is common to the ruling classes under the bourgeois regime and to the individualistic anarchists,—since both alike imagine that the social organization can be changed in a day by the magical effect of a bomb,—more ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... words on Barnes was almost magical. The dull colour streamed into his sallow cheeks, he shook all over with excitement. His voice, when he spoke, was almost hysterical. He had been so near to despair. This indeed had been ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... It was almost magical the way the Boer fire dropped. The guns came into action about a quarter-past nine, and for an hour you would hardly have known they were there. Whenever a group put their heads over the sky-line 1950 yards away there came a round of ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... finding the key of the rainbow. Yet here we were; and Granada—after we had entered at last by crossing still another river—came out from under its spell of enchantment when we saw it at close quarters. Only that wonderful hill above was magical still, as magical to the eye as when Ibraham the astrologer ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... claims; and, whether from being deceived or as a deceiver, whether as an enthusiast or as a cheat, he pretended to have learned all the supernatural knowledge which they pretended to teach. By the Egyptians he was looked upon as the favourite of Heaven; he claimed the power of working miracles by his magical arts, and of foretelling events by his knowledge of astrology. In the Thebaid he was so far honoured that at the bidding of the priests one of the sacred trees spoke to him, as had been their custom from of old with favourites, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... magical,' he added; 'when anyone uses the fan, in three strokes of it I am with them; if they fold it and tap it on the table, in three taps I am at home again. The casket will not open to all, but you see it was this fair ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... all my gifts are magical words That sing sweet songs to me; And the sensitive words are caroling birds In the ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... we had crucified Jesus, not knowing that he was the Son of God, but supposing he wrought his miracles by some magical arts, we summoned a large assembly ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... death and life. The figure one is subject to illimitable expansion. It is without beginning in the infinite of number, as God is without beginning in the infinite of being. As with the vegetable kingdom, the tiny seed or acorn silently working its magical transformation into a plant or tree, and directing its destiny with marvelous intelligence through the torrid and frigid vicissitudes of the seasons; so is man without beginning in the infinitude of his own being or microcosm. Man is both a type and antitype. A type of what pre-existed ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... eat, and had to sup on some pineapples and plums from the hot-houses. This was a very light diet for people who, without food for twenty-four hours, had spent the preceding night on foot and all day fighting! But we were the victors, and that magical word enabled us ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... court with equal effect; that knowledge of the law in its innumerable doctrines, principles, and decisions, which made the study even in Lord Coke's day the work of twenty years; the prompt application of this learning to the rapid matter in hand; the magical use of the faculties of the mind and the wondrous discipline which they must have undergone, every hour, every minute demanding a stretch of thought and an adroitness of discrimination which have justly ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... for his sake!—and his wife, mounting as he mounted beside the one man in the world she had elected to admire and love. "Doctor and Mrs. John Tenison "—so it would be written. "Doctor Tenison's wife"—"This is Mrs. Tenison"—she seemed already to hear the magical sound of it! ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... the practice seems to have at present no further significance than that of ornamentation. No therapeutic nor magical nor ceremonial effects are associated with it. Neither is it symbolic of prowess, nor distinctive of family, place, nor person, for two persons from different localities and groups may ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... Many affected to believe that Marie was the victim of sorcery, and that such was the real source of the influence of Leonora; and thus the heart-broken mother and unhappy wife, whose morbid imagination had caused her to consider her trials as the result of magical arts, was herself accused of having employed them against her ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... peoples, regard madness as due to possession by an evil spirit,[123] but the Malanaus extend this theory to many other forms of disease, and practise an elaborate rite of exorcism. This will be described in the chapter (XVI.) dealing with charms and magical practices. ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... collection of primitive customs, and will be an inexhaustible quarry for all future students—is apparently very little concerned with theories about the Sun and the stars, but concentrates his attention on the collection of innumerable details (2) of rites, chiefly magical, connected with food and vegetation. Still later writers, like S. Reinach, Jane Harrison and E. A. Crowley, being mainly occupied with customs of very primitive peoples, like the Pelasgian Greeks or the Australian aborigines, have confined themselves ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... to St Helena, never faded from their memories. They believed the Iron Duke to be the instigator and encourager of a shabby trick. It was a wonderful phenomenon that made these men talk so systematically of their magical enemy, and yet they never lost an opportunity of showing their national dislike for and superiority over the French people as a whole. So strong was this instinct that it permeated British crews from the captain to the cabin-boy. Of course there were at times violent ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... a poignant grief when for a moment he feared that, unable to follow her, he must forever lose sight of his beauteous visitant. But in another instant he was stepping into a tiny skiff which suddenly appeared where a moment before had floated a lily. The magical craft followed its spirit guide, moving against the tide, impelled by unseen power, and ever and anon the sprite beckoned him onward. Soon they entered the river, which here was deep, broad, and smoothly flowing. Motion ceased when they were under a high overhanging ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... all remarkable in the verse. All the wonder of the performance had been in the voice of the woman. But long after the singer had gone that voice seemed still to stay,—making within me a sense of sweetness and of sadness so strange that I could not but try to explain to myself the secret of those magical tones. ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... she had said to John that she hoped there would be a lake on the land she owned, and he had answered casually: "If there isn't a lake, make one!" Kate thought that over repeatedly. "Make one!" Make a lake? It would have seemed no more magical to her if he had said, "Make a cloud," "Make a star," or "Make a rainbow." "What on earth would I do with myself, with my time, with my ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... brought bread and cheese against a hungry time, and after all, it was not so cold in the forest, for the North Wind with his blue ballooned cheeks could not blow hard down those long avenues. Peter was full of excitement, for he was sure that the tree would become magical as soon as ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... told him this. He nodded his white lock, said "All right, Macumazahn," and started. I noticed with some surprise, however, that before he did so he went to the waggon and fetched his "mouti," or medicine, which, together with his other magical apparatus, he always carried in a skin bag. I asked him why he did this. He answered that it was to make himself invulnerable against the spears of the Zulus. I did not in the least believe his explanation, for in my heart I ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... you not know that a dryad haunts this garden of Fernley? Sometimes she is not seen, only heard in the dusk, singing magical songs, that fill whoever hears them with a strange feeling akin to madness. But sometimes—sometimes she leaves her tree, and comes out in ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... piece of pork and whipping out a knife cut it into strips, which he, his mother, and his sisters devoured raw, as though it were a delicacy to which they had long been strangers. The hard biscuit also made a magical disappearance, and when all were gone, Arsenic, looking up with a hideous grin, uttered the ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... Fouquet, "somebody is coming. Ah! the fireworks are producing a magical effect." At this moment a shower of sparks fell rustling among the branches of the neighboring trees. Pellisson and Gourville went out together by the door of the gallery; Fouquet descended to the garden ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... spoke there rose from the depths of the house the sound of muffled voices, children's voices singing faintly together; it rose and fell exactly like the wind, and with as little tune; it was weird and magical, but so utterly mournful that the boy felt the tears start to his eyes. It drifted away, too, just as the wind does over the tops of the trees, dying into the distance; ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... Perseus—Mr. Hartland finds in this a survival of a culture stage in which all birth is believed to be supernatural. Survivals of this belief that birth is a phenomenon independent of the union of the sexes are found in the existence of numerous semi-magical devices to obtain children, still practised in many parts of Europe, and which were practised on a much more extensive scale during the medieval period; in the ignorance of man concerning physiological functions ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... returned, bringing with him what Alda took for a dressing-case, and Cherry for a drawing-box, but which proved to contain a wonderful genie to save the well-worn fingers many a prick. To Lance he first administered the magical words, 'All right,' and then making an opportunity, he put five sovereigns into his hand. Lance's first impulse was, however, not to thank, but to exclaim, 'Then Poulter has not ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her. Certainly no convent would harbor my lady of marvelous tresses and magical perfume, of wild fancies and heretical theories. That thought of mine was indeed far afield. But where, then, ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... a rope to the sacred tree, I twist it in eight folds, that by it I, a magician, may descend to the magical house. ...
— Rig Veda Americanus - Sacred Songs Of The Ancient Mexicans, With A Gloss In Nahuatl • Various
... could see, in the moonlight, the faint thread of the beginning of the Borhaze Road. To the left of this there was some sharp point of light, some cottage perhaps. It flashed at him as though it were trying to attract his attention. The night was so magical, the world so wonderful, so without bound or limit, that he was prepared now to wait, passively, for his experience. That point of light was where the Scarecrow used to be, just where the brown fields rise up against the horizon. In all his walks to-day he had deliberately avoided ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... be civilized in Grand Traverse country, they began to use this "Mani-tou-au-kick," as they called it, in common to boil the sugar sap in it, instead of cooking bear for the feast. And while I was yet in the government blacksmith shop at the Old Mission in Grand Traverse, they brought this magical kettle to our shop with an order to put an iron rim and bail on it so that it could be hanged in boiling sugar, and I did the work of fixing the ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... the idea of dependence upon Christ alone has been often, indeed, one may say generally, associated with a conception of salvation widely different from that of Schleiermacher. It has been oftenest associated with the notion of something purely external, forensic, even magical. It is connected, even down to our own time, with reliance upon the blood of Christ, almost as if this were externally applied. It has postulated a propitiatory sacrifice, a vicarious atonement, a completed transaction, something ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... of the American Indians never to tell their own names, nor even to allow them to be spoken to strangers by any of their own immediate kindred. The reason for this lay in the superstition which held that the speaking of one's real name gave to the stranger to whom it was spoken a magical and harmful influence over such person. For the Indian religion was full of what is ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... men had ready to hand a very serious weapon that might be used against innovators. By craftily circulated rumors the populace was brought to accuse him of magical practices, that is, of producing his cures by association with the devil. We are rather prone to think little of a generation that could take such nonsense seriously, but it would not be hard to find ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... between 1813 and 1816. The verses are almost immediately preceded by a detached note printed at the close of an essay entitled 'Self-love in Religion' which is included among the 'Omniana of 1809', Literary Remains, 1834, i. 354-6: 'O magical, sympathetic, anima! [Archeus, MS.] principium hylarchichum! rationes spermatic! logoi poitikoi! O formidable words! And O Man! thou marvellous beast-angel! thou ambitious beggar! How pompously dost thou trick out thy ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Baleinier has often found me in my solitude, a prey to a strange excitement: yes, it is true; for it is then that, escaping in thought from all that renders the present odious and painful to me, I find refuge in the future—it is then that magical horizons spread far before me—it is then that such splendid visions appear to me, as make me feel myself rapt in a sublime and heavenly ecstasy, as if I ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... she had snuffed some of the crystals was magical. From a quivering wretch she had become now ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... the same transactions thus: "Capital punishments were inflicted on the Christians, a class of men of a new and magical superstition (superstitionis novae et maleficae)." What gives additional character to this statement is its context, for it occurs as one out of various police or sanctuary or domestic regulations, which Nero made, such as "controlling private expenses, forbidding taverns to serve meat, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... when I shall be able to pitch my tent in your neighbourhood,' I was most potently commanded to a breach of the second commandment, and on my knees, to entreat the said goddess, to touch your bank notes and guineas with her magical multiplying wand. I could offer such a prayer for you, with a better conscience than for most men, because I know that you have never lost that healthy common sense, which regards money only as the means ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... collectors, most of them simple peasants, and as the result of three and a half years' work, he brought together 'of epics, lyrics, wedding songs, etc., upwards of 20,000 specimens; of tales about 3000; of proverbs about 18,000; of riddles, about 20,000, besides a large collection of magical formulae, superstitions, and the like.' These figures include variants of the same tale or ballad theme, of which there were in some ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... train she had felt hungry and tired, with burning head and cold limbs. As she walked these feelings wore off, and were replaced by a feeling of upliftment which was magical in its change. Her misery and her burden dropped from her. The softness of the moors was beneath her feet, and a sweet wind touched her lips and cheeks with a breath which was a caress. The plaintive distant cry of a gull reached ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... rag on the garden wall, amid the falling snow of March, in the opening of Charles Avison—these are sufficient evidence of the abounding force of Browning's genius as a poet at a date when he had passed the three score years and ten by half an added decade. Nor would we willingly forget that magical lyric of life and death, of the tulip beds and the daisied grave-mound—"Dance, yellows and whites and reds"—which closes Gerard de Lairesse. Wordsworth's daffodils are hardly a more jocund company than Browning's wind-tossed tulips; he accepts their gladness, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... took her hand, and passed her own rosy finger-tips, with a pretty, caressing movement, over the girl's hair. The touch had a magical effect. So vivid a look of joy flushed up beneath those fingers, that it seemed as if the sad and wan Priscilla had been snatched away, and another kind of creature substituted in her place. This one caress, bestowed voluntarily by Zenobia, was evidently received as a pledge ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the readers "ought to allow for the capriccios of what is after all but a better sort of goblin." She was suggested by the Undine of De La Motte Fouque. In his next novel, The Fortunes of Nigel, Scott formally renounced the mystic and the magical: "Not a Cock Lane scratch—not one bounce on the drum of Tedworth—not so much as the poor tick of a solitary death-watch in the wainscot." But Scott cannot banish spectres so lightly from his imagination. Apparitions—such as the Bodach Glas who warns Fergus M'Ivor ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... unhealthiness of any kind. Foot-passengers slackened their pace, and were disposed to linger near it; neighbors who had got up splenetic that morning, felt good-humor stealing on them as they heard it, and by degrees became quite sprightly; mothers danced their babies to its ringing;—still the same magical tink, tink, tink came gaily from the workshop of the ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... stay," said the shadows, and hung On the brush of the master; "we are thine own." Fearless he flung The magical chains around them, and said, "Ye too shall be light, and to life bring the sun!" And man delayed By the captive pain's revealing glow Feeleth earth's breathing woe, And his vow is made; "Ye shall pass, ye shadows, yea; And life, as the sun, be free; The God in me saith!" And the shadows ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... hall furnished with chairs and divans did they find themselves this evening, but in a monstrous grotto in the heart of Olympus—a grotto of sparkling, glittering mountain crystal, bright and transparent as silver gauze, and behind this a magical moving to and fro of beauteous human shapes, of genii and Cupids. Only the long table in the middle of the grotto reminded of earth, or maybe ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... can prophesy With a wink of his eye, Peep with security Into futurity, Sum up your history, Clear up a mystery, Humour proclivity For a nativity—for a nativity; With mirrors so magical, Tetrapods tragical, Bogies spectacular, Answers oracular, Facts astronomical, Solemn or comical, And, if you want it, he Makes a reduction on taking a ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... ever homeward bound?—No?—Quick! take the wings of the morning, or the sails of a ship, and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. There, tarry a year or two; and then let the gruffest of boatswains, his lungs all goose-skin, shout forth those magical words, and you'll swear "the harp of ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... to it, and, instead of compensating for the decay of the imagination, accelerates that decay, and renders it more obvious. When the adventurer in the Arabian tale anointed one of his eyes with the contents of the magical box, all the riches of the earth, however widely dispersed, however sacredly concealed, became visible to him. But, when he tried the experiment on both eyes, he was struck with blindness. What the enchanted ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... it is naught—as you felt, and so broke off—for the baron knew well enough it was a spray of the magical tree which once planted in his domain would shoot up, and out, and all round, and be glorious with leaves and musical with birds' nests, and a fairy safeguard and blessing thenceforward and for ever, when the foolish ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... to an evening of perfect rest. The windows of the bedrooms being guiltless of blinds and curtains, the effect of waking, in the early morning, to find them blocked up, as it were, by the green slopes of pasture and the dark bands of fir-woods which clothed the limiting hills, seemed almost magical, the foreground being occupied solely by the graceful curve of the dome of the church-tower, glittering with intercepted rays, and forming a bright omen for the ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... right ones for children to hear—the wonderful things that used to be done, up in the sky, and down under the ocean, and inside the mountains. If the boys and girls do not find out now, while they are young, all about the strange, mysterious, magical life of the days when the whole world was young, it is ten to one that they will never find out about it at all, for the most of us do not keep ourselves like children always, though surely we have all been told plainly enough that that is what we ...
— The Wagner Story Book • Henry Frost
... Bandmaster, however, would not be denied, the horse divined there was danger of losing; being full of courage he resented this and put forth his strength and speed to stave off defeat. How he did it Colley could not tell, but by some almost magical power he drew level with Rainstorm again ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... beauty, which had bewitched me at my first sight of her, was added another allurement—the thought of a magical flight far beyond the boundaries imprisoning other men. If romance is a striving toward something at once unique and sympathetic, here was romance attained. Moreover, in embracing that exquisite personification of the Renaissance, one might add to love the glamour of a terrible audacity. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of poetic genius," said Coleridge, "Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole." It is by that "synthetic and magical power" which he calls "imagination" that the poet "brings the whole soul of man into activity," and "diffuses a tone and spirit of unity." Coleridge's theory of the Fine Arts presupposes his metaphysic; and ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... this magical blade, he continued his march into the wilds of Suruga, the haunt of the insurgent Ainos. But he found it no easy matter to bring these savage foes to an open fight. Fleeing before his army into the woods and mountains, they fought him from behind ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... "from some of those old Hebrew grimoires (books on magic), which, if they had been known, would have sufficed to hold up the Jews to the execration of the whole earth."[226] Voltaire, in his Henriade, likewise attributes the magical blood-rites practised in the ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... gossip, activity and intrigue. Half a dozen steps only separated him from the door of the Chamber itself, and that door he was always privileged to pass and listen to the debates, standing by the entrance outside the magical strip of matting which indicates the bar of the House. From this point of vantage he watched the first stages of a Parliament in which Mr, Gladstone set out with so triumphant a majority—and watched too the inroads made upon the power and prestige of ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... anything that could be done and much to the inconvenience of the business of getting salt. This man said that the oil was being subjected to experiments for use in illumination. As an ointment it was magical, and in a few days ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... which may be said to be an epoch in the handling of musical style. Daring, brilliant, and attractive, they disguise their profundity under so much grace, their science under so many charms, that it is with difficulty we free ourselves sufficiently from their magical inthrallment, to judge coldly of their ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... your native country. They are the pioneers in the great work of redemption. What emotion and what pride for them! To complete the work they are ready to sacrifice their lives. The French nation with one heart spurs them forward, and on the folds of their flag are inscribed the magical names Liberty and Right. Long ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... the ideas which it contained were in the air. The cult of Elizabeth, which was far from being a piece of insincere adulation, had for some time past been growing into a kind of literary religion. Even to us, there is something magical about the great Queen, and we can hardly be surprised that the pagans of those days hailed her as half divine. When Lyly commenced his career, she had been on the throne for twenty years, in itself a wonderful ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... cavalcade drew near the village, had a magical effect upon the inhabitants. The gates and front doors cast forth groups eager to be the first to catch the meaning of a visitation ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... focussed the card. There were only two words printed on it, only "Lord Blandamer" in the most unpretending and simple characters, but their effect was magical. Doubt and suspicion melted suddenly away, and a look of radiant surprise overspread her countenance, such as would have become a Constantine at the vision of the Labarum. She was a thoroughly unworldly ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... with the cognomen—is only a catchpenny publication, to which the title of Le Petit Albert has been given by way of resembling its name to that of Albertus Magnus, who wrote a work or works of a character which gave rise, in the middle ages, to the accusation that he practised magical arts; and hence, probably, any abridgement or compendium of them, or any little work on such arts, would be styled by the French compiler Le Petit Albert. In the Biographie Universelle, it is affirmed that the rhapsodies known under the name of Secrets du Petit Albert are not by Albertus ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... the chairman, no one heard his name because of the noise at the tables. Two men asked me who he was. But not two minutes after he began, the place was still and men craned their necks to catch his words. I never saw anything so magical. I know how you would have enjoyed it. Its effect was a hot surprise. The revelers all worn; the people ready to go home; the waiters impatient; the speech wholly extemporaneous. It was a triumph that did honor to American oratory at its best. The applause was decisive and ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... place and to penetrate my soul when I enter, as if I were in a holy temple. 'Thou standest in a holy place,' I would say. A loud word, a heavy footstep, makes me shudder, as if an infidel were desecrating the place. I stand speechless, in a magical atmosphere that wraps my whole being, scarcely daring to lift my eyes. A perfect stillness comes over my soul; it seems to be soaring on the ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... he was often acted upon and swayed by subtle and invisible influences. At any rate his conduct was sometimes inexplicable. He had been strangely fascinated by the ignoble Duke of Anjou, and, in the sequel, it will be found that he was destined to experience other magnetic or magical impulses, which were once thought suspicious, and have remained mysterious even ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... have accompanied me from first to last; and perhaps it may be a pardonable vanity which induces me to reflect with complacency on a composition which in some degree connects me with the spot where it was produced, and the objects it would fain describe; and however unworthy it may be deemed of those magical and memorable abodes, however short it may fall of our distant conceptions and immediate impressions, yet as a mark of respect for what is venerable, and of feeling for what is glorious, it has been to me a source of pleasure in the production, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... American Suffrage Association for the second time took its annual convention to a southern State and held it in New Orleans, March 15-25, in Athenaeum Hall.[23] The Woman's Journal said: "To the northern delegates there was something almost magical in the sudden change from snowdrifts and nipping winds to balmy air and a temperature like June. The delicious climate of Louisiana in spring has not been exaggerated and it seems wonderful to find ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... better information, we are of opinion, with Agricola, that in itself it is a fruitless exploration, strongly scenting of pagan derivation and the virgula divina proverbially magnified of old. The ground whereof were the magical rods in poets—that of Pallas, in Homer; that of Mercury, that charmed Argus; and that of Circe, which transformed the followers of Ulysses. Too boldly usurping the name of Moses' rod, from which notwithstanding, and that of Aaron, ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... completed a very masterpiece of white beard. Afterwards, Archie packed his trunks. When he turned in at last, outward bound next day by the cross-country mixed train, he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had stowed the phonograph, the printing-press and type, the signal flags, the magical apparatus and Fakerino costume and the new accordion; and he knew—for he had taken pains to find out—that the stock of trading goods, which he had bought with most anxious discrimination, was packed and directed and waiting at the ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... Obscura of the Italian philosophers, although highly appreciated, on account of the magical character of the pictures it produced, remained little other than a scientific toy, until the discovery of M. Daguerre. The value of this instrument is now great, and the interest of the process which it so essentially aids, universally admitted. A full description ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... the Prince found that the stolen ring brought him ill-luck after all. The Witch-maiden had never rested night nor day until she had found out where the ring was. As soon as she had discovered by means of magical arts that the Prince in the form of a bird was on his way to the Eastern magician, she changed herself into an eagle and watched in the air until the bird she was waiting for came in sight, for she ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... flowers. The uniforms of the men and the dresses of the women were almost equally magnificent. The eyes of the spectators were dazzled by dresses trimmed with precious stones. Never had there been seen such profusion of light, flowers, perfumes, and diamonds. In this magical setting, fashionable beauties, with their dresses worked with silver and gold foil, their turbans of Eastern stuffs, their jewels and ancient cameos, appeared like sultanas. It was a most sumptuous ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... been said and conceded, there yet remain countless passages of true and vital beauty, exquisite phrases, haunting pictures, glimpses of perfect loveliness. His poems of comradeship and the open air, his pictures of family life, have often a magical thrill of passion, leaving one rapturous and unsatisfied, believing in the secrets behind the world, and hoping for ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... minstrel has never a tone As sad as the song in his bosom to-night, For the magical touch of his fingers alone Can not waken the echoes that breathe it aright; But oh! as the smile of the moon may impart A sorrow to one in an alien clime, Let the light of the melody fall on the heart, And cadence his grief into ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... country and the almost complete isolation from foreign influences have retarded progress and preserved the natives on the whole in their most primitive state, the headmen of the various totem clans are charged with the important task of performing magical ceremonies for the multiplication of the totems, and as the great majority of the totems are edible animals or plants, it follows that these men are commonly expected to provide the people with food by means of magic. Others have to make the rain to fall or to render other services ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... "woman, I feel as if I must believe you. But who was my father? What was he called? What was the awful fate which overtook him on that terrible night? Who was it who adopted me? And—what was that occurrence in my life which now, like some potent magical spell from a strange and unknown world, exercises an irresistible sway over my soul, so that all my thoughts are dissipated into a dark night-like sea, so to speak? When you tell me all this, you mysterious woman, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... it has been a magical or arbitrary government of the world that has been for ages the dominant one in the human mind. People have supposed that these invisible beings desired them to do certain things, to refrain from doing certain other ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... eloquence. He was eminently an orator of action in its finest sense; his contemporaries speak of him as a flame of fire and repeat the phrase as if it were the only one which could express the intense passion of his eloquence, the electric flames which his genius kindled, the magical power which swayed the great assemblies with the ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... fast in the web of the tribal instinct, Corinna realized as perfectly as if she had seen the net closing visibly round him. Though she was unaware of the blow Patty had dealt him, she felt his inner struggle through that magical sixth sense which is the gift of the understanding heart, of the heart that has outgrown the shell of the personal point of view. If he would only for once break free from artificial restraints! If he would only let himself ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... seconds it has become a large duck's egg which he places in an egg cup on the table in full view of the audience. This little trick is very effective, easy to do, and can be purchased for half-a-crown at any magical depot in London. ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... bearded veterans and nobles sat stupefied, frozen in their last gesture. Then, in the midst of their silent despair, came the sound of a curious, high-pitched horn that had in its note something of the eery wail of a fire siren. The effect was magical, for the nobles sprang up, hands on sword hilts and ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... to his costume for his magical box and other tricks, and learning that Harry was still safe under the watchful eye of Paddy Flynn, Joe hurried out to his stage, where Mr. Tracy was already making the ten thousand ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... With magical swiftness of movement, prompted by an intense desire, the dead woman was carried into the convent parlour, passed through the window, and lowered from the walls before the Abbess, followed by the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... I said faintly, and the words of Anthea came unbidden to mind, "to sleep—oh! who would forget? You plead merely with some old dream of me—not all me, you know. Gold is but witchcraft. And as for sorrow—spread me a magical table in this nettle-garden, ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... of Meudon-Fleury, a magical and quite ideal site, is the finest pleasure-house that ever yet the sun shone on. The park and the gardens are in the form of an amphitheatre, and are, in my opinion, sublime, in a far different way from those of Vaux. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the beauty of the bay And the magical display Of its coronet of mountains have not altered since his day, And the lake of which he wrote At that epoch so remote With the same caressing murmur laps ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... priests belonging to this sect both live profligately and practise magical arts, each one to the extent of his ability. They use exorcisms and incantations, love-potions, also, and charms, as well as those beings who are called "familiars" [paredri] and "dream senders" [oniropompi], and whatever other curious ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... was completed, printed, and published on December 1, 1816; but without the magical words, "by the Author of 'Waverley,'" on the title-page. All doubts as to the work being by the author of "Waverley," says Lockhart, had worn themselves out before the lapse ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... disorders of the time, haunted by painful memories of his past life, Francis saw in money the special instrument of the devil; in moments of excitement he went so far as to execrate it, as if there had been in the metal itself a sort of magical power and secret curse. Money was truly for ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... almost entirely covered with a white spar, intermixed with curious and unique specimens of polished pebbles and petrifactions. The ceiling is ornamented with pendants of the same material; and the whole, when under the influence of a strong sun, has an almost magical effect. These and other decorations of the same grounds were executed by a person named Turnbull, who was employed here for several years by Mr. Agace. Our View is copied from one of a series of engravings by Mr. Hakewill, the ingenious architect; these illustrations ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... the Laplanders given to superstition, that they worshipped the first object that presented itself in the morning. Every house and family had a deity. They had magical drums, which were consulted in a particular manner on important occasions; and when they engaged in battle, these drums were carried to the scene of action. In consequence of their supposed virtue, writers have said that drums were originally implements ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... was whispered in the ear of his listener, but the effect was magical. The Honorable Mr. Tickels started, and rapidly surveyed the person and countenance of the Corporal; then he reddened with confusion, and began to murmur a broken apology for his conduct, in which he ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... effect with the perfumed air of the apartment, filled with orange trees and other aromatic shrubs; the dress of the company, among whom were many ladies in costumes not inferior to those of a court; the glitter of diamonds; the sparkle of stars and decorations, rendered more magical by knowing that the wearers were names in history. There, with his round but ample shoulder, and large massive head, covered with long snow-white hair, stands Talleyrand, the maker and unmaker of kings, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... wrangle all night as to whether the normal healthy child is at heart a mystic or a realist; whether he likes fairy tales because they show him a magical world where flowers can talk and umbrellas are turned into black geese, or because they tell of strange romantic things happening to a real human boy like himself; but there can be no shadow of doubt that much of the verse intended for children is either too clever in its humour ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... individually to bestow in charity, Christ evidently intended should be a means of moral discipline, which we cannot safely dispense with. Its influence, though not generally realized, is far-reaching, almost magical. It strengthens the intellect, elevates to a noble independence and disinterestedness of feeling, gives stability to character and energy to purpose, leading on to thoroughness of self-inspection, earnestness of investigation as ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... some pineapples and plums from the hot-houses. This was a very light diet for people who, without food for twenty-four hours, had spent the preceding night on foot and all day fighting! But we were the victors, and that magical word enabled us ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... seemed magical—not upon her horse, but upon the soldiers by whom she was now surrounded. The officer in command bowed as she uttered the ringing words, "On, Cavalier, on!" and instead of turning her back to the wall, called upon ...
— Hayslope Grange - A Tale of the Civil War • Emma Leslie
... to such aid. What is very remarkable, although he is constantly declaiming against the enormous sums of money given for books at public auctions, Mustapha doth not scruple to push the purchaser to the last farthing of his commission; from a ready knack which he hath acquired, by means of some magical art in his foresaid laboratory, of deciphering the same; thus adopting in a most extraordinary manner, the very line of conduct himself which he so tartly censures ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... had made his camp in a small glade opposite our own, the bend of the river being in front of us. The tall pines cast their long reflections on the water, our great fires gleamed athwart them, illuminating the under foliage of the birches with magical light, whilst the half-breeds, grouped around and silhouetted by the fires, formed a unique picture which lingers in the memory. We slept like tops that night beneath the stars, on a soft bed of berry bushes, and never woke until a thin morning rain sprinkling in our ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... Deity of the Bontok. One stone was pierced by a round hole, made by Lumawig's spear: on arriving, he decided he would remain permanently in Bontok, and began by sticking the shaft of his spear in the stone in question—a very minor example, by the way, of his magical powers. More interesting, perhaps, than the ruins of Lumawig's house was a sacred grove on a hill rising just back of the village, in which, according to Father Clapp, certain rites and ceremonies are held once a year. The matter is one for experts, but it appears strange that this ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... of our sleeping partnership with Prussia saw her not as a partner but a potential enemy; such men as Mr. Blatchford, Mr. Bart Kennedy, or the late Emil Reich. But there is a distinction to be made. Few even of these, with the admirable and indeed almost magical exception of Dr. Sarolea, saw Germany as she was; occupied mainly with Europe and only incidentally with England; indeed, in the first stages, not occupied with England at all. Even the Anti-Germans were too insular. Even those who saw most ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... generation had murmured when a tyrant filled their chamber with his guards, those words which a hundred thousand Londoners had shouted in his ears when he ventured for the last time within the walls of their city; still retained a magical influence over all who loved liberty. It was long before even the most enlightened men became sensible that the precautions which had been originally devised for the purpose of protecting patriots against the displeasure of the Court now served only to protect ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a little further on in studying the relations between the theory of evolution and socialism, and which is common to the ruling classes under the bourgeois regime and to the individualistic anarchists,—since both alike imagine that the social organization can be changed in a day by the magical effect of a bomb,—more or ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... and splendid Thing of Whiteness and Wind, riding out there in the morning, this ghost of a train—soul or look in the eyes of it, haunting it, gathering it all up, steel and thunder, into itself, catching it away into heaven—was one of the most magical and stirring sights I have seen for a long time. It came to me like a kind of Zeit-geist or passing of the spirit ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the body, was believed to accomplish in the various divisions of the lower regions, are related in this book. It contained also a collection of prayers for the use of the deceased in the other world, and of magical formulae intended to secure the preservation of the mummy from decay, and to prevent its possession by an evil spirit, till the ultimate return of the soul of the deceased. Many of these rituals are also found ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... act with equal truthfulness ... his human characters have not only such depth and individuality that they do not admit of being classed under common names, and are inexhaustible even in conception; no, this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits, calls up the midnight ghost, exhibits before us the witches with their unhallowed rites, peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs; and these beings, though existing only ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... would do—- that, and a pint of wine. I have a bottle of inky-pinkie in my pocket. (Approaches Goloshan.) By the hocus-pocus and the magical touch of my little finger; heigh ho! start up, Jack, ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... of Josephus on Pilate's governorship, we find, "At that time there appeared a certain man of magical power, if it is permissible to call him a man, whom certain Greeks call a Son of God, but his disciples, the True Prophet, said to raise the dead, and heal all diseases. His nature and his form were human; a man of simple ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... TALISMAN, a magical figure of an astrological nature carved on a stone or piece of metal under certain superstitious observances, to which certain wonderful effects are ascribed; is of the nature of a charm ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... nature could be read in his eyes. Raoul, concealed in the shadow, divined the many passionate thoughts that established, between the tent of the young ambassador and the balcony of the princess, a mysterious and magical bond of sympathy—a bond created by thoughts imprinted with so much strength and persistence of will, that they must have caused happy and loving dreams to alight upon the perfumed couch, which the count, with the eyes of his soul, devoured ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... these words: "So long as thou art in possession of this purse money will never fail thee. But if thou shouldst ever see me again, beware of speaking to me; for if thou speak thy luck will depart." When the man got home he found the purse filled with dollars; and by virtue of its magical property he became the richest man in the parish. As soon as he found the purse always full, whatever he took out of it, he began to live in a spendthrift manner and frequented the alehouse. One evening as he sat there he beheld ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... her fancy and hope to the habitation of God, where it is her delight to hold communion with the spirits that have been ransomed from the thraldom of Earth and wreathed with a garland of glory. Her beauty may throw a magical charm over many; princes and conquerors may bow with admiration at the shrine of her beauty and love; the sons of science may embalm her memory in the page of history; yet her piety must be her ornament, her pearl. Her name must be written in 'The Book of Life,' that when the mountains ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... still see through my closed eyelids when the Inevitable Day comes. For it was in that house that I was born; it was in that garden I first learned, while playing, to feel and know some particles of this old universe. Magical hours!—sacred hours!—when the soul, all fresh from the making, first discoveries the world, which for its sake seems to assume such caressing brightness, such mysterious charm! And that, Madame, is indeed because the universe itself is only the ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... wonderful execution, she talked and laughed with those around the instrument, or looked round the apartment, and nodded to this one and that, her great black eyes flashing like chain lightning. Her playing seemed to have a magical effect. No one could keep their feet still. Even the dignified president patted his, marking the measure of her prancing fingers. I could have danced wildly myself, for I never heard any thing so inspiring to the animal spirits as those wizard strains. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... fructification of plants. The consequence was a feeling that these things were due to unseen agencies; and the attempt was made to bring those powers into some sort of relation with mankind, either by the compulsion of magical operations and magical formulae, or by sacrifices and offerings of propitiation, or by promises. A superhuman power might be placed under a spell, or placated with food and drink, or persuaded by a vow. Such "powers" ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Hobo's injuries, there was plenty of fight in him yet, and the consequences might have been serious if Peggy had not arrived upon the scene at the critical moment. Her stern command, "Down, Hobo! Down, sir!" emphasized by stamps of her foot had a magical effect. The poor, bleeding, bewildered creature, who had stopped at nothing to protect a member of the household which commanded his fealty, recognized in Peggy the ultimate authority. The tense muscles, bent for a spring, instantly relaxed. The lip dropped over the bared teeth. ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... the wine he had drunk, the brightness of the scene and the colour of the music and the thoughts they conjured up, as well as the gowns and head-dresses of the pretty women, all awaked in him the glow a child feels at its first pantomime. The dancers were to him not flesh-and-blood women, but magical creatures, and yet he was stirred to a new excitement too. As he sat there all the sense of poise with which he usually so confidently faced the affairs of life, and which, far from failing him, generally served him only too well, began to sway and ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... hesitation and deliberation, presented himself one morning in the banker's tapestried sitting-room, and unburdened his heart to that gentleman—stopping every now and then to stare at the maker's name imprinted upon the lining of his hat, as if that name had been a magical symbol whence he drew certain auguries by which he governed his speech—Mr. Dunbar was especially gracious. "Would he honour Sir Philip by entrusting his daughter's happiness to his keeping? would he bestow ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... to know the political and moral condition of a state, we must ask what rank women hold in it. Their influence embraces the whole life. A wife,—a mother,—two magical words, comprising the sweetest sources of man's felicity. Theirs is the reign of beauty, of love, of reason. Always a reign! A man takes counsel with his wife; he obeys his mother; he obeys her long after she has ceased to live, ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... destined to keep quite clear of the summary jurisdiction of Jack Ketch—no one doubted this, until the story of the apparition of the murderess began to be spread abroad. Then, awful misgivings arose in the popular mind. A woman who had been born close by the magical well, and who had therefore in all probability been baptized in its water like her neighbours of the parish, had nevertheless been publicly and unquestionably hanged. However, probability was not always ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... watchfulness, he would see her threading the avenues of the forest, her dark hair half floating in the breeze, and wearing her white hood and her skirt bordered with ivy. Since the spring had returned, she had become associated in his mind with all the magical effects of nature's renewal. He discovered the liquid light of her dark eyes in the rippling darkness of the streams; the lilies recalled the faintly tinted paleness of her cheeks; the silene roses, scattered throughout the hedges, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... promenade. The dealers in rich goods, elegant trifles, costly nothings, all knew her well. Whatever satisfied her artistic taste she purchased. To see was to desire, and, in some way, all she coveted tended by a magical attraction to her rooms. "Society" frowned upon her; she went to no receptions in the higher circles, but she had no lack of associates for all that. At concerts and other public assemblages, her brilliant figure ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... matter is this: as I said before, those small individual fortunes are of no use to us individually; they have no earning power; they will not buy anything. But, put them all together—ah! the result is magical. You see, it is the aggregate that counts. Now with this theory in view, our company gets to work and canvasses the country and it gathers together thousands of little, useless, insignificant, unproductive funds like yours and mine and joins them together into one vast, giant aggregate which ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... formed the substratum, and, among the early Accadians, apparently the greater part, of their supposed knowledge of the spiritual world. M. Lenormant's profoundly interesting work on Babylonian magic and the magical texts given in the Appendix to Professor Sayce's "Hibbert Lectures" leave no doubt on this head. They prove that the doctrine of possession, and even the particular case of pig, possession,[117] were firmly believed in by the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians before the tribes of Israel invaded ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Enters into Heaven The Drunkards in the Street The City That Will Not Repent The Trap Where is David, the Next King of Israel? On Reading Omar Khayyam The Beggar's Valentine Honor Among Scamps The Gamblers On the Road to Nowhere Upon Returning to the Country Road The Angel and the Clown Springfield Magical Incense The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotos King Arthur's Men Have Come Again Foreign Missions in Battle Array Star of My Heart Look You, I'll Go Pray At Mass Heart of God The Empty Boats With a Bouquet of Twelve Roses St. Francis of Assisi Buddha A Prayer to All the ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... the Danes under Hubba, and defeated them with great slaughter about the year 877. The English captured the famous standard of the Danes, the Raven, which was "wrought in needlework by the daughters of Lothbroc," and which had magical properties—clapping its wings when defeat was at hand. The remnant of the Danish force, carrying their wounded leader with them, retreated to their ships, and Hubba died there on the beach, and was buried by his followers before they ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... friends" sat tightly glued to their chairs. Then the Doctor would approach with Agag-like delicacy, and, extending his hand to the shyest and most loutish boy, would say, "Must you go? Can't you stay?" and the party broke up with magical celerity. Such, at least, was our ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Fichtian, dreamed of a magical idealism, an art of creating by an instantaneous act of the Ego. But Schelling's "system of transcendental idealism" was the first great philosophical affirmation of Romanticism and of ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... since I had suffered wrong there, as he, Kari, had in his, he had persuaded me to accompany him back to his own land, that there my wisdom might shine upon its darkness, and owing to my divine and magical gifts hither we had come in safety. Lastly, he asked the assembled priests and lords if they were content to accept him as the Inca to be, and to stand by him in any war that ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... stages, 296the different varieties, from the early blossom to maturity: curious Chinese symbols are suspended from the trunk, and connect themselves with a grand lustre, rising to a height of thirty feet, and reflecting the most varied and magical effect, being multiplied by other lustres, in the several angles adjoining. The walls are decorated with groups of figures, nearly the size of life, portraying the costume of the higher classes of the Chinese; domestic episodes, painted on a ground of imitative pearl, richly wrought, in all the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... same in principle, endeavours have been, and still are being, made to secure an identical object, viz. to obtain food and thus to sustain life. The various methods adopted both in the past and the present are invariably associated in one form or another with the invocation of magical influences. The primitive savage, Miss Harrison says, "is a man of action." He does not pray. He acts. If he wishes for sun or wind or rain, "he summons his tribe, and dances a sun dance or a wind dance or a rain dance." If he wants ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... her's does the same thing, with an Oorakin of the same size, and nearly alike, which is placed by the bride's side. After this ceremony of placing the Oorakin, the Juggler pronounces certain magical words over the meat: he foretels, especially to the bride, the dreadful consequences she must expect from the victuals she is about to eat, if she has in her heart any perfidiousness towards her husband: ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... and Chris' rifles sent thirty-two bullets zipping and singing in amongst the trees. Before the convicts recovered from their surprise, forty-eight more leaden messengers whined through the air above them. The effect was magical, the convicts ceased their fire, and puzzled and alarmed by the sudden leaden hail, sought shelter behind the largest trees ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... slightly upon it with the habitual ease of a Western hunter—doubly picturesque m his own lithe, youthful symmetry. Miss Nellie looked at him from under her eyelids, and then half defiantly raised her head and her dark lashes. Gradually an almost magical change came over her features; her eyes grew larger and more and more yearning, until they seemed to draw and absorb in their liquid depths the figure of the young man before her; her cold face broke into an ecstasy of light ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... who may be the Irish sheikh's son, or may be merely a magical illusion, and vanish or turn into a cat some fine morning, is your friend, I suppose?" ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... fabled by the Muslim chroniclers to have been to Solomon what Odin's ravens were to the Norse god. It is said to have known all the secrets of the earth and to have revealed them to him; hence the magical virtues attributed by the Mohammedans ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... bewilderment of the people, was immediately obeyed; and a cylinder covered with inscriptions was drawn out from its hiding-place of twenty-four centuries, as fresh as when deposited there by the hands, probably, of Nebuchadnezzar himself! The Colonel added in a note that the fame of his magical power had flown to Bagdad, and that he was besieged with applications for the loan of his wonderful instrument to be used in the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... His voice had a magical effect. Before he could add another word she sprang up as if she had been struck, and faced us, a cry of alarm on her lips. Simultaneously we both cried out too, for it was not mademoiselle at all. The woman who confronted ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... a faint idea that someone was spying upon her, for she kept looking behind her and this way and that, as though expecting danger from an unknown source. Perhaps some yookoohoo instinct warned her. Woot saw that she had escaped from her room by some of the magical means at her disposal, after her prisoners had escaped her. She was now occupying the big hall of her castle as she used to do. Also Woot thought, from the cruel expression on the face of the Giantess, that she was planning ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... one is subject to illimitable expansion. It is without beginning in the infinite of number, as God is without beginning in the infinite of being. As with the vegetable kingdom, the tiny seed or acorn silently working its magical transformation into a plant or tree, and directing its destiny with marvelous intelligence through the torrid and frigid vicissitudes of the seasons; so is man without beginning in the infinitude of his own being or microcosm. Man is both a type and antitype. A type of what pre-existed in ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... the Dark Tower; lying, too, in a temperature so fiery that it coagulated the blood in the veins, and stopped the beating of the heart. Underfoot were fine dust, and whitened bones; the air was prismatic and magical, ever conjuring up phantom pictures, whose characteristic was that they were at the farthest remove from any possible reality. The azure sky descended and became a lake; the pulsations of the atmosphere translated themselves into the rhythmic lapse of waves; spikes of sage-brush and blades ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... to find game. On another occasion they fell in with a tribe of bushmen who harassed them with poisoned arrows, killing two of their best men, and were only prevented from annihilating them through the terror inspired by their firearms, which they took for magical instruments. ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... and trim it was. Here a man produced a curious red suit of clothes, rather too small for me; but still a lot better than Bill's rags. He begged me to put it on, which I did. I know now that it was the red magical suit in which the gipsies dress their magical puppets on St. John's Eve; but as I did not then know this, I put it on quite willingly, ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... in legerdemain to account; and before we denounce the latter as impostors, we should bear in mind the ignorance of the times in which they lived. People would not have believed any natural explanation, though they might have felt inclined to persecute the man when stripped of his magical character: we should also consider how far the general belief might influence even the man himself; how far he could in his inmost mind draw the distinction between what we call natural philosophy and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... presence, De Quincey's account, silly, coxcombical, and vulgar, is the worst; Carlyle's, as might be expected from his magical gift of portraiture, is the best. Carlyle cared little for Wordsworth's poetry, had a real respect for the antique greatness of his devotion to Poverty and Peasanthood, recognised his strong intellectual powers and strong ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... he was destroying MacDougall's plan and realizing his own. Sometimes he met a surly Mexican who would not listen to him, but nearly always he won the man over in the end. He was amazed at his own resourcefulness and eloquence. It seemed as though some inhibition in him had been broken down, some magical elixir poured into his imagination. He found that he could literally take a sheep camp by storm, entering into the life of the men, telling them stories, singing them songs, passing out presents of tobacco and whisky, ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... both father and mother may be greatly aided in their efforts to devise means for reaching and influencing their hearts by means of them, and especially through the action of the imagination, which will be found, when properly employed, to be capable of exercising an almost magical power of imparting great attractiveness and giving great effect to lessons of instruction which, in their simple form, would be dull, tiresome, and ineffective. Precisely what is meant by this will be shown ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... declaration that it was of no use, and that they had better not speak about the matter; yet she was generally the first to begin, and Mary would bring out the map, and they both would pore over it, the elder lady through her spectacles, as if they could there discover by some magical power where Ned was, and the point the "Hope" had reached. They were cheerful and happy, though nothing occurred to vary the monotony of their everyday life, until the post one morning brought a letter addressed ...
— Ned Garth - Made Prisoner in Africa. A Tale of the Slave Trade • W. H. G. Kingston
... understand the passage to mean, that the number three has a magical influence in summoning spirits; or to teach that the power of evil is so overruled by a higher Power, that he cannot approach to begin his work of temptation and ruin unless he be, not once merely, or twice, but three times, called by the free will and act of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various
... did not enter her mind dimly and vaguely, but with perfect clearness and distinctness, the hours passed with magical swiftness and, ere she was aware of it, the springless waggon rolled over the uneven pavement of a street in the suburbs. The noisy rattle of the wheels, which followed their former comparatively noiseless movement, and the jolts ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... not overlook such a source of power. Alcoholic liquor became their implement of almost magical work in controlling the lives, labors, and resources of the Indians. The priests with their captivating story of the Cross had a large influence in softening savage natures and averting many an awful danger; ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... foam flew from his mouth, and he gave a wild screaming neigh that had something quite diabolical in its sound. I was standing perfectly thunderstruck at this scene, when one of the party took a lasso and very quietly laid it over the animal's neck. The effect was really magical. With closed mouth, drooping ears, and head low, there stood the mustang, as meek and docile as any old jackass. The change was so sudden and comical, that we all burst out laughing; although, when I came to reflect on the danger I had run, it required all my love ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... when the ocean is clear as glass, and ice-humps and ice-mountains of every shape and size are glittering in the sun's rays with intense brilliancy, while the delicate whiteness of these floating islands, and the magical atmospheric illusions by which they are frequently surrounded, ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... after our ship, Predpriatie: we now tacked to stand out to sea for the night, and at break of day again made towards the island, under feelings of strong excitement. The many telescopes which our eager curiosity pointed towards its object, seemed each endued with the magical power of conveying different images to the sight. Some of us saw what others saw not, till these delusions of the imagination vanished before the conviction produced by rising columns of smoke visible ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... with him is altogether unlike all others of her sex. She is a foreigner—a stranger. Nobody knows who she is, or where she comes from. No doubt she belongs to the same horrible race he does, and is, like himself, a dealer in magical arts. I entreat of you not to go near him—at least to-night; and if to-morrow your curiosity still continues as great, pursue your researches if you will; but to-night you neither can nor shall. For ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was so clear. Oh, that marvellous, lofty sky with just clouds enough to make the blue more intense! Oh, the wonder of the wind from the wild, mysterious green sea to the west! With the change and sheen of the prairie, incessant and magical life was made marvellous and the ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... indicate that in the best of these letters of Stevenson's you have some echo, far away indeed, but yet the nearest, of his talk—talk which could not possibly be taken down, and of which nothing remains save in the memory of his friends an impression magical ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were given to understand in reply that the quality per se of the man signified nothing in this connection, and that three magical letters were the thing seriously required. The College had always gloried in a list of faculty members who bore the doctor's title, and to make a gap in the galaxy, and admit a common fox without a tail, would be a degradation impossible to be thought of. We wrote again, pointing out that a ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... spots." At the same time, it is noteworthy that many of the plants which were in repute with witches for working their marvels were reckoned as counter-charms, a fact which is not surprising, as materials used by wizards and others for magical purposes have generally been regarded as equally efficacious if employed against their charms and spells.[2] Although vervain, therefore, as the "enchanters' plant," was gathered by witches to do mischief in their ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... were not the offspring of the poetic imagination, personifying the various aspects of nature. Traces, indeed, we find of their influence over the operations of nature, but they are, upon the whole, slight and unimportant. From nature they extract her secrets by their necromantic and magical labours, but nature is as yet too great to be governed and impelled by them. The Irish Apollo had not yet ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
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